Tomas started it.

It’s a kind of fame I suppose, but centered thousands and thousands of miles from where I live. I’ve written about the Stanford Libraries exciting acquisition of a stunning treasure trove of drawings, poems, photographs, samizdat manuscripts and more from the Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky.  The story began in Vilnius, when I was visiting a friend of the eminent Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, the physicist Ramunas Katilius and his family. I told that story here.  The news was picked up by the Russian press – I wrote about that here.

Then a Russian TV station wanted to film the collection for its Moscow viewers.  See below.  Did I flunk my screen test?  My career in Slavic film-making – over before it began!  But working with the handsome young Russian videographer and photographer Grigory Rudko was great fun.  Enjoy the clips of Stanford, the Libraries, the Katilius Collection, and, if you can, Humble Moi.

Yes, yes, I know it’s in Russian. Please stop complaining.  You can read the whole story in English here – or in Russian, over here. And I’ll try to get that fractious look off my face in the screenshot below. (Postscript on 10/17: Fixed the screenshot! Enjoy my hand instead – it’s better than my scowl. Really.)

The Italian writer Italo Calvino would have been ninety today.  Happy birthday, wherever you are…

“In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language.”

– Italo Calvino (Oct. 15, 1923–Sept. 19, 1985)

At the Pont de l”Archevêché, “a forest of glittering objects…” (Photo: Francis Hannaway)

San Francisco’s Litquake kicked off last weekend, and one of the opening events took place close to home – at the deathless (literally, so far) Kepler’s bookstore in Menlo Park.  In all likelihood, I won’t be able to attend any other events this year, but there was no excuse for not toddling over to Menlo Park, especially since a friend, Marilyn Yalom, was one of the writers scheduled for the reading.

A pleasant but exhausted woman named Jane Ganahl, one of the Litquake co-founders (download the schedule here), told the audience that the place to be this weekend is Lit Crawl, Litquake’s signature event.  Participants are asked to dress for the night in a classic literature T-shirt, for sale at the Lit Crawl headquarters at 518 Valencia Street, purchase a cocktail, and tip the bartender.

At the event, the organizers threaten us with “30 bearded men singing at a barbershop, a post-mastectomy stripper, a Twitter novelist, a Holocaust survivor, award-winning TV writers, a professional hair model, and the executive director of NaNoWriMo.” There’s more: readings inside a botanical brewery, a consignment store, and a rug retailer.  Plus an open mic.  I won’t be going. The idea of staggering about the noisy streets of the Mission District with a stack of books in one hand and a martini in the other leaves me cold – and at this time of year, this will be a literal, not figurative, cold.  Another reason to show up at Kepler’s … if one needed a reason.

At Kepler’s, Harriet Scott Chessman read from her new book, The Beauty of Ordinary Things, a novel in two voices, one a Vietnam vet and the other a novice at a Benedictine abbey in rural New Hampshire.  Meg Waite Clayton read from The Wednesday Daughters, a sequel to the Wednesday Sisters, focusing on a group of women combing through a tangled family history in England’s Lake District.  The only male in the group, Keith Raffel, read A Fine and Dangerous Season, a thriller spun from the “what ifs” that flow from John F. Kennedy‘s fall quarter at Stanford in 1940.  Michelle Richmond read from her forthcoming novel, Golden State, which takes place on a single day when California votes for secession. It’s due out in February. Ellen Sussman read from her novel, The Paradise Guest House, which explores one survivor’s coming to grips with the 2002 terrorist bombings in Bali.  You’ll notice I’ve listed everyone alphabetically?  That’s the order in which they read.

Marilyn’s last name begins with a “Y.”  She finished the reading with this, from How the French Invented Love:

During the summer of the [Dominique] Strauss-Kahn affair, I found myself walking behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame and wondering how I could finish this book. Had love in France become little more than a myth?  Were the French abandoning the ideal of “the great love” in favor of serial affairs?  Had seduction won out over sentiment? And then my eye was drawn to a strange sight. I saw, attached to the grille on the Pont de l”Archevêché crossing the Seine, a forest of glittering objects, small padlocks with initials or names on them, sometimes with dates or hearts: C and K, Agnes & René, Barbara & Christian, Luni & Leo, Paul & Laura, 16–6–10. There must be at least two or three thousand. And already, on the other side of the bridge, a few similar locks were clinging to the grille.  How long before that side would also be completely covered?

I hung around, enchanted by the spectacle, and was rewarded by the sight of two youthful lovers, who came across the bridge arm in arm, affixed a lock to the grille, drank from each other’s lips, and threw the key into the Seine.

Rory Kinnear’s Bolingbroke should get more love.

The Shakespeare-deniers, of course, say the upstart from Stratford could not have written the plays, that it must have been some nobleman in Elizabeth’s court – how, they ask, would a glover’s son know the way courtiers and kings converse at court? The obvious answer, of course, is that he didn’t. He made it up out of his head. Historians agree that the royal interactions don’t ring true. Now, however, this is the way we imagine kings and queen should speak. William Shakespeare shaped our reality.  Check it out: the BBC is giving you an excellent opportunity to revel in the matchless histories of Shakespeare with The Hollow Crown, which includes Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V.  (Follow links I’ve provided.)

A lot of rubbish has been written about the series already.  Even esteemed places like the New York Times don’t seem to know how to write about Shakespeare anymore (here and here) – any moment I expect them to begin complaining about how hard the language is.  Pretty much all of them, however, agree that this is a terrific, must-see series. Ben Whishaw has been praised for his Richard II, though I find it over-the-top, and Rory Kinnear‘s Bolingbroke underrated (see Clip #2). David Suchet (a.k.a. Hercule Poirot) is at Bolingbroke’s left, by the way, another good performance. Clip #3 features Patrick Stewart‘s John of Gaunt. Clip #4 Jeremy Irons as Henry IV. Clip #5 features Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff. And the final clip is Tom Hiddleston‘s Henry V.

It’s been at least a year or two since I’ve seen Shakespeare performed. The ear craves it. Tease your own with the excerpts, below. The full videos are available for listening at www.pbs.org for a limited time only. Take advantage of the opportunity.  Please. You owe it to yourself.

Postscript on 1/13:  I broke down and bought the DVDs on Amazon. Under $30.  Free shipping with a Prime account.  How could I forbid myself this little indulgence?

1.  Trailer for the series.

2.   Richard II  (A few seconds of “Great Performances” la-di-da at the beginning. It’s only a few seconds, really…)

3.   Richard II

Henry IV, Part 1

Henry IV, Part 2

Henry V

“You talkin’ to me?”

Literary agent Andrew Wylie has been nicknamed “The Jackal.”  He represents more than 700 clients and literary estates, many of them famous.  He has a distaste for the social media and a distaste for commercial fiction – so I guess I don’t have to worry about him reading what I say.  I’ve had occasion to deal with the Wylie Agency over the years, thanks to my work on Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, and others.  I’ve always found Wylie’s people to be sharp, professional, and more than fair.  But then, I’m small potatoes, working on books with non-profit, usually academic, publishers.  If I were dealing with big-shot publishers making megabucks, maybe it would be a different story.

I always enjoy Wylie’s interviews, in any case.  This one, in the current New Republic, is cherce.  Much of it is about Odyssey Editions, his new venture for ebooks, which initially partnered with Amazon.

“When I visited Wylie at his midtown office, I was struck by the total, airless calm. Its neatness is inhuman, all stacked books and white walls,” writes Laura Bennett. “As for Wylie himself, everything about him suggests an elegant efficiency, from his carefully crossed ankles to the sculptural placement of his hands. And he is not worried at all.”

A few excerpts:

Laura Bennett: Tell me about the first time you saw a Kindle.

Andrew Wylie: I was in Rome, in the back of a taxi, and I couldn’t see it. So I thought, fuck this. This was in 1924 or something when the Kindle was launched. I bought it right away and discarded it immediately. And I haven’t picked it up again. Mea maxima culpa.

LB: What was your reaction when Amazon arrived on the scene?

Jeff … zat you?

AW: Amazon seemed to me a beautiful response to the chains. We had an equal playing field for Humboldt’s Gift and the latest number-one best-selling kerfuffle.

LB: When did your feelings change? I assume it didn’t help when Amazon launched its own publishing house.

AW: I am not one of those who thinks that Amazon’s publishing business is an effort marked by sincerity. If you are as clever as Jeff Bezos, you don’t do it the way he’s doing it.

LB: What do you mean?

AW: I believe that Amazon has its print publishing business so that their behavior as a distributor of digital content can be misperceived by the Department of Justice and the publishing industry in a way that is convenient for Amazon’s bottom line. That is exactly what I think.

LB: So why did you decide to partner with Amazon in 2010?

AW: I spent nine months talking to the publishing industry about the fact that digital royalties should be closer to fifty percent than twenty-five. I got nowhere.

LB: Hence, Odyssey Editions?

AW: It launched as a stealth operation.

***

LB: What would it take to get you to sell a book to Amazon?

AW: If one of my children were kidnapped and they were threatening to throw a child off a bridge and I believed them, I might.

***

LB: What would you do if Martin Amis said, “I really want Amazon to publish my book”?

AW: I would talk him out of it. I would say, “Look at Amazon’s lack of success with authors.” Who was that muscle man who decided that he’d get more money from Amazon than from [Crown Publishing] and sold seventeen books when he’d sold six hundred thousand before? He swan dived into the pavement.

If Mrs. Bezos had published her book with Amazon, I’d be more convinced. She seems to feel that Knopf is a better publishing company than Amazon. Her agent could probably tell you why. That’s Amanda Urban.

LB: Do you feel as hostile toward Amazon as you used to?

AW: I think that Napoleon was a terrific guy before he started crossing national borders. Over the course of time, his temperament changed, and his behavior was insensitive to the nations he occupied.

Through greed—which it sees differently, as technological development and efficiency for the customer and low price, all that—[Amazon] has walked itself into the position of thinking that it can thrive without the assistance of anyone else. That is megalomania.

***

Kinda like a book.

LB: Are you really as relaxed about the future of the industry as you sound?

AW: I am as calm as I’ve ever been in my life. I was concerned for a while. I think everything’s going to work out.

LB: What would you like to see happen?

AW: The biggest single problem since 1980 has been that the publishing industry has been led by the nose by the retail sector. The industry analyzes its strategies as though it were Procter and Gamble. It’s Hermès. It’s selling to a bunch of effete, educated snobs who read. Not very many people read. Most of them drag their knuckles around and quarrel and make money. We’re selling books. It’s a tiny little business. It doesn’t have to be Walmartized.

The interview has been “edited and condensed.”  Love to see the rough cut.  (Full disclosure: I just bought a book on Amazon.)

It’s a few more hours before the Nobel Prize for Literature is announced.  Back in the days when I worked at the Stanford News Service, that meant setting my alarm for the wee hours of the morning to catch the European news, make sure it wasn’t one of “ours,” and then go back to bed. Because it never was.  The News Service got a workout this week with two days of Nobel winners, but I’ll bet everyone has an opportunity to sleep in tomorrow morning.

Two major news outlets, Time and the New Yorker, published stories in the last day explaining why Americans never seem to get the Nobel – or at least not since 1993 when Toni Morrison received the nod.  Radhika Jones over at Time wrote:

“Our literature in America is rich and varied, to be sure, but our sense of the global literary landscape is parochial at best. This is not exactly our fault, unless you think not seeking out foreign literature is our fault. The truth is, there’s so much good writing available in English—thanks in large part to English imperialism of the 18th and 19th century and American cultural imperialism of the 20th century—that we don’t generally feel pressed to find out what writer is big in France or Germany or Argentina or (with the exception of Haruki Murakami) Japan. And publishers don’t feel pressed to introduce those writers to our public. Breakouts like Roberto Bolano and Stieg Larsson are rare exceptions to this rule. It may be true that 1 in 5 Americans now speaks a foreign language at home, but by and large our literary culture hasn’t embraced the world beyond our borders. Foreign language translations comprise less than three percent of new publications in any given year, and that includes new translations of classics like Tolstoy and Stendhal.

“So the second Thursday in October is one of the only days in the year that we get to wake up, take note of the recipient of a giant prize, scratch our heads at this new god of the pantheon and say, Who the hell is that guy? And then find out a little bit about the presiding themes and tropes and tones of the Great Italian Playwright or the Great French Naturalist or the Great Chinese Fabulist, instead of the Great American Novelist. And think about the world from that point of view, instead of from our own—which is, after all, the great disorienting thing that literature helps us do. It’s a humbling and enlightening experience. And as it is, nearly a quarter of Nobel laureates’ works are primarily available to English-language readers: 26 times out of 109, the prize has gone to an English-language writer. That’s quite a panoply of worldviews right there, with writers from Australia (Patrick White), the Caribbean (Derek Walcott), South Africa (J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer) and England (Doris Lessing, Harold Pinter, Rudyard Kipling), to name just a few—but the point is, even the monolingual American is hardly shut out of the Nobel experience. By comparison, French- and German-language writers have won 13 times each, Spanish 11, Russian 5, Chinese 2, Portuguese 1, and Swedish, despite significant home-court advantage, 7.”

Bellow a winner.

I have a bone to pick with this. I question the alleged “parochialism” of Americans.  Most people in most countries are pretty oblivious to world literature, and also the literature of their own nation, too. Sure, the average man on the U.S. street may not know the current U.S. poet laureate, but I doubt the average English subject could name the current holder of that honor, any more than the average Frenchman knows the members of the Académie Française.  I spent several years living in England, diplomatically correcting its denizens on their own history, culture, and literature – not my own culture, theirs – so I speak with a little authority.  The literary culture of New York is second to none, U.S. academia has nothing in particular to be ashamed about.  Yes, I wish Americans would hit the books, but I also wish they’d get over the national inferiority complex, the constant looking over their shoulders to assess what their neighbors think of them.  It’s embarrassing, and the Jungian shadow to the insistence that we’re the greatest in the world.

I agree with Ian Crouch at the New Yorker:

Steinbeck a winner.

Since 1930, ten other Americans have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, including a few whom [Sinclair Lewis] mentioned in his lecture—O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway. Others, whom he couldn’t have predicted—John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison—have become central writers in a national literary canon worthy of the vastness of this, or any other, country. Still others—Isaac Bashevis Singer, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky—came to the United States as adults, and wrote primarily in their native languages, which reflected another step toward cosmopolitanism among American letters. (The work of the other American winner, Pearl Buck, who won the Nobel in 1938, has not aged well, and her award has become a frequently cited example of the committee’s idiosyncratic choices.) Through the twentieth century, the idea of the American literary scene as an overlooked backwater faded, owing to the artistry of these writers and scores of others, but also because the United States became a haven for exiled Europeans during the Second World War and its Cold War aftermath, and, perhaps most especially, because of the economic dominance of the American publishing industry.

Nowadays, New York is the world’s publishing capital for books written in English, and American literature has joined film and music as one of the country’s principal artistic exports.

I understand that we’re second only in Nobel lit awards to France.  There’s nothing to bitch about.  Please everybody. It’s fine. Sleep in.