We don’t always get to choose our gigs, so jazz scholar Ted Gioia recently accepted an unlikely invitation to talk to med school students about the humanities. (More news: the Jazz Journalists Association had chosen Ted’s lively and informed The Honest Broker as blog of the year, and also awarded him the Robert Palmer-Helen Oakley Dance Award for Excellence in Writing.)

Back to the med school visit:

So I agreed to give this talk, but with trepidation. When you’re involved in arts or culture and stand up in front of an audience of science or tech people, they expect you to justify the humanities. 

Why should we waste time with you? They don’t actually say that, but it’s hanging thick in the air like a bad odor.

A “casual talk” about the humanities turns into a plea to the jury for acquittal. There’s simply more skepticism about the humanities now than ever before, and you can’t avoid that cynical attitude, especially when talking to a whole room of future doctors.

Frankly, I don’t like defending the humanities. Don’t get me wrong—studying the humanities was life-changing for me. I grew up in a neighborhood where nobody’s parents, including my own, had gone to college. So when I got the chance, I found it liberating to study Dante, Plato, Shakespeare, Mozart, Sappho, Goethe, and all those other dead people from across the big pond.

But these individuals, so important to my development, aren’t as beloved nowadays. I don’t know how anyone can grapple with ideas or the world at a deep level without paying close attention to the leading lights of the past, but I don’t believe anyone should be forced to read Shakespeare, for example. Let those who are curious and willing, go down that path. If that’s just a tiny number of people, so be it. And if others think they have found a better way to wisdom that doesn’t involve learning from the past, I wish them well and send them off to their favorite TikTok influencers.

So how did it go? Read here, on Ted’s award-winning blog.

Peter Pomerantsev is a Kyiv-born author, journalist, and TV producer who grew up in London. His family was exiled in 1978, when he was nine months old, after his father, poet and author Igor Pomerantsev was arrested by the KGB for distributing banned books, including Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. (His mother is film producer Liana Pomerantsev.)

Even so, he wrote, watching the atrocities “fills an émigré Ukrainian like myself with cold hate. I can feel my heart hardening. But it’s much stronger for those who live in Ukraine permanently.” And it affects the rest of us, too – as far away as California.

The Ukrainian-British author wrote a poignant article, “I can feel my heart hardening as the war goes on,” during Passover. An excerpt from The Spectator:

Recalling Ukraine during Passover Many Ukrainians I speak to worry that the war will brutalise them, that they risk becoming so full of hate it will eat them up inside. As I rode down to Rome airport I was reading WhatsApp messages from my friend and colleague Denys Kobzin, who is in Kharkiv. Before the war, just seven weeks ago, he was a famous sociologist. Now he’s joined a territorial defence unit and sends me selfies with a machine-gun slung across his shoulders. I asked him about how his unit copes with hate. He explained that the soldiers he is with see themselves as fighting to join the civilised world – which can help check the most brutal instincts.

The puzzle of how to keep your humanity while killing a genocidal enemy is also the most troubling part of Passover. This year it falls on Good Friday and overlaps with Ramadan. I’ve always found the Passover Seder a brutal affair, with its celebration of dead Egyptian firstborns, and rejoicing at the destruction of Pharoah’s army under the Red Sea. As my car passed from Umbria into Lazio I called my rabbi, Jeremy Gordon at New London Synagogue, to ask if there’s anything in the tradition that deals with this moral fallout. During the Seder there’s a line about asking God to ‘pour out Your wrath on the people who know You not’. One mollifying custom, Rabbi Jeremy told me, is to add another verse: ‘Pour out Your love on the nations that know You.’ Meanwhile in the Talmud there’s a passage describing how when the angels wanted to celebrate the drowning of the Egyptian army, God stopped them. How could they sing when His creations were dying? Even a genocidal enemy has some humanity. But if I’m honest, I celebrate every incinerated Russian tank. I tried to think about the soldiers inside them at the start of the war but I lost that moral battle by week two.

… At breakfast in the hotel I suddenly find myself weeping over the boiled eggs and coffee. That’s how you recognise Ukrainians these days – they’re the ones crying in public for no apparent reason. Like Zelensky, I may be angry at God, but religion helps: the ever-returning catalogue of mass murder imprinted in Judaism puts this current evil into a context of pain and ultimate resilience. Passover seems more special this year. Should I spend it at New London? With my parents in Prague? My new home in DC? No – there’s only one place which captures the puzzles, paradoxes and victories of Passover. I’m filing this as I head down to Warsaw station, then it’s a long, rumbling ride to the town of my birth. Next year, perhaps, in Jerusalem. But this week I can only be in Kyiv.

Read the whole thing HERE:

Here’s something cheery and inspirational to add a little oomph to your day: Kurt Vonnegut‘s 2006 letter to Xavier High School students in New York City. The English teacher, Ms. Lockwood, had given the students the assignment of writing to prominent authors and inviting them to the school. None visited, and only one responded – Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five. Here’s what he had to say:

The eminent Poetry London has featured Czesław Miłosz: A California Life for its spring issue – and we couldn’t be more pleased that England is taking notice of the Nobel poet’s American life. The issue includes a long selection from the book, which was published by Heyday Books in Berkeley. In the selection, the Lithuanian-born poet talks about the American wilderness and the “prickliness” of California. Where to get your copy? Try here.

The journal’s Poetry Editor, André Naffis-Sahely, contacted me last winter to make all this happen, and he also recorded a podcast with me. Stay tuned for its appearance on the Poetry London website; it will also be online as an Apple Podcast. (We’ll link it on this post, too.)

Meanwhile, let us excerpt Poetry London’s excerpt, from the chapter in my book called, “I Did Not Choose California. It Was Given to Me”:

In 1985, Czesław Miłosz spent an awkward afternoon on a hilltop with the novelist Wallace Stegner, one of California’s most prominent conservation writers.

The occasion was a Public Broadcasting Service filming. The setting, Tilden Regional Park, is a mile or two down winding Grizzly Peak Boulevard from Miłosz’s home. Both of the eminent writers look slightly ill at ease conversing alone on the parched yellow grass, with conifers and hills in the background. Stegner is doing most of the talking, and he attempts to draw Miłosz out, but the poet’s replies are brief and tend to extinguish the line of thought rather than extend it. (“When Miłosz didn’t want to talk, you sure as hell felt it,” translator Clare Cavanagh once commented to me.)

“I lived through rebellion against California landscape,” Miłosz confesses on camera, in an accent still redolent of his European roots. It was a rebellion, he continued, that lasted twenty years.

Stegner affably agrees that California “offends a lot of people by being so dry and barren and prickly. Everything in it has barbs.”

Miłosz then recounts to Stegner his long history with natura: “When I was, I guess, twelve, I had an obsession of wilderness. I wanted to change everything into untouched wilderness. I was drawing maps of imaginary countries covered by forest, and the only means of transportation would be canoes. Yes, I had my dream of virgin land.” This was his America, and those images overrode all the crass TV shows and garish billboards he saw every day. His America was the America he’d read about as a child in the pages of James Fenimore Cooper. As he wrote:

America is for me the illustrated version
Of childhood tales about the heart of tanglewood …

He described himself, in third person, as “obviously in love with American Nature, which he duly romanticizes, as he did in his childhood when he read books for young people about travels in America.” (Watch the whole 33-minute film here.)

During his early adventures on the East Coast, he developed an extensive vocabulary of plants, animals, and birds, but they were sojourns, not an exile, and so the nearness of species and varieties, their similarities, were fascinating, not poignant reminders of a lost land. California and exile had made the relationship to natura more conflicted, highlighting the overwhelming abundance, and also the similar-but-dissimilar aspects, of everything he saw: “I had known only one sort of pine, a pine tree was a pine tree, but here suddenly there was the sugar pine, the ponderosa pine, the Monterey pine, and so on—seventeen species, all told. Five species of spruce, six of fir . . . . Several species each of cedar, larch, juniper. The oak, which I had believed to be simply an oak, always and everywhere eternal and indivisible in its oakness, had in America multiplied into something like sixteen species, ranging from those whose oakness was beyond question to others where it was so hazy that it was hard to tell right off whether they were laurels or oaks.”

Prof. Peter Stansky‘s annual “A Company of Authors” will take place from 1 to 5:05 p.m., this Saturday, April 23. The virtual event, sponsored by Continuing Studies and the Stanford Humanities Center, features Stanford authors discussing their newest books. (Some of us pictured above.) It’s free and open to all. You can read full schedule below. Bring a cup of coffee and enjoy! It’s a wonderful way to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday.

One among many reasons to attend: I’ll be presenting my new book, Czeslaw Milosz: A California Life on the 2:40 p.m. panel. I’d be happy to see some Book Haven readers – even if virtually only.

Register here.

And please forward this announcement to your friends! I look forward to seeing you there!

EVENT SCHEDULE 1:00 pm — Welcome (Peter Stansky)1:05 – 1:35 pm — Culture Peter Stansky, Chair Gavin Jones, Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History Jeannette Ferrary, Eating Alone 1:40 – 2:10 pm — A Better Life Barbara Gelpi, ChairJudith Mundlak Taylor & Susan Groag Bell, Women and Gardens: Obstacles and Opportunities for Women Gardeners Throughout History William Damon, A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present Tracie White & Ron Davis, The Puzzle Solver: A Scientist’s Desperate Quest to Cure the Illness That Stole His Son 2:15 – 2:35 pm — Changing the World Larry Horton, Chair Lenora Ferro & Susan Southworth, Sidney D. Drell: Into the Heart of Matter, Passionately David Alan Sklansky, A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What It Means for Justice Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami & Jeremy M. Weinstein, System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot 2:40 – 3:20 pm — The Arts and Humanities Roland Greene, ChairPeggy Phelan & Richard Meyer, Contact Warhol: Photography Without End Cynthia Haven, Czeslaw Milosz: A California Life Emily J. Levine, Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University 3:25 – 3:55 pm — History and Humans Carolyn Lougee, Chair Steven Press, Blood and Diamonds: Germany’s Imperial Ambitions in Africa Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe Henry T. Greely, CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans 4:00 – 4:30 pm — The Bay Area and Beyond Tania Granoff, Chair Mary Beth Meehan & Fred Turner, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America Gene Slater, Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America Destin Jenkins, The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City 4:35 – 5:05 pm — Germany Paul Robinson, Chair Samuel Clowes Huneke, States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany Adrian Daub, The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany Peter Mann, The Torqued Man: A Novel