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.