Fiction that Matters

penamerican:

Marjane Satrapi in conversation with New Yorker art editor Francoise Mouly.

The PEN World Voices Festival event included a screening of Satrapi’s new film Poulet aux Prunes (Chicken with Plums), based on the graphic novel of the same name.

Co-sponsored by The Museum of Modern Art

Image © Susan Horgan / PEN American Center

penlive:

Cartoonist Steve Bell demonstrates the inspiration for one of his comics at the PEN World Voices panel “Steve Bell Goes to America”.

Photo © Beowulf Sheehan / PEN American Center

penlive:

If someone asked me what this week’s festival was about, my answer would be fairly simple: “it was a celebration of the arts for social change.” Kronos Quartet: celebrating music as a way to connect across borders, as a way to define oneself and one’s nation, as a way to express oneself when words are censored. Tony Kushner, Politics as Story: celebrating theatre’s ability to transform peoples’ thoughts, beliefs and actions. Salman Rushdie, Freedom to Write: celebrating our (relative) freedom of expression, and rallying for those who are without. All of these events recognized and celebrated the arts as activism.  

As he was talking about the power of theatre, Tony Kushner explained that theatre could impact the audience in a way that a well-written novel, or essay, could not. Theatre has the ability to change the world—slowly—it is not a tidal wave; it changes people’s thoughts through their feelings and emotions, to help them understand the world they live in. As he put it: “any true representation is going to show that justice is a desirable thing, that injustice is a terrible thing, that inequality is a problematic thing,” and so on.

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penlive:

Memory in Harlem at the PEN World Voices Festival

From left: Marcus Samuelsson, Sonia Sanchez, Tracy K. Smith, Adam Mansbach, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and Etgar Keret (standing). 

(via penamerican)

Rushdie Brings PEN Festival to Close - NYTimes.com

penamerican:

A wonderful post in the NY Times on the close of the PEN World Voices festival.

“The PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature ended Sunday night on a traditional note, with a lecture by the Indian-born novelist Salman Rushdie, the target of an ayatollah’s fatwa in 1989, about the freedom to write. In recent years the festival has experimented with offerings that blur the distinction between literature and other forms of art or entertainment, and this year was no exception: the 37 scheduled events included one on Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum in which three writers recited texts over a live musical performance by the Kronos Quartet and another on Saturday night that had five authors giving a thematic reading called “Messiah in Brooklyn” as they stood amid an installation at a gallery called the Invisible Dog Art Center.”

(via penlive)

penlive:

The Children’s Rights panel included (from left) PEN Children’s Committee chair Susanna Reich, Polish journalist and novelist Wojciech Jagielski, children’s/YA author Debby Dahl Edwardson, YA author Patricia McCormick, and Cambodian human rights activist Arn Chorn-Pond

penlive:

PEN’s Freedom to Write director Larry Siems introducing the panel Life in the Panopticon: Thoughts on Freedom in an Era of Pervasive Surveillance. From left, Julian Sanchez (Research Fellow at the Cato Institute), Catherine Crump (ACLU attorney), Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russian novelist), Ken Macleod (UK science fiction author), Gabriela Adamesteanu (Romanian novelist), and Corina Suteu (translator and director of the Romanian Cultural Institute).

Deftly moderated by Julian Sanchez, who offered poignant introductory remarks on the interplay between fiction and surveillance, the panel covered wide ground, exploring the role of surveillance in the Soviet Union as well as imagined futures in the far-flung realm of science fiction. Catherine Crump identified the unexpected interplay between surveillance technologies and over-reach by the state into our lives. It became clear that the ACLU battles in the courts—in which PEN American Center is participating—lay at a critical juncture where well intentioned surveillance, such as tracking drug lords, can quickly slide towards the dystopian. As Sanchez observed, citing scholar Dan Solov, we tend to examine surveillance by reference to George Orwell and Big Brother, but it may be more appropriate to consider privacy issues with respect to Kafka—with headless bureaucracies that order our lives at whim. The government does not always peek into our lives in a coordinated fashion. And we are simultaneously inviting in social media networks and advertisers by the choices we make while walking under CCTV cameras or while surfing the net.

Becoming philosophical, Russian author and thinker Ludmila Ulitskaya stressed the role of the self in surveillance states. Whether or not surveillance increasingly pervades our lives, we can control our acceptance of it, and we must master our own paranoia. The implication is that the intrusion or lack of intrusion by a surveillance state does not remove our individual need to become at peace with ourselves.

There was, of course, a lot more discussed during this fascinating panel and I am paraphrasing irresponsibly. We hope to have Julian Sanchez’s introductory remarks available and there will be a video recording of this landmark discussion as well.

—Deji Olukotun

penlive:

On Friday afternoon, May 4, McNally Jackson Books hosted a meet-and-greet of authors taking part in the evening’s Literary Safari at Westbeth. There, I got to meet Polish journalist and novelist Wojciech Jagielski, who has written about child soldiers and who will be talking part in tomorrow’s panel on Children’s RIghts. Also speaking with Jagielski is PEN staffer (and once my fellow Festival Blogger) Deji Olukotun.

penlive:

Graphic novelist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi at MOMA for a screening of her film Poulet aux Prunes (Chicken with Plums), a fanciful, elegiac love story set in 1950s Iran that moves between animation and live action. Satrapi spoke with New Yorker art editor Francoise Mouly before the screening.

Photos © PEN American Center / Susan Horgan