Rise and shine! Happy Monday from LIVE!
baby wombat. via
Aaaand now I want to change our logo from an olive to a baby wombat.
Sandra Day O’Connor in Conversation with Madeleine Albright
Thursday, March 28, 2013
7 p.m.
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
This just in! Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will join retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in conversation at LIVE from the NYPL on March 28. The event celebrating Justice O’Connor’s new book, Out Of Order, has been sold out for weeks but we’ve just released a few more tickets to this exciting program.
April LIVE from the NYPL Schedule
Make sure to purchase your tickets before it’s too late, don’t miss out!
Nathaniel Rich in Conversation with Slavoj Žižek: Worst-Case Scenarios
MONDAY, APRIL 8, 2013, 7 P.M.
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek joins Nathaniel Rich for an exploration of worst-case scenarios, a subject at the heart of Rich’s new novel Odds Against Tomorrow.
WILLIAM GIBSON
FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013, 7 P.M.
William Gibson is the author of ten books, including, most recently, the New York Times-bestselling trilogy Zero History, Spook Country and Pattern Recognition. Gibson’s 1984 debut novel, Neuromancer, was the first novel to win the three top science fiction prizes—the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. Gibson is credited with coining the term “cyberspace” in his short story “Burning Chrome,” and with popularizing the concept of the Internet while it was still largely unknown. He is also a co-author of the novel The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Sterling.
The Costs of Assimilation: André Aciman & Nicole Krauss
MONDAY, APRIL 22, 2013, 7 P.M.
What are the costs of assimilation into American society? And what happens when we become someone other than the person we thought we would be? In his new novel, Harvard Square, André Aciman explores these and other questions in a tale of friendship between a Jewish student and an Arab cab driver, set amid the bars and cafés of late 1970s Cambridge. Aciman is joined in conversation by novelist Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love to talk about themes that haunt them both: identity, exile, fiction, and memory.
JUNOT DÍAZ
TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 2013, 7 P.M.
2012 MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Díaz joins Paul Holdengräber onstage to discuss multiculturalism, family, love, and the immigrant experience - prominent themes in the author’s works. Díaz’s first book, the short story collection Drown, established him as a writer with “the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet” (Newsweek). His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, established him as a bestseller and earned critical acclaim; Wao was named #1 Fiction Book of the Year” by Time magazine and spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. In his new book, This Is How You Lose Her, Díaz again offers a collection of short stories, all deeply concerned with love – obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love.
“Carson employs the punctuation and syntax of a teenager’s Twitter feed.”
Take a look at Rosecrans Baldwin’s review of tomorrow’s LIVE guest, Anne Carson.
“If you like books to provoke you, dare you, even change the way you think, let me recommend this strange, wonderful pair of novels about a young red man. We all have volcanoes in our lives. Sometimes it takes someone else to show us how to survive them.”
Thank you to everyone who came out to see Ed Ruscha with us at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building Wednesday night.
“Good art should elicit a response of ‘Huh? Wow!’ as opposed to ‘Wow! Huh?’” — Ed Ruscha
For more LIVE events, click here!
LIVE from the NYPL is excited to host Ed Ruscha at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Wednesday night. http://ow.ly/ilvS1
Ed Ruscha’s work has profoundly influenced countless modern artists, but his artist books - such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles, and A Few Palm Trees - offer a unique opportunity to trace that influence directly to the near and far corners of the modern art world. For decades, a broad spectrum of artists have produced their own small books revisiting, rebelling against, and responding to the American painter and photographer’s idiosyncratic collections.
Now, Ruscha’s artist books and the fascinatingly kindred works they inspired are the focus of a new exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery and book - Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha from MIT Press - both of which showcase Ruscha’s materials alongside the numerous books they influenced. To coincide with the exhibit opening and book release, Ruscha joins Paul Holdengräber onstage to reflect on his career and enduring influence.
AWWW
![The strikingly eloquent psychoanalyst Adam Phillips will join LIVE for the second time tonight. His first appearance on our stage was in 2007, when he spoke with director Paul Holdengraber about — among other things — psychotherapy, literature, and how both intersect with human behavior. Here are several highlights from their conversation to acquaint you with Phillips’ unique philosophy:
On the title of his book, “Side Effects”:
“Well, one of the things that interested me about psychoanalysis originally was that it wasn’t an instrumental cure. That is to say, people would go to psychoanalysis with a specific located problem. What would emerge in the process of the therapy would be all sorts of often other things that also people would sometimes not get relief for the symptom they came for, but would still find the conversation interesting, useful. So side effects seem to me—and I say this in the preface—were there to be a drug that somebody marketed and said the value of this drug is its unexpected side effects, you would think this is preposterous. And that is exactly what psychoanalysis is at its best, and that was the point of the title.”
On why the act of tickling is important:
“One is it’s intensely pleasurable and painful at the same time. And can be abusive. So it’s on a real threshold. It’s also something that is blurred in childhood as something children crave and love and like and are frightened of, so it’s a really obvious — in a way — everyday initiation into the dangers of pleasure. And the question about whether one can contain excitement.”
]On writing as divergent expression from everyday life:
“I very much like the idea of people like Freud in a way, or Kafka, or Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams — people who did ordinary, regular jobs, and led very ordinary so-called bourgeois lives but then would write these extraordinary things. And these people strike me from reading biographies of them as, being in the best sense, nice ordinary people but who when they wrote could be, could perform a version of themselves that was by definition not something they would in that sense live or could only be lived as writing. And that’s interesting, I think.”
On Phillips’ fascination with the essay form:
“I think the literary analogy for a psychoanalytic session is more of an essay than anything else. I mean, they’re not like novels, they’re not like epic poems, they’re not like lyric poems, they’re not like plays, they’re a bit like bits of dialogue of plays, but they do seem to me to be like essays. As in nineteenth-century essays because in that situation or in that form there is the opportunity to digress, to change the subject, to be incoherent, to come to conclusions that are then overcome and surpassed and so on.”
On why good communication involves forgetting:
“It’s like the way in which you know you’ve had a good conversation because you’ve forgotten the fact that you’re having a conversation, that you’re not acutely self-conscious of the fact that you’re speaking. So it’s like the kind of talk in which you forget yourself and can speak, because the most interesting words come out of the forgetting of self. But I also think there’s something important about being able to forget what people say. Because only if you forget it has it gone inside your body. If you remember it, I think it’s very available, and there’s no use in that.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/22878a45122aad6fe66250886e9d8b81/tumblr_milf13qEeA1r1te77o2_r1_500.jpg)
The strikingly eloquent psychoanalyst Adam Phillips will join LIVE for the second time tonight. His first appearance on our stage was in 2007, when he spoke with director Paul Holdengraber about — among other things — psychotherapy, literature, and how both intersect with human behavior. Here are several highlights from their conversation to acquaint you with Phillips’ unique philosophy:
On the title of his book, “Side Effects”:
“Well, one of the things that interested me about psychoanalysis originally was that it wasn’t an instrumental cure. That is to say, people would go to psychoanalysis with a specific located problem. What would emerge in the process of the therapy would be all sorts of often other things that also people would sometimes not get relief for the symptom they came for, but would still find the conversation interesting, useful. So side effects seem to me—and I say this in the preface—were there to be a drug that somebody marketed and said the value of this drug is its unexpected side effects, you would think this is preposterous. And that is exactly what psychoanalysis is at its best, and that was the point of the title.”
On why the act of tickling is important:
“One is it’s intensely pleasurable and painful at the same time. And can be abusive. So it’s on a real threshold. It’s also something that is blurred in childhood as something children crave and love and like and are frightened of, so it’s a really obvious — in a way — everyday initiation into the dangers of pleasure. And the question about whether one can contain excitement.”
]On writing as divergent expression from everyday life:
“I very much like the idea of people like Freud in a way, or Kafka, or Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams — people who did ordinary, regular jobs, and led very ordinary so-called bourgeois lives but then would write these extraordinary things. And these people strike me from reading biographies of them as, being in the best sense, nice ordinary people but who when they wrote could be, could perform a version of themselves that was by definition not something they would in that sense live or could only be lived as writing. And that’s interesting, I think.”
On Phillips’ fascination with the essay form:
“I think the literary analogy for a psychoanalytic session is more of an essay than anything else. I mean, they’re not like novels, they’re not like epic poems, they’re not like lyric poems, they’re not like plays, they’re a bit like bits of dialogue of plays, but they do seem to me to be like essays. As in nineteenth-century essays because in that situation or in that form there is the opportunity to digress, to change the subject, to be incoherent, to come to conclusions that are then overcome and surpassed and so on.”
On why good communication involves forgetting:
“It’s like the way in which you know you’ve had a good conversation because you’ve forgotten the fact that you’re having a conversation, that you’re not acutely self-conscious of the fact that you’re speaking. So it’s like the kind of talk in which you forget yourself and can speak, because the most interesting words come out of the forgetting of self. But I also think there’s something important about being able to forget what people say. Because only if you forget it has it gone inside your body. If you remember it, I think it’s very available, and there’s no use in that.”
We know it’s The Most Important Night Of The Year in Hollywood tonight, but we interrupt your regularly scheduled scrolling-through-red-carpet-screenshots to announce that there’s some special news on this end too: it’s our 1,000th Tumblr post!
Truly momentous, we know.
In the spirit of that other awards show thing happening though, we’ve decided to join forces and use this celebratory post to honor some past guests at LIVE who have also been Oscar-nominated or took home the prized gold statue itself. (Click names or dates for full program links.)
JOHN IRVING, opening guest for the Spring 2013 season and winner of the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1999 for The Cider House Rules.
WERNER HERZOG, guest in Fall 2012, Spring 2012, and Spring 2007 and Best Documentary Feature Oscar nominee in 2009 for Encounters at the End of the World.
ARI FOLMAN, guest in Spring 2009 and both writer and director of Waltz with Bashir, the first animated film to receive a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
SPIKE LEE, guest in Fall 2008 and two-time Oscar nominee: Best Original Screenplay for Do the Right Thing in 1989 and Best Feature Documentary for 4 Little Girls in 1997.
ERROL MORRIS, guest in Spring 2008 and winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2004 for The Fog of War: Eleven Life Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.
MIRA NAIR, guest in Spring 2007 and director of Salaam Bombay!, which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988.
Happy viewing party!
