Posts Tagged ‘Mark Gonnerman’

The eminent Japanese author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki has been called an “ecological prophet.”

Please join us for a discussion of his 1933 classic In Praise of Shadows. It’s coming up fast! Another Look will discuss Tanizaki’s 73-page essay at 7 p.m. (PST) on Monday, April 29, at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center at 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus. This is a hybrid event, so you can come in person or via zoom, but we encourage you to register either way (link below). 

Some more praise for the book: “Tanizaki sums up what he feels Japan has lost in becoming modern. In brief, it is his view that the traditional Japanese arts thrived in the shade, and that the glaring light of the Twentieth Century is destroying them,” wrote Edward Seidensticker in The Atlantic in 1955. “At the end of the essay he suggests that we try turning down the lights.”

Ethen Wood, the associate director of Stanford’s Sustainable Architecture + Engineering, grew up in San Francisco’s Zen Buddhist community in the 80’s and spent part of his childhood in a Zen Buddhist monastery in the mountains of Carmel, without electricity. “This was part of a concerted effort by the temple to stay true to the traditions and historic experiences from Japan,” he said.

The book is available on amazon.com or abebooks.com, at Kepler’s in Menlo Park, and Bell’s Books in Palo Alto (call first). It’s also available on Kindle. Register on the link below.

Panelists will include Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and three special guests: Mark Gonnerman, who has a Stanford PhD in religious studies, has been a student of Japanese histories and cultures since he first ventured to Kyoto in the mid-1970s. Meri Mitsuyoshi is a longtime Another Look aficionado whose appreciation of Japanese aesthetics is informed by study of ritual and intergenerational cultural transmission. 

This event is sponsored by the Stanford Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Continuing Studies Program at Stanford, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Register here:

https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZeL5ynQVQnW6JZzrvhbHFg#/registration

“When I arrived at his home in the Sierra Nevada foothills in May of 1998, Gary Snyder was covered with ants. He was on the roof of a shed, straddling solar panels and pulling out insulation that a colony of carpenter ants had claimed as its own,” recalled Eric Todd Smith. “A few minutes later, he was showing me around his tool shed and the old barn that houses his office, occasionally slapping at stray ants crawling in his hair. We talked about how to use the old crosscut saw and logging cables hanging from the walls, about local birds and trees, and eventually wound our way into poetry, Buddhist philosophy, and natural resource management. Such simultaneous immersion in concrete tasks and abstract ideas is normal for Snyder, who has lived with his family at Kitkitdizze, the house he built himself, since the early 1970s. His long poem, Mountain and Rivers Without End, testifies to his conviction that the quotidian and the cosmic are inseparable.”

With this passage, Smith introduces his unpublished interview with the Pultitzer prize-winning poet Gary Snyder – but he’s also introducing the man himself. It’s only one chapter in A Sense of the Whole: Reading Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End, edited by Mark Gonnerman. Some of you locals will remember Mark as the amiable and informed host of the Aurora Forum public conversations at Stanford. There’s lots to recall Stanford in this new volume, published by Counterpoint in Berkeley.

Snyder’s book-length poem was published in spring 1996. In December of that year, Snyder read from the poem at the legendary independent bookstore Kepler’s, just down the street from Stanford (we wrote about its history here). Gonnerman was in the audience, and perhaps that was something of an inspiration for the year-long research workshop Gonnerman organized at the Stanford Humanities Center in 1997. Scholars, writers, faculty, students, and community members met regularly to discuss Snyder’s 39-poem cycle, Mountains and Rivers Without End.  

The new volume includes the October 8, 1997, conversation at Stanford’s East House between Snyder, Gonnerman, and Counterpoint publisher, Jack Shoemaker. The following night, October 9, Snyder read a large portion of the poem to a full house at Kresge Auditorium on the Stanford campus. It also has a short Stanford discussion between Gonnerman, Carl Bielefeldt, and Charles Junkerman.

It includes essays by other participants at the year-long Stanford Mountains and Rivers celebration, such as David Abram, Wendell Berry, Carl Bielefeldt, Tim Dean, Jim Dodge, Robert Hass, Stephanie Kaza, Julia Martin, Michael McClure, Nano Sakaki, and Katsunori Yamazato.

The poem is “a complex, engaging, and, I presume, enduring work of art,” writes Gonnerman, but a work of art that’s hard to classify: “Is it an ‘American epic poem’ (M&R dust jacket)? A multimedia poem cycle? A contribution to American mythology? A collection of poems depicting major ecosystem types? Is it a spiritual autobiography – a pilgrim’s progress – aimed at effecting some kind of religious conversion?” Clearly, all of the above for Gonnerman, who intended the book as a guide to the poem, as well as an homage.

But he had another purpose, too: “One of the most pressing problems in American education and society at large is a breakdown of community owing to specialization, a trend that has infected even undergraduate life,” Gonnerman writes. He says “the book aims to inspire others to organize learning communities around poetic and allied arts. Our Mountains & Rivers Workshop began in an effort to turn the contemporary research multiversity into a university once again, if only for a moment.”

(Postscript: I have never met Gary Snyder, even while living nearby in the Sierra foothills for years. But we briefly exchanged emails two years ago, after Mark had mentioned that René Girard once spent an evening eating horsemeat with the foothills poet.  That was so far-fetched I had to check it out. I finally reached him via a mutual friend. Sorry, he said, although he’d cooked and eaten horsemeat before, he’d never done so with the renowned immortel of the Académie Française. Now if you should hear that rumor, you can squash it, too. Like an ant.)