February 2012
52 posts
Something out of Something: Only One Week Left... →
fsgbooks:
If you’re creative. And you like winning.
somethingoutofsomething:
Four months ago, BOMB magazine and FSG Originals announced the Something out of Something art and design contest. And now we’re down to the final seven days. We’re looking for the best in any kind of visual art inspired by or incorporating the work of Etgar Keret. At stake?
$500
A chance to have your work appear...
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Was the 20th Century a Mistake? February 16, 2007
Werner Herzog: I miss something completely out of the twentieth century, which is—
Paul Holdengräber: Culture.
Werner Herzog: Which went wrong in the culture, yes, and that is, yes, we see embarrassments like whale huggers. I mean, you can’t get worse than that, or tree huggers, even, such a strange bizarre behavior. And people are hugging whales, and they are concerned about the panda bear, and they are concerned about the wellbeing of salad leaves, but they have overlooked, they have completely overlooked that while we are sitting here and spending two hours, probably the last speaker of one language that is still spoken may die in these two hours. There are six thousand languages still left, still left, but by 2050, by 2050, only fifteen percent of these languages will survive.
Paul Holdengräber: So we are paying attention to the wrong things.
Werner Herzog: No, to pay attention to ecological questions is not the wrong thing, but to overlook, to overlook the immense value of human culture.
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“Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line. I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and...
“…you have to keep on trying to do. You have to be willing to realize that...”
– Zadie Smith, November 22, 2010
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WERNER HERZOG LIVE SIMULCAST AT THE NYPL
Rebecca Solnit and Peter Coyote in conversation,...
Rebecca Solnit: I think being a citizen is really the antithesis of being a consumer. You become a producer of meaning, you have all these pleasures that money can’t buy, you might be a lot less interested in buying things. You may with the collective power of civil society make some radical changes in your society, which is part of why the aftermath of disaster and any moment when people congregate as civil society is quite intimidating or even terrifying to the business elites and et cetera, you know... and we also don’t have the language for it, and that’s what struck me over and over again is that we have so much—
Peter Coyote: Language for what?
Rebecca Solnit: : Public pleasure, social pleasure, you know, the sort of love that’s of society, of membership in society, et cetera. We hear so much about erotic love and family life, which are so fetishized and celebrated right now, and they’re great and they’re lovely, but it’s part of the private world, but there’s a whole public world where you’re also a citizen, where you also are somebody participating in making history and making a nation and making a community and making meaning that doesn’t necessarily take place in the private realm, and everybody in some sense is part of that project, but they don’t feel that, they don’t feel they have a voice, and every time you see them get it, as I did, for example, on February 15, when people on all seven continents rose up against the current war, you see this incredible joy of feeling like you belong to something big and powerful and meaningful, that you’re able to participate in creating meaning, that you’re a writer of history, not just a reader of it, that you’re a maker of history, not a victim of it, and, you know, which sounds very grandiose, but I think it’s also about having agency in everyday life, about what you eat and what, you know, what your work is like and how things are connected and how decisions are made, et cetera.
nprfreshair:
From 2007: A John Waters...
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“Taking a look at what’s around us, there is some sort of a harmony; it is the...”
– Werner Herzog, describing the Peruvian jungle while filming Fitzcarraldo, 1982 (via foucaultscat)
And, on that note, come see Herzog talk about death row.
What Big Media Can Learn From the New York Public... →
“First, she wants the next Biblion collection to be drawn from an unconventional source. Something like Paul Holdengraber’s Live from the NYPL series will be transformed into a Biblion collection, Lee said. He’s interviewed everyone from Jay-Z to Harold Bloom and the videos are all available online. ‘I want to show that anything can be a collection,’ she...
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to...”
– Salman Rushdie (via doubledaybooks)
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“In grieving for a writer I’d never met but loved anyhow, I was able to grieve...”
– Pete Michael Smith on Kurt Vonnegut for The Rumpus. Pico Iyer will be talking about his parallels with and thoughts on Graham Greene TONIGHT!
“I’ve had this tiny little—it was just a little stick, it’s barely bigger than a...”
– Howard Jacobson at LIVE on April Fool’s Day, 2011. Many of LIVE’s guests end up talking about Dickens because his pen is in the NYPL’s special collection. Happy 200th, Chuck!
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OCCUPY ROUSSEAU: INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE →
Click above to get tickets to our new Spring 2012 event
March 9, 7PM Celeste Bartos Forum Stephen A. Schwarzman Building NYPL
What would Jean-Jacques Rousseau say about our democracies if he were among us today?
Distinguished intellectuals, political leaders, activists, and artists from both Geneva and the U.S. join forces to ask that question. Rousseau was an ardent defender of equality,...
Errol Morris came out with this new Op-Doc today titled “El Wingador”:
where the eating champion Bill “El Wingador” Simmons discusses his wins, losses and experiences as a competitive eater. As I was watching, I was trying to remember what this reminded me of. Then, when around 7 minutes hit, and I saw the red-head next to Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, I...
Happy Birthday, Paul Auster!
Today, Paul Auster is 65 years old. The author, who physically looks like the type of person who would write his books, came to LIVE with Céline Curiol in 2008. The two novelists came together to talk about living and writing in a world of ordinary joys, contradictions, and impulses while always being capable of the most grotesque violence. Download, watch or listen to the program here…
Greeneland
lareviewofbooks:
JUDITH FREEMAN on Pico Iyer’s The Man WIthin My Head. Voice In My Head © Andy Warde courtesy of the artist and Joshua Levi Galleries
Pico Iyer The Man Within My Head Alfred A. Knopf, January 2012. 256 pp. Raymond Chandler once said that great writing, whatever else it does, nags at the minds of subsequent writers, who find it sometimes difficult to explain just why they are so...
We sent an e-mail earlier today announcing our upcoming program with writer Pico Iyer.
One of the subscribers to our listserv forwarded the message, and we, perhaps mistakenly, also received this forwarded note. The beautiful message is as follows:
“I can’t go to this because of work. It made me think of your affinity with Henry James & George Marshall. As Iyer says (my...
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Anonymous asked: What's NYPL