Thursday, February 26, 2009
Talks and Readings Also c), The Coffee, Now I Know How Bad American Coffee Is*
Posted by Mark Asch on Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 3:00 PM
Other countries are great because a) they are not nations of hideous slobs, like ours, and b) they just love to try to boost their cultural profile in America by sponsoring cool events here, for their culture-makers. Support for artists, entertainment and edification for audiences, everybody wins.
Like this Festival of New French Writing thing, which the French Embassy and France's Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture are holding with NYU this evening, all day tomorrow, and Saturday afternoon. The basic idea, it seems, is to put an established or emerging French writer and an American writer onstage together, and shake the stage until they fight, or else have interesting and unreplicateable conversations about literature and culture and whatnot.
I never know on posts like this how much it helps to mention the names of the writers involved — it'd take up too much space and be too boring to explain who these people are if you don't know them already, and I never know if you know or not because who can say how big a star a writer is in someone else's cultural firmament? Can we really ever know each other? (No. No we cannot. Just check the schedule and bios.) Well, in any case, Bernard Henri-Levy gon be there; in his honor this post is accompanied by the unbuttoned-shirtiest BHL photo I could find. There were many.
*If we were an old couple, dated for years, this'd be where you say, "They have good beer there," and I say, "... now I know how bad American beer is."
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I'd go to all of these if I could clear my schedule...
I'm most interested in Marjane Satrapi and Chris Ware (next time you're in a bookstore check out "Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth", great sitting-in-the-aisles reading material...) Satrapi we know from "Persepolis", so Chicago meets Tehran...
also the "Windows on the World" author Frederic Beigbeder should be interesting. I think that would be a good book for the New Yorker reading club, seeing they are looking for suggestions...
I haven't been to Prague been to Prague, but I know that thing.
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