In his year as state poet laureate, Dana Gioia was determined to speak, read, and hold a literary event in every one of California’s 58 counties. And so he did. But that meant a lot of lonely hours on the road for Santa Rosa-based California guy.

Dana chilling in L.A. with Doctor Gatsby (Photo: Starr Black)

Perhaps that’s what brought this poem to mind for one of his newest in the Blank Verse Films series. It’s one of his poems that was driven by sound, which is appropriate for the subject.

“I imagine it already needs footnotes for the young, but I like to think that the experience is nearly universal in our era of entertainment,” he told me. There’s a personal link not mentioned in the poem: he shares a hometown with the Beach Boys outside L.A. – Hawthorne, California, before a freeway ran through it.

Cruising with the Beach Boys

So strange to hear that song again tonight
Travelling on business in a rented car
Miles from anywhere I’ve been before.
And now a tune I haven’t heard for years
Probably not since it last left the charts
Back in L.A. in 1969.
I can’t believe I know the words by heart
And can’t think of a girl to blame them on.

Every lovesick summer has its song,
And this one I pretended to despise,
But if I was alone when it came on,
I turned it up full-blast to sing along –
A primal scream in croaky baritone,
The notes all flat, the lyrics mostly slurred.
No wonder I spent so much time alone
Making the rounds in Dad’s old Thunderbird.

Some nights I drove down to the beach to park
And walk along the railings of the pier.
The water down below was cold and dark,
The waves monotonous against the shore.
The darkness and the mist, the midnight sea,
The flickering lights reflected from the city –
A perfect setting for a boy like me,
The Cecil B. DeMille of my self-pity.

I thought by now I’d left those nights behind,
Lost like the girls that I could never get,
Gone with the years, junked with the old T-Bird.
But one old song, a stretch of empty road,
Can open up a door and let them fall
Tumbling like boxes from a dusty shelf,
Tightening my throat for no reason at all
Bringing on tears shed only for myself.

One of the nation’s preeminent literary critics, Harold Bloom, died today at 89 (we’ve written about him here). One of his students, Ann Kjellberg, publisher of Book Post, remembers her time as a Yale undergraduate in the 1980s, when Harold Bloom taught a famous course with John Hollander called “Originality.”

“During office hours with me, Bloom once buried his head in his hands in despair that he was momentarily unable to remember the opening lines of Yeats’s ‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae.’ He blamed the fact that he had been briefly haunted by the death of his mother.”

Here are the lines, for others who do not know them by heart:

On the grey sand beside the shallow stream,
Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still
A lamp burns on above the open book
That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon,
And, though you have passed the best of life, still trace,
Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion,
Magical shapes.

She continued: “It meant so much to me, in those days when some sort of ‘science’ was supposed to direct the reading of literature, that he saw reading as a great human enterprise, an engagement of the passions, a heroic endeavor.”

On Facebook, the writer Marat Grinberg posted an email he received from Bloom a dozen years ago:

From arts journalist and author Thomas Gladysz: “Back in high school I had a couple of jobs, and with my spending money I bought a copy of The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, with commentary by Harold Bloom. It cost $7.95, a not inconsiderable sum for a softcover book back in the 1970s. I treasured it, and held onto it all these years. In the early 2000s, I managed to get this famous academic to drop by the bookstore where I worked to sign copies of his new books. I admit I was a little intimidated by this prolific and bestselling literary critic and “monster” of reading. (“Yes, I do read 400 to 500 pages a day,” he replied when I asked him about his renowned ability.) I slipped my copy of Blake’s poems into the pile for him to sign. It made him pause – and I told him it was my personal copy. He smiled just a bit. Yesterday, Bloom died. His body of work lives on.”

From poet, playwright, translator Nina Kossman: “Years ago he wrote me a letter about my translations of Tsvetaeva (my second book of translations). The letter is short but memorable. I scanned it, and so here it is.”

A few Tweets below. We’ll be adding to the stack:

Congratulations to Olga Tokarczuk! She is the 2018 winner of the Nobel Prize – 2018, because the Nobel Committee was enveloped in scandal last year, and so is issuing two awards at once (the 2019 one went to playwright Peter Handke, a more controversial choice). We’ve written about Tokarczuk before, here and here and here. We didn’t predict this big win, however. The dreadlocked vegetarian is a mere 57 years old – relatively young for Nobel winners. However, she has been a leading light in the Polish firmament for years. According to The Guardian, “it has found not only a fine winner but a culturally important one.” The Nobel Committee cited “a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” And congratulations, too, for her translators into English (vital for Nobel contenders) –American Jennifer Croft, and Britain’s Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Congratulations, too, to her phenomenal publisher (we’ve written about him here), Jacques Testard of Fitzcarraldo.

The photo above was taken during a reading at the home of Izabela Barry, in New York City (Yonkers, to be more precise). Izabela has been a mover and shaker in the world of Polish lit for years (she’s holding a glass of wine in the photo above), and her living room the setting for readings, discussions, and receptions. (We were honored to have Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard featured one evening a couple years ago – a French event, not Polish, admittedly, but we were further privileged to have the incandescent Polish scholar Irena Grudzińska Gross as interlocutor.)

The New York Times reports:

Ms. Tokarczuk is best known for her 2014 historical novel Księgi Jakubowe or The Book of Jacob, centered in the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires and focused on the life of Jacob Frank, an 18th century Polish leader of a Jewish splinter group that converted to Islam and then Catholicism. “She has in this work showed the supreme capacity of the novel to represent a case almost beyond human understanding,” Nobel officials wrote in their citation.

In 2018, she got renewed prominence after winning the Man Booker International Prize for translated fiction for “Flights,” an experimental novel based on stories of travel.

From the Guardian:

“Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner,” mused the 57-year-old author earlier this year, “because English is the language that’s spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.” This might not be a desirable state of affairs but for writers from many parts of the world it is a fact of life. Her Booker win, as Antonia Lloyd-Jones – one of her two English language translators – remarked, was not just a triumph for her but for the whole of Polish literature.

By then, her canny independent publisher, Fitzcarraldo, had already followed up with Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Whereas Flights was one of the glittering historical and geographical collages that Tokarczuk calls her “constellation novels”, Drive Your Plow is very different: a William Blake-infused eco-thriller which significantly extended her reputation, not least because it is much easier to read.

Postscript from NYRB Classics, via Twitter: In the photo above, one careful observer noticed another notable Polish translator, Sean Gasper Bye.  The “photobomb, if the eyes do not deceive,” would describe the man sitting on the floor, facing the camera, half-lit. Wrote the NYRB Classics: “I love his expression. Happy and rapt.”

Tokarcyk and Croft at the Man Booker awards, 2018. (Photo: Janie Airey/Man Booker Prize)

With his dog “Sambo.” The dog was killed during the Warsaw Uprising.

First News, a Polish news site, observed a disturbing anniversary today. It’s haunted me all day, and now I’m going to say a little about it.

It’s the 76th anniversary of the death of one of Poland’s leading actors, comedians, directors, producers, and entrepreneurs during the interwar period. Witty, gallant and seductive, Eugeniusz Bodo  shot to fame following his debut in the 1925 silent film Rivals. But he found his true vocation with the “talkies.” He starred in some of the most popular Polish film of the 1930s, including His Excellency, The Shop Assistant, Czy Lucyna to dziewczyna? and Pieśniarz Warszawy. His songs became instant hits.

His fame spread. So much so that, in 1939, Bodo signed a good contract with by an American film company and planned to emigrate.

Before he could leave, however, Poland was invaded by Germany, which invaded Russia two years later. His father, Teodor Junod, had been Swiss, and so his son was traveled abroad on a Swiss passport.

Portraiture by NKVD.

Then, after returning from one of his USSR tours, he submitted his Swiss documents for emigration to the U.S. He was arrested by Stalin’s notorious NKVD (the maiden name of the KGB) on trumped-up charges of espionage. After a series of brutal interrogations in Moscow, he was sent to a forced labor camp.

The New York Times called Ben Moser’s Susan Sontag: Her Life and Work (Ecco) “a landmark biography, the first major reintroduction of an incomparable literary heavyweight to the public since her death.” Leslie Jamison, writing in The New Republic, called it “utterly riveting and consistently insightful . . . The book takes this larger-than-life intellectual powerhouse—formidable, intimidating, often stubbornly impersonal in her work—and makes her life-size again . . . fascinating.” I haven’t read it yet. However, her close friend, Steve Wasserman has, and he disagrees. (He’s spoken about her before on The Book Haven, here and here.)

His mini-review below:

Ben Moser’s biography of Susan Sontag is appallingly reductive. Her actual writings and ideas interest him rather less than what he construes as her private life. He is transfixed by the halo of celebrity that seemed to hover above Sontag during her life and which, even after her death, continues to glow. As a result, his biography is strikingly coarse and prurient, mocking and condescending, even as it pretends to an unearned seriousness of purpose, accompanied by a style designed to tell readers what to think and feel. He accuses Sontag of being a coward about her sexuality, a narcissistic diva, a person whose efforts to transform herself are derided as comic.

Suppose he is right. What does this have to do with the work — her writings — which is, after all, why we ought to care, if we care at all, about Susan Sontag. If people think the work is no good, or at least that it’s wildly overrated, fine, then they should say so. But if the work has any true and lasting merit, then this voyeuristic emphasis on celebrity and careerism is, to say the least, misplaced, not to mention that it seeks to have it both ways, and exploits the very fame it so condescends to. But then, condescending to Sontag while fixating on her, even when she was alive, is something so commonplace as to be tediously familiar.

Paying any attention to Sontag, especially now, fifteen years after her demise, matters only if her work matters. Everything else amounts to gossip about a person who was famous in her lifetime, or is grist for the most trivial sort of social and cultural history. Moser seems to believe that what matters most about Sontag was her effect on her contemporaries, not her work. This view is a disservice to and a caricature of the woman and writer I knew.

(Photograph above right by Andy Ross, Berkeley, circa 1995.)

Hollywood’s underside (Photo: Hayes Estate)

“Your only vice is yourself. The worst of all. The really incurable one.” 

Another Look is returning from its long summer break, launching its eighth season with Alfred Hayes‘s 1958 noir novella, My Face for the World to See. The event will take place on Wednesday, October 30, 7:30 p.m., at the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall on the Stanford campus.

The narrator, a Hollywood screenwriter, rescues a young actress from suicide in the Pacific. The incident leads to an affair fueled by gin, cigarettes, and ultimately madness.

Hayes (1911-85) was also a screenwriter, television writer, as well as a novelist. He published My Face for the World to See when he was 47.

In The Los Angeles Review of Books, filmmaker Alex Harvey called the book “his most achieved portrait of male self-deception … a sharp, forensic examination of power and money…”

The discussion will be led by author Tobias Wolff, founding director of Another Look. Panelists include Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, novelist Terry Gamble, and film critic David Thomson, who wrote the introduction for the NYRB Classics edition.