PEN pals

I had the great fortune of being able to sneak into a special reading by some of the literary world's luminaries tonight at the PEN "State of Emergency" seminar. Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Francine Prose, and many others added their voices to other author's works (Ariel Dorfman reading Cervantes in both Spanish and English, A.M. Homes reciting Ferlinghetti, for instance). Each piece was meant to be related to the removal of rights that have occurred thanks in large part to the Patriot Act, in their campaign to amend it.

Amend it? How about repeal the damn thing! I mean -- really, as Rushdie eloquently put it at the beginning of the evening, "how we deal with fighting the terrorist threat will probably be the defining battle of (this) civilization. Will we become our enemy?" Many more eloquent moments, brought forth from quotes from suffragette before her time Susan B. Anthony (via Barbara Goldsmith), as well as a rendition on imperial tendencies (Mark Twain via Russell Banks) and the use of bully journalism (the bible of America, as he wrote). Eve Ensler pounding the microphone with her pulpit delivery reading from Egyptian novelist Nawal El-Sadaawi (whose name I'm sure I've badly butchered, thanks) whose words rang as true now as ever. The grim estimations of Henry David Thoreau on the nature of unjustice (via Paul Auster's equally grim delivery) which also rang contemporary. Overall, the impression based on the excerpts chosen to my mind was that what we are going through is a horrible thing -- but it is not unprecedented. In fact, it is not even unexpected in some sense. America has long been a country of indelible injustices, stretches of imperialistic fervor, and occasionally we do the right thing, though often too late or too little. The readings of this evening drilled home that cyclical nature of our country, perhaps for better or for worse. I may not live to see this one unravel itself properly, but freedom is always a fragile cracked piece of ceramic, and will always need to be glued back together and treated carefully if you hope to enjoy its presence at your tea time the next year. By ignoring it, we -- as a society -- will insure its eventual fall and shattering.

The evening also featured one of the more surreal readings -- a "poem" crafted like mosaic from GWB's actual words (as arranged and orchestrated by Jonathan Safran Foer) which began with some hilarious verbal hiccoughs, but lost a little bit of its steam as Safran Foer took so much poetic license as to create concrete sentences from collaging various phrases into whatever he felt the need to say, instead of just letting the absurdity of what Bush had said stand on its own ludicrously poetic merit. The biggest laughs came not from the decontextualized parts of his poetic collage, but rather from the verbatim, in context comments. Which should teach anyone that the truth is far more powerful, strange, and hilarious, than any didactic fiction.

Overall, a fairly amazing evening, and another reason why I am glad to live in New York City.