This 1955 letter from John Steinbeck to Marilyn Monroe has been making the rounds on Facebook in the last few days, so we thought we’d join the party. It’s a sweet letter, somewhat bashful, and it was found in the superstar’s personal archive, and sold for $3,250 at Julien’s in 2016. Steinbeck humbly, even grovelingly requests a “girlish” photo for his nephew. Did she send the photo to the lovestruck boy, Jon Atkinson? We’ll never know, but she valued enough to keep it till her dying day.

Happy World Book Day! According to Wikipedia, “World Book Day, also known as World Book and Copyright Day, or International Day of the Book, is an annual event the organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to promote reading, publishing, and copyright.”

Nota bene: Apparently, World Book Day was first celebrated on 23 April 1995, and continues to be recognized on that day – but it’s also recognized as Shakespeare’s birthday, and we rather think the Bard deserves his own day.

So let’s celebrate with one of the English languages other Bards: John Milton. From Milton’s Cottage on this day: “What better time to quote Areopagitica – Milton’s iconic defense of the freedom of the press and the source of his best quotes about books?”

“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

And this: “For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” (Thanks to poet Dan Rifenburgh for the find!)

Beautiful Bergen from the atop one of its seven hills. (Photo: Zygmunt Malinowski)

We promised, we promised, we promised that we’d write more about our adventures at the inaugural Bergen International Literary Festival, and what have we delivered? Nada! Nada! Nada to date!

Fortunately, there are others picking up the slack. Jacob Silkstone over at Asymptote includes some observations of the fête in the journal’s “weekly dispatches from the frontlines of world literature.” An excerpt:

Glasses, please. (Photo: Zeljko Koprolcec/Wikimedia)

Writers from twenty different countries gathered in Bergen’s bowl of snow-capped hills, including recent Asymptote contributors Helon Habila and Dubravka Ugrešić. In her opening notes, festival director Teresa Grøtan emphasised that “This is a festival where politics meets poetry, where society meets art, and where art meets the world . . . [This] is not a place where we seek consensus. It is not a festival where we are looking for an answer.”

A festival with a clear purpose, then, although sometimes the real charm of literary festivals lies not in the grand message but in the minor details: Dubravka Ugrešić twice interrupting questions from Daniel Medin to rummage through a crumpled grey and orange rucksack before locating a pair of reading glasses; Cambridge professor James E. Montgomery left temporarily speechless by a performance from Saudi poet Hissa Hilal, eventually breaking the silence with a muttered “Powerful . . .”

Partners in crime, looking a tad silly in a Bergen bookstore.

Encouragingly, the children’s programme was held in front of a packed audience, and most venues were filled to capacity. Cynthia Haven was among the bloggers covering the inaugural festival, “tired and hungry and footsore and jetlagged, but delighted . . .” It’s hard not to conclude that any event that can remain a delight even to the tired/hungry/footsore/jetlagged audience member has to be regarded as an emphatic success.

You can read more here. (The free umbrellas he mentions were a nice signature for the festival in Bergen, where it rains 266 days of the year.)

A less-touted event at left: a rare get-together between the Book Haven and Daniel Medin of the American University of Paris. We’ve written about him before, here and here.

Was Dante a precursor to modern notions in sci-fi? Perhaps so. I was recently reading Disorder and Order, the book that came out of Stanford’s remarkable 1981 conference of that name organized by René Girard and Jean-Pierre Dupuy. I had seen the volume before, but somehow overlooked the brilliant essay, with the unalluring title, “Cosmology and Rhetoric,” written by one of the world’s leading Dante scholars, Stanford’s own John Freccero. In it, he makes the case for the written language as a spatial representation of time. He begins the discussion this way:

He recaptured time too.

“…I would like to cite the representation of the solar disc and zodiac in the pavement of the baptistry in Florence. Surrounding the Romanesque wheel of the heavens is a nearly effaced inscription – En giro torte sol ciclos et rotor igne – which may be roughly translated, “Behold the sun in its cyclical gyres and the wheel of fire!” Its significance is not in what it says but rather how it says it. The phrase, in fact, is a palindrome which reads the same from left to right and from right to left. In a tradition that goes back at least to Plato‘s Timaeus, the two apparent motions of the sun diurnally moving from east to west and zodiacally from west to east were described as a motion to the right and to the left. …

Dante’s disciple, John Freccero

“Dante’s literary cosmology is infinitely more complex, although elements like this can be discerned here and there in his voyage through the heavenly spheres. The complexity arises from the fact that the tautological structure of his poem warps the categories of time and space so that his voyage ends where it begins and time is recaptured. The arrow of temporality is also reversed in the final part of Proust‘s work where Le Temps retrouvé marks the end and therefore, paradoxically, the beginning. But the space was Paris, or at least the corklined study. In Dante’s work, however, space is a figure for this temporality so that it too bends back upon itself, boundless and all-encompassing, yet encompassed by the time that it takes to traverse it. The space-time continuum was familiar to Dante through the metaphor of written language which is a spatial representation of time. We are made surprisingly aware of this each time we run across phrases such as ‘as we saw above’ or ‘as we shall see below.’ The surprise comes from our temporal representation of space which is, in fact, the act of reading, in which we lend to space our own temporality as does a machine to the film frame placed before it. In the case of a book, however, the claim to totality is implicitly made – bound up and bounded by its covers, encyclopedic in the etymological sense of the word. When such a claim is translated into temporal terms, then all of time must be contained within it. When Dante refers to the primum mobile with one of his most bizarre images, referring to the outermost heavenly sphere as the flowerp0t in which time has it roots, he is making a claim not only for his voyage but also for the poem, which is coextensive with it. Since his story is in part how this story is written, it is inevitable that the closing of the book be its ending in which all of time and space are contained.”

Martin and Milton. “He filled the room, with his crisp voice and laugh.” (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Recent thoughts have turned my mind again to the late Prof. Martin Evans, one of the leading John Milton scholars in the world – well, perhaps it’s no surprise, given my recent Milton Cottage residency (see here). Poet Kenneth Fields of the Stanford English Department penned this little tribute at the time of the Welshman’s death in 2013. It was never published … till now.

Ken with cup

There has never been a time when Martin Evans was not at the center of the English Department, and I’ve been here for a long time. Martin was a man of great enthusiasms. He loved food and wine, he loved teaching, he loved Milton and the Renaissance, he loved his wife, the unfailingly charming Mariella, and he loved his children. He also loved being a contrarian. But it was not enough for him to be contrary; he wanted to be right. He once complained about a former colleague, “What I hate about him is that in any conversation, he always heads for the moral high ground, usually getting there ahead of me.” Few people got anywhere ahead of Martin. He filled the room, with his crisp voice and laugh. I always thought his voice resembled that of his countryman Richard Burton, but without the deepening and coarsening effects of cigarettes and booze. I cannot think of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” without hearing Martin’s voice reading it at department Christmas parties.

About a year ago I asked several of my colleagues what they told students who were preparing to write papers. Martin’s reply was the shortest and the best: “I tell them to take me on an intellectual journey from point A to point B.” I pass this nugget on to my students every quarter, always careful to cite him, and to deliver it in Martin’s declarative voice. It’s a deceptively simple remark that needs to be passed on, and can stand some attention. First, intellectual. Second, a journey. From A to B means that there must be an A, must be a B—how often do we realize about even our own writing that there’s no A, no B? Finally, “take me on a journey.” Many of us have been taken on journeys by Martin. I intend to keep and broadcast that little sutra until I reach point B myself. Were Martin to hear me say the line that now comes to me, “They are all gone into the world of light,” he’d recognize his fellow Welsh poet, and he’d complete the sentence.

The dapper diplomat thanks a teary-eyed soldier in Boise

We’ve written about the popular new consul general at the French consulate in San Francisco – the charismatic Emmanuel Lebrun-Damiens was, after all, an honored guest at the launch party for Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard. He is already a familiar figure on the Palo Alto tech scene. Now he’s a beloved figure farther afield, too. He went all the way to Idaho to say merci to a 99-year-old soldier who fought to liberate the French, and to bestow an honor he has already bestowed to a few at Stanford.

Hence on Friday, “technician fifth grade” Emil Reich was raised to the sublime rank of Chevalier in the Legion of Honour for his World War II service, where he served with the Antitank Gun Crewman 610 division. With hundreds of other servicemen, he sailed to Europe, and on June 6th, stormed the beaches in Normandy.

Reich continued on to fight in the Ardennes and Rhine region and participated in the famous Battle of the Bulge. Since he was fluent in German, he frequently traveled with higher ranking officers to speak to the citizens prior to troops approaching the towns in the Rhineland. He was wounded twice and spent time away from his division in a Paris hospital, returning to his unit after recovery.

After the end of World War II, he served as an interpreter at army camps housing German soldiers and returned in to the U.S. early in 1946.

“As a young man you left your home and family to fight and liberate not only France but the whole European continent,” said Lebrun-Damiens in an address. “Your courage and your bravery are the reason why the President of the French Republic decided to award you the highest French recognition.”

The ceremony took place on the second floor rotunda of the Idaho State Capitol building, attended by Reich’s family, as well as French Honorary Consul Mrs. Hortense Everett, Former French Honorary Consul Ms. Gabrielle Applequist, Congressman Russ Fulcher Representative Jake Ellis, Colonel Brit Vanshur Director of Staff of the Idaho National Guard, Marv Hagedorn Chief Administrator of Veteran Services, The Idaho National Guard Honor Guard, 25th Army Band, Chief of Staff of the Idaho National Guard COL Tom Rasmussen and Louis Hougaard Policy Advisor, Governor Brad Little.

The Reich family encourages any other WWII veterans who fought in France, or their family members, to reach out to the French embassy in San Francisco so they can also be recognized for their service. (Photos courtesy the French consulate)