pen festival
Playwright Tony Kushner, talking about his 'Lincoln' screenplay, says the left has become 'comfortable with powerlessness'
“When Spielberg was trying to convince me to write the movie," Tony Kushner said at a Pen World Voices event. "I thought, Why would you do this? As a friend of mine used to say: 'Stick your hand in a blender, it’s faster,'” Kushner said. “There are some human beings—Shakespeare, Mozart—that do things that defy human comprehension. They’re just better than us. Lincoln was one of them.” More
(1)Francine Prose, Doon Arbus, and Michael Cunningham host an evening on Diane Arbus at MoMA
The slideshow, at least, was an impressive piece of archival handiwork. In 1970, Cornell Capa (who later founded the International Center for Photography) asked Arbus to give a lecture for a group of fellow photographers. The result was a casual, revealing presentation of her work and her ideas. After Arbus’s suicide in 1971, an audio recording of the talk was acquired by her estate—and in 2005, to coincide with the traveling retrospective Diane Arbus Revelations, the estate reconstructed the slideshow, matching her words with the photographs and clippings they describe. The result is a master class from beyond the grave, which has been shown publicly only a handful of times. More
Jennifer Egan talks about her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, dedications, and getting inspired in the shower
The book Egan is referring to, of course, is her 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From The Goon Squad. Because no prize was given for fiction this year, it looks like Egan will be getting another victory lap. It’s a book that’s often called experimental and genre-defying, perhaps because Egan never intended to call it a novel. “I’m still reluctant to use the word novel to talk about the book,” Egan told Weisberg. “But when the hardback didn’t sell for four months, the publisher informed me we were going to call it a novel when it came out in paperback. And that it wasn’t a question, it was a fact.” More
