Curiosity drops its heat shield and descends to Mars (Photo by NASA)

According to the Washington Post:

“The photo-snapping rover Curiosity returned another postcard from Mars on Thursday — the first 360-degree color panorama of Gale Crater.

“Scientists admired the sweeping vista — red dust, dark sand dunes and tan-hued rocks. In the distance was the base of Mount Sharp, a three-mile-high mountain rising from the crater floor, where the six-wheel rover planned to go.”

Photos, photos, photos. Just like any tourist.  And plenty of postcards, too.

I had been more or less ignoring the brouhaha about the Mars exploration – until this morning, when a book fell from a pile of books by my bed.  It was Tracy K. Smith‘s Pulitzer-prizewinning collection of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf).

I wrote about Tracy, a former Stegner Fellow, here.

When I interviewed her after her award, she was bubbly and courteous.  She had celebrated the Pulitzer on her 40th birthday, with champagne.  She talked about her upbringing and her father, who had been one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.  Science and space infuse and inform her poetry.

Chip off the old block

But would she have anything to say to us on this particular occasion? I thumbed through the book.

Several passages seemed pertinent. From the oft-quoted “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” in which the universe is

. . . sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,
Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.
So that I might be sitting now beside my father
As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe
For the first time in the winter of 1959.

Or this, from the same poem:

Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,
That the others have come and gone — a momentary blip —
When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,
Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel
Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,

I found instead the last lines of this poem, “The Universe is a House Party.”

…We grind lenses to an impossible strength,

Point them toward the future, and dream of beings
We’ll welcome with indefatigable hospitality:

How marvelous you’ve come! We won’t flinch
At the pinprick mouths, the nubbin limbs. We’ll rise,

Gracile, robust. Mi casa es su casa.  Never more sincere.
Seeing us, they’ll know exactly what we mean.

Of course, it’s ours. If it’s anyone’s, it’s ours.

"a hunger to be needed"

Some time ago I wrote about Howard Griffin‘s Conversations with Auden.  I’m not sure I ever had read the front matter before tonight.  Had I done so, I would have learned that the young poet Griffin took these notes using a kind of shorthand (W.H. Auden would never have allowed a tape recorder) in 1946 and 1947, then transcribed them painstakingly with Peter Eckermann‘s Conversations with Goethe in mind as a model. They were highly regarded by literary circles in the 1950s.  Another poet, Marianne Moore, said “these discussions … profitable to me if no one else…”

The volume begins with this question:

Howard Griffin: Would you rather have lived at an earlier time when men knew less, when there was no police force, no plumbing?

W.H. Auden: I would not. If one thinks in terms of happiness or love, human behavior certainly has not improved through the ages, but if one thinks in terms of knowledge, power and potential for good, one must say: there has been an advance.

This was in 1946-47, remember. World War II was still a living wound; the avalanche of facts and photos and eyewitness accounts about it had yet to be published.  Auden had this take on Adolf Hitler:

“Although he seemed to be always telling other people what to do, Hitler’s acts were determined by compulsion and desire for prestige. Men like Hitler, Napoleon and Richard III contrive to make their surroundings sufficiently exciting so that they are sustained in a state of passion, which dictates what they will do. People like Hitler have a hunger for complete mastery and when things begin to go wrong, then there is nothing for them to do but wish their death.  The Hitler type is able to choose for others, but incapable of self-choice and he must go on arousing enemies because their fact proves that he exists. When we read of the night of the long knives, the SS slogan ‘Heads must roll,’ the Rohm purge, etc., we see that the Nazi leaders contrived to do evil consciously for its own sake in order to demonstrate their objective reality … Once they get started, they cannot stop. Their fatality is being what they are; they are their own disease …. For the dictator, war is a good thing; then he feels wanted. He has a hunger to be needed. A war provides people with a negative sense of self – enough self to destroy. What Hitler, Napoleon and Alexander lacked was a consciousness of their finiteness, a lack that can be disastrous …”

These conversations were published in literary journals, but never found a publisher – at least not in Auden’s lifetime. Nor in Griffin’s. He died in 1975, two years after Auden’s death, also in Austria.

The good news: he grew into his face.

Dinner guest tonight, and an interview to prepare for – but I had to take a moment to relay the awful news. The Great Gatsby, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, will not be a 2012 Oscar contender.  The release has been postponed to summer 2013, rather than Christmas Day, 2012.

The Huffington Post called it a “shocking bit of news,” but I think they must be rather easily shocked.

“Based on what we’ve seen, Baz Luhrmann’s incredible work is all we anticipated and so much more,” Dan Feldman, Warner Bros. president of domestic distribution said in a statement. “We think moviegoers of all ages are going to embrace it, and it makes sense to ensure this unique film reaches the largest audience possible.”

According to HuffPo:

Late-stage release date changes — particularly when there is already a marketing campaign in full swing — almost always raise eyebrows unless there are some extenuating circumstances to consider as well. (Warner Bros. just went through a release date shuffle with “Gangster Squad” following the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo.) On Twitter, prominent Oscar blogger Sasha Stone wondered whether “The Great Gatsby” was subpar.

The article speculates on a number of possible causes – one of them includes the surfeit of other releases on Christmas Day this year, including Les Misérables, which I’ve written about earlier.

I like the new date for another reason: It’s a better match with Gavin Jones‘s Stanford Book Salon presentation on the book in May.  Better a few months early than a few months late, after the buzz has died down.

I include the trailer below.  You’ll note the clip defiantly predicts a Christmas release, still.

What to say?  Music sounds off and distressingly un-period.  As HuffPo commented in May:

The Great Gatsby trailer has arrived with the familiar and era-appropriate tones of the Jay-Z and Kanye West collaboration, “No Church in the Wild.” You crazy for this one, Baz Luhrmann! …

If you needed further proof that this isn’t your father’s “Gatsby,” — beyond the anachronistic music cue, of course — try this on for size: Luhrmann’s film will get released in 3D, since nothing needs an extra dimension like classic 1925 prose.

“I think it will be a spectacle, but not necessarily a good movie,” my daughter concluded, barely looking up from her smartphone.

The most surprising thing is that Leonardo DiCaprio has grown into an interesting face.  Not always a given.

Postscript on 8/8:  Jim Erwin offers the best comment on the soundtrack:  “Umm… The modern music stresses the timelessness of the story…ummm…By using Jay-Z, they underscore the emptiness of quickly acquired and flaunted riches…ummm..nope, it’s rubbish.”

Lehrer: Is geekdom enough?

The fortunes of Jonah Lehrer have risen and fallen … perhaps to rise again.  Damian Thompson writes in an article in London’s Telegraph, “The Fall of the Hipster Intellectual”:

On Monday he resigned from the New Yorker magazine after what the New York Times described as “one of the most bewildering recent journalistic frauds”. Bewildering because Lehrer is cool, modest and smart. His postmodern CV leaps from neuroscience at Columbia to literature at Oxford; he dresses like a Palo Alto geek.

“He dresses like a Palo Alto geek.”  This, of course, throws a whole new light on the situation.  Who knew my little burg is famous?  I live in a place that has become a stereotype.  A Palo Alto geek … am I one?  I gulp hard and look in dismay at my worn jeans, my secondhand t-shirt, the sweater I found on a bench outside Stanford’s Green Library decades ago. More to the point:  If he dresses like “a Palo Alto geek” – can he be said to be a hipster at all?

Naturally, I did a google search for “palo alto geek” and turned up the following photo (below), captioned:  “Dragon Quest fans were treated to these ‘Be My ValenSlime’ T’s at creator Yuji Hori’s Palo Alto appearance over the weekend. Plus, the lucky fans got to buy Dragon Quest VI two days before release. Sigh, we’ll just add this to the list of reasons we wish we lived in Cali.” Note bene: Cali, the writer says, not Palo Alto.

"Dragon Quest" fans prepare for a formal-dress event.

I learned that Palo Alto even boasts a hotel for geeks, which offers “Free WiFi, the bagged lunch you can grab on your way out to a pitch meeting, and the whiteboard surfaces for late-night brainstorming sessions.” One commenter sneered:  “To become a real Geek Hotel, they have to arm themselves with a lot more than just iPads and free WIFI. How much Bandwidth do I share with the 42 other Rooms? What is the Latency of the Connection for Games? Do they have PS3 & Wii for Lend-out? Or a Boardroom with the lastest Gamer-Rigs for Weekend-Clan Parties?!”

We digress. Thompson continues on Lehrer’s plight:

“Anyway, he’s in a real pickle, because in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works he fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan. That was stupid. Dylan exegetes have memorised his every word; you might as well misquote the Torah and expect the Hasidim not to notice.

“Also, when journalist Michael Moynihan chased up those quotes – intended to show how the right hemisphere of Bob’s brain rearranged nonsensical thoughts – Lehrer told a pack of lies. The fibs were plausible, involving supposed unreleased archival footage. Unfortunately for him, Moynihan is a Dylan expert. Jonah ended up digging a very deep grave for himself.

“Sweeping statements are all the rage in the school of pop science that produced Lehrer, so here’s one for you. He’s a victim of digital culture.”

Reason #1, according to Thompson:  “the software that allows writers to cut, paste, tweak and borrow words also makes it easy to uncover plagiarism.”

Palo Alto dinner party (Photo: Scott Beale)

The second trap is more subtle: “the fad for books in which a light bulb goes on and everything is illuminated: apparently random events are tied together by the Big Idea.” He continues:

“Lehrer’s theory of creativity is too muddled to sum up neatly, but there’s evidence of clumsy shoehorning on almost every page. Long before the Dylan lie was discovered, critics had mocked Imagine for its slippery elisions. Shakespeare, Nike, Pixar and the brain: Lehrer had something misleading to say about all of them.

“In places, Imagine borders on parody. It talks about the left-field creativity that produced a disposable mop, the Swiffer. ‘That insight changed floor cleaning forever,’ says Lehrer.

“Today’s digital market seeks to satisfy the appetites of intellectually curious people with very short attention spans. The result is a deluge of books, blogs, online lectures and web apps that offer to unpack the world for us by playing multidisciplinary leapfrog.

“This scandal should make us think carefully about the methodology underlying many of these claims. We don’t need any more hipster ‘intellectuals’ telling us what traffic lights in Tbilisi and the mating habits of the duck-billed platypus reveal about Why Stuff Happens. Lehrer is a potentially brilliant exponent of proper science. I hope his career recovers from this scandal. But I hope the genre doesn’t.”

In my not-so-hipster thinking that’s just being a smart ass.  A very old-fashioned kind of thing.

Postscript on 8/6:  A pungent example of the two sentences above:  See Evgeny Mozorov‘s “The Naked and the TED” in the current New Republic, here: “’When I look at the 21st century, I reverse the numbers around and I see the 12th century.’ This is probing stuff.”

Jonathan Tucker in "Stateside"

Doors blow open between the past and present, and the sudden winds can be bracing and mysterious. I read with surprise that Reverge Anselmo was the writer-director for a movie Stateside (2004) and that he had also written a book, The Cadillac of Six-by’s, published by Harper Collins in 1997, described as “an almost existential take on the quotidian stress endured by US Marines in strife-torn Lebanon,” according to one review.

I doubt he remembers me.  I had visited his parents, Rene Anselmo and his Rene’s wife Mary, in Greenwich, Connecticut long ago.  At the time, I knew Rene Anselmo was a successful businessman in telecommunications, but I had no idea how successful.  He founded PanAmSat in 1984, putting his personal fortune on the line to launch the world’s first privately owned international satellite.

I had arrived at the doorstep for a different matter altogether, and the Anselmos were kind enough to extend an overnight invitation.

I had not expected to enter the kind of digs I did – modeled on the Petit Trianon of Versailles.  I don’t think I’ve ever, then or since, stayed in a private residence of that scale.

But mostly I was impressed with the Anselmos themselves. I learned later that Rene, the son of a postmaster who had become a Marine at 16 during the war, was renowned for his great passions and fierce feuds.  In 2004, nearly a decade after his death, he was named in the top 10 of “100 People Who Made a Difference in Space” by Space News International. He was a man with “unflinching self-confidence and willingness to risk all in his fight to upend the status quo,” according to  Space News.  

In Greenwich, he had also donated more than 100,000 daffodil and tulip bulbs, planting some of them himself. The vision caught on.  When the snows melt, the city is carpeted with daffodils – at least that was true when he died in 1995; I hope it still is.

From a New York Times article:  “Rene was a fighter and a scrapper,” said Mark Fowler, who, as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Ronald Reagan, helped Mr. Anselmo pierce the monopoly in satellites. “He was crazy like a fox.”

The Space News tribute recognized that “his legacy was an entire industry – one he created almost single-handedly.”

But mostly he seemed a deeply wise, paternal, and powerful figure, and Mary, too, seemed graceful and wise, in a more willowy way.  I look back now with gratitude on the occasional grace notes that are dropped into my life – such as this one.

During a time when the couple were out of the room, I had a short chat with their son, Reverge – he must have already undergone the experiences he describes in the autobiographical movie, including being wounded as a Marine in Lebanon –  I realize it was one of those conversations that, viewed in retrospect, laid the groundwork for a  different path ahead, way beyond what I could foresee then.  Decades have passed. I never expected to see that house again – till I bought the movie Stateside for six bucks or so online. The movie, which included Val Kilmer and Carrie Fisher, among others, was partly filmed in that home; I immediately recognized it, and suddenly the past was palpable as now.

Like a fox...

The film got an ambiguous review from The Washington Post, but there was a passage that rang home to me, that sounded exactly like Anselmo senior, at least in the brief two days of our acquaintance.  It occurs in a short, moving scene on a staircase in a courthouse.  The son has bungled his life rather badly and agrees to a court-negotiated plan to join the Marines in lieu of prison time.  The father (Joe Mantegna) advises his son:

“You’ll have to live for awhile. One day you’ll understand. Somehow, life unfolds perfectly.”

“I hope so, Pop. I think so, too.  … Did I mess up my whole life here?”

“Don’t be discouraged. Just put it together in a different way.”

“Okay.”

“Losing your mother was a hard blow for me, like this is for you. Keep going up the road.  That’s all I can tell you. Bars, you know, are full of people who want to tell you why they’re overwhelmed, why they can’t do it.  I’m different.”

“Me too. You’ll see.”

Trianon lookalike

It sounded so true to the man – I combed through the “commentary” – a bizarre modern custom in which the director and performers talk over the film with their random associations – to see if director Reverge had offered any comment on that particular scene.  He did.

“This is what my old man really used to say,” he said.

Now I will, too.

Art thrives in the everyday – and this year’s awards in the fifth William Saroyan International Prize for Writing prove it.  The numbing routine of today’s workplace and an author’s biographical “thank you” to a common snail captured the attention of the judges this year.

Daniel Orozco (Photo: Krysta Ficca)

The awards went to Elisabeth Tova Bailey‘s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010) for non-fiction and, in the fiction category, to Daniel Orozco‘s collection, Orientation and Other Stories (Faber and Faber, 2011). Each of the winners, selected from a field of 228 applicants, will receive $5,000.

The finalists for fiction were Ben Lerner‘s Leaving the Atocha Station and Miroslav Penkov‘s East of the West: A Country in Stories. The finalists for non-fiction were Arion Golmakani‘s Solacers and John Jeremiah Sullivan‘s Pulphead.

The major literary award, sponsored by Stanford University Libraries and the William Saroyan Foundation, encourages new or emerging writers in fiction and non-fiction.  The award honors the life and legacy of the American writer and playwright William Saroyan.

When Bailey was bedridden she received a snail as a gift.  Eventually, she wrote about the interspecies relationship that ensued. She told NPR that feeding it wilted flowers gave her “a feeling of being useful again,” and the sound of it munching on petals reassured her in the night. She said it “moved so smoothly and gently and gracefully, it was like a tai chi master.”

E.T. Bailey (Painting: Edith B. LaRoche)

She admits that at the worst phase of her debilitating illness, “my life matched its life more than that of my own species,” according to an interview on the website  SheWrites.

“That I could write an entire chapter on slime or another entire chapter on the way a snail hibernates – there was just so much to say,” she said.

Bailey said “the lives of the smaller and short-lived creatures are even more intense, more crammed with plot, than our longer human lives. … Like me, it woke up and went to bed. Like me it wanted something delicious for dinner,” she said in an interview on BookBrowse.  “Snails are also famous for spending many hours in courtship.”

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating has won a number of awards already. It has been named one of NPR Morning Edition’s top books for 2010 and also one of the American Library Association’s Booklist‘s top 10 science and technology books. According to the eminent poet Maxine Kumin, “Readers will find her mental journey remarkable and her courage irresistible. I am very taken with this small book.”

Orozco is a name familiar to the Stanford campus:  He is a former Wallace Stegner fellow and Jones lecturer in the Stanford English Department’s Creative Writing Program.

But the Bay Area native’s life was not always one of academic gigs.  In a KQED interview last year, he recalled a job in a fiberglass fabrication shop in South San Francisco where “our boss was a jerk.”

William Saroyan (Courtesy Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries)

“On the job is where we all have to be, whether we like it or not,” he said. “My mother packed licorice in a factory for over 20 years, and came home tired but still human, and I am in awe of how she managed that.

“For most people, the workplace is an extremely structured and regulated environment … you have to be civil to a boss or a co-worker who drives you crazy; you have to show up at 8 and leave at 5 and take lunch from 12 to 1 (not 1 to 2, not 12:15 to 1:15); you have to spend all day with people that you didn’t choose to spend all day with, and you have to do it for about a quarter of every week for the rest of your life.”

According to a New York Times review: “The bridge painters, warehouse crews and paralegal assistants in Orozco’s stories have no clear way to control their destinies at work, and life piles on with a series of banal indignities on the clock and pointed crises off it.  They witness suicides, murders and mass layoffs. One temp fields calls from the desperately unemployed, then moves to a job helping to plan the demise of an entire department. Her agency eventually rewards her with the Orwellian promise of ‘permanent temporary employment.'”

Oscar Villalon wrote in Zyzzyva, “Nobody else is writing quite like Orozco.  These are bracing stories. Rich with wicked humor and loving toughness.”

After his debut book of short stories, he is now working on a novel.

This year’s judging panel for fiction included award-winning authors Elizabeth McKenzie and Minal Hajratwala, a former editor and reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, and archaeologist Patrick Hunt. The non-fiction panel included Keith Devlin, executive director at Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information; Fritz Maytag, legendary brewer, distiller and winemaker; and Hank Saroyan, writer, performer and nephew of William Saroyan.

The Saroyan Prize was last awarded in 2010, when the fiction prize went to Rivka Galchen for her novel Atmospheric Disturbances and the non-fiction prize went to Linda Himelstein for The King of Vodka. Other notable winners include Jonathan Safran Foer in 2003 for his novel Everything is Illuminated.  George Hagen won in 2005 for his novel The Laments, and Kiyo Sato won in 2008 for her memoir Dandelion Through the Crack.

William Saroyan was the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Time of Your Life (1939-40), the novel The Human Comedy (1943) and many volumes of short stories, essays and memoirs. Born in Fresno in 1908 to Armenian parents, Saroyan was a high school dropout and largely self-educated. He is best known for his short stories about the experiences of immigrant families and children in California. He died in 1981.

Stanford University Libraries houses the William Saroyan Collection, which includes manuscripts, personal journals, correspondence, drawings and other material.