Vereshchagin

As long as I'm ranting about art, I might as well denounce the University Art Museum, Berkeley, for deaccessioning "Solomon's Wall," 1884-85, by V.V. Vereshchagin, a gift of Phoebe Hearst.

At Christie's it fetched $3.6 million. The deed was reported in the gossip column of the Chronicle!

Apparently, the Museum decided the work didn't fit in its collection; and the university's art history department declared it wasn't needed for teaching purposes.

First of all, it's pathetic that the work wasn't first hung in the Museum--where it hadn't been seen for 30 years--for public comment.

Although you've never heard of Vereshchagin, he was, to quote the jacket flap of Vahan D. Barooshian's 1993 biography (University Press of Florida), which I picked up inspired by Robert Rosenblum, "the most popular and famous Russian artist in Western Europe and America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century."

Well, yes, not that many late-19th-century Russian artists were popular at all in these parts, and this particular work isn't central to Vereshchagin's achievement.

While the French Impressionists were trying to seize the moment of appearances, Vereshchagin was trying to capture dramatic moments on the battlefield; he was the Matthew Brady of the Empire's campaigns in Central Asia and the Russo-Turkish War. "Solomon's Wall" is an extension of his interest in the Ottoman Empire.

The Russian government (and private collectors) weren't as quick to buy as he would have liked, so he took his work on tour to Berlin, Paris, London...and America. Phoebe Hearst wasn't dabbling in the avant-garde, she was being swept away by the flavor of the month.

In any case, if the museum takes pride in such "history" paintings of the period as Emanuel Leutze's gigantic "Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth," (Leutze also did "Crossing the Delaware" and "Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way"), surely there was room for "Solomon's Wall." Isn't its subject matter relevant to today's concerns?

Taste in art changes. It is the duty of a museum to preserve the past to let the future take its own look. Somebody out there thought this minor Vereshchagin was worth $3.6 million. That's not astronomical in today's feverish market, but it is certainly a measure of respect.

Will the money obtained by the museum really be better spent acquiring something else? Is that really what a museum should do, shuffle its collection, trading up as opportunity permits?

Que sera, Serra

As I mentioned yesterday, there's some wonderful faux stuff in San Francisco, which is also the locus classicus of bad outdoor art, for example, the sculpture garden of the de Young, with its pathetic Oldenburg and a Turrell that doesn't quite work, and a lot of tchotchkes by artists nobody has ever heard of.

The Embarcadero has a pathetic Oldenburg of its own, although I am a fan of the Vaillancourt Fountain, as long as the water's running.

The latest public abomination is Richard Serra's etiolated "Ballast" at UCSF's Mission Bay campus. Art historians in the future will have difficulty attributing this one: School of Serra? In the Manner of Richard Serra? Ellsworth Kelly on a bad day?

To see a more echt local Serra, you have to sneak into the Gap headquarters (on the Embarcadero at Folsom) to see the Gulliver in Lilliput called "Charlie Brown."

(Of course, it would be better to check out MoMA's retrospective.)

The reason Serra works so well indoors is because he needs to be seen struggling against overwhelmingly constrictive forces: if only I weren't enchained, if only I had space to--then, of course, his tipsy, convoluted slabs aggrandize the hell out of the filled-up space.

Inside the art world, Serra looks good: monumental, permanent, serious, especially against the background of so much jokiness.

Serra is our Rodin (I'll take Saint-Gaudens's "Grief" over "The Thinker" any day)--an obvious master amongst charlatans, but, to my eye, his recent work is overwrought, a dead end, desperately dated.

Serra's macho excess and industrial overkill (and Difficulty of Execution & Installation) is the epitome of Late Imperial bombast. The Will to Power.

Other useful terms: overleveraged; flirting with collapse; muscle-bound. And unfinished fetish.

Let's just say he lacks a sense of humor.

alt.tourism

I don't think I'll be getting to Florence or Delos or Rome this summer, but I did fall by the Ghiberti Doors at Grace Cathedral a couple days ago. (Actually, the Doors are playing the Art Institute of Chicago, July 28-October 13.)
And the Sutro ruins.

And the Laocoon at the south end of the Legion of Honor, a gift from James D. Phelan, mayor/senator/patron of the arts (Villa Montalvo).

Just to the east of the statue is a Monterey Pine (?) planted 7 April 1922, by Joseph Joffre, Marechal de France.

Gertrude meets Alice

I was reading William Gass and he was saying that when he first read "Melanctha" he read through the night and then walked through the dawn mesmerized and transformed.

And so I was reading and reading "Melanctha" and never getting to the end. No matter how much I was reading I was not getting closer. So I turned to the next selection in my selected Stein and began reading The Autobiography.

I had read it long ago and had liked it because it was full of such gossip as that Picasso was a little touchy early on about the Spanish-American War and that Hemingway "heard about bullfighting" from Alice and that Gertrude preferred Jane Heap to Margaret Anderson.

I knew as well that this is the one hundredth anniversary of the meeting of Gertrude and Alice. I was knowing this because former Board member Hans Gallas has been helping organize a lot of events around this event and has even taken three ads to help my readers know about it.

On my urban hike back home from the Farmers Market on Saturday, I stopped by the Jewish Community Center to check out an exhibition of his Gertrude and Alice items, for example, portraits, books, letters, Alice's typewriter, their Sunbeam Mixmaster...

Then I read more of The Autobiography, stopping with the Twenties, because things weren't as much fun later.

The Booksmith Sold

I ran into Gary Frank at the Farmers Market Saturday, looking chipper, and he mentioned that he had finally sold his bookstore of 31 years, The Booksmith, on Haight.

I had met with the new owners, Christin Evans and Praveen Madan, a few months ago, when they were thinking about buying and wanted to talk to some locals, to find out what it means to the community. I told them The Booksmith is a great bookstore and means everything to me.

In early 1988, Gary devoted a front display window to ZYZZYVA; I have a treasured photo of me holding Madison in a Snugli in front of it. I was also included as number 120 in the store's author trading card series.

I congratulated Gary: his new thing is an invention, a device to hold "staff recommendations" on bookshelves. He showed it at BEA and has high hopes for rolling it out. I wish him the best of luck.

I wish Christin and Praveen, who also run a website LitMinds, good luck as well.

On the Road, again

With the issue safely off to the printer (oh, there are a few problems preflight has already discovered), I've been hitting the road.

Had lunch with my friend Bob at the Cantor Center's cafe, after seeing the Tuareg (complete with a nook devoted to pieces Hermes had commissioned from the Tuareg, instead of just ripping them off). Said hello to the museum's Anna Koster, a sometime advertiser, whom I've known for years, since she worked for Bob MacDonald in the great days of the de Saisset.

As we walked back to his bike, past "The Gates of Hell" in the Cantor garden, I mentioned to Bob that the figure we think of as "The Thinker," at the apex of Rodin's monstrous assemblage, was originally supposed to be Dante, the presiding genius of "The Inferno," of course. The ensemble turned out to be a mess, so Rodin spun off individual passages, including "The Thinker." Does that make you rethink a chestnut?

Went on to the new ICA in San Jose, what a great new space. And the SJ Museum of Art and the extraordinary Martin Ramirez show. The cafe makes a delicious hot chocolate.

That was Wednesday. Yesterday, I stopped by Alexander Book Company, an advertiser, and got blindsided by "Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day," (Thames & Hudson), which I thought I'd get for Amanda, who'll be at the American Academy, on the Janiculum, starting in September. (Madison will be at John Cabot College for the fall semester, just down the hill, on the Tiber.)

I had been thinking about my own first tour of Europe and the high-end guide of that time, "Europe on $5 a Day." I'd even asked my friend Peter Wiley, whose company now owns "Europe's" publisher, Frommer, if he could find me a copy of an early edition, because I haven't been able to find one online....anyway, Michael Stuppin, who owns Alexander Book Co., emerged from his office and said he was reading "Ancient Rome" himself. It really is fun.

Katherine Taylor Rules

Katherine Taylor has taken a full-page ad in the Fall issue for her wonderful first novel, Rules for Saying Goodbye (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Chapter Nine, "Traveling with Mother," appeared in ZYZZYVA Fall 2001, in somewhat different form; in fact, it was considered her "first nonfiction in print." It was also included in our anthology AutoBioDiversity (Heyday Books, 2005). The copyright page of Rules does not acknowledge either appearance.

To add insult to injury, the jacket flap lists six litmags in which her work has appeared, but not ZYZZYVA.

Taylor will read at Cody's next Tuesday, 26 June. I've been asked by Opium magazine, which is sponsoring the reading, to ask her ten questions, before the audience gets to ask her five. My outrage should have subsided by then.

PS: ZYZZYVA Fall '01 set in motion another book just out: Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music (Knopf) by classical guitarist Glenn Kurtz. In his acknowledgements, he mentions that he is "especially grateful" for my help; he volunteered as an editorial assistant in '92-'93.

Intro to Lit, Part II

Yesterday, I praised The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading. Thinking. Writing, because it contains a decent chunk of West Coast writers, my kind of people.

Today, I will damn it:

The plastic (durable) front cover of this 2,200-page, 4.5-lb, much-adopted brick shows a painting of two teenage girls on a sidewalk in SoHo. One, of course, is on her cell. The other, spare me, has her nose stuck in a paperback.

The inside cover, a pleasant off-beige, lists "resources for reading and writing about literature," among them some three dozen "sample student papers," obviously intended not to intimidate the fledgling critic. This is new in the eighth edition. Also new: three cases studies on "humor and satire" and a 26-page study of Julia Alvarez, including five poems, a chronology, a picture of the poet age ten, an interview, and two and a half pages of "manuscript."

"Class-tested in thousands of literature courses, The BITL accomodates many different teaching styles." 66 stories, 430 poems, 21 plays.

The inside back cover lists help on the "Re: Writing" "Web site" [sic]; my favorites include "Avoiding Plagiarism Tutorial," "Using your Word Processor," and "Mike Markel's Web Design Tutorial."

Let us turn quickly (just past the copyright page), to the page with the editor's bio and photo wearing a Borsalino-type hat and a coat with one of those flaps on the collar that you can button up to make everything snug. He is a Thoreau scholar who's taught at UConn since 1981. He also edited the Seventh Edition of the brick in question. He is, in short, the guardian of a cash cow, and gets to dedicate the book to his wife. (Milton also gets a page of his own, with two short poems.)

Chapter 1. Reading Fiction starts off with a photo of the late Toni Cade Bambara, who, in case you missed her moment in the sun, was an African American.

Chapter 2. Writing about Fiction starts with a photo of Alice Walker. (Are you getting the idea that the first edition came out when the canon was being reloaded with the previously disenfranchised?)

Chapter 3. Plot starts with a photo of Stephen King.

Of course, there is some World Lit: Rushdie, Mafouz, Garcia Marquez, and the late Bessie Head, born in South Africa to a black father and a white mother, who moved to Botswana in her twenties.

And eight images in full color, including a diagram of a slave ship; J.M.W. Turner's "The Slave Ship"; a poster of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," co-starring Sidney Poitier; a Bollywood poster...

It's too easy kicking a brick like this, although it is obviously a godsend for instructors at such places as Winona State, Gateway Community, LSU at Alexandria, Pulaski Tech, Paris JC, Kilgore--

All right, class, settle down now. Please open your text to page one thousand eight hundred and seventy-six (a number I picked at random): Act II, Scene II of A Raisin in the Sun.

Reader, Lit; Lit, Reader

Bedford/St. Martin's sent me The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading. Thinking. Writing, because it contains a story by May-Lee Chai that appeared in ZYZZYVA Winter '01. It's a nice story, but was included, I suspect, because it's about immigrants.

This is the eighth edition, and Political Correctness is still the guiding principle.

There's a lot not to like in this 2,200-page tome, but I did enjoy seeing a poem by the (forgotten), hermetic Robert Francis, whom I used to visit at his tiny cabin just past the cemetery where Emily Dickinson is buried.

And then there is the photo of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, whose first fiction in print was in ZYZZYVA Spring '93.

And a poem by Alice Jones, whose second poem in print was in ZYZZYVA Summer ’90.

And a healthy contingent of other West Coast writers who appeared in ZYZZYVA (in the days when we courted Big Names): Sherman Alexie, Alison Baker, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, Dagoberto Gilb, Sam Hamill, Robert Haas, Jane Hirschfield, Maxine Hong Kingston, Caroline Kizer, Janice Mirikitani, Gary Snyder, Cathy Song, Gary Soto, Timothy Steele, and Alice Walker.

I sometimes feel that ZYZZYVA doesn't have much to do with Literature, but, as Mark Twain said, I'm proud to own an anthology that showcases my homies.

The Eggers Bush

McSweeney's took a hit of $130,000 when its distributor went bankrupt, so it's now having to auction off a bunch of stuff.

You have until this evening to bid on, for example, Dave Eggers's portrait of President Bush, which, as I write this, seems to have topped out last week at $4,225.

I once heard Dave admit, at the California College of Art, that he had started out wanting to be a painter, but soon realized he didn't have enough talent, so he went into commercial design.

One of Dave's drawings appeared in ZYZZYVA Fall '02.

New Voices

The Fall issue is wrapped up and ready to go:

seven first-time-in-prints,

zero professors,

and two dozen architects.

Elizabeth McKenzie Takes The Test

Is there a quickie way to "review"--or, rather, preview--a book?

McLuhan suggested reading page 69; if you like that sampling, you'll like the whole deal.

Of course, this is absurd, at many levels, but...Elizabeth McKenzie took the Page 69 Test on Tuesday, the pub date of her first novel, MacGregor Tells the World. (The title story of her first collection, Stop That Girl, appeared in ZYZZYVA Winter 2001.)

Personally, I wish there were a quickie test I could use on the slush pile. Save me a lot of time, and a lot of guilt.

I'm forced to make snap decisions, and the casual observer might think my approach rather cavalier. But I never dismiss a manuscript randomly; I always move--however briskly and off-handedly--from beginning to end. I've found lots of scripts that putz around for several pages before they get going and, of course, more than a few that run out of steam midstream.

Well-Donne Review

My position on book reviews is: they're seldom worth reading.

If you want an example of a good one, however, please turn to John Carey, Professor Emeritus of English at Oxford, on John Stubbs's bio, John Donne: The Reformed Soul (Norton), in The New York Review of Books, June 14. Unfortunately, only the first graph of the 3,997-word piece is free online.

What a lovely, simple, welcoming, informing lead.

What a shock to learn Donne was raised a Catholic! (I was raised in the twilight of New Criticism, when it was considered sinful to factor in a writer's "identity." And, to my shame, I have thereafter taken Donne for granted.)

Carey, following Stubbs, goes on to lay out the main events of Donne's life: college days at Oxford and Lincoln's Inn; sailing with Essex against Spain; "a closet liaison" with the 14-year-old daughter of his patron's neighbor...and their marriage, which ended his career as an M.P.; repositioning himself, in middle age, in the C of E, where he took orders, flirted with Calvinism, with "mortalism," and etc.

Only then does Carey take the young biographer to task for his raft of misreadings.

And here's the last graph: "The faults of Stubbs's biography do not cancel its merits. It displays great gifts and would be remarkable even it were not his first book. If he had taken the time to bone up on the full gamut of Donne scholarship before writing it, he would probably have dissipated its bravura and dulled its edge. It is vivid, ardent, and engaging, and no one will regret reading it."

Thinking Blogger Award

I am grateful to Sharon Hurlbut for tagging me with a Thinking Blogger Award.

I recognize her name from the slush pile, but not, unfortunately, from our list of subscribers.

I think it's fun to get awards.

So you won't think I'm resting on my laurels, I'll include something to think about in this post; I learned it on Sunday from Michael Korda's wonderful Journey to a Revolution--he and some Cambridge buddies drive over to Budapest to check out the '56 revolution: Russian officers, in Paris after defeating Napoleon, would enter restaurants calling out "bystro, bystro," hurry up. So bistros became places that served a faster cuisine. Wikipedia says this may not be true.

Korda also says the reason early Volkswagens didn't have fuel gauges was because the gas stations on the autobahns were spaced exactly a tankful apart. Anyway, he's a lovely writer.

And he suggests that the Hungarians were encouraged to rise in order that the Soviets might be distracted from the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, which happened at exactly the same time!

No wonder Korda does not denounce the U.S. for refusing to help the Freedom Fighters (as promised?).

The O'Haras

Enough with the Sopranos.

Of the O'Haras, I prefer John. Frank was too pleased with himself, and with his second-generation entourage, and with his own amateurism.

John felt relentlessly snubbed. So he was mean. So he had an eye for the destructive detail.

He never fulfilled the promise of Appointment in Samarra (1934) , the best first novel of the decade. I'd held off reading his follow-up, BUtterfield 8 (1935), until recently, because I knew it would seem shoddy. It is.

(Turner Classic Movies ran the extremely shoddy BU8 film (1960) Friday nite: Eddie Fisher with his new bride, Liz Taylor, who had converted....)

If you wonder why the "U" in BUtterfield is capped, you're too young for O'Hara, though you might turn to Fran Lebowitz's Intro to the Modern Library paperback. (Lebowitz is how unseriously O'Hara is taken these days.)

In any case, I like BU8's Eddie Brunner, "one of the plain Californians. He was one of those young men whose height and frame make them look awkward unless they are wearing practical yachting clothes, or a $150 tailcoat." (Unfortunately, Lebowitz provides no help with the specs of yachting clothes and tailcoats.)

Brunner was "well liked" at Stanford, and, since the distinction between being "well liked" and "popular" is widely misunderstood, O'Hara explains.

And here's what I really love: O'Hara totally gets Valspeak: Brunner "could not talk with animation unless he stood up, but he did not often talk with animation. Like all Californians he made a substantive clause of every statement he made: 'It's going to rain today, is what I think...Herbert Hoover isn't going to be our next President, is my guess...I only have two bucks, is all.'"

The villain: BIG GRAPHICS

I would like to weigh in on the way newspapers, in their desperation, are savaging their book review sections.

Killing them. Cutting them back toward nothingness.

And almost as bad: at the recent BEA, John Leonard, former editor of the New York Times Book Review, bemoaned “the misery that graphics have brought into the world." In his day, the NYTBR had 70 pages, but, since then, he lamented, "graphics" have gobbled up a third of the space once given to the words of reviews.

If you want a disgusting example, take a look at the Chronicle's pathetic book section and its gargantuan, meaningless front-page graphic this Sunday. I haven't seen it yet, but I have no fear I'll have to apologize for speaking false.

A couple of weeks ago, I measured that's week's front-page graphic and found it consumed 37 column inches. And the irrelevant subhead and pointless indentations at the margins consumed another 11 inches.

How can you defend a book review that is so oblivious in its stewardship?

Readem & Weep

Due to circumstances beyond my conscious control, I messed up my links yesterday to some lovely readings lists. If you're still with me and want to go back and check those lists, they'll be there for you. Sorry.

Meanwhile, read this:
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Summer Reading

I'm a great believer in the literary cannon (more boom for the book), so I like reading lists. Here are a couple from New York magazine that might be fun:

best novels you've never read

the canon of the future

to be read, of course, while listening to our cover FM play list in OZ.

Gross

Our first 22 years cost $3.5 million—an average annual budget of $160,000.

Individuals have donated just over a million dollars; grants have supplied half a million, advertising revenues slightly more. Subscriptions and single-copy sales, mostly in bookstores, have made up the rest.

We have no debt.

Thank you, one and all.

Frisco Bob

Friday night, I went to the Robert Hass reading at the de Young; $8 for members seemed a bit much, but the rip-off probably deterred the lumpen, who had come for the no-host bar and band holding forth beneath the hideous Richter...and the pathetically overstuffed Vivienne Westwood show (how quickly she became ordinary).

Anyway, from my perch in the back, Bob, for a second, reminded me of another locally born poet. No, not Alice B. Toklas. No, not Sharon Olds. Bob Frost, who moved to frostier climes when he was ten or so, and never wrote anything significant about San Francisco.

But here was another white-haired (& balding), avuncular bard...but, of course, Hass is infinitely sweeter.

Besides a sappy early poem listing the charms of The City, he read a harrowing one: every morning his father dosed his mother with Antabuse, which would make her sick if she drank, which she did, as soon as he left for work: and she drank and gagged, drank and gagged.

The first question from the audience, about his experience as Poet Laureate, elicited a description of the funky corridor leading to a rather grand attic office and its splendid view of the Capitol. Then Hass kvelled how he never missed a deadline during his four-year stint supplying a once-a-week poetry column to some 40 newspapers.

The next question was about his relationship with Milosz. The first time the master visited Hass's house, to discuss working together on translations from the Polish, Bob knew his guest would want a beer, so he splurged with an upscale Pilsner Urquell. "Good beer," Milosz declared, and they were off.

The Fantastic

The fantastic, newly made-over issue of The Big Ugly contains three poems by our managing editor, Amanda Field. These poems also appear in Amanda's chapbook, That Year (Etherdome, Boulder, CO).

Amanda concludes her seven-year career at ZYZZYVA this summer; she leaves to accompany her husband, the filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, who has won a Rome Prize, a year's residence at the American Academy.