Callender and Donnie Hill (Photo: Stefanie Okuda)

Last year, during the Stanford Summer Theater’s Electra by Sophocles, one performance stood out remarkably in the mixed bag of university theater. L. Peter Callender played a role that might have been negligible for a less accomplished performer.  The faithful family retainer, in this case a tutor, is a staple in Greek tragedy, but Callender infused it with dignity and distinction.

I’m not the only one who noticed him last year: A San Francisco Chronicle review praised his performance in Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!, a play that some consider too persistently didactic, although in this production “one dedicated teacher’s tragedy is a fierce reminder of the complexity of trying to right social wrongs.  L. Peter Callender embodies that complexity with every paternalistic utterance and sidelong glance he casts as the prematurely aging black teacher,” Robert Hurwitt wrote.

He’s back.  I sat in on some of the rehearsals for a few weeks ago for the Stanford Summer Theater’s Homeric cycle, which showcases The Wanderings of Odysseus, an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, opening Thursday night.  It was the second year of the Greeks, but not for Callender, who has performed Greek tragedy for years, everywhere from his alma mater (Julliard) to Berkeley Rep.

“It’s one of my favorite types of theater when it’s done well,” he told me later by phone, “because of the language, because of the history, the mythology, the depth of character and the depth of passion.”

But he admitted, “I’m finding a lot of this very difficult to memorize.”

With Courtney Walsh (Photo: Stefanie Okuda)

No surprise.  His work with Shakespeare (he’s logged in a couple dozen Shakespeare roles in the California Shakespeare Theater alone) has given him a feel for the iambic beat of the Bard’s blank verse — the beat that mimics the rhythms of the heart.  Oliver Taplin’s translation of The Odyssey, which Rehm directed for the Mark Taper Forum in 1992 at the Getty Museum, uses a loose Anglo-Saxon prosody – a quicker four-beat line that’s dependent on a lot of alliteration and a big caesura in the middle of the line (think of Seamus Heaney’s bestselling Beowulf.) It’s a bit of a rhythmic (and therefore psychological) shakeup.

During the rehearsals, Callender joined Rush Rehm in making suggestions for the fine detail work of the challenging production. ”This text is not a play but a poem, it’s a very difficult task. Everyone has to be on the same page at the same time,” he said.

His self-confidence in the director’s chair isn’t a surprise, either:  he’s the founding director of San Francisco’s African American Shakespeare Company, launched in 1994 to “create an opportunity and a venue for actors of color to hone their skills and talent in mastering some of the world’s greatest classical roles; and to unlock the realm of classic theatre to a diverse audience who have been alienated from discovering these time-favored works in a style that reaches, speaks, and embraces their cultural aesthetic and identity.”

The “L.” at the front of his name was a sort of augury for things to come:  It stands for “Lear.”  (In answer the inevitable follow-up question, he replies, “I don’t know what my parents were thinking.”)

Walcott

The Trinidad-born actor will probably excel also at the August 10 and 11 reading of Derek Walcott’s Omeros – which takes place in the poet’s native Saint Lucia.  It will return Callender to blank verse, as well as combining his love of the Greeks and his Caribbean heritage.  I was recently reading Irena Grudzińska Gross‘s comments on the Nobel poet:

Instead of history, which is degrading and calls for revenge, Walcott proposes a narrative, or a myth, which, because of its continuous present, opens time, making the new world equal to the old one.  His long poem Omeros show that the world of the Caribbean islands is as epic as Greece, because it contains a journey, a return to the native island, the fear of ancestors, gods.

Avowed Tolstoyan

Palo Alto is often portrayed as a boring and staid address, the southernmost fringes where hip San Francisco fades into the dull heart of Silicon Valley.  The most recent Times Literary Supplement to arrive in my mailbox makes it seem positively exotic.

Andrew Kahn reviews Elif Batuman‘s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.  He notes that Batuman is an “avowed Tolstoyan” who nevertheless gets drawn into situations of Dostoevskian hysteria.  Her book is filled with the “unlikely stories and eccentric characters that populate a post-Soviet globalized world from her doorstep in Palo Alto to Samarkand.”

“Few satirists since David Lodge’s campus novels have captured so sparklingly and sometimes cruelly the degree to which human banality (vanity, pettiness, spite, grumpiness) and idealism (selfless sacrifice, steadfastness, loyalty) vie in academic life”:

René Girard

“Her final chapter, initially an essay about Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, his twisted satire of Russian provincial life and nihilist conspiracy, becomes a group portrait of fellow graduates at Stanford who, just like that novelist’s characters, suffer from wasting passions, religious fervour and fits of torpor.  Behind their trysts lies the theory of the Stanford guru René Girard that a relationship between two people is mediated through an Other. His views were based in part on his reading of none other than Dostoevsky.  To be gripped by higher education in Batuman’s The Possessed is to be possessed by lovers possessed by Girard possessed by Dostoevsky.  Palo Alto might seem like an unlikely hothouse for a phalanstery of existentialists.  But who could possibly fault (well-funded) graduates for living out the texts they read?”

Colorless ... like a mouse

“Colorless … rather like a mouse” and “not conspicuous in any way … There was nothing you could grapple with, except for his insignificance.”

Such was the description of Mark Zborowski by his Trotskyite comrades, who rather underestimated him.

He went on to co-author 1952’s influential Life Is With People, a book that “resolutely enveloped the Eastern European Jewish past in nostalgic amber,” according to Steve Zipperstein, writing about him in the current issue of the Jewish Review of Books. It is also “the book that Jewish historians of the region loathe more than any other.”

Zborowski was also a Soviet spy, and the NKVD’s most valuable mole in Parisian circles in the 1930s and New York in the 1940s.  While several of his anti-Stalinist pals died sudden, violent, mysterious deaths, nothing could ever, exactly, be pinned on him.

Trotsky himself was warned that “a Jew named Mark with excellent Russian and a young family … had infiltrated his Paris headquarters and was responsible for its decimation.  Moreover, the correspondent warned, Trotsky himself was to be this spy’s next victim.  Trotsky dismissed the note as “Stalinist meddling.”

He was warned.

Trotsky was murdered in Mexico in August 1940.  The following year, Zborowski emigrated to the U.S. with his wife, and the help of his still-deceived Trotskyite friends.

“When Norman Podhoretz first heard that Zborowski was a spy he dismissed it as nonsense because at their meal Zborowski sounded like a Stalinist.  Why, he asked himself, would he express such views openly if he was a spy?” wrote Zipperstein, author of last year’s acclaimed Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing.

The making of Life Is With People, a projected funded by (of all things) the Office of Naval Research and headed by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, was punctuated by curious conversations such as this one about Jewish prostitution in shtetls:

Mark Zborowski: I vaguely remember streets reserved for Jewish prostitutes and others for non-Jewish prostitutes in Lemberg.
Ruth Landes: But Lemberg is not a shtetl.
Naomi Chaitman: Yes.
Natalie F. Joffe: In Chortkov.
Margaret Mead: How big is Chortkov?
Zborowski: Population of about 15,000.
Mead: That’s a city!
Zborowski: The shtetl can be any size, if it’s big there can be sub-groups. But there is only the Jewish community. It’s not a place, it’s a state of mind. The problem of size is so different. You can’t use words ‘smaller’ and ‘bigger.’
Joffe: It’s interesting how informants time and again talk about the shtetl.
Elizabeth Herzog: Did people living there call it a ‘shtetl’?
Zborowski: No, ‘shtot.’ But the esprit was shtetl and the organization was shtetl. It’s not size at all.

Zborowski’s story has a happy ending.  At least for him. With Margaret Mead’s support (he lied to her till the end, telling her that he was forced to work for the Soviets because they threatened his Russian relatives), he got a job as a medical anthropologist at San Francisco’s Mt. Zion Hospital, a respected private institution in the city’s Fillmore district.  He eventually co-directed its new Pain Center and authored People in Pain, which studied the nexus of medicine and culture, as it applied to patients of different ethnicities.  According to Zipperstein, “The book solidified his clinical standing despite reviews, which ranged from equivocal to awful.”

He died in 1990, at age 82, of natural causes.

Since we wrote about cartoonist Molly Norris being added to an execution hit list a few days ago here, there’s been an article in the Huffington Post here, and an article in the Washington Post here.  (Nothing from the New York Times.)

It’s a spit in the bucket, I know, but Pulitzer Prizewinning cartoonists are circulating a petition protesting politically and religiously based attacks on cartoonists around the world.  Please join Oliphant, Garry Trudeau, and others by signing the petition here.  The petition is sponsored by Cartoonists Rights Network International, a sort of Amnesty International for cartoonists.

The organization last month gave its Annual Award for Courage in Editorial Cartooning to Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani.  Sandya Eknaligoda also accepted a Special Recognition award for her spirited challenge to the Sri Lankan government to account for her disappeared husband, writer and cartoonist Prageeth Eknaligoda.

Back to Norris.  CNN spoke to FBI Special Agent Marty Prewett:

“Prewitt declined to comment on where Norris is and whether she is receiving protection from law enforcement. Al-Awlaki also threatened eight other cartoonists, journalists and writers from Britain, Sweden and Holland.”

Colleague David Horsey, a Seattle cartoonist, blogs about Norris here.

Mark Zuckerberg

Meanwhile, BBC Urdu reports that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is being investigated by Pakistani authorities under a section of the penal code that makes blasphemy against Muhammad punishable by death:

“According to the paper, Section 295-C of the penal code reads: ‘Use of derogatory remark etc, in respect of the Holy Prophet, whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable for fine.’

Molly Norris

So, peace be unto Muhammad. But not unto Mark Zuckerberg.”

As the daughter and the mother of cartoonist, this cause has a special resonance.  However, one doesn’t seem to be able to address this issue without offering the politically correct proviso, so here goes:  I respect Islam.  But I also respect freedom of speech, and protecting those whose exercise of such freedom has been entirely non-violent. Freedom of speech can only begin when you say something that I find offensive.

Mollie Norris’s website, which disappeared when she did, is reported to be under construction.  We wish her well.

Collins doesn't like the Kindle Effect on line breaks

Poet Billy Collins has come out decisively against the e-book. The AP story is here.

His reason:  It’s difficult to manage a poem’s line breaks on the electronic screen, which has a disturbing tendency to break lines at awkward places and slide the remaining text onto the next line flush left, as if it were a new line.  Why it’s taken Collins so long to notice this is unclear — he could have seen it in any of his online reviews.  (Or witness my unsuccessful attempts to reproduce a few lines from Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno”  on wordpress here.)

From Collins:

“The critical difference between prose and poetry is that prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into to. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break.”

Here’s some more mixed views on poetry and the e-book from Ed Hirsch:

“I have mixed feelings about poetry and e-books,” says award-winning poet Edward Hirsch, whose The Living Fire came out in March in hardcover, but not as an electronic text. “I don’t think it’s the best way to read poetry myself and I wouldn’t want to read it on the e-book, but it also seems important to have poetry available wherever possible.”

Pinsky (Photo: Steve Castillo)

and Robert Pinsky:

“On the whole, poetry is well suited for electronic media,” says Pinsky, a frequent Slate contributor. [Slate publishes poetry and has weekly poetry podcasts.] He is confident the technical problems can be fixed, but that adds that besides the problems with portable e-readers, “most word processors treat verse as though each line were a paragraph.

“So, for example, typing a Wallace Stevens poem with capital letters at the beginning of the lines can be mildly annoying,” Pinsky says.

Poets not yet in e-form:  Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sylvia Plath, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Langston Hughes, C.K. Williams, W.S. Merwin, Charles Simic, Louise Glück, Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, and Robert Pinsky.

Nice review of Collins’ new Ballistics in the New York Times here.  And a 6-minute podcast of Pinsky reading “Jubilate Agno” here — listening is one way to avoid the line break controversy altogether.

Josh Cohen

Josh Cohen reviews two books on Derrida in the July 2 TLS — the first, The Beast and the Sovereign, is the first volume from the University of Chicago Press, includes Derrida’s lectures from 2001 to 2002, revealing “a vivid attestation to the experience of Derrida as a teacher — the quality of his attention, the tone and rhythm of his voice, his means of sparking his students’ capacities to read and think.”

Josh makes me want to take a dive into Derrida, with intriguing explanations such as this one:

“Derridean practice of philosophy simply doesn’t consist in making, elaborating and defending propositional statements, even sceptical ones.  It is premissed rather on a conception and practice of philosophy as reading, understood in a very singular way.  Briefly put (and risking the very perils of summary exposition I’ve just pointed to), reading as Derrida conceives it focuses on the predicament of philosophy itself.  To read is to be subject to the temporal delay and spatial dispersion that are the conditions of any and every text.  Meaning is never gathered immediately in a determinate textual time and place but, to use Derrida’s terms, ‘differs’ (that is, depends on the play of difference between words, or ‘signifiers’) and ‘defers’ (that is, spreads over the time and space of reading).  Derrida famously coined the term différence for this radically elusive logic of differing and deferring, a term reducible to no entity or substance.  The play of différence ensures that meaning is always divided from itself.  Reading is a kind of ongoing experience of this internal division in, and dispersion of, meaning.”

Alas, he’s not as enthusiastic about David Mikics’s biography, Who Was Jacques Derrida? He finds the Derrida who emerges  from the pages “is a tediously predictable one, and as such, unrecognizable,” and writes that Mikics reduces Derrida’s thought to a few summary positions:  “One imagines a reader new to Derrida coming away from Mikics’s book rather puzzled as to why the question posed in the title was worth asking.”