The Song Is Over, But The Melody Lingers On

Emily Gordon: The festival is done. But I’m not. (Did you think I would be?) For another day or so, or as long as Ron will let me, I’ll post the carefully selected best of my copious notes and a few wrapups of all the events I attended, plus sketches of some of the characters I encountered. Today’s major highlights included talking (goonily, I probably need not add) to a buoyant end-of-weekend David Remnick as he puzzled out a tiny toy ball that laughs, which someone was handing out to people outside Town Hall, and miraculously catching my prose hero Donald Antrim, who’d just finished his fiction master class. Goodness, he’s compelling in person! He could be a novelist-mesmerist. He gave me an Altoid. (Admit it, this is the kind of thing you read blogs for.) And graciously agreed to give me an interview for emdashes, so look for that. It was the end of a weekend that made me wish I lived in New York City so I could do this kind of thing all the time. Oh, hold on, I do. I plan to amp up my general enrichment so my life after this weekend will continue to be, in the words of Diane Keaton in Sleeper, pure keen. No, no, it’s greater than keen! It’s kugat. (Remnick did a swell job reading the Woody Allen piece that first made him want to work at the magazine; it was fun to see him getting into the silliness.)

Soon, you may be pleased to learn, Beatrice will return to its regularly scheduled program, or, alternately, cease to be possessed by the spirit of a mildly obsessive lindy-hopping poet, but while I still have the floor (block that metaphor!), I’d like to point out the remarkable abilities of the New Yorker Festival crew to keep their heads when all about them have long lost theirs. From the big cheeses to the Babybels, this is a remarkably professional, and remarkably good-natured, bunch of people. For one thing, they put up with me, the often sleepily forgetful new-media upstart, all week, and were unfailingly helpful at every turn. Not to mention that every event I saw was run smoothly, almost always starting and ending on time, with almost no discernible technical glitches. There were plenty of staff on hand to direct people and answer questions, very few people didn’t know what was going on, and although some of them seemed too tired to speak today, they smiled encouragingly anyway. New Yorker admiration aside for the moment, I’ve really got to hand it to them.

26 September 2005 | events |