I hadn’t seen Dana Gioia since his 2007 commencement address at Stanford.  All our communication had occurred via email and phone lines, including the interview I did when he was awarded the Laetare Medal.

The last time I actually made the trek to the poet’s California home was even farther back in time — before his appointment to the National Endowment for the Arts chairmanship in Washington D.C. – eight years ago. In that era, I lived in the Sierra Nevada foothills, and the long winding journey to the hills above Santa Rosa seemed to me to be a temporary return to an urban center and blessed civilization.

That was then; this is now.  Driving from my new life in downtown Palo Alto on a sunny Friday, the miles along 101N north of the Golden Gate seemed instead a return in the opposite direction — back to the hinterlands, driving four hours in almost continuous traffic through the vineyards, the yellow hills dotted with green trees, miles and miles past Petaluma, Cotati, and Santa Rosa.

Surprise:  It was not only a return to the hinterlands but, after three years of city life, a return to a kind of sanity.  Or maybe it was just the presence of Dana — one of the busiest and level-headed people I know, and also one of the most generous I have ever met.  The Gioias’ spacious white house has been stripped of many of the furnishings I remembered – most of their things remain in Washington – and a stone walkway to the house now gives it the settled flavor of time.  A few santos collected in the Southwest have replaced their familiar bric-a-brac.

Dana, Mary, and I sipped wine on the balcony overlooking the valley and the hills.  We talked about the increasing commercialization of society, where marketed celebrities famous for being famous in turn market corporate brands for us to buy — how to keep Guess jeans, Netflix, Jimmy Choo shoes, and apps from monopolizing our remaining memory banks and our lives?  We discussed the crazily increasing speed of 21st century communications and life.  He liked, he said, living in a place where impressions are taken in and thought occurs no faster than the speed of walking.  August notwithstanding, the wind gave the air a bite, and Mary and I wrapped in blankets and watched the deer nibbling on the newly clipped lawn below.

Commencement 2007 (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Back in his study, in a separate white building that looks like a New England church, he offered some CDs from his popular Big Read program at the NEA: Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Naguib Mahfouz’s “The Thief and the Dogs,” and Rudolfo Anaya’s “Bless Me, Ultima” for the road, packing them in a leftover Thomas Garraway canvas tote, along with a few extra books — among them  the Longman Masters of Short Fiction, which he edited with R.S. Gwynn, and The Wilderness of Vision: On the Poetry of John Haines.  But the book that intrigued me was the fine anthology he edited a quarter-century ago with William Jay Smith,  Poems from Italy.  Dana’s name is among the translators, an eminent crew including W.S. Di Piero, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jonathan Galassi, Anthony Burgess, James Merrill, Leigh Hunt, and others. Here’s Dana’s  translation of a poem by Mario Luzi (1914-2005), a poet previously unknown to me:

Night washes over the mind.

After a while we are here, as you well know,
a line of ghosts along the mountain ledge,
ready to leap, almost in chains.

On the page of the sea someone
traces a sign of life, fixes a point.
Rarely does a gull appear.

The evening in the wine country had a magical glow, and the three of us ended over late-night coffee and blueberry pie, as Dana read his newest poems, the first after a long pause while he was preoccupied with the NEA.  I think they will be quite a surprise when they are published, and are likely to be his best ever – I qualify “likely to be” because I’m always mistrustful of what the ear takes in, and how discernment can be lulled by good company, good conversation, and an excellent reader like Dana.  I will have to wait for bound copies, and meanwhile rely on those overloaded memory banks, where the poems will jostle for space with computer passwords and drupal.  With the Thomas Garraway bag and CDs, I headed back into the darkness for the quick return to Palo Alto after midnight, with no traffic at all, and a stack of “Big Read” CDs.

What will it be next?  Books as landfill?

Take heart: the books used to construct this room have a future life — “but meanwhile they will have been worked on as sculpting matter and as the spirit of the place where the artist intends to hold us: an hexagonal enclosure with a passage defined by mirrors that assure the vertigo of a fall, the ad infinitum fragmentation, the panic of spatial disorientation characteristic of a virtual infinity,” according to the translated website of Prague artist Matej Kren.

Whatever.  The Book Cell Project remained intact for six  months, demonstrating “the work … of piling up thousands of books, creating an architectonic structure where we are invited to step inside.”

On the other hand, is there a cell we would rather occupy?  “Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,/Are a substantial world, both pure and good,” wrote Wordsworth.

” … and books are yours,
Within whose silent chambers treasure lies
Preserved from age to age; more precious far
Than that accumulated store of gold
And orient gems, which, for a day of need,
The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs.
These hoards of truth you can unlock at will:”

"In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist."

Christopher Hitchens usually summers in the sunny, mild climate of our own beautiful Palo Alto — not, obviously, this year.  He writes about his chemotherapy in “Topic of Cancer,” in Vanity Fair here.

In Susan Sontag‘s 1977 Illness as Metaphor, she writes: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.  Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

Here is Hitchens’s version of the 911 call that launched a very different kind of journey during his book tour:

“Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services. They arrived with great dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.”

Hitchens continues Sontag’s metaphor in his piece, with an unexpected detour for Edna St. Vincent Millay (of all people).  Hitchens at his best when his observations are sharp, pungent, and iconoclastic, even when his offensive observations land like a pie in the face (and any with an IQ over 73 will meet something that offends).  Oddly, it’s only in his prejudices that he descends to conventionality.  So cancer has found him, ironically, in good hands — his bracing attempts to come to grips with sudden illness will have a familiar echo for anyone who has suffered a forced deportation to this unwished-for valley.

With his illness, he has entered the land of cliché, and for a writer that is mortal combat indeed.  As someone who survived a terminal cancer diagnosis nearly a decade ago, I appreciate the vividness of his own internal experience contrasted with the shopworn expectations and conventions of the “well people” (for example, I recall their sentimentality, as if I had crossed the final border into terminal self-pity when I was merely struggling to breathe or swallow).  I also recognize his startled confrontation with the barbaric practices that are the very best modern medicine has to offer — but that remain outrageous assaults on the body and its sense of well-being.  One views as a stranger one’s own, equally barbaric will to live:

“Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.”

Among the clichés one confronts are the strictures of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose constructs are often seen as ironclad, rather than commonplace patterns. Hitchens of course has a few clichés of his own:  I rather doubt his chest hair was once “the toast of two continents” — in fact, I’d rather not think about it at all.

His piece is well worth the read.

Years ago Michael Kinsley, now at the Atlantic, held a contest for the most boring headline.  The winner was from The New York Times: “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.”

The New York Times is apparently the source of endless ennui.  Its writing has inspired him to extend the thought into a new contest, this time saluting the most boring article — he announces the competition here.  He nominated this offering from the Gray Lady, which he described:

“It was about a man who used to take long walks around the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, until he died last week. That’s it. That’s the story. In Silver Lake, he was wittily known as ‘the Walking Man.’ (You see, it’s because he walked all the time).”

Kinsley continues:

“Was he a homeless man who walked because he tragically had no place to go? No, he was a family doctor named Marc Abrams. Was he an eccentric recluse who lived in squalor and scared the neighborhood children? No, he lived in a house with a hot tub next to the reservoir with his wife, Cindy. Cindy worked with him in his practice. Did he walk every day, rain or shine? No, only ‘near-daily.’ Did he reject all conversational overtures due to the intensity of his need to keep walking, walking, walking? No, a local restaurant owner used to ‘walk half a block with him’ and ‘strike up a conversation.’ People along his route knew him from ‘years of drive-by small talk.’ So what inner demons possessed him and caused him to take long walks nearly every day? The Times reporter asked neighbors. ‘He walked, he told them, to keep fit.’ Of all things.”

Then Kinsley threw down the gauntlet:  “Can you top this?”  One reader responded:  “You just did.”  Although some thought Kinsley’s account itself was the most boring article they’d read in awhile, the ensuing controversy was anything but dull.  It was a pile-on.

You see, not everyone found the Walking Man boring, especially not people from Silver Lake, who seem to read the Atlantic Wire in droves.  Apparently the Walking Man was about to be prosecuted before his mysterious death, and hundreds walked in his honor.  Said Kerr-mudgeon:

“This doctor was investigated by law enforcement and medical practice bodies for prescribing thousands of pills to hundreds of addicts without so much as a cursory physical examination. The newspaper articles started with one about a young man who died of a prescription drug overdose after he visited the ‘walking man’ doctor in his office one evening, got another prescription, then died. Apparently the authorities were closing in.”

Others attacked Kinsley as a snotty New Yorker, who didn’t appreciate that a man who actually walked in Los Angeles was a noteworthy man-bites-dog story.

Others had nominations of their own:  One nominated an article from Oslo, another recommended his own writing for the honor. But the overwhelming number of nominated articles seem to be from the New York Times — one reader suggested looking to its Home section’s stories about people’s houses for suitable candidates. Wegpasadena, a Socal denizen who joined the spirit of the contest, wrote: “Years and years ago a writer named E.J. Kahn wrote a four-part series on wheat for The New Yorker. I think that sets the record, still, for a boring article.”

I liked these:

“I think anything by Andy Rooney would be in contention, but this one is among his gems:  ‘Andy Rooney: Few people appreciate good writing‘ –where he spends in excess of 550 words warbling about grammarians Strunk and White and how he had lunch with them once.

A sample: ‘Writing is difficult, and one of the problems is there are no dependable critics. Hardly anyone tells me that what I’ve written is terrible, even though what I write must be terrible sometimes.’

More often than not Andy, more often than not.”

And this one:

“This was sent to me by a friend under the email title “most boring article ever?”:  ‘Strangers on a Train‘ in the NYT. Nothing happens, and not in an interesting way.”

“You’ve found a cracker here. May top the Walking Man. It’s possibly the dullest reflection I have ever been subjected to.The good news is that the writer is working on a memoir. I can hardly wait to read through the time she went shopping and couldn’t find any chicken; the time she went for a walk and ended up with a blister; the time she was sure someone was in the backyard but it turned out to be a squirrel; and so on ad nauseum.”

Others voted for Kinsley’s original choice. John wrote: “I just read the article, and was fascinated by it. It is a Seinfeld-like marvel of journalism. My favorite sentence was: ‘You saw the brutality of concrete against his body.’ I definitely plan to take a long walk in Dr. Abrams’ memory today.”  Kyle Ledbetter replied: “Yeah, that was an awesome line.  ‘He walked, he told them, to stay fit.’ — Notice the attribution. Adds hint of uncertainty.”

But my favorite is this one, from herebutforfortune, recommending an Associated Press foreign news release in the Guardian, entitled, “South bakes, humidity feels like a 100 plus degrees“:

“According to the article, temperatures in the South have been ranging from the high nineties to over a 100, hence it feels like it. The explanation given is, ‘It’s summer.’ Several inhabitants verify feeling hot. One woman said she almost passed out while playing tennis in the sun. The National Weather Service advises people ‘to stay out of the sun, drink lots of fluids, and get some air conditioning’.  Further heat is forecast for Friday, yet the report is dated Saturday.”

You can twitter your own nominations to:   #mostboringarticleever with a headline and link.  But do take a moment to log in your entries here.  Clearly, we  love to read them.

Abraham Verghese reviews Pulitzer prizewinning author Jonathan Weiner‘s curious book about a more secular brand of life everlasting, Long for this World: The Strange Science of Immortality, in the New York Times here:

“We get old because our ancestors died young,” Weiner writes. “We get old because old age had so little weight in the scales of evolution; because there were never enough Old Ones around to count for much in the scales.” The first half of life is orderly, a miracle of “detailed harmonious unfolding” beginning with the embryo. What comes after our reproductive years is “more like the random crumpling of what had been neatly folded origami, or the erosion of stone. The withering of the roses in the bowl is as drunken and disorderly as their blossoming was regular and precise.”

I wondered if Weiner had ever studied Carl Jung, whose description of purpose during our long path on the descending arc of life is somewhat less glum, and makes more and more sense to me as the years progress.  The book concludes:

“The trouble with immortality is endless. The thought of it brings us into contact with problems of time itself — with shapeless problems we have never grasped and may never put into words. Our ability to exist in time may require our being mortal, although we can’t understand that any more than the fish can understand water. What we call the stream of consciousness may depend upon mortality in ways that we can hardly glimpse.”

Provider of grace notes

Most people don’t seem to know much why they’re alive, so I’ve always wondered why more-of-the-same has always held such allure. Leave it to the eloquent Dr. Verghese to supply the grace note:

As a young physician caught up in the early years of the H.I.V. epidemic, I was struck by my patients’ will to live, even as their quality of life became miserable and when loved ones and caregivers would urge the patient to let go. I thought it remarkable that patients never asked me to help end their lives (and found it strange that Dr. Kevorkian managed to encounter so many who did). My patients were dying young and felt cheated out of their best years. They did not want immortality, just the chance to live the life span that their peers could expect. What de Grey and other immortalists seem to have lost sight of is that simply living a full life span is a laudable goal. Partial success in extending life might simply extend the years of infirmity and suffering — something that to some degree is already happening in the West.

***

Finally.  Finally.  A biographer is thoroughly exploding the Myth of Amherst.  Emily Dickinson is not the Belle of Amherst … the Dickinson siblings struggled with volcanic emotions, as anyone exposed to Austin and Mabel can attest.  But was she epileptic?  Lyndall Gordon explores the possibility in Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds (reviewed by Christopher Benfey) in the New York Times here.

I discussed the tormented Dickinson family in a Times Literary Supplement article, “Letter from Amherst,” in 2003.  Alas, it is behind a paywall now, never to be seen again except to subscribers.

***

Patrick Kurp considers Helen Pinkerton‘s “Redtailed Hawk,” a poem she wrote for Kenneth Fields, at the blog “Anecdotal Evidence” here.  Patrick had his own encounter with a somewhat similar bird:

“The kestrel flew around the room close to the walls like a bat, in a tight orbit of disciplined panic. Moths bump off walls and lamps but raptors are always predators. Their competence is savage, even the kestrel’s, a small hawk with a songbird’s voice. He had escaped a park ranger readying him for visitors. …”

Read Pinkerton’s poem, from her collection Taken On Faith here.