I posted a transcript of a Slavoj Zizek talk last night at the endangered St. Mark’s Bookshop. The talk is as meaty as a Zizek rant can get in an hour. Topics covered include a theoretical discussion of melancholy, mourning and prohibition, and how they apply to the Occupy Wall Street protests as well to the state of the left and modernity, in general; the problematic relationship between democracy and globalization, and how the protests and Anne Applebaum fit into this; the obscene pact of Zionism; the true 99%; a new multi-centric world where countries like India, China and South Korea are buying tracts of land from countries that can barely feed themselves; and lots more.

READ THE TRANSCRIPT

As soon as I read Development As Freedom, I decided Amartya Sen was one of my heroes. And since the chances of me getting more stupid every year is extremely high, I’ve taken to the idea of re-reading it each year as a way to provide much-needed nourishment to my brain; but most of all, to continue to make sense. Its vision is so complete, simple, free of controversy and politics, appealing to the best of human nature, and rational without compromising on ethics that if it ever replaced the bible (it’s my bible), I’d expect the world to explode of over-perfection. Needless to say, I cannot wait to get to his new book, The Idea of Justice, which Sylvia Nasar introduced as a lifetime’s work (she modestly introduced herself as a “journalist” but she’s also the author of John Forbes Nash’s biography, A Beautiful Mind).

The talk took place at Old St. Patrick’s Youth Center and moved back to McNally Jackson book store for signing. It was filmed for C-SPAN so hopefully the video will be available soon. Lots of photos included here.

Sylvia Nasar

The only work I really like from Dave Eggers are Away We Go and McSweeney’s artwork. Too bad this cover (top left) for his upcoming Zeitoun looks kind of terrible.

January 14 12:00PM – 01:00PM Details

Dave Eggers will sign copies of his latest books: Zeitoun, a non-fiction account of a Syrian-American immigrant and his extraordinary experience during Hurricane Katrina; The Wild Things, his book based loosely on Maurice Sendak’s picture book, Where the Wild Things Are, and the screenplay by the same name, co-written with Spike Jones; and McSweeney’s, No. 33: The San Francisco Panorama, a Sunday-edition sized newspaper, featuring the work of Art Spiegelman, Dan Clowes and Chris Ware, among many others.

Slavoj Zizek has a new book out on Verso Books: First As Tragedy, Then As Farce; a title borrowed from Marx’s “correction” of Hegel’s idea that history necessarily repeats itself: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

So Verso teamed up with the Brecht forum yesterday to pack the 900-seat Great Hall at Cooper Union with an audience that sold the event out well in advance. At $10 each, that’s $9000, though it seemed like quite a few tickets were bought at the $15 option, which included a copy of the book. That sure is philosophy operating at the level of rock stardom, but we learned that Verso is trying to replace the “Elvis of Cultural Theory” quote with “The most dangerous philosopher in the West” in marketing Žižek. Fittingly, the author’s new website operated by Verso states that the event had to stop when it did because of a bomb threat. Sure, I’ll believe the 10% of truth, 80% of liberal arts theater and 10% of marketing potential in that.

Attending a lefty event at an artsy school in New York comes with a mixed baggage. On the one hand you have all these young students speaking in foreign languages, representing the metropolises of the world. On the other you have a bunch, only slightly less annoying than teenagers, who think squatting at Starbucks is somehow an act of substance or that being dragged out of the Great Hall by cops once the event has run out of time is somehow preferable or even symbolic. Not all, but most liberal students in the first world pick up on the thrill of changing the world before coming around to the reality of putting food on the plate or understanding what it really means to live in the marginalized space outside the operations of modern civilization. But that’s only a minor complain, the minor point being that the events at NYPL, where I saw Žižek last, seem more mature.

I’m also not a fan liberals (like the organizers of the event) using the word “radical” in reference to people like Edward Said. How is Said radical, unless radical means articulate, clear in thought and sound in ethics? I can only assume that what divides the radicals from the non-radicals is either the sympathy for Palestinians or an intelligent understanding of Communist writings.

I forgot my audio recorder at home, but, as always, Žižek made great points in his usual animated ways. Here’s a bad recap:

The future of the political divide lies not between the Christian conservative and the liberals, but between the proper (dying) left and the liberal “softies”, who are afraid to use terms like “the working class”, though what is needed is not the burial or revival of these terms, but really the redefinition of them; who, in the end, believe in capitalism as a viable solution (and are probably afraid of sympathizing with Palestinians). He evoked the debate he had with Bernard-Henri Lévy not too long ago, when the French philosopher (playing the role of “softie” in this instance) asked if it wouldn’t be wonderful to have a world where the women can wear whatever they want and be in a relationship with whomever they choose. When presented as such, Žižek said that the answer is hardly ever a “no” but to be accounted for is the price of the bombs that fall over villages and cities to make this women liberation possible; and then there’s the option of asking the Communist question in the same sly way (roughly and poorly paraphrased here): “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a collective force to feed the whole world, fight poverty and survive economic crises, etc.?” To which the answer is hardly ever a straight “no”.  You can download that truly fantastic debate from the NYPL website.

We found out that Žižek gets his intellectual orgasm from watching Fox News, when he hears of the concentration camps Obama is setting up to eventually fill with the political right (I assume). The right pushes the notion of freedom of choice when it comes to healthcare reform, but as is the case with electricity and water,  Žižek would much rather not have to spend time choosing a health care provider, which would free up time that would make actual freedom of choice, where it matters most, more attainable.

Realistically, Israel-Palestine should be a bi-national secular state. We pay “rent” to Microsoft (stand-in for everything it represents) to participate in the “general intellect”.

One of the few instances when the brutal consumer in Žižek comes out is when he goes to Starbucks. In the realization that he’s not only paying for coffee, but also a dollar in ideological fees to help a needy community somewhere, he feels, “I just want a coffee and nothing else!”. This was an often-used example he was reluctant to repeat, so he also read the marketing literature from Tom’s shoes: that a pair bought here gives a pair to the needy elsewhere; that the force of consumerism and capitalism that is responsible for the disparity is re-enforced and encouraged in an attempt to somehow address this disparity.

Žižek has an issue with being called the “Elvis of Cultural Theory” because it was Elvis who, when threatened by the popularity of the Beatles, went to the big boys and complained about the Beatles being tools of Communism. Despite running out of time, Žižek pretty much forced his way to the conclusion of his talk, which ended with a poignant joke about a Communist who (“obviously”) ends up in hell. I have no desire to butcher it, so I will try to find either a sound clip or a transcript.

For the substantial and meaty bits, you’ll have to get the book. Since they started late and ran out of time, there was no Q&A, so to make up for it Žižek asked Verso Books to put up the complete text of his talk on the new “shitty” website. It’s not up yet, but hopefully they will follow through.

Being at the Brooklyn Book Festival—which I also attended in its year of inception, and which has clearly multiplied its prowess since then—was rejuvenating. Really, it’s not a bad place to be at on a Sunday when you’ve been feeling brain-dead for months. I only wish I’d gotten there soon enough to catch more panels than I did.

It was a few minutes past 2pm when I rushed past the steps outside the Historic Brooklyn Borough Hall. Nelson George (City Kid), Alyssa Katz (Our Lot) and Tom Vanderbilt (Traffic) were just beginning to discuss their take on necessary components of urban life.

All around, of course, were vendor tents filled with books.

I headed straight to the information booth to pick up my tickets for the Literary Masters panel at 3. Picking up the ticket was easy enough, but when I went to St. Francis College just to check out where the auditorium was, there was already a line forming, so I spent the rest of my hour there. The readers at the panel were Paul Auster (Man in the Dark), Francine Prose (Goldengrove), and Russell Banks (The Reserve).

Francine chatting up Paul.

Doesn’t Louisa Ermelino of Publishers Weekly look like an ideal librarian hottie?

The excerpt Paul read was smart, funny and engaging, and my favorite amongst the three. It was from a scene in which the young narrator first meets an intriguing, sharp-mouthed elderly professor and his mysterious French friend who has rightly identified the narrator’s sad face as being that of a poet.

Russell Banks approves.

Francine Prose read next. She said she had proposed to read from a book that’s coming out later this month, but that her publisher said, Why would you read from a book that’s not available yet? In retrospect, she said, she forgot to give the most counter-argumentative reason: Because it’d be fun?

I like her because of her open and devoted approach to consuming literature, which has been captured in the book Reading Like a Writer. When I tried reading one of her fiction works a couple of years ago, though, I lost interest soon and had to put it away (mainly because the central characters were from the world of academia and I couldn’t bring myself to care about them), so I was happy to hear the excerpt she read from Goldengrove. It was a scene that introduces the two young sisters, who like to re-enact scenes from old movies, and their mother: that I can totally care about! It reminded me of The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West, which I loved.

Paul listens on.

Russell Banks read a short story, whose only merit, he said, was that it was short. It was actually much longer than the two excerpts that had just been read, but it was a sweet story about the passage of time, which involved a 50-year-old man and an 80-year-old woman who had been lovers about thirty years ago. I kept wanting it to end abruptly, because of all the sweetness involved, with just a wave of a goodbye or something, but there were numerous closing lines that spelled out the main character’s reflections on the passage of time.

When I headed back to Borough Hall, these Jewish folks were singing and clapping and dragging a mini procession out onto the street. Apparently they had just escorted Rabbi Simcha Weinstein to the Main Stage (the stage by the main steps). The Rabbi, with Ethan Gilsdorf (Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks), Brian Raftery (Don’t Stop Believin’) and Eddie Sarfaty (Mental), were just starting their discussion on obsessive fun!

The St. Francis Auditorium was a nice place, and though I badly wanted to stay there for the 4pm panel with Oliver Sacks, I didn’t have a ticket for it. I was back in the ticket line to pick one up for the 5pm panel with Astra Taylor. There I saw Thurston Moore, who had spoken at an earlier panel.

Once the ticket was in hand, I ventured out to breeze through all the vendor tables. They would be all packed up to leave by 6, which is when I would get out of my 5pm panel, so this was my last chance.

The Harper Perennial table was one of my favorites:

Everything was priced at $10 each. I bought this 4-book series of short stories by Stephen Crane, Oscar Wilde, Herman Melville, and Leo Tolstoy.

Verso Books table was my second favorite. Bought a bunch from here at 50% off!

I love Bookforum. I should subscribe again!

Clock Root Books was my third favorite. Look how pretty their table was!

And look at that amazing Iraqi cook book! Why didn’t I buy it?

Familiar faces outside the Author Green Room.

I went to the 5pm Writing Writers panel, presented by Bomb magazine, because of Astra Taylor, trusting her to ask good and sincere questions, which she did. What I like about her is that she always seems to be a little confused and driven to figure things out. I can relate because I’m always confused and trying to figure things out!

This nice woman from Bomb magazine introduced, and I can’t believe I’ve forgotten her name even though she pronounced it with a great Spanish accent.

Although I picked this panel over the one with Oliver Sacks, I had no idea who the two authors about to be interviewed were. That’s Christopher Sorrentino (Trance) above. I’d also misunderstood the content of this panel: I thought the subject was what writing about real, brilliant writers, alive or dead, reveal about “the creative impulse, the relationship between fact and imagination and the ethics of representation”. But, of course, they meant fictional characters who happen to be writers, which is a lot less interesting because though a few select real writers are brilliant and endlessly interesting, most of the writing world that revolves around the MFA and the publishing industry is pretty dull, don’t you think?

But maybe I’ll be proven wrong once I read Man Gone Down from Michael Thomas, pictured above.

I enjoyed all of Astra’s questions: for example, is there a pressure to depict a character in good light, just like there is when she’s making a documentary? Is there a social obligation for them to write? Do rejection letters turn out be really helpful?

And the answers were enjoyable and smart, too, though I have to say that Michael Thomas, who had a self-conscious air about him the whole time, seemed almost unwilling at times to comprehend Astra’s perfectly clear questions.

I wonder if this is one of the few opportunities for people to go into this gorgeous court room.

As I was regretting eating a burrito bowl from a nearby Chipotle (I thought it’d be a light option, but all they do is give you more of the heavy stuff in place of the tortilla!) on my way back to my bike, here was Jonathan Lethem, signing books and chatting with fans.

I did see David Cross outside the Author Green Room, but I missed what was apparently the highlight of the whole event: him repeatedly spanking Jonathan Ames with a paddle, but, guess what, it’s been captured on video!

Next year I’d like to go way earlier so that I can attend more panels and spend more time at the vendor tables. I didn’t even get to several tables I’d wanted to check out: Word, the bookstore in Greenpoint; New York Times Book review; Tin  House, etc.

I can’t believe I missed the Naomi Klein panel, for example, and I don’t know why every time I think of Naomi Klein, I see Nina Garcia’s face! I think it’s Naomi’s Canadian accent when she says “again” and Nina Garcia’s pointed mouth that perfectly fits that accent.

Or maybe they just look alike. Can you even tell who is who?

The annual Brooklyn Book Festival returns to Borough Hall this Sunday (forecast is sunny), featuring a multitude of vendors, panels and workshops, and covering a wide range of interests: fiction, poetry, biography, comics, politics. Admission is free, but a ticket must be picked up for select events, such as the Poetry, Pop, and Hip-Hop panel, where Thurston Moore and Lupe Fiasco, amongst others, discuss “how poets, songwriters and rappers push language in new and essential ways”. See full schedule

Since you can pick up a ticket only an hour prior to each event, and the turnout was great last year, making it into ticketed panels one after the next will probably be impossible. Here are the ones I’ll be trying to get into.

12:00 p.m. The Great Recession
Justin Fox (The Myth of the Rational Market), Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) and Kai Wright (Drifting Toward Love). Moderated by New York Daily News columnist Errol Louis.

1:00 p.m. Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia
Readings from Rasskazy, the Tin House anthology of new Russian fiction, by Francine Prose (Goldengrove), Dale Peck (Sprout), Anya Ulinich (Petropolis) and Vadim Yarmolinets (Led Zeppelin ‘Jericho 86-89’). Emily Gould will interview Rasskazy contributor Dmitry Danilov. Presented by Pen American Center.

3:00 pm Literary Masters Readings
Paul Auster (Man in the Dark), Russell Banks (The Reserve) and Francine Prose (Goldengrove). Introduced by Louisa Ermelino, Publishers Weekly (ticketed).

4:00 p.m. Writers on Unforgettable Friendships
Oliver Sacks on Francis Crick; Darryl Pinckney on Djuna Barnes; and Anita Desai on Ruth Jhabvala. Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, will introduce (ticketed).

5:00 p.m. Writing Writers
Christopher Sorrentino (Trance) and Michael Thomas (Man Gone Down), moderated by Astra Taylor (film and book Examined Life). “The authors discuss what writing on writers might reveal about the creative impulse, the relationship between fact and imagination and the ethics of representation. Presented by BOMB magazine as part of BOMBLive! (ticketed)

Filmmaker Astra Taylor, whose debut was the documentary Zizek!, has been touring with her latest, Examined Life, which has brought her back to New York as limited screenings resumed yesterday at Symphony Space. You really can’t go wrong when you’ve brought together a fresh selection of eight contemporary philosophers to devote a high density 10-minute segment to each one; but in addition to that, the personalities have been curated with careful thought to whose idea bounces off whose, and effective cinematic decisions have been deployed, the prominent one being the attempt to take philosophy out on the streets and put it in motion, so that it feels like the ideas are awakening in a social space (the park, 5th avenue, the lake, the airport, etc), instead of being presented to us in the form of stationary talking heads positioned in some well-lit room.

The full list of philosphers, in order of appearance, features Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwarne Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler. Cornel West quite easily packs the most heat in his charming and rhythmic manner, as he shares his insights on the nature of philosophy and the Truth, with a capital T, while the filmmaker drives him around in a car to eventually drop him off at Union Square. West is closely matched by my personal favorite, Slavoj Zizek, who doesn’t think that nature or ecology is a balanced system as some new age people seem to think, but that it has always been a series of extreme catastrophies, and that what is required is not going back to nature, but divorcing ourselves from it.

The Q&A was far more intimate and informal than what I’d expected: Astra showed up as the end credits were rolling, and stood amongst the tables scattered in the lower level with her coat still on and her hands often in her pockets, picking questions up herself without a host of any sort. We learned that this list of eight was pretty much her original shortlist and the only person she had to cajole and buy fancy dinners for was her sister Sunaura Taylor, who was born with a disease that affects her joints, which has now confined her to the wheelchair. Judith Butler had met her in Berkley, and for her segment that takes place on the streets of San Francisco, insisted that Sunaura join her. Astra referred to her sister as “Sunny” and said that she had orignally declined the request. She also talked about the semi-vérité nature of the film, with most scenes being set up: Zizek would be filmed by a heap of trash, Peter Singer would walk on luxuy-filled 5th avenue as he talks about the morality of what you spend your money on, and so on. She felt that the best moments of the film, however, were the unplanned ones: reactions of people in the background, Micahel Hardt’s boat colliding with a rock, winding up with Cornel West in a car (due to scheduling), which serves as a perfect frame to contain his explosive energy with; San Francisco turning suddenly cold, leading Sunaura to a thrift store where someone must help her try a sweater out, minutes after Judith Butler and she are talking about the role of interdependence in our society, the expectations of what our body parts can do, and the awkwardness produced by picking up a cup of coffee with your mouth even though it is perfect capable of doing so.

Someone asked about the lack of animal rights issues addressed in the film, apart from the slight reference Peter Singer makes to vegetarianism, and Astra said that because that was the one thing that got her started and is close to her heart (as a four-year-old she realized that she eats animals and then later that other kids actually enjoyed eating animals), she made a conscious decision to not give that a center stage, especially since the movie was about philosophy, not animal rights, and there were already other great movies about animal rights. She talked a little bit about getting funding for the project, mainly how getting an exerpienced executive producer on board enabled her to do things she alone couldn’t have, and how some of the rejections she got were very clear, such as “The people of the Netherlands will never be interested in seeing this movie”, “The people of France will never be interested in seeing this movie”.

She was asked which of the philosophers presented she most aligned with, and she said that in the typically liberal fashion, she found herself unable to devote entirely to one line of thought like some of these philosophers were, and that this kind of “open-mindedness” is the reason she finds herself unable to get into a PhD program. Someone wanted to know, since there were only leftist philosophers presented, if there were any right-wing philosphers in existence that weren’t religious. Nobody seemed to know, but Astra concluded that there must be. She said that the leftist spectrum was a conscious choice in order to have a cohesive chemistry between the ideas presented, which were still pretty diverse though from the same side of the field, and that if she had included some right-wing philosphers, she wouldn’t be surprised if some of them convinced us of their line of thought.

Examined Life is showing next on the 19th (with Q&A) and the 26th at Symphony Space. Details. There is a companion book being released, featuring fuller transcripts of the conversations taped for the purpose of the documentary.

At half-past twelve next day Lord Henry Wotton strolled from Curzon street over to the Albany to call on his uncle, Lord Fermor, a genial if somewhat rough-mannered old bachelor, whom the outside world called selfish because it derived no particular benefit from him, but who was considered generous by Society as he fed the people who amused him. His father had been our ambassador at Madrid when Isabella was young, and Prim unthought of, but had retired from the Diplomatic Service in a capricious moment of annoyance on not being offered the Embassy at Paris, a post to which he considered that he was fully entitled by reason of his birth, his indolence, the good English of his despatches, and his inordinate passion for pleasure. The son, who had been his father’s secretary, had resigned along with his chief, somewhat foolishly as was thought at the time, and on succeeding some months later to the title, had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing. He had two large town houses, but preferred to live in chambers as it was less trouble, and took most of his meals at his club. He paid some attention to the management of his collieries in the Midland counties, excusing himself for this taint of industry on the ground that the one advantage of having coal was that it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of burning wood on his own hearth. In politics he was a Tory, except when the Tories were in office, during which period he roundly abused them for being a pack of Radicals. He was a hero to his valet, who bullied him, and a terror to most of his relations, whom he buillied in turn. Only England could have produced him, and he always said that the country was going to the dogs. His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices.

One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are morally fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed. Several dukes, earls and whatnots were killed in the recent campaign in Flanders. That could not happen if these people were cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to be. It is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their actions. What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living in.

But really, you should continue for a little bit of George Orwell hilarity on socialism and bombs:

If we survive this war, the defeat in Flanders will turn out to be have been one of the great turning-points in English history. In that spectacular disaster the working class, the middle class and even a section of the business community could see the utter rottenness of private capitalism. Before that the case against capitalism had never been proved. Russia, the only definitely Socialist country, was backward and far away. All criticism broke itself against the rat-trap faces of bankers and the brassy laughter of stockbrokers. Socialism? Ha! ha! ha! Where’s the money to come from? Ha! ha! ha! The lords of property were firm in their seats, and they knew it. But after the French collapse there came something that could not be laughed away, something that neither cheque-books nor policemen were any use against–the bombing. Zweee – BOOM! What’s that? Oh, only a bomb on the Stock Exchange. Zweee – BOOM! Another acre of somebody’s valuable slum-property gone west.

This and three other essays–”Why I Write”, “A Hanging” and “Politics and the English Langauge”–are available in Orwell’s Why I Write, published last year by Penguin Books as part of their “Great Ideas” series of mini-books, out of which six are available as a freaking box set!

Of the several noteworthy gatherings hosted this year by New York Public Library’s Live from the NYPL series, the last one I attended was Zadie Smith’s lecture on “Speaking in Tongues”. Poking right away into the nature of lectures and how a novelist is faced with “tonal challenges” when attempting to deliver one, she rolled her premise out: whereas a speech demands a singular true voice, a novelist–whose area of expertise is the imagined, after all–speaks his truth in a diffused voice filled with multiple personalities. But is this ability to be many-voiced, moving from one register to another, also useful for citizens and Presidents, and not just novelists?

The lecture she had prepared was itself going to be an “orchestra of voices”, featuring a wide cast of characters–from Elisa Doolittle to Zadie Smith’s brothers, Barack Obama to Joyce “the tragic mulatto”, Father Garnet the Jesuit to Macbeth, Steven Greenblatt to Lord McCauley, and Viscount Halifax to Frank O’Hara; all of it colored with Zadie’s lively impersonations of a few of these voices within voices: a passage read in the tongue of a 17-year-old Barack Obama, a few illustrations of the black British dialect used by Zadie’s brothers–which she herself largely lost after acquiring a more “lettered” tongue in college–and of the voice Elisa Doolittle arrived with, the one she left with, and so on.

Central to her premise was the question of whether a voice is meant to be singular, or a synthesis of disparate things; and despite the many characters and stories she alluded to, this speech, given exactly a month and a day after America’s new President Elect had been announced, relied on Obama as its central figure; he being a “genuinely many-voiced man” who “doesn’t just speak for you, he can speak you“. He, of the Dream City:

It’s a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion–naturally, Obama was born there, so was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair, and in the neither this nor that beige of your skin, well anyone can see that you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get from your mother to your father. From talking to one set of folks who think you’re not black enough to another who figure you’re insufficiently white. It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously. Because “I” feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experiences. Instead, citizens of the Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun, “we”. Throughout his campaign, Obama was always careful to say “we”. He was noticeably wary of “I.” I think by speaking so he wasn’t simply avoiding a singularity he didn’t feel. He was also drawing us in with him. He had the audacity to suggest that even if you can’t see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated back stories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy. His enemy latched on to his imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City. This ill-defined place where you can be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time.

Typical of the self-created man (like Cary Grant from the Dream City, like Barack Obama from that same town) is his reflective quality: “We see in them whatever we want to see”, she said, and imagined the President Elect backstage at the Grant Park, thinking, Everyone wants to be Barack Obama, even I want to be Barack Obama. It was clear, though, that through Obama, Zadie was telling not only her own personal story, but the personal story of entire centuries; and that with the open-ended questions the blood-and-flesh version of Obama currently leaves us with, we of the “self conscious” 21-st century are, in a way, all waiting for answers to our own personal narratives:

I believe that flexibility of voice leads to flexibility in all things. My audacious hope in Obama is based on, I’m afraid, on precisely such flimsy premises. It’s my audacious hope that a man born and raised between opposing dogmas, between cultures, between voices, could not help but be aware of the extreme contingency of culture. I further audaciously hope that such a man will not mistake the happy accident of his own cultural sensibilities for a set of natural laws suitable for general application. I even hope that he’ll find himself in agreement with the lecturing writer George Bernard Shaw who declared, “Patriotism is fundamentally a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it”. But that may be an audacious hope too far. We’ll see if Obama’s lifelong vocal flexibility will enable him to say proudly with one voice, “I love my country”, while saying with another voice, “It is a country like other countries.” I hope so. He seems just the man to demonstrate that between those two voices there exists no contradiction and no equivocation, but rather proper and decent human harmony.

Download the full lecture from NYPL website.

Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes, was also there.

New York Public Library
December 5, 2008