Posts Tagged ‘Ted Gioia’

When I ran across Bill Johnsen at the 50th anniversary fête for the seminal Deceit, Desire and the Novel a few months back he gave me three copies of René Girard‘s newest volume, a small, elegant paperback called Sacrifice. One was for me, he said.

“Who are the other two for?” I asked. “Two famous people you know,” said the Michigan State University professor. Did he have anyone in mind? “Yes, Dana Gioia,” he said.

The turnabout was sweet. In 2007, when Dana was invited to be a commencement speaker at Stanford, Dana was knocked for not being famous enough. Gioia acknowledged some students’ disappointment: “A few students were especially concerned that I lacked celebrity status. It seemed I wasn’t famous enough. I couldn’t agree more,” he said. “As I have often told my wife and children, ‘I’m simply not famous enough.’”

I sent him the book with that comment, and added a poem by Tomas Venclova and another little-known one by Rainer Maria Rilke, in the James Leishman translation.

Famous

Bill gift was a nice followup to an earlier event: One of the joys of life is being to introduce your favorite people to each other – so I was honored to have the chance to invite Dana to Palo Alto to meet René some months back. I hoped the meeting would be fruitful.

And it was, I learned, in the followup that followed the followup. A few minutes ago, jazz scholar Ted Gioia‘s Facebook page offered a link about his big bro. From Evan R. Goldstein Q&A in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “My Daily Read: Dana Gioia“:

Q: What books have you recently read? Do they stand out?

Not famous enough in 2007 (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

A. I still read a great many books. I travel almost every week, so I have long stretches of quiet time on planes and in hotel rooms. I’m also a terrible insomniac so I read for hours late at night. At the moment I’m reading Meryle Secrest’s Modigliani as well as Peter Humfrey’s Painting in Renaissance Venice, which must seem like an odd pair chronologically. I’ve also been reading through René Girard’s books on mimetic theory and just finished Sacrifice, which deals with religious violence in the classical Vedic texts. I also enjoyed Kevin Starr’s survey of California historians, Clio on the Coast.

During my visit to his Santa Rosa home last summer, we had discussed some of the same themes that emerged in the Q&A. Here’s what I wrote then:

“Dana, Mary, and I sipped wine on the balcony overlooking the valley and the hills. We talked about the increasing commercialization of society, where marketed celebrities famous for being famous in turn market corporate brands for us to buy — how to keep Guess jeans, Netflix, Jimmy Choo shoes, and apps from monopolizing our remaining memory banks and our lives? We discussed the crazily increasing speed of 21st century communications and life. He liked, he said, living in a place where impressions are taken in and thought occurs no faster than the speed of walking.”

He’s clearly still of the same mind – and he dismisses the celebrity phenomenon he had decried in 2010 (and been denied in 2007):

Q. Do you use Twitter? If so, whom do you follow?

A. I never use Twitter. In fact, I am deeply suspicious of the massive communications overload that the media obsesses over and glorifies. So much of this activity is just covert advertising for products and celebrities. The objective is to capture and commercialize every moment of people’s time. What we really need is more quiet and less phony connectivity.

Dana’s reading is far more disciplined than my own. My attention, admittedly, has been blown to bits by the world wide web. Meanwhile, it’s good to know Dana and I have something in common: I am currently making my way through René’s classic Deceit, Desire and the Novel, with plans to hit Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World next.

Zbigniew and Katarzyna Herbert ... the happy times (Photo: The Herbert Estate)

In December 2008, I penned these words in the Times Literary Supplement:

Katarzyna Dzieduszycka was sitting at her desk at Warsaw’s Association of Polish Writers and Artists in 1956 when a quiet, unassuming young man sat down in a nearby chair, waiting for an appointment. She noticed that he seemed as shy as she was. When he was finally called into his interview, the twenty seven-year-old secretary whispered to her co-worker. “Who was that?” “He’s going to be our new director!”, the colleague replied.

Zbigniew Herbert, the young man, was not, in fact, particularly young – he was thirty-two years old. Nor was he a composer. But he definitely needed a job; and he got it. The poet was made the head of the Association of Polish Composers. Katarzyna Dzieduszycka, who eventually became Mrs Herbert, now lives in a pleasant, light-filled apartment in Warsaw, next to the verdant enclave of Morskie Park. (It wasn’t posh when the Herberts moved in, but the post-Communist years have been kind to it.) …

The relationship evolved in a cafeteria, Mrs Herbert remembered. As Herbert spoke about poetry and recited poems to her, they drank Egmi Bikower, a ubiquitous Hungarian white wine, the only wine readily available in postwar Poland. To the Polish Galatea, it might as well have been the nectar of the gods. “I wasn’t the first or last one who fell in love with him”, she admitted. “Courtship is nice, but it didn’t last forever, because Herbert treated his life seriously. The time of reciting poetry and flirting soon finished. His first priority was writing.”

Horror! The column inspired this reply a few days later, which was forwarded to me by my editor:

Dear Sir,

This may appear a piddling point, but the name of “Egmi Bikower”, the “ubiquitous Hungarian white wine” which Zbigniew Herbert and Katarzyna Dzieduszycka drank during their courtship (Commentary, 12th December), bears a more than passing phonetic resemblance to Egri Bikaver, the famous and delicious “Bulls’ Blood from Eger”. Legend has it that the Turks withdrew from a siege of Eger when they heard that the red stains on the beards of the inhabitants were the result of bulls’blood being their favourite tipple - an effect hardly likely to be produced by white wine.

Yours faithfully,
Anthony Ridge

Importing the good stuff (Photo: My Droid)

I had made every effort to make sure that spelling of the wine was correct – I had Madame Herbert write it in my notebook with her own hand. Somewhere, I still have the notebook with her carefully printed words. Moreover, I have her words on a digital recording.

But I should have known better – I, the daughter of the Magyars, who had sipped bull’s blood at my grandfather’s knee. The Polish “w” is pronounced as “v.” And the rest was either pure error or a Polish variant I hadn’t recognized in time. Imagine the shame.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with the attractive man in the photo at left?

Ted Gioia had sent me these wise words on my Facebook page: “Try to find time to visit Wierzynek Restaurant while in Kraków. It’s been providing fine cuisine since 1364, and is one of my favorite European eateries.”

I made the trek to the restaurant (the fare was somewhat more limited for vegetarians … well, not just “somewhat”) and instead I found Davide, who gave me a tour of the historic restaurant, and a tour of its gift shop as well.

And what should he show me? That’s right. A bottle of Egri Bikaver. In Poland. Which makes it even more likely it was in the company cafeteria in 1956.

Feeding folks since 1364

Poland recognizes its limitations, the connoisseur told me – and one of them is that it doesn’t produce great wine. So they are happy to import the good stuff from their neighbors. Hungarians and Poles have always enjoyed an especial affinity – Czesław Miłosz thought so as well.

The wine he showed me, however, is not cheap plonk from a company cafeteria, nor is it white wine. And it was, alas, too expensive, and too heavy, to haul back in my bulging suitcases.