Stegner in his studio

Wallace Stegner lived on the slopes off Page Mill Road, in Los Altos Hills, for 50 years until his death in 1993.  He did much of the carpentry himself on the home he bought in the 1950s, before there was water, electricity, or a road.  He built the studio in the mid-1960s.

“Just about every major book that he wrote was written in that study,” his biographer Jackson Benson says.

Now the bulldozers are headed that way, and the Pulitzer Prizewinning author’s fans are making a last-minute bid to save the studio where he penned Angle of Repose. Don’t bother trying to find the studio on 13456 South Fork Lane: It’s not visible in any readily accessible way.  The only way to get to it would be to wade through poison oak across private property.

In Los Altos Hills...

From an article in the San Francisco Chronicle:

“It sent a bolt of sadness through our hearts because there are so many wonderful memories associated with it,” says Lynn Stegner, wife of Page Stegner, the only child of Wallace and Mary Stegner. “The part that kills me the most is Wally’s study. It’s a separate building with a rare blue oak tree in front of it. I’m hoping they don’t tear it down because he treasured that tree.”

The tree’s fate is not determined, but the studio’s is. It will be scrapped, along with everything else, and that might be the most regrettable loss to the Peninsula’s literary history since Ken Kesey‘s cottage on Perry Lane in Menlo Park met a wrecking ball in the 1960s.

“I think people would appreciate the studio as a place where they could go to remember (Stegner) and be able to look at memorabilia and photographs,” Alice Sakamoto, the author’s longtime neighbor, said in an email. “Also, because he was instrumental in the formation of this town, I think preserving the studio is something we should try to do.”

Zbigniew and Katarzyna Herbert ... the happy times (Photo: The Herbert Estate)

In December 2008, I penned these words in the Times Literary Supplement:

Katarzyna Dzieduszycka was sitting at her desk at Warsaw’s Association of Polish Writers and Artists in 1956 when a quiet, unassuming young man sat down in a nearby chair, waiting for an appointment. She noticed that he seemed as shy as she was. When he was finally called into his interview, the twenty seven-year-old secretary whispered to her co-worker. “Who was that?” “He’s going to be our new director!”, the colleague replied.

Zbigniew Herbert, the young man, was not, in fact, particularly young – he was thirty-two years old. Nor was he a composer. But he definitely needed a job; and he got it. The poet was made the head of the Association of Polish Composers. Katarzyna Dzieduszycka, who eventually became Mrs Herbert, now lives in a pleasant, light-filled apartment in Warsaw, next to the verdant enclave of Morskie Park. (It wasn’t posh when the Herberts moved in, but the post-Communist years have been kind to it.) …

The relationship evolved in a cafeteria, Mrs Herbert remembered. As Herbert spoke about poetry and recited poems to her, they drank Egmi Bikower, a ubiquitous Hungarian white wine, the only wine readily available in postwar Poland. To the Polish Galatea, it might as well have been the nectar of the gods. “I wasn’t the first or last one who fell in love with him”, she admitted. “Courtship is nice, but it didn’t last forever, because Herbert treated his life seriously. The time of reciting poetry and flirting soon finished. His first priority was writing.”

Horror!  The column inspired this reply a few days later, which was forwarded to me by my editor:

Dear Sir,

This may appear a piddling point, but the name of “Egmi Bikower”, the “ubiquitous Hungarian white wine” which Zbigniew Herbert and Katarzyna Dzieduszycka drank during their courtship (Commentary, 12th December), bears a more than passing phonetic resemblance to Egri Bikaver, the famous and delicious “Bulls’ Blood from Eger”. Legend has it that the Turks withdrew from a siege of Eger when they heard that the red stains on the beards of the inhabitants were the result of bulls’blood being their favourite tipple – an effect hardly likely to be produced by white wine.

Yours faithfully,
Anthony Ridge

Importing the good stuff (Photo: My Droid)

I had made every effort to make sure that spelling of the wine was correct – I had Madame Herbert write it in my notebook with her own hand.  Somewhere, I still have the notebook with her carefully printed words.  Moreover, I have her words on a digital recording.

But I should have known better – I, the daughter of the Magyars, who had sipped bull’s blood at my grandfather’s knee.  The Polish “w” is pronounced as “v.” And the rest was either pure error or a Polish variant I hadn’t recognized in time. Imagine the shame.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with the attractive man in the photo at left?

Ted Gioia had sent me these wise words on my Facebook page: “Try to find time to visit Wierzynek Restaurant while in Kraków. It’s been providing fine cuisine since 1364, and is one of my favorite European eateries.”

I made the trek to the restaurant (the fare was somewhat more limited for vegetarians … well, not just “somewhat”) and instead I found Davide, who gave me a tour of the historic restaurant, and a tour of its gift shop as well.

And what should he show me?  That’s right.  A bottle of Egri Bikaver.  In Poland.  Which makes it even more likely it was in the company cafeteria in 1956.

Feeding folks since 1364

Poland recognizes its limitations, the connoisseur told me – and one of them is that it doesn’t produce great wine.  So they are happy to import the good stuff from their neighbors.  Hungarians and Poles have always enjoyed an especial affinity – Czesław Miłosz thought so as well.

The wine he showed me, however, is not cheap plonk from a company cafeteria, nor is it white wine.  And it was, alas, too expensive, and too heavy, to haul back in my bulging suitcases.

America's lama

There’s a celebration going on today in China, at the Southwest University for Nationalities in Chengdu.  The library has just acquired a “significant portion of the personal collection of E. Gene Smith,” the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC) announced yesterday in an email.  “Significant” means about 12,000 volumes of what is the world’s largest private collection of Tibetan texts.

Gene’s organization to digitally preserve his collection, TBRC, chose the Sichuan library because of the university’s strong Tibetan research, its focus on minority education in China, and its proximity to Tibetan cultural areas.  The university is celebrating its 60th anniversary.

I wrote about Gene, the American lama who saved Tibetan literature, last February here.  Although he died last December, he’s obviously still a strong presence – look at the photo from a wall of the Chinese library above.

I told his story in an article and interview in the Times Literary Supplement in 2004 – some of it is cited in my post, “Karma I Guess“:

E. Gene Smith, a Utah-born Mormon who traced his lineage to founder Joseph Smith, became a rebel of a different kind — a man charged with an extraordinary mission: to save the Tibetan canon, almost single-handedly.  He has been called the greatest Western scholar of Tibetan literature, the most important person behind the Tibetan collections in university libraries across the U.S.  In India, he is regarded as an important lama. Lisa Schubert, who had been a director at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, which had housed his collection, called him “a savior of civilization.”

Reading room at the library – let's hope the hope is not misplaced

The TBRC described him this way:

E. Gene Smith was universally recognized as the Dean of Tibetan Studies.  During the turmoil of the 1950s and Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, thousands of rare and important texts, many of them centuries old, were carried over the Himalayas to India and elsewhere by Tibetan refugees. Through persistence and ingenuity, Smith was able to locate, publish and make accessible – eventually in digital format – these works of religious, philosophical, historical, medical and mystical literature, as well as poetry and narrative works.  His creative repurposing of PL 480 (“Food for Peace”) made possible payments to local people in return for the reprinting of these documents.  Smith wrote prefaces to the reprinted texts, for the first time lending invaluable historical context to the origins and lineage of each Tibetan Buddhist tradition.  Representatives of more than 300 Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, India, Nepal and Bhutan unanimously nominated Smith for a lifetime achievement award, which he received at a ceremony in January 2010.  His knowledge of Tibetan literature was the source and inspiration of TBRC’s online archive.

Gene is the subject of a forthcoming documentary, Digital Dharma, produced by Lunchbox Communications – who provided these photos.

I find the donation odd, given the Chinese government’s ongoing occupation of Tibet and its continuing harrassment and persecution of the Tibetan people.  Obviously, the university’s intentions are good – but I’m not so sure about the government it answers to. Presumably, this is an extension of trust and goodwill on TBRC’s part, accepted in a spirit of trust and goodwill by the Chinese university.  I hope the future shows it’s not premature, let alone altogether misplaced.

We're still stupid, he says

“I think as a society we’re choosing information overload: we’re choosing to sacrifice the more meditative and contemplative aspects of our minds.”

I wrote on just this subject a few days ago, in a post entitled “Are We ‘Outsourcing Our Brains to the Cloud?’” – then I ran across the latest from technology writer Nicholas Carr, who appears to agree, as shown in his comment above.  His latest book, The Shallows, discusses what he fears the Internet is doing to our brains.  It’s sold 50K hardbacks in the U.S. alone – that’s real books, with paper pages.

Carr, the blogger behind Rough Type and the author of the controversial Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” got his first PC back in the 1980s and was an avid net user until “a few years ago, I noticed some disturbing changes in the way my mind worked. I was losing the ability to concentrate.”  According to the AFP article:

While the Internet has enormous benefits in delivering incredible amounts of information at incredible speed, it’s also a distracting and interruption-rich environment.

Carr said it encourages quick shifts in focus – and discourages sustained attention and the ability to think deeply and creatively about one topic and to challenge conventional wisdom.

Carr concluded, “We take in so much information so quickly that we are in a constant state of cognitive overload.”  He added that “multitasking erodes cognitive control. We lose our ability to say that this is important, this is unimportant. All we want is new information.”  However, when we open a real book with real pages, “there’s nothing else going on except words on a page, no distractions. It helps train us to be deep thinkers.”

Over at Books Inq., my previous column generated a few comments. Frank Wilson hoped we could find a sort of middle way:  “I think the problem is real, at least potentially. I just think we may be making too much of it. I have noticed, now that I have returned to work, that my memory is sharper for some reason. I think may be we just have to make some time to do things the old-fashioned way, things like memorizing poems. The way we still make bread, though we can buy it at the store.”

I hoped so, too.  But so far, Carr hasn’t had much success:

Carr admitted he himself has not had great success in limiting the time he spends online. But the biggest change he made as a writer and researcher was to use the web only to track down source material.

“Then I’d make an effort to actually read those things in print. I did find that made a big difference in my ability to be attentive and a thorough reader and hopefully a deeper thinker.”

But Carr said it was not just a matter of individual choice. If friends, colleagues and employers were constantly on line, “then you feel in many ways compelled to do so even if you don’t want to, because you don’t want to damage your career or your social life”.

Congratulations, Fatima (Photo: Martin Roberts)

“She awoke without rancor thanks to poetry. She knew how to cuddle me with verse-like hands and swaddle me with stanzas by great writers.”

That’s what award-winning poet Fatima Frutos said, speaking of her grandmother, who brought her up while reciting poems she had learned by heart, because she could neither read nor write.  The Jerusalem Post has an article about here; the Reuters article is here.  Frutos beat more than 200 international poets to win the 2011 Kutxa Ciudad de Irun Poetry Prize, Spain’s second biggest poetry prize.

The award honors her  collection, Andromeda Encadenada (Andromeda Enchained), commemorating “unsung heroines” including Irena Sendler, who saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto.  Sendler is hardly unsung – I’ve written about her here and here and here and oh so many other places, like the History News Network here.

“The visibility of such women needs to be vindicated, the ones who have been deemed secondary, who have had no recognition but deserve that and so much more,” Frutos said.

“I start out with the anecdotes and build on them with lyricism and poetry, to vindicate them verse by verse,” she said. “It’s not just about giving visibility to invisible women, but also to 20th-Century geniuses whose work has yet to shake up 21st-century consciences.”

The volume also honors eminent Italian 17th-Century painter Artemisia Gentileschi and Spanish 19th-Century writer Carolina Coronado, who both struggled to achieve recognition in fields then dominated by men.  It also celebrates Carl von Weizsaecker, a 20th-Century nuclear physicist who later became a philosopher, German 18th-century mystical writer Novalis, and 19th-century lyrical poet (and another German) Friedrich Hölderlin.  (Both Reuters and the Jerusalem Post manage to misspell Hölderlin … but then, they also misidentify Novalis as a philosopher.)

Congratulations, Irena.

But her main inspiration as a writer has been Miguel Hernández, known as the “people’s poet,” fought Francisco Franco’s troops during the Spanish Civil War and was later sentenced to death for his poetry. The sentence was commuted to a long prison term, but Hernández died in prison at the age of 31 in 1942 .

“Hernandez has inoculated us with the blessed poison of poetry so that we may grow without rancour, but with the strength to vindicate social justice,” said Frutos, who works as a local government equality officer.  Her grandmother recited Hernandez’s poems to her from childhood.

In an awards ceremony on May 28, Frutos dedicated her price to her grandmother.  “I am a poet because of her. It needs to be said that an illiterate woman who lived in poverty also knew how to raise an international award-winning poet.”

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, recently let his 13-year-old daughter join Facebook – my goodness, how had he stopped her before then?  Within a few hours she had over 170 friends, “and I felt a little as if I had passed my child a pipe of crystal meth,” he admits.

This launches him on a meditation of our times. The column appeared last week, but in my travels I hadn’t gotten a chance to post a few words about it – nor have I had time to read all the comments, many of which are nuanced and excellent. It’s worth a look if you missed it.

Frank Wilson over at Books Inq. put this under the heading “More Complaining,” but I’m not so sure that’s the whole story.  I’ve made the same lament, and it’s not simply a curmudgeon criticizing the kids of today – I’ve noticed my own inability to concentrate without an every-five-minute squirt of dopamine from Twitter or Facebook … and yet, and yet, how else would I have met Arthur Sebastian Rosman, had not someone suggested our introduction on Facebook? (Actually, he had translated one of the essays in An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz, but he was just a name at the bottom of the page, back then.) I keep up with family, friends, and colleagues on Facebook, just as I rely on various news aggregators for news, and blogs for off-the-beaten track news.  Moreover, I’ve downloaded Henry IV, Part 2 onto my new Droid.

Yet I find it harder and harder to memorize a short poem.  Heavens, I find it harder and harder to read a short poem.  I find it harder and harder to get into that slow, reflective space where I can think long thoughts.  Keller writes:

As we became accustomed to relying on the printed page, the work of remembering gradually fell into disuse. The capacity to remember prodigiously still exists (as Foer proved by training himself to become a national memory champion), but for most of us it stays parked in the garage.Sometimes the bargain is worthwhile; I would certainly not give up the pleasures of my library for the ability to recite Middlemarch. But [Joshua Foer’s  Moonwalking With Einstein] reminds us that the cognitive advance of our species is not inexorable.

My father, who was trained in engineering at M.I.T. in the slide-rule era, often lamented the way the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation’s math skills. Many of us have discovered that navigating by G.P.S. has undermined our mastery of city streets and perhaps even impaired our innate sense of direction. Typing pretty much killed penmanship. Twitter and YouTube are nibbling away at our attention spans. And what little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google. Why remember what you can look up in seconds?

Robert Bjork, who studies memory and learning at U.C.L.A., has noticed that even very smart students, conversant in the Excel spreadsheet, don’t pick up patterns in data that would be evident if they had not let the program do so much of the work.

He concludes:

Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.” But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity.

The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions. Unlike the virtual fireplace or that nesting pair of red-tailed hawks we have been live-streaming on nytimes.com, Twitter is not just an ambient presence. It demands attention and response. It is the enemy of contemplation. Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from . . . from . . . wait, what was I saying?

The irony, the irony … I found the column because of an online news aggregator, and I read it on an Apple screen.  Now I am blogging about it.

OK, Frank. Call me grumpy.

(I’ll be in a literal cloud in 12 hours, back to the U.S.A.,  after spending a lot of zlotys and a lot of time getting 20 pounds of books from my travels into the Polish mail today.)

Postscript on June 3:  By now everyone knows that Bill Keller has stepped down as executive editor.  Apparently, NYT staffers had to intervene in his hate-hate relationship with Arianna Huffington and the new social media.  Could that be part of the reason why?