We’ve written about Marci Shore, author of the acclaimed Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, before – here.  This week, Wiesława Niziol brought the following interview from New Eastern Europe to my attention. It’s rather remarkable. A few excerpts:

One of the first, most naïve questions I wanted to understand was: Why was there no “happily ever after”? From the point of view of an American teenager, nineteen eighty-nine was a fairy tale: for all of my life and my parents’ lives, there was an Evil Empire where people were thrown into prison, sometimes beaten and tortured, at the very least condemned to live in greyness and sadness, forbidden from leaving—and then suddenly one day it was over. I thought that coming to Eastern Europe would be like arriving at a non-stop party, that everybody would be celebrating his or her liberation. Of course, it was nothing like that. The 1990s were in some ways not very happy times at all. There was a sense that now people were suffering and being exploited in entirely different ways from the ways in which they had suffered and been exploited under communism. And there was a sense of the past as tormenting.

People had made difficult choices in a world in which those choices had perhaps seemed the best possible ones. And suddenly they had to account for those choices in a new world in which all the rules had changed. What might have felt like the best possible decision in difficult circumstances suddenly no longer seemed liked the best possible decision when judged by the gaze of a new world. In some ways this book is my attempt to explain why the fall of communism in Eastern Europe was not a fairy tale’s happy ending. …

Czesław Miłosz was right when he wrote that “the habit of civilisation is fragile”—and that “[t]he man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.” That sense of the impossibility of understanding, of being understood, and the drama, the resentment, the jealousy and bitterness that often accompanied that feeling—perhaps that has not entirely disappeared, but it has faded. …

I think, in a certain sense, that nationalist populism is a response to a feeling of rootlessness, or groundlessness. It’s an attempt at psychic consolation via the exporting of guilt, the displacement of what haunts us onto “others” who are not ourselves. Nationalism is arguably always about that: a failure to take responsibility, an attempt to export that which makes us uncomfortable. It is completely understandable in human terms. I can empathise with the desire to do that. That said, I think this kind of attempt to find a safe place for ourselves in the world will always fail. There is something rootless about the human condition. We are, alas, thrown into the world and then have to go about finding—that is, creating—a place for ourselves in it.

Moreover, space has changed. The West is no longer far away, it’s no longer even so clear where the border lies, or whether there is a border. “The West” was once that place that was not accessible. Now the fall of communism, the expansion of the European Union, and the Schengen zone have created a situation in which it’s “normal” to wander around Europe without a passport.

Read the rest here.

I spoke earlier this year in New York City about the future of democracy, which I didn’t see as the shuffling of parties and the need for right-thinking people to triumph electorally.  I saw technology as a game-changer, on so many levels – notably, the role of technology in accelerating the move to mobs and herd opinions.  E.L. Doctorow seems to be on a parallel wavelength. He made these remarks at the 2013 National Book Awards ceremony, where he received the NBA’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (and a hat tip to Rebecca Solnit for bringing his words to my attention).

He’s concerned. (Photo: Mark Sobzcak)

“In fact, as concerns interactivity, one of the web world’s waving flags, the techies don’t want to know that reading a book is the ultimate interactivity, where the reader’s life flows through the sentences, as through an electric circuit, animating those sentences, bringing them to life in the mind—so that it is only when a book is read that it is completed. Nothing else is as interactive as that. And a book is written in silence and read in silence, another advantage in our noisy world—an integrity of the mind is maintained with the ability to live in an extended discourse.

“No, that isn’t the major problem. Nor is it the digital undercutting of authors’ copyright and the pirating of texts, equivalent to what has happened to musicians… though that is a problem.

“You may have read a few days ago the results of a survey conducted by PEN: not only that American writers worry about being the target of government surveillance, but that ‘a significant portion of writers are engaging in self-censorship by avoiding research on certain controversial topics, choosing not to engage in sensitive conversations, and declining to pursue particular topics and stories when doing so might lead to scrutiny by the U.S. government.’

“So it has begun. That slowly gathering, ghostly darkness coming off the otherworld technology. A kind of China-like darkness, maybe. Or call it a first look into the Internet world’s hell. It’s hard to believe as we assemble here this evening, a flourishing example of Western democracy. But the struggle has begun as to who will rule that webby other world—government data miners and the corporations in step with them, or everyone else? We’ll have to pull ourselves together and, reluctantly or not, join that struggle. I don’t have to remind us that everyone in this room is in the free-speech business.”

Read the whole thing at The Nation here.

Last month, I published an excerpt from Russian poet Joseph Brodsky‘s Nobel speech. Here’s a bit: “If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness – thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous ‘I’. Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem by, say, Rainer Maria Rilke. A work of art, of literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tête-à-tête, entering with him into direct – free of any go-betweens – relations.

“It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular, is not exactly favored by the champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. For there, where art has stepped, where a poem has been read, they discover, in place of the anticipated consent and unanimity, indifference and polyphony; in place of the resolve to act, inattention and fastidiousness. In other words, into the little zeros with which the champions of the common good and the rulers of the masses tend to operate, art introduces a “period, period, comma, and a minus”, transforming each zero into a tiny human, albeit not always pretty, face.”

On a lesser scale – and I do want to emphasize the qualifier “lesser” – the same holds true for the humanities in general, and critical thinking.  They provide a powerful antidote to the mob, whether in a democratic  election, or the incitement to murder.  Offhand, I can think of no better illustration than the video clip below.

Yoko and me in 2009 (Photo: Toni Gauthier)

Today is the somber anniversary of John Lennon‘s assassination in 1980. In tribute, my sister, an indefatigable Beatles fan, posted my photo with his widow Yoko Ono on my Facebook page. I’ll do the same for the Book Haven – at left.

Meanwhile, a few articles culled from the weekend:

In The Telegraph today here, Alexander McCall Smith, author of What W.H. Auden Can Do for You (I know, I know…a utilitarian approach to the poet) picks out his five favorite W.H. Auden poems.  He has excellent taste. In fact, it coincides largely with my own.

“In Praise of Limestone” and “Lullaby,” two personal favorites, are on his list. He calls the latter “one of the finest love poems in the English language.” I couldn’t agree more. As for the latter, “Who would have thought that there was so much to say about limestone and its merits?” Actually, I find his endorsement of limestone somewhat ambiguous. See what you think in the video below. In any case, I love the lines “The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,/Having nothing to hide.”  Joseph Brodsky shuffled over this line with one of his odd smiles, where the ends of his mouth went up while the center stayed down in a sort of suppressed chuckle.  “Tautological,” as I recall he said.

Geoffrey Hill isn’t a difficult poet, he is “one nut to crack among many,” according to Jeremy Noel-Tod, reviewing the poet’s latest volume, Broken Hierarchies, over here at The Sunday Times, if you can crack the paywall.  I can’t.

This isn’t a new article, but one I finally got ’round to reading, to my profit: Adam Thirlwell considers the staggering neglect of Danilo Kiš, one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, which is “morally and aesthetically, a scandal. It’s also, I think, some kind of literary koan or mystery. The optimist might try to analyse the possible pragmatic reasons for his obscurity – such as that comical bird perching on the final letter of his name; or his reckless savagery towards every ideology, menacing both the Right and the Left; or his political bad luck, to die shortly before the wars in Yugoslavia made the lands of his birth briefly famous, albeit for the wrong reasons. But none of these seems adequate. Or this optimist might then urbanely lament Kiš’s own lack of urbanity, his legendary irritable boredom with the world of social appearances.” One redress is Mark Thompson‘s inventive and erudite new biography-of-sorts, Birth Certificate.  Read about it at the Times Literary Supplement here.

Dana Gioia has always been upfront about his roots: “I think that being proud of your religion, your culture, and your ethnicity is the beginning of revival for Catholic artistic culture. As an individual, I refuse to be ashamed of my faith, my culture, or my family background.” Even more so now:  he’s written about the decline of Catholic culture in an essay entitled “The Catholic Writer Today.”  The article (here) was trapped behind a paywall several weeks ago, but has been officially liberated, and so was picked up this weekend by Andrew Sullivan today here, and has also been picked up here and here and here and here.  Dana has never shied away from controversy – his essay “Can Poetry Matter?” is still a gold standard for controversy, generating a record avalanche of mail after it was published in The Atlantic Monthly.  Looks like he’s about to do it again.

Edna St. Vincent Millay‘s shoes in the National Museum of American History (Photo: Creative Commons)

A gentle spirit and unassuming hero, at the Ars Interpres Poetry Festival in 2006.

If you don’t subscribe to the weekly “Poetry News in Review,” perhaps you should. I get a weekly email notice when the new page goes up on the Prairie Schooner website.  The maestro behind the page is David Sanders – a longtime friend and formerly the director of the Ohio University Press. We met more than a decade ago on Michael Peich‘s back porch at the West Chester Poetry Conference in Pennsylvania…I think.  All I remember was a conversation in the dark, somewhere at some gathering in some state, and the glow of his cigarette, which moved like a firefly as he gesticulated.

From this week’s eloquent “Envoi: Editor’s Notes,” remembering the master translator and poet Daniel Weissbort, who died last month:

There are so many people whose names do not appear on the marquee, even on a marquee as small as that of poetry, that we sometimes don’t think to recognize their achievement in service to the art. Daniel Weissport did have, for some, a recognizable name, but it is through his many contributions as a translator, editor, teacher, and scholar – that is, as a conduit, nearly invisible – by which we recognize him. I remember having breakfast with him once about thirty years ago, when he was a guest of a friend of mine, the translator, John DuVal. What struck me was his engagement and generosity, what seem in retrospect to be common traits among those who are primarily translators. Reading his obituary, I am all the more impressed though not surprised by the connections he fostered, the work he did, and the difference he made.

Read this week’s “Poetry News in Review” here. (It also has a nice mention of the Book Haven’s post on Natalia Gorbanevskaya, the Russian dissident poet whose work he translated and championed. She died last week at 77.)