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 |

A sleep trance, a dream dance, a shared romance, synchronicity

Emily Gordon: New Yorker Festival wrapup quiz! Match the statement with the speaker:

1. “I had a therapist once who said, ‘When are you going to finish that book? I need something to read.’ It helped a lot. I’ve read so many great books, and I’d like to repay that favor.”

2. “I am taken by the boldness of any performer who makes a personal decision, who can take an idea and make it happen. I don’t want to name-drop, but most of my friends are film directors, and I was having dinner with some of them in Paris. Roman Polanski said, ‘I want to do Oliver Twist.’ ‘Why?’ I said. ‘It was a pretty good musical.’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. My son Elvis—he has to see something.’ Take your craft and make it happen.”

3. “[That] is the thing I’ve worked hardest on and worked on the most. I was a lazy person until I had to do [it]. But when the chance is really there, I go for it. And I was rewarded. It was a revelation at 36—the more you try the more you get out. Amazing!”

4. “Classics have the advantage of being models and also being…beyond the fads, and the few that really move you it is important to take into your deepest self.”

5. “TV is not the answer, for God’s sake…. The government should take an aggressive stand and invest in art in general. When a little kid drops a Coke bottle under his feet in the subway, it’s not bad behavior but a lack of understanding of the art of living.”

6. “Work every day, find good work habits. Read who you like and figure out why you like it. They don’t owe you something, you owe them something.”

7. “I don’t aim for perfection. I have a fan mentality.”

8. “You compete with the dead as well as the living—it’s a big crowd you’re competing with!”

9. “We figure that among New Yorker cartoonist bluegrass bands, we’re in the top five.”

10. “I was working at a job where a lot of people were talking about writing, but not writing. I didn’t want to just talk and not write.”

11. “My grandmother learned this song from a Virginia state senator when she was nine years old.”

12. “I used to never read anything by anyone younger than me. Now I don’t read anything by people older than me! The younger ones have much more to say to me.”

13. “Any new work creates polemics and discussion—and that’s very healthy.”

14. “I have my students read Lorrie’s stories…. Teaching makes you go out and be social and not have it be all about you.”

15. “Recently I found myself panning El Greco. El Greco didn’t come all this way to be panned by an American!”

16. “I got somethin’, but it’s not the banjo.”

17. “Are there any ex-English majors here? Tell me, where is the big money they promised?”

A. John Updike
B. Frank Gannon
C. Zadie Smith
D. Steve Martin
E. Chang-Rae Lee
F. Mikhail Baryshnikov
G. Lorrie Moore
H. Jonathan Franzen
I. Matt Diffee
J. Tony Ellis
K. Ricky Gervais

(more…)

26 September 2005 | uncategorized |