In honor of Sybille Bedford’s centenary, I’ll be one of several writers and editors reading from her work at the Paris Review offices at 62 White Street in Manhattan tomorrow night, Thursday, March 24, at 6:30pm. Free and open to the public, if you RSVP.
If you aren’t already a fan of Bedford’s, please check out the appreciations of her at the Paris Review Daily by Brenda Wineapple and Lisa Cohen.
I'm going to be introducing Paprika, Satoshi Kon's anime movie about a team of therapists who have discovered a technology that enables them to enter their patients' dreams, this Friday, March 4, at 9:30pm at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues) in Manhattan. $7. (I mentioned the movie in passing last summer, when I wrote about Inception for the Paris Review Daily.) Hope to see you there!
I’ll be answering questions about “Tea and Antipathy,” my New Yorker article about the role that smuggling merchants may have played in fomenting the American Revolution, during a “live chat” on the New Yorker website today (Wednesday, Dec. 15) at 3pm.
If you’re looking for questions to ask me, check out “‘The Revolution May Have Been Astroturfed’?”, a post by J. L. Bell at his blog Boston 1775, in which he fills in some details of the Tea Party story that I didn’t have room for in my New Yorker piece and raises some good questions about the hypothesis I entertain.
Update, Dec. 16: Thanks to all who participated in the live chat, which has now been precipitated into a transcript on the New Yorker website. Meanwhile, over at Boston 1775, J. L. Bell today adds a further supplement to my historiographic blog post by reviewing the scholarship of Oliver Morton Dickerson, who focused on the self-dealing of the British customs service in the American colonies.
Yesterday afternoon I gave the 2010 Walter Harding lecture at SUNY Geneseo. The lecture series is named after Walter Harding, who taught for decades in Geneseo and was the preeminent twentieth-century scholar of Henry David Thoreau, and I felt it was a tremendous honor to have been asked. I talked about Melville’s secrets—in particular, about a distorted Platonic myth that I suspect may be present in Moby-Dick. “Ishmael,” I claimed, “might be considered a final, uninvited guest to Plato’s banquet, and his tale a postscript to Diotima’s.”
SUNY Geneseo has already uploaded a video of my talk (perhaps also embedded below, if I’ve coaxed the html sufficiently); a downloadable audio is forthcoming. I’m not going to post a transcript, because I’m hoping to revise the talk into a scholarly paper in the not-too-distant future. To that end, if any of you who heard the talk yesterday or who listen to it online have suggestions, corrections, or comments, please get in touch.
I had a great time at SUNY Geneseo. Many thanks to Marjorie Harding, for the gift that made the lecture series possible; it was an honor to meet the Harding family. I’m very grateful to Geneseo’s English department for their hospitality and great questions. I’m especially grateful to department chair Paul Schacht for his support and guidance, to associate professor Alice Rutkowski for a very kind introduction, and to the college president and English professor Christopher Dahl and his wife Ruth Rowse for a lovely dinner.
On 8 December 2009, I moderated a panel, “Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual,” which was organized by the journal n+1 and hosted by the New School. The panelists were Malcolm Gladwell, Christine Smallwood, and James Wood. N+1 has posted the one-and-a-half-hour video on its website.
Update, Dec. 30: You can also download the video from the Internet Archive.
