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  • Janet Malcolm and Ian Frazier Talk Shop at The New Yorker Festival

    18/10/2011 Duration: 01h24min

    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

  • Wrestling with Words: Poet Philip Schultz Talks about Dyslexia

    17/10/2011 Duration: 36min

    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 pa

  • The Call of Things: Jane Bennett Talks About Hoarders at the Vera List Center

    26/09/2011 Duration: 39min

    “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,

  • Game of Thrones: Sir Peter Hall and Michael Boyd in Conversation

    05/08/2011 Duration: 36min

    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 Ha

  • 'Speak the Speech I Pray You': Directors Weigh in on Bringing Shakespeare to the Stage

    18/07/2011 Duration: 49min

    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

  • Talk To Me: A Happy Beginning for Happy Ending

    15/06/2011 Duration: 28min

    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 fl

  • Talk to Me: New Orleans as Paradox

    11/05/2011 Duration: 01h09min

    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 contrad

  • Talk to Me: The PEN World Voices Festival Takes on Corporate Publishing

    10/05/2011 Duration: 01h06min

    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. A

  • Talk to Me: From Russia with Love at the Greene Space

    06/05/2011 Duration: 59min

    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 journa

  • Talk to Me: China in Two Acts

    05/05/2011 Duration: 01h06min

    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

  • Behind 'War Horse': The Puppeteers at The New School

    29/04/2011 Duration: 01h08min

    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

  • Cornelia Street Café Says Happy Birthday to Shakespeare

    29/04/2011 Duration: 35min

    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—

  • Talk to Me: Stranger Performances

    27/04/2011 Duration: 18min

    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 y

  • Talk To Me: Art, Pornography and Censorship

    18/04/2011 Duration: 01h22min

    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

  • Talk to Me: The Yale Review Celebrates 100 Years

    11/03/2011 Duration: 01h17min

    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 tho

  • Talk to Me: Celebrating 100 Years of Tennessee Williams

    09/03/2011 Duration: 107h52min

    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

  • Talk to Me: Story Prize: Short Stories, Big Prizes

    07/03/2011 Duration: 01h28min

    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 th

  • Talk to Me: Bill Callahan's Letters to Emma Bowlcut

    07/02/2011 Duration: 18min

    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

  • Talk to Me: Zadie Smith and Gemma Sieff

    07/02/2011 Duration: 01h08s

    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

  • From Belarus with Love and Pain: The Belarus Free Theatre at Le Poisson Rouge

    21/01/2011 Duration: 48min

    "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

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