I stopped by Tishman Auditorium at The New School tonight for a free literary event produced by The Believer magazine and PEN American Center.
Host John Hodgman was the epitome of the unreliable narrator, which is to say The Believer/McSweeney’s signature style of humor, welcoming everyone with non sequiturs and lies issued unemotionally as fact (“like PEN, The Believer was founded in 1921 in London”). At one point, he got the audience to repeat what he claimed was a credo from Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac, part of which involved promising to sharpen one’s teeth at night.
Ben Marcus introduced the first speaker, British-born visual artist Matthew Ritchie, with an unrelated discourse on the character of Ejlert Lövborg from Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.
Ritchie then gave a talk about...I’m not sure, really. Something to do with the creation and expansion of the universe, physics, philosophy, abstract expressionism and earthworks, world monuments and the disaster films of Charlton Heston, supplemented with PowerPoint slides.
Samantha Hunt, who reminded me of one of the women from Saturday Night Live’s Delicious Dish sketches, moderated a panel of writers talking about politics in their books, also touching on the ideas of self in fiction and doppelgängers. Two of the writers offhandedly mentioned that they had doubles; Yiyun Li said hers was Winnie the Pooh.
Salman Rushdie read a passage from his most recent novel, Shalimar the Clown, dedicating it to Ralph Newsome, a presidential aide in Joseph Heller’s novel Good as Gold who contradicts himself in the second half of nearly every sentence he speaks. “I feel the benign spirit of Ralph hovering over us,” Rushdie said.
I’ve never read Rushdie before, but at least Shalimar sounds like a wicked farce on war and politics. (I’m thinking it wasn’t a coincidence that he chose a Heller quote.) Rushdie has a wholly engaging reading style, with eye contact and a clear, strong voice that gets caught up in the action when it should.
The program listed the event concluding with a segment of Okusama Wa Majo, a Japanese version of Bewitched, subtitled by Lemony Snicket and several writers from The Daily Show. Instead, we were shown an Errol Morris clip, produced in his signature white-backgrounded Interrotron style, of Donald Trump explaining the meaning of Citizen Kane in a way that’s impossible to tell whether he’s being serious. (I think this was an excerpt of the short film Morris produced for the Academy Awards in 2002.)
It was a strange evening, a jumble of often intriguing and unrelated stuff, but so is The Believer, which is part of the charm.