Talk to Me from WNYC

In 1976, the New York premiere of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s “Einstein on the Beach” captivated audiences, polarized critics and put both artists on the map of contemporary performance art. In four-and-a half hours, its famously reductive score, enigmatic text and limpid, tensile choreography (by Lucinda Childs) teases out the meaning of the time/space continuum. The work’s first New York revival in twenty years opens Friday evening as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. On Wednesday, Philip Glass talked about the work—and a range of other pieces that have been performed at BAM over the years—with a former protégé, the composer Nico Muhly. Affectionately coaxed by Muhly, speaking composer-to-composer, Glass reflected on his major operas, his work in collaboration with artists from other cultural traditions, and the evolution of his own musical style, which Muhly pointed out has become more lush, and (clearly jokingly) “decadent.”  For a man who is indeed an icon, Glass is somewhat bashful about his own place in the musical pantheon, and clearly bemused to be in a position to look back on a work that is entering its 37th year.   “As composers, we don’t really write for posterity,” he says wryly.  “You’re writing for this year’s repertoire, you’re writing for what you’re doing right now. I think it never occurred to Bob and I that thirty-seven years later we’d still be doing this piece.” Glass also commented on the ease and confidence with which younger musicians approach his works, because they have grown up on them. “I was the lunatic who was always there,” he notes. And “Einstein?” This is the first time the piece has received a major revival without any of the original creators performing, so Glass has actually had a chance to watch it, and reflect on intentions of his younger self. “It seems like someone I used to know once.”  With three new operas and a film in development, this is clearly as elegiac as Glass, at 75, is prepared to get. Bon Mots On new music: "There’s a performance practice that goes with a piece of music…for a piece of music to be truly new, there has to be a new way to play it." On collaborations: "The reason I was doing it to begin with was to understand my own language better; and I found that when I had to embrace somebody else’s language, I had to find a common place where we could work together." On the change in his own musical style: "It just comes from having written music for a long time.  My brain got re-wired; I don’t have to sound like Philip Glass any more."

Geoffrey Rush is one of Australia’s most celebrated exports, a protean character actor whose roles have ranged from the mentally frail pianist David Helfgott (his Oscar-winning performance in “Shine”) to George VI’s speech therapist Lionel Logue (“The King’s Speech”) to the Marquis de Sade (“Quills”).    Courtesy of the 92nd Street Y He most recent film, in which he is pictured above, is “The Eye of the Storm,” directed by Fred Schepisi, and also starring Judy Davis. The film is based on a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Patrick White, about a domineering matriarch and her alienated adult children. Last Wednesday, Rush paid homage to this less well-known Australian genius as part of the 92Y’s long-running film screening and discussion series, “Reel Pieces.”  Rush, director Schepisi, and Schepisi’s daughter Alexandra, who has a featured role in the film, were interviewed before a live audience by Dr. Annette Insdorf, the head of undergraduate film studies at Columbia University.   Bon Mots Geoffrey Rush on Patrick White:  "Here was somebody writing about the Australian landscape and the Australian psyche with big, bold, fat novels." Fred Schepisi on White’s characters:  "Patrick White believes that everyone is an actor, that you’re one way with your family, another way with your friends, another way with your work colleagues.  You present all those different faces to the world." Geoffrey Rush on Australian films of the 1970s:  "There were a lot of pioneering films.  Guys used to have to be on horseback with their shirts off, with picks." Fred Schepisi on his cast:  "It was a great collaboration, and by the end I really did love them all." To listen to an excerpt from the “Reel Pieces” talk, click on the player above.

Host and curator Amanda Stern concluded this season’s Happy Ending Music & Reading series at Joe’s Pub on July 11 with an evening themed around “communication.”  Stern’s themes are almost always designed to resonate ironically and this program was no exception, as the authors Rajesh Parameswaran, Alex Shakar and Nell Freudenberger delivered variations on the idea of wanting what you can’t have, and don't know how to ask for. Parameswaran read from his collection “I am an Executioner” — a story in which a captive tiger falls in love with his zookeeper and things do not go well. Shakar offered an excerpt from his novel “Luminarium.”  His protagonist Fred is beset by a Job-like pile of woes, and spends an afternoon with a Hollywood wannabe who claims to have achieved enlightenment.  Nell Freudenberger’s novel “The Newlyweds” features a 21st-century version of the mail-order bride; in the excerpt heard here, she finds her arranged (by her) wedding more light-hearted than she anticipated. Musical guest Ana Egge helped set the mood with a set of dark rock/folk songs about — well, wanting what you can’t have. This show was the last at Joe’s Pub.  The series will continue in the autumn. For further information check Stern’s website at http://amandastern.com/happy-ending/ To hear excerpts from the readings, and Egge’s performance, click on the player above. Bons Mots A tiger in love.  “Where was my hunger?  Where was all the gloom and trouble of the day?  It was all gone.  Kitch was here.” -- Rajesh Parameswaran, “The Infamous Bengal Ming.” Unlikely prophet at a Universal theme park.  “’So I heard you attained Nirvana or something,’ Fred mumbled…’what’s that mean?’…’beyond the slum of human reality. It means free, Freddie, just free.’”—Alex Shakar, “Luminarium.” Wanting it the way she wants it.  “In ‘Desh you make your plans and they usually do not succeed.  But in America you make your plans and then they happen.”— Nell Freudenberger, “The Newlyweds.” 

“If you are going to go through hell, keep going.” This is just one of the many robust adages coined by Sir Winston Churchill during World War II. A new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum called “Churchill:  The Power of Words,” which showcased his long, celebrated career as a statesman, writer, and orator, opened on Friday. Churchill's inspirational speeches and radio broadcasts helped to guide England from its darkest to its finest hour during the long years of fighting and the constant threat of attack and invasion by the Nazi forces. As noted by the journalist Edward R. Murrow in an introduction to Churchill's collected speeches: "Now the hour had come for him to mobilize the English language, and send it into battle, a spearhead of hope for Britain and the world.” The exhibition at the Morgan kicked off with a lecture by Churchill’s granddaughter, The Hon. Celia Sandys, who has written extensively about him. During the talk, Sandys asserted that Churchill’s combination of clarity, command, courage and charisma make him a much-needed model for leadership in our own dark times. Indeed, she pointed out that a renewed interest in Churchill began at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as world leaders looked for ways to console and inspire their citizens. The Sandys talk also included a video of iconic Churchillian moments in war and peace, accompanied by examples of some of his most vivid utterances, and the purposeful, magnetic voice that bound a nation together. The lecture is part of the Winston Churchill Literary Series, a program of The Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, and The Writing Center at Hunter College. Sandys was introduced at the Morgan by the series patron, Tina Santi Flaherty. Click on the link above to hear the talk. "Churchill: The Power of Words" runs at the Morgan through September 23. Bons Mots from Sandys On Churchill’s integrity: “Even today ... you can listen to my grandfather’s words without ever wondering, ‘What on earth did he mean by that?’” On the fact that Churchill employed no speech writers: “Modern leaders’ speeches often betray their origins in committee.” On Churchill as inspiration: “It’s been said that Hitler could persuade you that he could do anything, but Churchill could convince you that you could do anything." Bons Mots from Churchill On assessing historical events (in light of a military failure): “Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.” On the need for good intelligence: “Facts are better than dreams.” On his own reputation as a bon vivant: “I am a man of simple tastes, easily satisfied by the best.”

The PEN America Center’s organizational focus is the effect of world events on the safety and freedom of expression of writers, so the topic of war naturally looms large in its cultural consciousness. As part of the recent PEN World Voices Festival, Polish journalist and author Wojciech Jagielski was interviewed by Joel Whitney, a founding editor of Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics.  Jagielski began his career on assignment in the former Soviet Union and then spent a decade in Afghanistan. He became particularly interested in how countries with trenchant ethnic divisions seem so often to wind up in the midst of seemingly irresolvable conflicts. His most recent book, The Night Wanderers, is on Uganda and the problematic resistance leader Joseph Rao Kony, a now recognizable name thanks to a wildly circulated viral video. The PEN World Voices event took place at the Brooklyn Public Library on May 2 and was introduced by Meredith Walters, the director of exhibitions at the library. Listen to the talk between Jagielski and Whitney by clicking on the link above. Bons Mots: Jagielski on becoming a foreign correspondent: "It was easy choice because in the '80s, when we [Poland] were the colonist country, writing about Poland and politics in Poland, it was not the job for the journalist, it was the job for the politician, the activist." Jagielski on child soldiers: "The scenario was always the same. At night the guerillas were attacking a village … and they were taking hostages, the children. It was planned action because it was easier for children to be made a soldier. I was even told the best age to be kidnapped … to be made a future guerilla, was eight to 10 years." Jagielski on Idi Amin: "The stereotype was created in Western media. The real Idi Amin was not the same person that we have from the movies, from the books."

The 2012 PEN World Voices Festival ended with a talk about censorship at the Cooper Union by novelist Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses). After the speech, the PEN festival founder had a conversation with writer Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Super Sad True Love Story). Peter Godwin, the president of PEN American Center, and Laszlo Jakab Orsos, PEN World Voices Director, introduced Rushdie before he gave the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture that traditionally wraps up the festival.   Listen to and download Rushdie's 17-minute talk by clicking the audio link above. Bon Mots: Rushdie on censorship: "If writing is Thing, then censorship is No-Thing. And as King Lear told Cordelia, 'Nothing will come of nothing.' Think again. Censorship changes the subject. It introduces a more tedious subject and creates a more boring world." Rushdie on liberty: "Liberty is the air we breathe...in a part of the world where, imperfect as the supply is, it is, nevertheless, freely available—at least to those of us who are not black youngsters wearing hoodies in Miami, and broadly breathable—unless, of course, we’re women in red states trying to make free choices about our own bodies." Rushdie on originality: "Great art, or, let’s just say, more modestly, original art is never created in the safe middle ground, but always at the edge ... Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such entities. It can be shocking, or ugly, or, to use that catch-all term so beloved of the tabloid press, controversial." Watch a video of Rushdie speaking at the talk.

Comparisons are invidious, but Hugo Hamilton is clearly a successor to the late Frank McCourt, author of the celebrated “Angela’s Ashes,” in the tradition of Irish memoir.  Hamilton read from his book, “The Speckled People,” as part of the PEN World Voices Festival on May 3. The event was held at Ireland House, a handsome mews building off Washington Square Park that is home to NYU’s Irish studies department. Hamilton was introduced by John Waters, head of the university’s Irish literature program. In the competitive world of memoir writing, a bizarre childhood is almost de rigueur. But Hamilton’s was even more bizarre than most. His father was an ardent Irish nationalist, married to a German woman. In protest against what he viewed as the British “occupation” of his country, he refused to allow any English to be spoken in his home.  As a result, Hamilton grew up as a virtual émigré in his own country, speaking primarily Celtic and German. The two languages also came to delineate the very different temperaments of his parents — an angry, pessimistic father and a nurturing mother with a sense of humor. To further complicate matters, Hamilton and his siblings still had to go to the local school in his English-speaking community, so that life was “a daily form of emigration.” As if to emphasize the polyglot nature of the PEN festival, the evening at Ireland House included a discussion between Hamilton and the Basque philosopher Fernando Savater, who spoke through a translator. Click on the link above to hear Hugo Hamilton comment on and read from “The Speckled People.”  Bon Mots Hamilton on not speaking English at home: "The feeling we had was that we weren’t in the right country somehow." Hamilton on writing memoirs: "As a child, you collect very strong memories. As an adult, you go back and reclaim your own story." Hamilton, recalling what his mother said about baking and life: "If you bake a cake in anger, it will taste of nothing."

Earlier in May, Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief for the Slate group, and author Jennifer Egan discussed Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, genre-busting novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, and her writing process at The New School. Their conversation was part of the annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. Bon Mots Weisberg on the incredible likability of A Visit from the Goon Squad: “The thing about this book is I don’t know anybody who disliked it. You can get an argument going at any dinner party if you just say ‘Jonathan Franzen’ and at least somebody will take the contrary position. But I have yet to find somebody who read this and wasn’t impressed by it." Egan on the mysterious P.M., to whom she dedicated A Visit from the Goon Squad: “You’re killing me with these questions! I feel as though I really should have had a warning. I am going to come out and answer that … It is my long-time therapist.” Egan on developing her characters: “I’m really bad at trying to use people I know. I wish I could use them. But I’m sure most people I know are [so] happy that I can’t!” Download the audio of the talk above or watch a video of the talk:

One of the highlights of this year's PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature was a talk between writers E.L. Doctorow, Margaret Atwood and Martin Amis. New York Times chief film critic A.O. Scott asked the authors about America and its role in the global political culture at The Times Center. The Sunday before the talk, Doctorow (Homer & Langley, Ragtime), Atwood (The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace) and Amis (Time's Arrow, The Rachel Papers) had written essays for The Sunday Review section of The Times on the subject. Doctorow's was called, "Unexceptionalism: A Primer"; Atwood's was titled, "Hello, Martians. Let Moby Dick Explain"; and Amis's, "Marty and Nick Jr. Go to America." Roughly 100 writers from 25 countries were in New York City from April 30 to May 6 for this year's PEN festival. Bon Mots: Doctorow on why America is becoming increasingly unexceptional, "in terms of our secret warrant-less searches of people's homes and businesses and records, and our data-mining, and all the subversions of what we think of as life in the United States."  Atwood on what America should be: "I think with a lot of countries, you don't ask the question, 'What should it be?' But America has always had that question, 'What should it be?' because it did start as a utopian community. So it is always examining, 'What should it be?' as opposed to 'What it is.'" Amis on Trayvon Martin and American law: "Is it possible to confess to the pursuit and murder of an unarmed white 17-year-old, white 17-year-old, and be released that evening without charge? And I wanted to be told, 'Yes.' But in fact, as we all know -- it's one of the public secrets of America -- is that this happens all the time." Atwood on Herman Melville's Moby Dick: "I think that Melville designed it very carefully to represent a number of different segments of American society. It wasn't for nothing that he named the ship after an extinct native tribe and put three harpooners in there from different parts of the empire and made the owners two hypocritical Quakers." Doctorow on Edgar Allan Poe: "Did I ever tell you I was named after him? [Atwood: No.] I think it was my father's idea. He was philosophically inclined but he was busy supporting us during the Depression and couldn't give vent to his literary and philosophical being but he named his child after a writer he admired ... A few years before my mother died, I finally asked a question, I said, 'Do you realize you and Dad named me after an alcoholic, drug-addicted, delusional paranoid with strong necrophiliac tendencies?'" Atwood on being a smart, but not necessarily an intellectual, politician: "What you probably want is somebody who's got some political smarts or somebody who's at least smart enough to avoid sinking the entire fortune of a country in some really ill-advised, unnecessary war." Amis, responding to Atwood's point: "And anti-intellectualism exists in many English-speaking countries, but the American variant is worship of stupidity." Atwood: "And that's a different thing." Amis: "It is an entirely different thing." Click the link above to hear the full PEN festival talk, which took place on May 2 and opened with remarks from Carol Day. Or watch a video of the talk below.

Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her 86th birthday on April 21, and the entire Commonwealth is preparing to honor her on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee on June 5. So a look at the future of the British monarchy is timely, and one take on this rich topic was offered at Bonham’s New York auction house on April 30 by a very privileged observer: former Royal Naval Officer Patrick Jephson, who served for eight years as private secretary and chief of staff to the late Princess of Wales. Jephson said that his family’s history of service to the crown goes back to the 13th century, and his talk managed to combine respect and affection with a shrewd assessment of the Windsor “brand,” and what those who will succeed the Queen need to do to succeed in the coming years as a relevant part of British life and a resonant symbol of a vital monarchy in an increasingly diverse and globalized society. The glimpse Jephson gives us of the royal family, particularly those two very private-in-public women, HRH Queen Elizabeth, and Diana, Princess of Wales, reveals a perhaps surprising earthiness, and in the case of the Princess of Wales — that bird in a gilded cage — enormous humility.  For example, her response to being named “International Humanitarian of the Year” in 1994 was to say that, “she didn’t deserve the award, but she was working on it.” By contrast, Jephson deplores the rise of royal spin doctors and cautions that what the monarchy needs to survive and thrive for another 60 years and beyond is to gain and keep the belief of the people in their authenticity and sense of duty. Trust, he says, is Queen Elizabeth II’s greatest legacy. Photo of and by former Royal Naval Officer Patrick Jephson. He served for eight years as private secretary and chief of staff to the late Princess of Wales. Listen to Jephson’s talk at Bonham’s by clicking the link above. He is introduced by the historian and journalist, Sir Harold Evans, former editor of The Times of London. Bon Mots Former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin on monarchy: “The throne is bigger than the man.” Patrick Jephson on the family business: “If you’re in the dynasty business, your job is to survive, and to keep the business in the family.” Patrick Jephon on core values: “Because the British monarchy is a very human institution, it’s always going to have flaws, but the flaws will always be forgiven if the virtues of modesty, integrity, and duty are always associated with it in the public mind.”

New York City has no shortage of sites that have a direct connection to the Titanic. (See our handy map of some of them below.) One such landmark is the Jane Hotel, formerly known as the American Seamen’s Friend Society Sailors’ Home and Institute, which on April 19, 1912 was the site of a memorial service for surviving sailors rescued from the Titanic. The brick neo-Classical building on the West Side Highway and Jane Street was built in 1907-'08 by a Presbyterian group called the American Seamen’s Friends Society. William A. Boring designed the sailors' home. Boring was the former partner of Boring & Tilton, which designed the immigration station on Ellis Island. "One of the identifying characteristics of the building is this wonderful octagonal tower in the corner which used to have a light beacon on top so it looked like a lighthouse," said Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation. "It both symbolically and practically was meant to be a place that sort of called out to sailors as a safe port. And in this case, it was a safe port for the crewmembers of the Titanic who were rescued from the disaster." On a recent Thursday night, more than 100 people gathered in the Jane's decadent ballroom to understand the connection between the Greenwich Village spot and the ship's surviving sailors. The event, called "Titanic & The Village," was organized by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and featured a talk and book-signing by Titanic scholars Jack Eaton and Charlie Haas. Learn about the Jane's history and connection to the Titanic by clicking the audio above. Also check out our map of New York City Titanic landmarks based on the talk or scroll down to see some of the "bon mots" from the evening from Haas, Eaton and New Yorkers who attended the event. Bon Mots Charlie Haas, co-founder and president of the Titanic International Society, on room rates at the sailors' home in 1910: "The average seaman paid only a quarter a night and there were larger rooms at 50 cents per night for the officers and those included shower baths. You'll notice also that there were facilities here for billiards, a bowling alley, shower baths, a swimming pool, banking facilities and an assembly hall ... which I suspect may have been this room right here." Jack Eaton, co-founder and historian of the Titanic International Society, on an artifact in New Jersey that some claim is a piece of a Titanic lifeboat: "We have had to put the cease-and-desist order on this twice within the last 10 years. It is not a Titanic lifeboat. However the mystery of the Titanic and the aura make people believe with just a little urging from the entrepreneur that this is a Titanic lifeboat. Don't believe it." Long-time Titanic fan Greg Shutters on the centennial: "100 years -- it’s a big one. I was planning on throwing a Titanic party of my own, so maybe that will come to pass." Richard Currie on how he got interested in the Titanic: "My birthday is April 15 and that’s the night it went down. So I’ve had this sort of passing interest." Jeffrey Ryan, who learned about the ship from reading Walter Lord's 1955 book, "A Night To Remember," on his fandom: "I just bought something on eBay -- a deck plan of the Carpathia ... so I’m a collector." Sumi Vatsa on gathering in honor of the centennial: "I thought it was a little strange, 'Are we commemorating the disaster?' Then it was like, 'I understand what we’re commemorating.' It's actually very inspirational ... it’s definitely much more than Kate and Leo on the boat, you know?" Pat Bartels on the Jane Hotel's history: "To see the development of the Chelsea Piers and this particular building, which we’ve looked at for years saying, What a shame, it’s such a dump,' and to find out it’s such a wonderful place, is, you know, it’s really fun."

The theme for the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series at Joe's Pub in March was Strange Places. Listen to the extraordinary — and absurd — environments that authors Jessica Anthony, Amelia Gray and Heidi Julavitz conjured up their readings. Host and curator Amanda Stern was fighting through a migraine. Author Jessica Anthony had a chest cold. And half of the musical duo Kaiser Cartel, Courtney Kaiser, went into labor the day of the show, leaving Benjamin Cartel to perform on his own. Regardless of these challenges, Anthony, along with the two authors Amelia Gray and Heidi Julavits, were in the house, reading from their work as well as performing their one-thing-they'd-never-performed-on-stage-before for the audience, which is one of Stern's requirements for participating in the series. Gray, an author who funded her current book tour via the popular web site Kickstarter, read a story about a date gone horribly, viscerally, wrong: larynxes fall out of the daters' throats, arms land on the floor and "flesh is siphoned into a free standing grandfather clock" that's set on fire and rolled into the street. After her reading, Gray arm-wrestled her editor on stage. Anthony read from her first novel, "The Convalescent," about "a short, sickly Hungarian near-midget who sells meat out of a bus in Northern Virginia." Afterwards, she taught the crowd how to use sign language to perform a popular pop tune. Julavits, author and the co-editor of The Believer magazine, read what she calls "The Bachelor fan-fiction" — an imagined life of one of the bachelors who was kicked off of the show. She then performed rowdy rugby fight songs. Bon Mots: Happy Ending Music and Reading series host and curator Amanda Stern on headaches and humanity: "We are human beings. We grow people in our bodies. That's so weird. That's bizarre. So I think we actually live in the strangest place of all — where your head actually hurts. And you can't see what's causing it to hurt!" Amelia Gray reads the inconspicuous opening of a very conspicuous story: "The woman and man are on a date! It is a date! The woman rubs a lipstick print off her water glass. The man turns his butter knife over and over and over and over. Everyone has to pee. What's the deal with dates?!" Heidi Julavitz's Bachelor on how "so real" his connection to the bachelorette was: "When we were on our date on a half-finished skyscraper, which we summited with the help of a team of urban mountaineers, I said, 'This feels so real.' And Ashley had totally agreed."

The Center for New York City Affairs hosted a forum on February 2 to review the connection between child welfare and juvenile justice in New York City and the state. The event, entitled “Ties That Bind: Reimagining juvenile justice and child welfare for teens, families and communities,” was intended to coincide with the implementation of key new initiatives that would bring the administration of the intertwined child welfare, juvenile justice and foster care services under New York City jurisdiction.  Participants included Ron Richter, the Commissioner for the New York City Administration for Children’s Services; Deputy Commissioner Larry Bushing; Gabrielle Prisco, Director of the Juvenile Justice Project, the Correctional Association of New York; Mike Arsham, Executive Director, Child Welfare Organizing Project; and Angela Watson, Program Director, Juvenile Justice Initiative, SCO Family of Services in Brooklyn. The forum was moderated by Andrew White, the Director of the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs. As the speakers and panelists at the New School’s Theresa Lang Community and Student Center noted, historically, both foster placements and detention often take at-risk teens far from their families and communities, thereby making care and counseling modalities even more difficult and frustrating for those in the system. Childcare advocates also call for more involvement by parents, community representatives and non-profits in instituting programs and reforms. The two-hour forum discussed and debated the issues surrounding Governor Andrew Cuomo’s ”Juvenile Justice Services Close to Home Initiative”; the strategic plan for New York City’s Child Services Administration; and the fundamental approach to treating troubled juveniles in a way likely to produce positive outcomes.  While there was some disagreement among the group, all seemed to agree on two underlying premises: if child welfare services can be made more effective, there is a greater chance of keeping at-risk teens out of the juvenile justice system (i.e., of having them classified as actual offenders, and often incarcerated in some way), and programs that keep children closer to home are likely to be more successful. Bon Mots: Andrew White’s thought-provoking headcount: “We recently calculated that more than one-tenth of the city’s school-age children — more than 100,000 children — come into contact with either child welfare or juvenile justice services every year in New York City.” Commissioner Ron Richter on his belief in hands-on “kitchen table” social workers: “This is not a long-term intervention. They come in, like a tornado, if you will, and they help the parent get control.”  Mike Arsham on the strength of communities: “I’ve come to believe … that there is great strength and wisdom and compassion even — and maybe especially — in the most economically stressed New York City communities.” Gabrielle Prisco on striking while the iron is hot: “We have a moment where we have political attention, we have money, we have momentum, and we have people of good will.” Listen to the complete forum at the link above. During the forum, Commissioner Richter showed a number of slides featuring statistical data from the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS); the data from which these were derived can be viewed on the ACS web site.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the post-curtain talk between John Hurt — who has just finished a limited run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater in Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” — and philosopher Simon Critchley, it’s that if you throw philosophy at an actor, he’ll throw it right back. The two sat down — on the very stage where Krapp obsessively listens to the tapes of his past life — on Dec. 15th, and engaged in a gentle duel of words about exactly how to interpret Beckett’s intense 55-minute play. Hurt began disarmingly by saying, “I’ve always felt that very clever people had to play Beckett,” people with “strings of letters after their names.”  And Critchley’s, “What do you think this play is about?” drew the response, “I was hoping you were going to tell me that!” But when pressed, it was clear that Hurt has very strong ideas about the play, ones that come from inside the experience, from his views on Krapp’s life choice (to abandon love for a life of the mind), to exactly what those bananas mean. “I’m a huge believer in the word,” he maintained. “I’m here to serve Beckett, and that’s absolutely all I’m here for.” Bon Mots: Hurt on interviewers: "The one thing that all interviewers want to know — they have about six questions, I reckon — and all of them are, 'How do you act?' … couched in different ways." Hurt on Krapp: "It’s an intensely private play. If Krapp for a second thought that all you wonderful people were out there watching him … he would be devastated." Hurt on Krapp’s tape: "[That spool] means so much, doesn’t it? That’s a man who loves the sound of language, and he chose that image — it’s lovely."

The Happy Ending Music and Reading series has formed a partnership with the arts colony Yaddo located in Saratoga Springs, New York, to present programs featuring writers who have been Yaddo fellows. On December 7th, curator Amanda Stern welcomed three Yaddo alums at the series’ performance home, Joe’s Pub, for a program entitled “Reality and Scandal.”  Two of the authors, Helen Schulman and Jesse Browner, read from works featuring teenage boys in emotional, sexual and social turmoil — Schulman’s “This Beautiful Life" and Browner’s “Everything Happens Today.” This has been fruitful territory ever since J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caufield made such a hash of his prep school career 60 years ago. The third writer, Walter Kirn, went engagingly off course with excerpts from his New York Magazine-approved (as in the weekly “Approval Ratings”) Bible blog. The writer inherited a well-worn study edition of the “King James Bible” from his mother, and is offering up hilariously transgressive interpretations of the narratives (example: Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden is about illicit drug use.)  Stern requires all her writers to “take a risk on stage,” and Kirn was eccentric here, too, inviting author Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose memoir "Prozac Nation" he savaged in a 1994 review, to come up to the stage to enact her revenge. (She didn’t.) Musical guest Mark Eitzel was the perfect foil to the authors, offering up a trio of mordant songs about marginal and desperate characters. (You’ll hear an homage to a male stripper in the excerpt above).  Stern’s requirement for musical guests is that they play a cover song and try to get the audience to sing along. There was a kind of perverse pleasure, after an evening crowded with angst and tales of sexual misconduct, to hear Eitzel bring down the house (and carry every one of us with him) with that preposterously hopeful standard, “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” Bon Mots: Helen Schulman, author of “This Beautiful Life,” on the burden of allure: “’You are just an idiot boy,’ said Audrey…She slung that cool bag over her shoulder and she started walking. She started walking away from Jake and all the idiot boys, walking away from the prison of her youth and beauty and into the hard-fought-for loneliness of her future.” Jesse Browner, author of “Everything Happens Today," on coming of age: "If he were ever to be a serious writer, Wes recognized, he would have to learn to embrace solitude and silence.” Novelist, critic and essay writer Walter Kirn on Genesis: "God basically made a huge mistake in creating man, and spends the first part of Genesis trying to correct himself."

The Asia Society inaugurated its new Asian Arts & Ideas series this month with “The ‘Chindia’ Dialogues,” a three-day forum that examined the confluence of the world’s two most powerful developing economies. The organizers chose an unusual point of departure for event — not a historical overview, but a conversation between Jonathan Spence, former Sterling Professor of History at Yale, and the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh’s most recent book, “River of Smoke,” centers around the mid-19th century Opium Wars, and in their talk, Ghosh and Spence used the topic as a lens through which to view the early modern histories of India and China. As Ghosh notes, historians tend to segment the past in terms of their own specialties (economics, politics, culture, etc.), but, “What a novelist can do is imagine the totality of the experience.” Bon Mots Jonathan Spence on Amitav Ghosh: "The joy of reading Amitav’s work is the completely new way of reading about things I thought I knew — of asking outrageously simple questions that are so difficult." Amitav Ghosh on India and the opium trade: "India today does not recognize this past." Ghosh on learning Cantonese in preparation for writing “River of Smoke”: "It was so exciting to discover this whole world of Cantonese street slang and Cantonese obscenities, which are so inventive!” Ghosh on old (drug) money: "It’s possible to say that all old money in the major presidency cities in India really goes back to the opium trade. The same is true of Massachusetts, I should add." Hear the complete conversation by clicking on the audio player above. The image of the painting above by George Chinnery was provided courtesy of Asia House, where it is featured in the exhibit: The Flamboyant Mr Chinnery. An English Artist in India and China. The show is open through Jan 21 and its curator is Patrick Conner.

The poet Anne Sexton took her own life in 1974, but had she lived, this year would have marked her 83rd birthday. Reason enough, thought the actor Paul Hecht, to organize an elegant tribute to her at the Cornelia Street Café on Nov. 14. Two strong women — Kathleen Chalfant and Jennifer Van Dyck — took turns mapping Sexton’s somewhat fragile life through the ley lines of her verse. Even without knowing how it ended, it was possible to glimpse a conflicted mind through the shifting surfaces of her words.  Pianist Liz Magnes provided deft transitions between sections of the program, which followed a loose arc from childhood to maturity. Cornelia Street Café co-owner and host Robin Hirsch provided the introduction. Bon Mots: Verses from "Rowing": Then there was life with its cruel houses and people who seldom touched — though touch is all — Verse from "A Story for Rose": Someday, I promised her, I'll be someone going somewhere. Verses from "The Ambition Bird": The business of words keeps me awake.I am drinking cocoa,that warm brown mama. Verses from "The Black Art": A woman who writes feels too much,those trances and portents!As if cycles and children and islandsweren't enough; as if mourners and gossipsand vegetables were never enough. Use the player above to hear selections from the program.

With the three-month wait for the re-opening of newly renovated Joe’s Pub over at last, you’d think there would be cause for celebration. But Happy Ending Music & Reading series host and curator Amanda Stern decided on “frustration” as the theme of her series opener, inviting authors Seth Fried, Jesse Ball, and Paul La Farge to vent, with plangent musical guest Anni Rossi adding the low notes. Actually there was little venting, as the writers’ selections all looked at the idea of “frustration” obliquely. Seth Fried’s story, for all it was called “The Great Frustration,” invited us into a kind of ur-Eden in which all the animals are plagued by ambivalence about their own nature, and anxious inertia. Jesse Ball presented himself as a sort of living trope; in the program bio and Stern’s introduction he was described as a recently rediscovered “American writer from the '30s, '40s, and '50s.” In fact, Ball, born in 1978, bristles with decidedly contemporary sesquipedalian irony, as in the excerpt here, describing characters in a military parade viewed by a mysterious onlooker.  By contrast, Paul La Farge, although only slightly older, seems to be the grand old man of lost causes, reading from his new novel “Luminous Airplanes” a segment in which his protagonist remembers attending a spectacularly unsuccessful rally. For an excerpt from the evening, click on the player above. Bon Mots Fried on losing touch: "Why when the peacock waddles past should the lion imagine a beautiful explosion of feathers?" Ball on the parade passing by: "That is always the decision one is pressed to make — do I join the parade, or not? In certain cases the decision is easy, in others, not so." La Farge on waiting in Dolores Park: "After all the rain we had this winter, the grass shone emerald, like a patch of wet Scotland set out to dry, here on the coast.”

Two famed poets, essayists and translators — Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger — recently read from new work at the True Story: Non-Fiction reading series at the KGB Bar in the East Village. Davis ("The Varieties of Disturbance: Stories") and Weinberger (editor of "American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators & Outsiders"), who have been friends since high school, said they decided to call the genre in which they work "Poetry Essays." "Lydia and I were trying to talk about, 'What do we call this genre?'" said Weinberger. "If you have prose poetry, this is sort of like poetry essay. Or poem essay or something like that, because it’s non-fiction but it looks like a poem." Bon Mots: Lydia Davis on Weinberger: "I knew him when he was shorter than I was. Then, strangely, he grew. He changed. We were pals in high school and we’re still pals. He hasn’t changed much. I don’t know if I’ve changed. Coolest kid in high school I wasn’t. He was." Eliot Weinberger on Davis:  "I’ve known Lydia since I was 13. As she said, she used to tower over me. I grew taller and she grew wiser. It’s not true that I was the coolest person in high school. Lydia was way cooler. She was like 'Nadia, Woman of Mystery.'" Davis on surprising reading selections: "[I'll then read] an excerpt from what will be an even-longer poem based on found material and written, largely in 19th-century American language. So it seemed like the least appropriate thing to read at the KGB Bar. But, we’ll see. I’ve never read it out loud, partly because it didn’t exist until a few days ago." Weinberger on surprising reading selections: "We’re both doing the same thing, which is reading a work that’s totally inappropriate for the East Village or the KGB bar." From Davis' "Our Village," a closing line: "The world has been for me, even from childhood, a great museum."

While diplomats and academics met at the General Assembly of the United Nations on the East Side of Midtown Manhattan, the Asia Society hosted "Voices from Burma," an event honoring the stories of Burmese refugees and political prisoners. Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, actor Kathryn Grody, writers Amitav Ghosh and Deborah Eisenberg, and former political prisoner Law Eh Soe read from Nowhere to Be Home: Narratives from Survivors of Burma's Military Regime. Veteran journalist, educator, and current Director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations Orville Schell opened and closed the event.   The stories in Nowhere to Be Home are first-hand accounts of refugees who have survived displacement within and across Burma's borders, who have witnessed the destruction of thousands of ethnic minority villages, and who witnessed their home become a country with one of the largest fleets of child soldiers in the world. The book is the seventh title in the McSweeney's non-profit Voice of Witness publication series, and executive director Mimi Lok helped curate the event. “It’s impossible not to be engaged and moved by these stories,” Lok said. “Hopefully people will be compelled to encourage the United Nations to make sure the work is being done to investigate these abuses.” The event concluded with a prayer by U Agga, a Theravada Buddhist monk and Burmese refugee. Facing the packed auditorium and joined by monks U Gawsita and U Pinyar Zawta, U Agga repeated three times: “May there be no deception of one another. May love and kindness envelope the world and may there be peace on earth.” The issue of human rights in Burma has been a long-standing debate at the U.N. Sixteen member states currently support a U.N.-led Commission of Inquiry to investigate crimes against humanity in Burma, including the United States, Australia, Canada, France and the United Kingdom. Others argue open political and economic engagement with Burma is a better strategy. Below listen to Amitov Ghosh and Deborah Eisenberg read the oral histories of Aye Maung and Fatima. Closing remarks by Orville Schell. Burmese refugee U Agga ends with his oral history narrative and Theravada Buddist prayer. Bon Mots: The words of survivor Khin Lwe on the complex beauty of Burma, read by actor Kathryn Grody: "One day when I was a child, I was playing with some fruit. My mom had never let me eat this fruit before, because she was worried I would choke on the seeds. But I accidentally broke the fruit open and I saw it was ripe, so I tasted it. It tasted so sweet. The situation in Burma is like that. The people don’t even know what the fruit is, but when they start to learn and become concerned about the issues in Burma, then they will start to understand how sweet the fruit can be." Survivor Hla Min remembers life before abandoning his post in the Burmese military. His words as read by Wallace Shawn: "While we were on the front line, our officers ordered us to completely destroy the local people. They told us that even the children had to be killed if we saw them. I saw soldiers abducting young girls, dragging them from their houses and raping them. At the time, I felt that those girls were like my sisters." Executive director of Voice of Witness Mimi Lok on publishing first-person narratives: "We approach the architecture of an oral history narrative in the same way we might approach a short story—but underpinned by our responsibility to journalistic integrity. So we make sure everything is fact checked and accurate." The Asia Society event was sponsored by the Pen American Center, the Open Society Foundations, Voice of Witness and the Magnum Foundation. Video work by Magnum photographers Chien Chi Chang and Lu Nan with James Mackay were presented throughout the evening. To watch a video from the event by Chien-Chi Chang, click here, or a video by Takaaki Okada, click here.

Late last month, journalist Janet Malcolm had a conversation with New Yorker writer Ian Frazier at The New Yorker Festival. Malcolm's writing has been appearing in The New Yorker — as well as in other outlets — for almost 50 years. From her first piece published in the magazine (a poem, followed by a monthly column entitled "About the House"), to the keenly descriptive, long-form investigative articles that have become her trademark, Malcolm's career trajectory can be very clearly plotted in the pages of the The New Yorker. In the recording above, Frazier, another longtime New Yorker writer, holds court with Malcolm — discussing topics such as the journalist/interviewee relationship, the impact of technology on their work, and the challenges facing young writers. The two also gave writing advice to the audience. One audience member asked, "I wrote a profile over the summer, it was my first ... Where do you start, or any advice you have, for [young] journalists?" "I used to write 'Talk of the Town' a long time ago with an older writer who was there named George Trow," said Frazier. "George would go out and take notes on an event and then he'd go back and circle the things that he really liked in his notes. And then he'd take those things and put them in order — to the thing that he liked absolutely the most." Malcolm added: "I had started by writing about design and shops ... you've just made me think about what I was doing when I was your age. I think I was writing easier subjects than profiles. I was going and looking and describing things. And I've been grateful for that apprenticeship..." Another audience member posed this question: "Do you use a computer, how has that affected your writing process?" To which Malcolm said to Frazier, "You still use a typewriter, right?" "Janet and I used to be the only two people to use manual typewriters," he replied. "I wrote a profile — I went down to get my typewriter fixed. And he was the only guy that still fixed typewriters. I wrote a profile of him. Janet wrote me a letter because she knew the guy, too." Bon Mots: Frazier on Malcolm:  "Janet Malcolm describes chaos better than anybody." Malcolm on opening lines: "That's my criteria for beginnings. If they kind of peter out, you haven't got the right one." Malcolm on the real thing: "This is the beauty of this work. There are these surprises that come to us all the time. These are the gifts from actuality." Frazier on doing what you have to: "I would often be in situations where I'd be interviewing someone and they'd say, 'I really need a ride to the clinic.' Or some crisis would come up. Someone would need my car to take them somewhere. You had to judge by a case by case, but I usually did it.  A lot of those cases involved giving people, like, $40. Someone described it as ATM journalism, because I was always going off to the ATM."

Philip Schultz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Failure," among other books of verse, has written an unexpected work of prose called "My Dyslexia." Surprising as it seems, it wasn't until his own young son was diagnosed with the learning disability dyslexia, that Schultz, 58, realized that his life-long struggle with reading, language, and simply understanding directions had a name. In a candid memoir, the poet recounts a familiar tale — a childhood of confusion, isolation, distain from others, and self-loathing — but not one with a familiar end. Schultz battled through his disability to a life as a writer and teacher. And now that he knows its name, he has come to cherish aspects of his burden, which he says confers "an inborn sense of sympathy with others." Listen to an excerpt from "My Dyslexia" here: Schultz reads My Dyslexia Schulz read from his book, and spoke with Dr. Sally E. Shaywitz and Dr. Bennett Shaywitz of the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity at the Churchill School and Center as part of the Writers Studio Reading series.   Bon Mots: On calling up the right words: "Most people try to avoid cliches. It's my ambition in life to try to get 'em right!" On becoming an artist: "My imagination was a great place to escape from all the anxiety and disapproval of my life ... I had to live in my head ... art was a way of making myself feel better." On learning to love your weaknesses: "I think one's relationship with one's vulnerability is a very delicate and precious relationship. Most people try to hide, disguise that vulnerability, and in doing that, you, I think, diminish a great source of power." Click on the link at the top of the page to hear the full interview with Philip Schultz.

“Les chose sont contre nous” ("Things are against us") is the wry slogan of Paul Jennings’ parodic philosophy resistentialism*. But Professor Jane Bennett of Johns Hopkins University doesn’t think so. (*For more on resistentialism, check out: Paul Jennings, "Report on Resistentialism," The Jenguin Pennings, 1963.) Bennett, who is the author of “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things” (Duke, 2010), presented a provocative digest of her own material philosophy at a lecture at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics on September 13. Her talk examined the idea that hoarders (as portrayed on the A&E reality show “Hoarders”) might be viewed not within the framework of socio-pathology, but as “people who are preternaturally attuned to things.” From this platform, Bennett went on to examine and classify the intrinsic power of inanimate objects, while avoiding the idea of animism. Bennett’s lecture inaugurated a two-year exploration of what the director of the Vera List Center, Carin Kuoni, in her introduction called “Thingness,” which she describes as “the nature of our material world and us in it, and within it.” Bon Mots On hoarders and things: "The things with which [hoarders] live and that live with them in close proximity are less possessions … than pieces of self." On hoarding as a symptom of our society: "Perhaps hoarding is the madness appropriate to us, to a political economy devoted to consumption, planned obsolescence, planned extraction of natural resources, and mountains of discarded waste." On “thingness”: "Our projections are only part of what draws us to things. If we subtract all our 'self' — what’s left?"

In honor of its 50th birthday, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) brought together company founder Sir Peter Hall and current Artistic Director Michael Boyd in conversation at the Park Avenue Armory where the RSC is currently in residence.  Their talk was guided by company ensemble member (and RSC board member) Noma Dumezweni, but the two men needed little prompting to embark on a combination of reminiscence and philosophical discourse. They discussed the importance of ensemble acting; the role of the director; and — in the most memorable part of the evening — debated the merits of the thrust stage (Hall doubtful; Boyd ardent) by walking about the RSC’s reconstructed theatre and demonstrating how speech sounds from different parts of the house. The evening finished with the presentation of a birthday cake to Hall and Boyd, who issued an impromptu invitation to the audience to join them onstage, and then dispensed slices of cake to all the takers—probably the easiest job he’s had in months. Bon mots: Peter Hall on Shakespeare: "Shakespeare is one of the great, great con artists. He says, 'This is true, but on the other hand, this might be also true, and so might that.  Why don’t you just go home and talk it over with your wife?' That’s the Shakespearean creative act." Michael Boyd on Americans and Shakespeare: "One of the ways Americans have taken hold of Shakespeare…is as family drama — is looking at Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller, and through that prism coming to Shakespeare." Peter Hall on "the theater:" "The important thing about 'the theater' is that a group of people who are alive and who know each other meet together in a space and try to actually catch the tail of this person, who’s written something, which is the record of his dreams." Listen to the complete talk by clicking the link above.

The second of four panel discussions held in conjunction with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) residency at The Park Avenue Armory focused on “Directing Shakespeare." David Farr, the RSC's associate director and director of "King Lear" and "The Winter’s Tale" in the company's New York repertoire was joined by Arin Arbus, Associate Artistic Director of The Theater for a New Audience; Karin Coonrod, the founding director of the Arden Party Theater Company; and Mark Lamos, Artistic Director of the Westport County Playhouse. The panel, moderated by the artistic director of The Shakespeare Society, Michael Sexton, took on each individual's personal approach to directing, acting and speech, and included the admission that sometimes "stealing" from other directors is part of the process. Arin Arbus also echoed the remarks of the season's first two directors, Peter Brook and the RSC's Michael Boyd, in expressing belief in the power of hunches. Bon Mots David Farr on Shakespeare’s language: “His language gives you the psychology when you speak it. To get an actor to trust that is more and more unusual ... You are the words that you say. How can you be anything else?” Mark Lamos on conveying the verse through your body: “It’s not this uggabugga thing. You’ve got this great instrument: two feet, two legs, knees that bend, a butt. Breathe through it all. Let it happen.” Karin Coonrod on sussing out Shakespeare’s language: “...The visceral, the necessity, of speaking. ‘Why did you say that in that moment? Why are you full of contradictions?’ He gets more of the psychic cartography of our landscape than many.” Arin Arbus on initial hunches and notions: “It’s never happened to me where the things you find are in contradiction to what your initial instinct is. I don’t know what I would do in that situation. That would be... unfortunate.”

The Happy Ending Music & Reading Series is celebrating a happy beginning. The series performance on June 8 at Joe’s Pub marked the launch of Happy Ending’s partnership with Yaddo, an artists’ working community based in Saratoga Springs, New York. Starting next fall, the series will produce three shows featuring entirely Yaddo-affiliated artists. Wednesday night, Suzanne Bocanegra and Kyle deCamp performed a collaborative visual and performance piece, and Amor Towles read from his new novel. Lucius, the musical guest and Happy Ending curator Amanda Stern’s self-proclaimed favorite band, took to the stage for two sets of tunes, gripping the audience with its haunting yet ethereal melodies. The band, fronted by Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, cast a spell over the crowd, traversing scales with a soulful clarity and an underlying pain that colored even the band's more upbeat numbers. As they performed, Wolfe and Laessig faced one another across a set of keyboards, dressed in matching mod apparel from their floral get-ups to their ponytail poufs to their hybrid heels (one blue, one pink for each leading lady). Toying with a similar mirror effect, the performing artist Bocanegra presented a piece entitled “How to Paint” in collaboration with the visual artist de Camp. Through vivid imagery of painting as a means of expression, Bocanegra brought to life de Camp’s own coming of age experiences. On the screen behind her played an accompanying video in which pieces of mounted artwork were continuously layered on top of one another. Towles, a first-time novelist, also graced the stage to read excerpts from his novel "Rules of Civility." Passages from the book’s first chapter chronicled the late-night, big-city plans of 25 year-old Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse roommate, Eve. As the two women explored New York City in the late hours of the last night of 1937, Towles took his readers from a jazz club out onto the curbs of the city, meeting characters steeped in thoughts of gin and gentlemen, wit and winter, hardship and hope. The theme of “community” weaved its way throughout the night, accompanying tales of love and loss, friends and family, art and angst. Lucius’ whimsical harmony and Bocanegra’s search for an artistic identity traveled from the stage, dissipating through the performance space and culling an even greater sense of collaboration between the artists and the audience. But with all happy beginnings must come a happy ending. As the series commences its relationship with Yaddo, it also wrapped up its time at Joe’s Pub, which will be closed for renovations until October. Stern noted that it would be her first stretch of unoccupied time in seven years. In the spirit of community, she invited the audience to join her in “catching up," joking with the audience: “I’m going to go see The Gates, which I’m so excited about... I have to go back to Canal Jeans, a shirt from Fiorucci.... And if I have time I’m just going to run over to CBGB and see a couple of shows.” Bon Mots Suzanne Bocanegra performing "How to Paint": "I would look at the paintings. These are tragic paintings — paintings of obvious flatness making great depth. They gave a lot, they gave nothing. Some days, I would get lost in them, feel with them, and they were painful. They moved me. And on other days they didn’t move me at all." Amor Towles reading from "Rules of Civility": "In New York, it becomes so easy to assume that the city's most alluring women have flown in from Paris or Milan. But they're just a minority. A much larger covey hails from the stalwart states that begin with the letter 'I' like Iowa, Indiana, Illinois. Bred with just the right amount of fresh air, rough-housing and ignorance, these primitive blondes set out from the cornfields looking like starlight with limbs." Click on the link above to hear excerpts from the evening.

New Orleans manages to leave a mark, good or bad, on its tourists, natives, and those who've decided to take up roots there. Most people who visit have a great time, but many can attest to how the city's unique insular culture, history and traditions can be as frustrating as they are fascinating. As part of the 2011 Pen World Voices Festival of International Literature, five distinguished New Orleans writers — Sarah Broom, Richard Campanella, Nicholas Lemann, Fatima Sheik and Billy Sothern — read selections from their recently published books and essays. Through their writing, each author has made sense of the nuanced complexities that make up this Louisiana port city. Panel moderator and novelist Nathanial Rich called the discussion a manifesto to the city. Five years after Hurricane Katrina, the flurry of positive national media attention has helped create the impression that all is well in the Big Easy. But the city is still fraught with problems. In conversations about New Orlean's stark contradictions, emotions run high and opinions are strong. The five fiction and nonfiction writers participating in the PEN discussion are either originally from or currently living in New Orleans. Each has devoted his or her work to erasing the city's fairytale image and telling the true story of its past, present and future. At the end of the workshop, the participants issued a statement with suggestions on what PEN could do to improve education in New Orleans. Bon Mots: Billy Sothern, a New Orleans anti-death penalty lawyer and author of "Down in New Orleans: Reflections From a Drowned City," on understanding New Orleans: "I think there are many who view NOLA as this exceptional place and some of them are the city’s biggest fans. But I argue that instead of its exceptionalism, the rest of America needs to be concerned with New Orleans because it's highly representative of the problems of the rest of the country ... These kinds of issues are coming to a neighborhood near you — they may already have but they are going to get worse. Instead of a metaphor, I think it's important to not say we have this 'New Orleans problem' with the schools and crime. Instead, we have this 'American problem' that is tragically magnified in the city of New Orleans." Nicholas Lemann, a New Orleans native, staff writer for The New Yorker (among other magazines), and Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, on race: "The fabled white elite that controls everything in New Orleans are probably the least powerful white elite than you'd find in any big city in the country. Not because someone took their power away, but for various cultural reasons. New Orleans has no locally controlled major economic institutions, so the infamous New Orleans white elite does not have the inclination to do what one would want done in New Orleans. And if they had the inclination, they would not be able to do them." Sarah Broom, a New Orleans native who wrote "A Yellow House in New Orleans," on local pride: "I think this 'love of place' is really just from people who are stuck in a lots of ways. There were very few opportunities for [career] advancement. It's almost impossible for a highly-educated person to move back to New Orleans and find some sort of intellectual rigor. That is just the truth. Part of it is that Hurricane Katrina forced a lot of people from New Orleans and now they don't want to come back. This population of people who can't come back because they can't afford to are also made up of people who don't actually want to return." Fatima Shaik, who is the author of four books of fiction set in Louisiana, on writing about New Orleans: "I think writers after Katrina were thrust into the roles of sociologists. People who are from New Orleans are likely to write about it. I think those people who are not from the city and want to write about it should focus on writing across the cultures and writing accurately. People don't have a conversation across cultures. Writers can do that."

While PEN is often at the forefront of debates and initiatives to do with the more obvious forms of oppression against writers — isolation, censorship, imprisonment — it is also ready to tackle the more subtle deterrents that plague the publishing industry as a whole. In a panel at the Standard Hotel as part of the PEN World Voices Festival, writers and editors talked about the ways in which corporate publishing limited access to audiences, the pressure to mainstream, and editing as a form of censorship. The evening was moderated by Mischief + Mayhem co-founder Lisa Dierbeck, who fueled debate by "impersonating" a corporate publishing executive and goaded her panelists ("the enemy") to confirm that they planned to overthrow her world. Speakers included writers Carmen Boullosa, Dale Peck (also a co-founder of Mischief + Mayhem), Mkola Riabchuk, and Monika Zgustova; writer and editor Ben Greenman, and Feminist Press editor Amy Scholder. The independent tone was set early in the evening by critic Eric Banks. As part of the festival this year, PEN asked six critics to each recommend five books representing works in translation, contemporary fiction, literary classics, small press publications, and something to surprise. All the Stand-up Book Critics recommendations can be found at this link, but Banks' surprise choice of Edward Said's last book, "On Late Style," resonated with the festival as a whole: "In an era when too many are eager to see the humanities as an anachronism, 'On Late Style' is a stylish retort."  Bon Mots: Amy Scholder on what matters: "My relationship to my authors is primary to me — and then there's the business of books after that." Carmen Boullosa on books by emerging Latino authors: "The novels are prodigious, different...I would even use the word, 'insurgent.' They are like little revolutions. I enter the book(s) and say, 'Wow!'" Dale Peck on the effects of a corporate takeover: "The more von Holtzbrinck got involved [with Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux], the more I was told things like my books needed to be happier, or they needed to be shorter...because paper was expensive."

Are you craving a little continental culture? Do you need a good book recommendation? Both were on offer on Tuesday, April 26, when New York Public Radio's Jerome L. Greene Space hosted a literary salon as part of the 2011 PEN World Voices Festival. The event: “From Russia with Love,” featured Russian poetry, criticism, and classical music. This year, PEN invited members of the National Book Critics Circle to come to each event and recommend notable books. Jane Ciabattari, the president of the National Book Critics circle, opened the evening with her favorite five books. (Get out your pen and paper!) The night was hosted by Ina Parker, who regularly hosts A Global Literary Salon, which is a radio and online television program transmitted from The Greene Space. Parker interviewed the Russian poets Igor Belov and Ksenia Shcherbino, as well as the Russian pianist, Svetlana Smolina. Belov has published two books of poetry: “All That Jazz” and “Music Not For Fat People.” Shcherbino has been published in the journals Babylon, Arion, Kreschatik, Reflect. The poems were read in the poets’ native language, but the lively commentary was in English, and the classical music transcends all language barriers.  Close your eyes and pretend you are in a literary salon—here is your beret. Igor Belov on censorship: "Since the leaders of Russia hardly read books at all, we can basically write almost anything that comes into our heads. Although now so-called 'extremism' is an offense that carries criminal liability...this is a concept that is so broad, that I could say just a little bit more than I’m saying right now and find myself in violation of that statute."  Ksenia Shcherbino on Soviet mythology: "In order to understand another culture, the best way to do that is to understand the myth of that other culture. I was born in 1980 so I grew up without the Soviet pressure. So, I had to re-invent Soviet mythology for myself." Jane Ciabattari on loving Russia: "What to love from Russia? Well, it could be Russian music, Russian poetry: all of the things that make us human beings. And I recall the words of Nietzsche, who said that art is what we have to keep us from perishing from the truth."

China watchers and writers Ian Buruma, Yan Lianke, Linda Polman, David Rieff, and Zha Jianying spoke at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature about human rights in China at the Great Hall at Cooper Union. Bon mots: Zha Jianying, author of "Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China," on human rights: "The questions of values and human rights lies not outside China but in China. And with the Chinese people and the Chinese leaders. This is about their life and their future. Nowhere else have these issues been debated and fought with as much passion and with a wider array of positions; the views as polarized and complicated as the situation. And the characters involved are four dimensional, not black and white."  Zha on humor: "I do know the party is not known for having a sense of humor. They wouldn't appreciate someone like Oscar Wilde who says, 'Life is too important to be taken seriously.'" Yan Lianke, who got the 2000 Lu Xun for "The Year, The Month, The Day" and the 2004 Lao She for "Pleasure," on Ai Weiwei: "An academic from Beijing told me something that shocked me. He said, 'What does all this have to do with our lives?' For example, when we see that Ai Weiwei is arrested, we see that he has a long list of crimes. And one of these crimes is fraud, and when people read about how much money he deceived from the people they think he deserves to be arrested and locked up. For all those who are struggling and fighting, 99 percent of the people in China don't really care about what they're doing. They care about their lives, they care about money, and their basic need to survive." Yan on censorship: "I think that people like Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei are true warriors, where as someone like me, I'm a coward. I can't fight out loud like they do, all I can do is silently write. So, to be a lonely writer in China, is perhaps one of the luckiest things to do."

One of the most powerful aspects of “War Horse,” which opened at Lincoln Center on April 14, is, of course, the astonishing puppets. Minutes into this riveting tale of a boy and his horse against the background of World War I (see our feature here), the audience has completely invested the “horses” with life. This is just what the co-founders of the Handspring Puppet Company, Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, who developed the production with Great Britain’s National Theatre, intended. However, at a lecture given in The New School’s Tishman Auditorium the night before the opening--the event was co-sponsored by The Vera List Center for Art and Politics and the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center--puppeteers pulled back the curtain during a lively panel discussion and demonstration. Joined by South African-born poet Yvette Christianse and Obie Award-winning puppeteer Dan Hurlin, Kohler and Jones talked about the origins of their company in apartheid South Africa; the use of puppetry as vehicle of advocacy; its place in the theatrical tradition; different schools of puppetry; and the form’s emotional and psychological impact.  Steered by the delicate-voiced Christianse, the quartet also explored some of puppetry’s central paradoxes: that we see (but choose not to see) the puppeteers; and that like a poet refining herself out of a poem (Christianse’s image) the operators must be willing to disappear for the puppet to live. Since the material and immaterial go hand in hand in puppetry, Jones and Kohler showed some video clips (excised in our audio above) of '“War Horse' in rehearsal,” and demonstrated the origins of their legendary horse puppets in some earlier old friends—a hyena demon from their production of “Faustus in Africa,” and Lisa, a chimpanzee from their piece “The Chimp Project.”  Bon Mots: Adrian Kohler on submission to the puppet: "There is a form of…subjection.  You have to put your whole being into this emotional prosthesis." Basil Jones on movement as thought: "We’re moving towards a slightly radical and cheeky proposition—that movement is thought. We’re trying to say that thought and the body are not two separate things." Adrian Kohler on the impact of “War Horse”: "That loss [of nearly a million horses in World War I] that affected us all is somehow reflected in our love of the beauty of a real horse: we no longer live with them, and that’s part of the tragedy of the story." Dan Hurlin on what we see: "Because of the distance between the puppets and us, they are actually better mirrors of who we are." Yvette Christianse on art and puppetry: "The true aim of the artist is to disappear."

It’s a good thing that William Shakespeare was born in the spring—April 26—because his sonnets are crammed with sumptuous images of ripe nature bursting its bounds. And for a good many years the Cornelia Street Café has celebrated the playwright’s birthday with a reading of selected sonnets.   There is a hint of the tavern about the restaurant’s downstairs performance space, so it was well suited to the April 25 performance put together by veteran actor Paul Hecht. Hecht was joined this year by Rachel Botchan, Barbara Feldon, and Peter Francis James (readers), Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek (soprano) and Simon Mulligan (pianist) providing some suitable Elizabethan airs in intervals between the sonnets. One planned diversion was a sonnet mash—all four actors professed to liking Sonnet 29 best (“When in disgrace…” etc), so all four had a go at it. The unplanned diversion was the interruption—during Horner-Kwiatek’s rendering of Thomas Morley’s “It Was a Lover and His Lass,” which has recurring images of bell chimes—of a chiming cell phone in a complementary key. The sympathetic audience responded with a wave of laughter as robust as any that might have been offered by Will’s original audiences. Listen to selections from the readings at the link above.

A large swatch of artist Laurel Nakadate's work features performances in which she performs acts with strangers—and videotapes them. Nakadate recently discussed her work at UnionDocs as part of New York's "Walls and Bridges" conference. Christopher Allen, Artistic Director of the Williamsburg, Brooklyn non-profit, introduced the artist. First, Nakadate talked about her photographic, video and performance art pieces. Then, she spoke to Allen and ethicist Ruwen Ogien about the components of longing and control in her work.    Bon Mots: Nakadate on inspiration: "Any transient place is really interesting to me. Because transient places are all about trying to get [from] where you are to where you want to be, which is ultimately about this motivation to a greater, better thing. Even if the greater, better thing is the Twinkies in the store." Nakadate on longing: "This is a performance where I was begging dead animals to wake up. I thought there was something interesting about the futility of asking for something you can't have. Or wishing for something that can't be. So, I begged dead animals to get up." Nakadate's work is up at PS1 from through August.   *Updated 4/29/2011

On Thursday, a conversation about censorship, art and morality took place at the New School's Arnold Hall between two American authors and a pair of French philosophers. The discussion was part of the Walls and Bridges lecture series. During the talk, entitled "(Self) Censorship: Art, Morality and Decency," the renowned American documentary photographer Nan Goldin flipped through nude images that she had taken of friends, of past lovers and of herself in the midst of lovemaking. Many were provocative, but none of them had caused as much sensation as one particular photograph--a shot of a young girl standing and looking down at her little sister who lies beneath her naked on the floor with her legs open. Upon its release, the image was immediately called pornographic. In Paris, France, hundreds of catalogs containing the image were shredded. Goldin stated she never intended to provoke anything illicit with the image--the two children in Goldin's photograph are actually her godchildren playing at home in Berlin--but much of the public had already made up its mind and taken offense. Other panelists besides Goldin were American writer and critic Lynn Tillman and French intellectuals Ruwen Ogien and Carole Talon-Hugon. WFMU's Benjamin Walker moderated the panel. The talk drew a large crowd. Oglen and Talon-Hugon spoke on attempts to censor artists' work. Goldin and Tillman spoke about instances in which friends, family,  and other outside forces had attempted to force ethics and morality on artists' work. Much of the conversation focused on society's relationship to pornography and its difficulty in defining it.  Bon Mots from the talk:Photographer Nan Goldin on self censorship: "I don't think about the audience when I'm taking a picture. I think about what I'm photographing. There are few times when my stomach tells me it's not appropriate to photograph. One was at David Wojnarowicz's bedside when he was dying. It felt like an invasion so I didn't take any pictures...the other times are times when people were having sex and I knew they may regret later having it be shown but that was more their censorship than mine." Goldin on her controversial shot of the sisters: "To me, there is no pornography in this whatsoever. I'm not inciting anyone to want to sexually abuse these children. A baby's body--to [think] that's pornographic is so sad and shows how disgusting this world has become to me. The idea that nude flesh is seen as pornographic--people  seem to forgot they were born naked and that they were born from women." Writer and critic Lynn Tillman on self censorship: "In order to fight self censorship, you actually have to know the ways in which you are censored. I teach a graduate fiction class in Albany on Tuesday evening. There were eight people in this seminar. Four were women. One of the women had written the story from the point of view of the men, and three of the four women said they didn't know if they should or could because they didn't know how men thought. I was horrified. It was interesting that the five men in the room didn't think or feel that. It was the women policing other women...or expressing [what] they didn't feel they could. I said I couldn't let this workshop end without saying that that attitude was censorious, self censorious, censorious to others and, of course, women could write in the point of view of a man and men could write in the point of view of women." Tillman on limits: "When referring to limits of imagination, I think as a writer I'm trying to learn what they are and write against them." Ruwen Ogien (pictured right) on his theory of "chic censorship": "One might say that two new forms of censorship exist that I can [call] 'chic censorship.' It is based on two fundamental principles. The first is that when sexual representation is artistic, it's okay, its good and it's not censored, but when it's not artistic, it is censored. The other principle is that sexual representation that seeks to reflect and artistic sentiment are good but sexual representation that seeks only to arose sexual excitement [is] bad and should be controlled. My own opinion is very simple. I feel that sexual representation--because it is not artistic enough--is not a good enough reason for censoring...When is sexual representation supposed to not be artistic? It's when it's in bad taste. What is punished is not sex representation, but the fact that it is bad taste. The idea was in a democracy, you shouldn't punish people because of bad taste--because if so we would all be in prison." Carole Talon-Hugon on art vs. pornography: "Amongst the charges that were brought against art, I have identified three types of charges. The first said that an art of work is bad and might be censored because it makes evil exist. In my essay I quote Victor Hugo who talks about Emile Zola's novels. Emile Zola can be very harsh at times. He deals with segments of society living in poor conditions and behaving in terrible ways as well. Victor reproaches Zola for painting this fact. Not because he doesn't believe they exist but he believes you shouldn't make them exist a second time. The second argument is to reproach a work of art for having deleterious affects. The idea that evil is contagious. Finally, there is a third argument by which certain subject matters--when they become the topic of an art work--call upon themselves a certain form of attention. Meaning a disinterested form of attention.

On Saturday, May 26, "The Writers Studio Reading Series" celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Yale Review, with authors who have some connection to the quarterly. The lineup of authors, including Louise Glück, Caryl Phillips, Edmund White and Michael Cunningham, read from their works at Le Poisson Rouge. All of the readers—with the exception of Edmund White, who has been published in the journal—teach at Yale. The writers were introduced by J.D. McClatchy, the current editor of the Review, who discussed the journal's impressive and colorful history as well as the difficulty small magazines face in the Internet age. “The literary quarterly is a threatened species,” he observed. However, if the packed room was any indication of the future of the Yale Review, McClatchy has nothing to fear. J.D. McClatchy, editor of the Yale Review, on the written word online versus in print: "I think that if writers had the choice between elegant paper and a beautifully printed piece or [being published] online and having thousands of more readers, I suppose they would answer that they want both." McClatchy on Robert Frost: "Robert Frost was a long-time contributor to the Yale Review and once wrote to the editor complaining about the $10 fee that he was paid for one extraordinary poem after another. 'Could he get more money?' The editor wrote back and said, 'No, this is going rate.' And Frost wrote back and said, 'Well, I regret your decision, but I’d rather be published in the Yale Review and make less money then be published elsewhere and make more.'” Caryl Phillips, Yale professor and author of "In the Falling Snow," on the pleasures of writing fiction: "One of the nice things about being a writer of fiction is that one is able to hide. Hiding one's personal life, hiding the tracks and the footprints that have led you to where you are now always seems to be one of the few pleasures of writing fiction. You can disappear, be offstage." Edmund White, Princeton professor and author of "City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s" on reaching out: "My new best friend is John Irving and he just sent me his book and it’s all about being gay—and mine has all these daring straight scenes. Well, at a certain age, I guess you have to start reaching out."

Tennessee Williams, perhaps best-known for his plays "Streetcar Named Desire," "The Glass Menagerie," and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," is the author of a "massive body of work," in the words of N.Y.U. drama professor Joe E. Jeffreys. On the occasion of the centennial of Williams' birth—the playwright was born March 26, 1911—Jeffreys hosted the first of a three-part series at Manhattan's Museum of Arts and Design entitled The Kindness of Strangeness. (Williams fans will recognize the title of the panel from an achingly memorable line delivered by Blanche DuBois in the playwright's "Streetcar Named Desire.") The memory-strewn afternoon included words from Williams' agent Mitch Douglas together with Williams' friends David Schweizer and Jeremiah Newton. Later in the day, the actress Charlotte Moore, who worked closely with Williams, also spoke. The author of 30 full-length plays, 70 one acts, as well as short stories, poetry, occasional pieces and novels, Tennessee Williams is a giant among American writers, and is equally celebrated for his complex, theatrical personality, including his wild cackle and large appetite. Agent Mitch Douglas called the playwright's work "really a roller-coaster ride." To hear the afternoon conversation, in which Douglas recalls Williams at the White House, Newton examines the writer's work with mutual friend Candy Darling and Schweizer gets found on a Key West beach (only to wind up at a grand Tennessee Williams party), click on the audio above. Bon Mots: David Schweizer on attending Williams' party in Florida: "I put on a suitable outfit from 1971."Joe Jeffreys responds: "What would have been a suitable outfit for a party at T.W.'s house in 1971?"David Schweizer: "Uh, kind of see-through lace."Joe Jeffreys: "There you go, that's what I was thinking." Mitch Douglas on Williams' appetite: "I.C.M. (International Creative Management) was owned and run by a gentleman by the name of Marvin Josephson and one day I had a call from Marvin saying 'I've had a rather distraught phone call from Tennessee and I want to ask you a question: What's he on?' and I said, 'Everything but roller skates.'" Jeremiah Newton on Williams' anger at disruptions in the theater: "He clutched a curtain and flung it back and went away, finally. I thought that was very brave of him, but not wise." Mitch Douglas on Williams' disrupting his own one-act play "Kirche, Kŭche und Kinder" in the theater: "I've had audience members ask him to shut up. I remember "Kirche, Kŭche und Kinder," he cackled through "Kirche, Kŭche und Kinder," and I remember some audience member turning around and saying 'Will you please quit laughing like that at Mr. Williams' work? He's a very important playwright.'" The Kindness of Strangeness was funded by the New York Council for the Humanities and took place this past January.

Anticipation was high at the Story Prize event at The New School's Tishman Auditorium last week. The three Story Prize finalists—Anthony Doerr ("Memory Wall"), Yiyun Li ("Gold Boy, Emerald Girl") and Suzanne Rivecca ("Death is Not an Option") read from their short story collections, knowing that, at the conclusion of the reading, one of them would win $20,000. Anthony Doerr came out the winner. Meant to honor the short story form, the Story Prize award is the largest first-prize amount of any U.S. fiction award. The other two finalists each received $5,000. Click above to hear the audio from all three Story Prize participants as they read selections from their works. Larry Dark introduces the authors. The readings are followed by a question-and-answer session with Larry Dark, the Story Prize director. "I'm sorry to say that James Franco can't be here tonight," Dark joked, referring to one of the hosts of this year's Oscars awards. "So, I'll be hosting." Bon Mots: Anthony Doerr on the pressure of reading at the Story Prize event: "It's a little crazy when you're giving a reading, there's a small chance that you might get a trophy at the end of it. You're like: 'Maybe I shouldn't curse! Should I cut out the curse words?' It's nice to know that they've already made their decision." Doerr on the influence of science in his writing: "I grew up with a mother who was a science teacher. We were the nerdy kids who had to identify all the bugs in the neighborhood. I've always believed that it's a little bit artificial to have the science building on one end of a university campus and the liberal arts building on another. I think they're both ways to ask questions about why we're here—science and literature. I don't necessarily see them as disparate fields." Yiyun Li on communicating with other writers in her work: "Oftentimes I feel like you write to talk to your master...I spend most of my days talking to dead people. I mean, I think, in a way, reading is a very good way to talk to people that you don't have access. So, I talk to Tolstoy often. He can hear me, but he doesn't laugh at me." Li on the influence of eavesdropping on her work: "I'm a very nosy person, so I eavesdrop a lot. And there are all sorts of ways to eavesdrop. You can go into the subway to listen to conversations on the phone. Or you can also go onto the Internet. For awhile I was working on a book...and I read online that there was this young woman in China who, when she was 17, she thought her father was having an affair with another woman. So, what she did was she waited until she turned 18 so she could sue her father...She didn't have a case, so she built a blog. The blog's title was 'My Father is Less a Creature than a Dog or a Pig because He Sleeps with Another Woman.' I was fascinated by this young woman's hatred. I sort of stalked her online. I followed her website every day. There were many women who would leave comments...As a nosy person I thought about leaving a message condemning her. I thought about making up an identity to do that." Suzanne Rivecca on dedicating her book to a tiger: "The tiger that the book is dedicated to is a Siberian tiger named Tatyana, who, until 2007, lived in the San Francisco Zoo. There was an incident on Christmas Eve where these three guys broke into the zoo after hours. They were kind of taunting the tiger, throwing stuff into her cage. They were all drunk. The tiger leaped out of her enclosure, hunted them down, killed one of them, injured the other two. The police came and immediately shot the tiger through the head and killed it. When it happened my sympathies were firmly in line with the tiger." Rivecca on the title of her collection "Death is Not an Option": "I wanted the title to reflect the fact that the book is a little bit provocative, it has a little bit of an edge, and isn't about sweet coming of age milestones of young girls. I think the harshness of it, of having the word death in the title, kind of underscored that."

Nearly two feet of newly fallen snow proved little obstacle for fans to clap their eyes on musician Bill Callahan on a recent winter's night. Callahan, known to many by the name Smog, drew a hip crowd to Spoonbill and Sugartown in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for a reading from his novel, Letters to Emma Bowlcut. The book, read in the author’s halting, sonorous voice, consists of correspondence written by a man to a woman he met at a party. Readers aren’t provided much context for the meeting but can sense the relationship develop as the letters progress. During the lengthy question-and-answer session that followed his reading, Callahan admitted he was attached to the art of letter writing. “If I was younger and had never experienced life without the Internet, then it probably would have been e-mails, but I’m still holding onto pen and paper,” he said. Callahan also noted that he’s focusing on his music these days, but that he might publish another book in five years or so, which was how long it took him to write Letters to Emma Bowlcut. Click the audio player above to hear the full reading. Here are our bon mots from the event: Reading from Letter 37: "My voice has a strange accent lately—wistful Korean grocer chiding a pyramid of pomegranates."Reading from Letter 39: "It smoothed me out to read your letter. Despite your strife, you are so tender to me. I was certain it was going to be a Vicodin night, as I needed some pinning down. But I lost that feeling when I read what you wrote."Reading from Letter 40: "Everything that I have done today could have been done by a bear. The long seasoned sleep. The lumbering out of bed. Tearing at a hard roll dipped in honey. And then sprawling lazily in the grass where the sun hit. I was going to take a bath but decided that would have been too much bear activity." Below, listen to excerpts of Callahan's answers from the question-and-answer session. He discusses what he's currently reading and names the two songs that were originally written as poems.

English writer Zadie Smith has accomplished so much in the past 11 years. Her first novel, White Teeth, was published in 2000 before she even turned 25. Now, she's got two additional novels, a number of short stories, and a growing body of criticism under her belt. Smith was also named a tenured creative writing professor at New York University last September and was recently made the critic for Harper's Magazine's "New Books" column. On Wednesday, Smith discussed her new role as critic with her new editor at Harper's, Gemma Sieff. The two talked about how writing criticism differs from fiction writing and Smith's love-hate obsession with the Internet. Bon Mots On writing non-fiction versus fiction: "The thing I'm attracted to when I'm writing non-fiction is that you don't know, but you can know, right? There's a possibility of knowing. You can control the area in which you write. And to me it feels like a small formal garden and I can make it as nice as possible. Whereas novels are absolutely chaotic and messy and embarrassing." On writing criticism: "The kind of reviewing I like, or the kind I aspire to, takes another moment. It's easy to feel contempt for writing, or to get one over on it. I guess I'm trying to read a book along its own grain, and not against its grain. I don't have enough energy to write about something I hate. On writing in a digital world: "When I'm using the Internet I am addicted. I'm not able to concentrate on anything else. This isn't a fancy argument. I'm trying to be honest. It's pathetic— like a drug addicted. I had to get e-mail taken off my phone!"

"World leaders need to answer to artists." This was the rallying cry of Natalia Kaliada, artistic director of the Belarus Free Theatre, at a benefit for the embattled dissident troupe organized by the PEN American Center that was held at Le Poisson Rouge on Wednesday. She added “politicians do not have steps; they have just words.” Belarus Free Theatre is the little theater company that could, and the media have been quick to pick up on its story. A few weeks ago the members of the company were either in jail or in hiding, the targets of a crackdown by Belarus’ government after recent election protests. Last week, they were in town for the Under the Radar festival at the Public Theater, but have used the trip as an opportunity to carry their battle into the public eye. The company spearheaded (not a lightly chosen verb) a protest rally at the U.N. Wednesday morning, and the PEN event was originally intended to celebrate the willingness of artists to join together to protest injustice, said Kaliada. But early that day, the group had received word, in the form of a terse text message, that the husband of one of the actors had been arrested. So it was a taut, tearful, and defiant face that they turned to an audience of supporters at Le Poisson Rouge’s cozy downstairs space. In times of trouble, we are counseled to find something to cheer about, noted Sir Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born playwright who hosted the evening’s event. For Stoppard, it was clearly the simple, unbelievable fact of the company’s existence. For the company, it may have been the warm support of the literary and theatrical community. For the event, put on at short notice (a more elaborate affair had been staged at The Public earlier in the week), resembled nothing so much as an old-fashioned jazz rent party, like the kind musicians used to put together when one of their number needed help meeting the bills.  In this case, the “session” started with some heartrending music by violinist and vocalist Iva Bittova, followed by readings of poems by imprisoned Belarussian poet Vladimir Neklyaev. Then, a scene from Stoppard’s disturbing “Cries From The Heart,” read by Billy Crudup and Margaret Colin, showed a government official training a lawyer in the delicate art of replacing all the words we recognize as dealing with torture, intimidation, cruelty, or repression with words for foods.  (“I want you to say,” taunts the chillingly reasonable official, “it’s not torture, it’s pizza.”)  Authors E.L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo read passages from books ("City of God," "Mao II") that touched on cruelty, war, or degradation. The evening concluded with a fierce performance by the Free Theater of the third part of a trilogy on life in Belarus called “Numbers.” Five actors moved through a rapid succession of scenes that enacted a range of damning statistics. The three cheerful men muttering hesitantly and throwing their arms up in confusion?  “70% of Belarussians have trouble expressing the idea of democracy.” The woman who gives birth to, and then pops, a balloon? The country has a high rate of abortion, stillbirths, and childhood diseases. The buckets full of empty shoes: “over 1,200 people vanish in Belarus each year.” As the demoralizing, often shocking, statistics succeeded one another on the video screen, the audience ought to have been left numb with despair on behalf of a country so defined by pain, loss, violence, and neglect. Instead, the performance—filled with a fierce energy and supple beauty—brought catharsis and epiphany, if the cheers and wild applause were anything to go by.  In Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” the work’s underlying nihilism is subverted by the sheer beauty of the language and the poignant souls of its characters. If you can write of the human condition, “Astride the grave and a difficult birth,” then you have already triumphed over death. In the case of the Belarus Free Theater, if your company’s brilliant work inspires others to stand for you and with you, in some sense no dictatorship can ever fully succeed. Click the link above to hear for selections from the benefit. (Unfortunately, much of “Numbers” was mimed and so is not featured here). Bon mots "We truly believe that the world leaders need to answer to artists...politicians do not have steps; they just have words."—Natalia Kaliada "If you believe in God's Judgement...then certain bacteria living in the anus of a particularly ancient hatchet fish at the bottom of the ocean are the recycled and fully sentient souls of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot."—E.L. Doctorow in "City of God." "I want you to say, it's not torture, it's pizza."—Tom Stoppard in "Cries from the Heart."

At last month's True Story: Non-Fiction at KGB Bar, famed essayist, journalist and critic Vivian Gornick talked about womanhood, working and life as a woman worker. KGB curator Erin Edmison introduced the night with a story of how she came to first read Gornick's work. Bon Mots Gornick on making work her priority: "The only important thing, I told myself, was work. I must teach myself to work. If I worked, I'd have what I needed. I'd be a person in the world. What would it matter, then, that I was giving up love? As it turned out, it mattered."  Gornick on her sacrifices for work: "I love my hardened heart. I've loved it all these years. But the loss of romantic love can still tear at it." Gornick on her place in the working world: "Clearly what I have here is—what I've lived on and with and all the rest of it—is what's called an elitist preoccupation. The whole world of ungratifying work, of mechanical work, of work that is drudgery still exists." True Story: The Non-Fiction Reading Series at KGB returns in the spring. Visit their Facebook page for more information.

Two is a famously bad age for toddlers, but it seems to be a prime number for a reading series marking a rite of passage—in this case, the celebration this past Wednesday of the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series’ two-year anniversary at Joe’s Pub.  Host and curator Amanda Stern called the evening “Old Friends/New Friends” and invited as readers Nelly Reifler and A.M. Homes—her first two guests when she started the series at a Chinatown bar seven years ago. Both women read stories that might be called modern fables. Reifler’s “Formica Dinette” was written for the Web site Underwater New York, which collects writing and art inspired by the waterways around New York City (take that, James Cameron). In this darkly comic piece (the actual dinette is somewhere in the East River) the Formica company somehow joins with a survivalist family gearing up for the final battle, and kitchen redesign is linked to the rehabilitation of a possessed parent. A.M. Homes’ untitled piece, written for her friend, the English painter Rachel Whiteread, shares some characteristics with its protagonist, a shapeshifter who treats sick buildings. It is a protean, lyrical work in which the woman moves through her day adapting her body to each circumstance she encounters. And she’s given to randomly sprouting feathers, which I take to be a metaphor for writing itself—the sharp feathery thing that makes its way to the surface and lets the possessor take wing. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham, who represented “New Friends” on the program, and whose work is often as lyrical and complex as a Beethoven sonata, seemed to be channeling Norman Mailer, who he later cited, in a passage from his new novel “By Nightfall.”  In a glimpse of the early courtship of the married couple whose story the novel tells, Pete Harris is dazzled by the opulent gentility of his girlfriend Rebecca’s Virginia home, and is equally titillated by tales of the sexual adventures of her sister. (Click on the link above to hear selections from the evening’s readings.) Happy Ending’s trademark (other than good literature read in good company) is host Stern’s insistence that her authors take a risk on stage. This trio met the challenge inventively. Reifler translated randomly selected passages of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” into an imaginary language, Idiga. A.M. Homes courted four volunteers from the audience using “speed dating” techniques from various Internet sites. (Hint, ask outrageous questions designed to reveal your candidate’s personality: “Do you think of chocolate as part of the food triangle?”; “Do you have a flat side?”; If you were a stalker, would you be a good one?”).  Cunningham, whose novel “The Hours” drew on the life of Virginia Woolf, offered a five-minute (all right, eight minute) history of the novel, concluding that rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated, and quoting Mailer, who once told a panel audience, with characteristic brio, that “The novel will be at your funeral.” Listen to Cunningham’s own version of “Cliff’s Notes” here: The musical guests for the evening were Thomas Bartlett and Sam Amidon, who offered up an eclectic mix of folk tunes, original songs, and pop standards, distinguished by fragile vocals that almost seemed to morph into the accompanying instruments. Hear their first set here:     Bon Mots "Mother may be disoriented mentally and spatially. This is just one more reason we suggest timing Mother’s emergence with the kitchen re-do."—Nelly Reifler, “Formica Dinette”.  "She’s a navigator, a mover, a shifter. She’s flown as a gull over the ocean, she’s dived deep as a whale, she spent an afternoon as a jellyfish, floating, as an evergreen with the breeze tickling her skin…She’s in constant motion, trying to figure out what comes next."—Reader A.M. Homes "If you were young Pete Harris, you felt the modesty of it eroding you, depopulating you. All those little satisfactions, and no big dangerous ones."—Michael Cunningham, “By Nightfall.” "The novel is born as a sort of lower form of entertainment, not unlike 'Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.'”—Michael Cunningham’s history of the novel in five minutes.