Another Look

Jun’ichirō Tanizaki would have been pleased. We didn’t exactly turn off the lights last week, but we did at least turn them down, as the Nobel-nominated Japanese writer would have wished.

The result was a surprisingly intimate evening on on Monday, April 29, as our four panelists took on an unusual event: Another Look discussed  Tanizaki‘s 1933 classic In Praise of Shadows at the Stanford Humanities Center’s Levinthal Hall on the Stanford campus. His 73-page essay truly is an overlooked classic, at least in the West.

You couldn’t make it to the event? Here’s another way to attend: the Youtube video of the event is here. And for your listening on the road or as you rest, you can listen to the podcast here. And for photos? Scroll below. (All photos by David Schwartz.)

Panelists included Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look; Mark Gonnerman, a Stanford PhD in religious studies; Meri Mitsuyoshi, whose appreciation of Japanese aesthetics is informed by study of ritual and intergenerational cultural transmission; and Ethen Wood, the associate director of Stanford’s Sustainable Architecture + Engineering.

As always, this event was sponsored by the Stanford Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and the Continuing Studies Program at Stanford, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Another Look aficionado Jeanne Verville, who recently visited Japan, wrote us this letter after the Another Look event:

“The long essay was written by one of Japan’s greatest writers at the time Japan was overtaxed with its new extended empire. It was a time when ‘old’ (quiet and sequestered) Japanese aesthetics and ways of life had given way to the rapid change, bright lights, and noise of industrial development and the rise of militarism. Tanizaki looks to the past and reflects on what has been destroyed in Japanese tradition by twentieth century Western influences.

“Having just experienced the architecture of temples, shrines, a ryokan, tea houses, Gassho-Zukuri farmhouses, large rambling gardens, the Ryoan-ji Zen temple garden, government buildings, and modern Tokyo’s Ginza area, bullet trains, the new train station in Kyoto, etc., the essay and discussion deepened my understanding of old Japanese aesthetics, many of which have appealed to me for decades. Think: uncluttered lines, focus on small slices of beauty, the quietness of gardens, tea ceremonies, the people…

“Deepening the learning is always a joy, but the experience of reading the essay and attending the discussion resonated for me in even deeper ways as I search for healthy ways of being in the scream of today’s terrifying changes: climate, political, religious intolerance, overt hatred, immoral wealth distribution, discrimination, and materialism. 

“Questions the discussion raised for me:

What am I missing by turning on the lights? What am I not noticing in the shadows?
When is the last time I truly lost myself peering into the night sky?
What do I hear and feel when sitting alone in the dark by the lake?
What mysteries of life have disappeared in the glare of the spotlight?
How does shadow create intriguing aesthetics? 
What comforts do I allow myself that detract from beauty and calm?
What would I gain by not reaching too quickly for comfort?
What aestetic pleasures am I missing by performing tasks in the light? (e.g., more fully feeling . shapes and textures when folding clothes)
What would cooking by candlelight feel like? What would I notice?
What insights am I missing by not walking around the block in the dark?
What am I missing by spending too much time on blue light-emitting devices?
Am I self-inducing cyber sickness?
In considering the benefits of shadow, how would experiencing them make me feel more . . . connected to my life?
How can I come out of my shadows and enhance, in quiet ways, the lives of others?

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

Add your own comments in the comments section at the bottom of this post.

Please join us for a discussion of Herman Melville‘s classic short story Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street at 7 p.m. (PST) on Monday, January 8, 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). 

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 Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Two special guests will round out the high-powered panel out to four: Robert’s brother Thomas Harrison, professor of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Katie Peterson, an award-winning poet and Stanford alum. 

Melville is most famous for his masterpiece Moby Dick, but his 1853 Bartleby is a short wonder, and his protagonist’s repeated “I prefer not to” is one of the most famous lines in American literature. Novelist Sophie Hannah, writing in The Independent, called it “a flawless and ambiguous work of art.” She writes, “Bartleby, blank in character, tests the characters of others. … Bartleby is pure enigma.” 

The short story is famous and widely available – buy a copy on amazon or abebooks.com, in local libraries and in bookstores. It’s also widely available online – google for links. 

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

Register here:

https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_05TfjtlERXesr_sv69GIJA#/registration

John Fante‘s 1939 novel Ask the Dust was up for discussion on September 19, at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus. You can watch the video here, Or if you prefer, listen to the podcast here.

Something you may not have known about Fante: He was the son of Italian immigrants, born in 1909 (he died in 1983). Hence, Italy considers him one of its own. So we partnered with the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco for the event!

Poet Charles Bukowski (not Italian) said the book had a lifetime influence on his own writing, and that the works of Fante, a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter, were “written of and from the gut and the heart.”

“One day I pulled Ask the Dust down from the library book shelf and stood for a moment, reading.  Then like a man who had found gold in a city dump, I carried the book to a table.  The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle for me….Fante became my god.” 

Panelists for the event: 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 Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Novelist Terry Gamble will round out the panel. Many will remember her from the Another Look discussion of Alfred Hayes‘s My Face for the World to See in 2019.

Let David Schwartz‘s photos tell the story.

Please join us for a discussion of John Fante‘s 1939 novel Ask the Dust on Tuesday, September 19, at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center at 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus. 

Poet Charles Bukowski said the book had a lifetime influence on his own writing, and that the novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter Fante’s works were “written of and from the gut and the heart.”

After meeting Fante in 1979, Bukowski wrote: “There is much more to the story of John Fante. It is a story of terrible luck and terrible fate and of a rare and natural courage. Some day it will be told but I feel that he doesn’t want me to tell it here. But let me say that the way of his words and the way of his way are the same: strong and good and warm.”

The book was adapted into a 2006 film starring Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek.

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 Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as  a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Novelist Terry Gamble will round out the panel. Many will remember her from the Another Look discussion of  Alfred Hayes‘s My Face for the World to See in 2019.

Join the Another Look mailing list here for updates.

REGISTER FOR THE EVENT HERE!
                                                                                                      *** 

Another Look is a seasonal book club that draws together Stanford’s top writers and scholars with distinguished figures from the Bay Area and beyond. The books selected are short masterpieces you may not have read before.

This event is sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and the Continuing Studies Program at Stanford. In a special surprise, this event will be co-sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco. Fante was the son of Italian immigrants, and Italy considers him one of its own.

Our April “Another Look” event was a record-breaker, with 880 people registering to attend our rich discussion of Virginia Woolf‘s 1929 A Room of One’s Own. The “hybrid” event took place at 7 p.m. (PST) on Tuesday, April 11, in Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus – and now you can attend it virtually, via podcast or video.

The video is up on Youtube here, and you can access the podcast on the Another Look website here. 

Another Look regular David Schwartz provided the photos for the event.

According to a contemporary review in The Los Angeles Times: “If you miss this book, which is profound and subtle and gently ironic and beautifully written, you will have missed an important reading experience.” Another Look will consider the work’s legacy a century later. The Bloomsbury author’s iconic book, an extended essay, is in public domain and widely available,

Panelists included: 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 Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers, a founding director of Another Look, and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts.

Constance Solari is a writing coach and the author of four novels, including 2012’s Sophie’s Fire: The Story of Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat. Maria Florence Massucco, is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies who specializes in the 20th century novel. You’ll remember her from our discussion of Dorothy Strachey‘s Olivia.

The Guardian called the book “a landmark in feminist thought and a rhetorical masterpiece” and rated it one of the top 100 non-fiction books of all time. Read about that here.

Please join us for a discussion of Virginia Woolf‘s 1929 A Room of One’s Own at 7 p.m. (PST) on Tuesday, April 11, in Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus.

The Guardian called the book “a landmark in feminist thought and a rhetorical masterpiece” and rated it one of the top 100 non-fiction books of all time. Read about that here.

According to a contemporary review in The Los Angeles Times: “If you miss this book, which is profound and subtle and gently ironic and beautifully written, you will have missed an important reading experience.” Another Look will consider the work’s legacy a century later. The Bloomsbury author’s iconic book, an extended essay, is in public domain and widely available.

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 Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers, a founding director of Another Look, and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts.

Constance Solari is a writing coach and the author of four novels, including 2012’s Sophie’s Fire: The Story of Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat. Maria Florence Massucco, is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies who specializes in the 20th century novel. You’ll remember her from our discussion of Dorothy Strachey‘s Olivia.

Join us in person or virtually, but please register here.

Stanford’s Another Look book club has often showcased New York Review Books’ excellent offerings, so as we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Stanford book event series, we’re pleased that our fall event on October 5 will feature Glenway Wescott‘s too-little-known 1940 novella, The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story. New York Review Books founder Edwin Frank (and, incidentally, he’s also a former Stanford Stegner Fellow), agreed to answer a few questions about the book, one of he first NYRB Classics published in 2001. (The Book Haven also ran an interview, “Great literature is literature that remains news,” between Edwin Frank and another Stanford alum, Daniel Medin, at Shakespeare & Company in Paris, 2016, here.)

Another Look was launched in November 2012, with William Maxwell’s So Long See You Tomorrow. Tobias Wolff, founding director of Another Look, talked about his choice in a short video here. Our tenth anniversary event for Wescott’s novel will take place at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, October 5, at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street, on the Stanford campus. The event will also be livestreamed. Come celebrate our tenth with us! It’s not to late to register here, for the virtual and live event. Walk-ins are always welcome, too.

The panelists will include a special guest, Steve Wasserman, former book editor at the Los Angeles Times Book Review and editor at large for the Yale University Press, and now publisher of Heyday Books in Berkeley. Other 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; Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers, founding director of Another Look, and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Author Cynthia L. Haven, a National Endowment for the Humanities public scholar, will round out the panel.

The interview with Edwin Frank …

CYNTHIA HAVEN: Wescott’s prose is meticulous, keenly observed, epigrammatic, profound – and often very funny. Do we have any idea how he wrote? How he crafted this perfect novel? His papers and manuscripts are at Yale, do they give us any idea?

EDWIN FRANK: I don’t know how Wescott worked and haven’t seen the papers. Nor am I conversant with the details of his life, except in the vaguest way, and I hadn’t even realized that Yvor Winters was his mentor. Interesting! As to his neglect as a writer, in America, or perhaps anywhere, not writing a lot, and essentially giving up writing novels, as Wescott did, is not a great recipe for a career as a writer. Why he wrote so little is another question—I don’t know the answer—though both Pilgrim Hawk (with its ambisexual Alex) and Apartment in Athens can be read as tales of the closet, suggesting that Wescott found himself more and more caught out by not being able to write frankly as a gay man.

HAVEN: Pilgrim Hawk features a lot of complicated relationships: painful love, unhappy love, unrequited love, non-existent love—often suggested in glances, or a quip, or in silence. How much do you think this evasiveness reflects Wescott’s own ambiguities, as a gay man at a time when it was far less acceptable than it is today?

FRANK: The Pilgrim Hawk is clearly enough about frustration, in love and as a writer. Counting the triangles it traces is an interesting exercise: there’s Madeleine, Larry, and Lucy; Jean, Eva, and Rickert; Tower, Alex, and Tower’s brother (and one might treat these three triangles as constituting a higher order triangle in their own right of different—or are they all alike at some level?—kinds of marriage); and perhaps most importantly, Tower, Alex (and all the rest of them for that matter), and The Pilgrim Hawk, the story of a day (and his life) that Tower finally can be deemed to have put down  (though the narrator of a book is never quite its writer, close as they may be), fulfilling himself as observer, even as central to his observation is his own inability to love. The narrator is left as one of “The lovers [who are] to be pitied…are those who have no one to hate, whose rough shooting can take place only in the imagination, and never ends” (page 34). 

The rough shooting was about to hit a different order of magnitude in 1940…

FRANK:“Rough shooting” reminds me that the book also has World War II in the background, and here another triangle can be discerned, between the late 20s, when the action takes place—the past—1940, the date of narration and of publication, when the war had begun but the U.S. had yet to enter it—the present—and the future, undetermined apart from the war going on (perhaps parallel to the narrator’s loveless future). In that light the book can be read as a very subtle allegory of the feckless fashionable interwar years that the Cullens, and Alex’s showy but “not splendid” house with its big glass modern windows, epitomizes, as the senile French politician in the chateau next door does the corruption of the Belle Epoque. Implicit is the question of what future is there for the world at war (so ostentatiously charted in the first paragraph) and what kind of world was it that led to that war. (You could read the book alongside Civilization and Its Discontents.) But this question is very much implicit, and maybe I am making too much of it, though the central presence of the hawk inevitably puts questions of entrapment and predation in the air (or on a bloodstained gloved hand). The narrator’s predatory gaze is also emphasized increasingly throughout. 

But as Michael Cunningham nicely says in the introduction the poor hawk is doomed from the get-go to be a symbol and yet triumphs for all that, becoming, in the telling, wonderfully, electrically, real and distinct. Those burning claws! And there is a lot of edgy, self-aware humor, too: “Still, I felt rather as if I had a great thought of death concentrated and embodied and perched on me” (page 47). Rather!

A book of concrete observations and endless reflections and lapidary sentences: “She said this in a great sad false way” (page 88); “airy murderess like an angel; young predatory sanguinary deluxe hen” (page 94).

HAVEN :The falcon’s name Lucy is usually linked with Walter Scott’s novel, The Bride of Lammermoor. But it also has associations with Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor. Its final act is one of the most frenzied in all opera. Certainly Westcott’s fierce and ominous Lucia has a good deal of madness about her. Can you channel Westcott for a moment and connect the Lucys—Wescott’s Lucy with Scott’s and Donizetti’s?

FRANK: There is nothing subtle about Donizetti’s Lucia, but there is nothing but subtlety in Wescott’s book, subtlety and ferocity, despair, and some genuine camp. That mix, so unusual, may explain why its audience has always been a little select. 

REGISTER HERE FOR THE EVENT!

Go HERE to read more about it!

Our October 5 event is sponsored by Stanford Continuing Studies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

PLEASE REGISTER HERE.

Welcome back to the Bechtel Conference Center for our spring event! Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde will be the subject of our next discussion at 7 p.m., Tuesday, April 12. It will be a hybrid event. Register here to attend virtually or in-person. Walk-ins welcome too. Please bring your friends!

The event marks our first in-person event since the beginning of COVID in 2020. The occasion will also be offered virtually for those who cannot attend on the Stanford campus. (Currently, face masks are recommended, but not required, for attendance; the situation is in flux and we will keep you updated as the situation changes.) 

Stevenson’s short 1885 novel is universally known but little read today. Vladimir Nabokov called it “a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction.” He compared it to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Gogol’s Dead Souls. Stevenson’s dark vision had come to him in a dream – as it had for Mary Shelley, who went on to write Frankenstein, a book that Another Look featured in 2018. Both works share a fascination with the limits of science, medicine, and technology on our humanity. 

Acclaimed author Robert Pogue Harrison will moderate the discussion. The Stanford professor who is Another Look’s director writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and hosts the popular talk show, Entitled Opinions. He will be joined by eminent novelist Tobias Wolff, founding director of Another Look and a National Medal of Arts winner, and Ana Ilievska, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Stanford Humanities Center and a lecturer in Stanford’s Department of French and Italian. 

The short book is available in many editions, and is available online. As always, this event is free and open to the public.  

Please join Stanford’s Robert Pogue Harrison, Maria Florence Massucco, and Tobias Wolff, for a webinar discussion of Dorothy Strachey’s 1949 novel, Olivia.The event will take place 5:00-6:30 p.m. (PST) on Wednesday, October 13. Given the ongoing COVID situation, this will be a virtual event.

Stanford’s Prof. Robert Harrison, an acclaimed author and director of Another Look, will lead the discussion, joined by the eminent novelist Tobias Wolff, founding director of Another Look and a National Medal of Arts winner. Massucco, a PhD candidate in Italian Studies who specializes in the 20th century novel, will round out the panel.

André Gide calledOlivia“a little masterpiece,” and we think you’ll agree. The story traces the intense emotional currents among the girls and teachers in a finishing school outside Paris. Olivia, a 16-year-old English girl, finds herself falling under the spell of the charismatic Mademoiselle Julie, a founder of the school.The Times(London)praisedOlivia’s “strange combination of strength and delicacy” and theWall Street Journalnoted that the book is “extravagantly French in its sensibilities.”

Dorothy Strachey and her famous brother, the writer Lytton Strachey, were prominent in the Bloomsbury group.Olivia is her only novel.

The book is available through Amazon (also on Kindle), as well as Stanford Bookstore (650-329-1217) Kepler’s in Menlo Park (650-324-4321), and Bell’s Books in Palo Alto (650-323-7822). Secondhand copies are also available on Abebooksas well. If all else fails, you can order directly from Penguin at 800-793-2665, but allow for delivery time and shipping costs.

Like all our events, this webinar is free and open to the public, but please register on the link below. See you on Zoom!

https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jIXoLGUWTKeS6HCyhVaibw