Rick Simonson

'Time-outs,' People Paying Heed
September 30, 2008

Each day's news seems, by volume and noise, to render a previous day's news as old, much less a previous week's. Somewhere in the din and haze, there are recollections last week of one of the presidential candidates announcing he was embarking on a 'suspension' of his campaign (which turned out not to be so), in order to single-mindedly pursue helping 'solve' the crisis with the economic system he helped devise. Up until its scheduled day, this put the planned presidential debate's fate up in the air. The other presidential candidate deftly put in the rejoinder that presidents have to be able to address more than one issue at a time - crises and key functions of governing don't tidily present themselves  in order that they can all be addressed with sequential, single-focus.

In Seattle last week, with the authors who came through. it felt as though audiences sided with the latter point, although one can connect dots and say that all is related when it comes to assessing the past eight years. It was a week with weighty matters in the air. All whom you might expect to draw a crowd did, some beyond the anticipated.

On Monday night, Town Hall Seattle, in its two lecture spaces, simultaneously helped host Dexter Filkins with his searing book on the Iraq War, The Forever War (Knopf), and French philospher extraordinaire Bernard-Henri Levy with Left in Dark Times (Random House). Each drew gatherings in the hundreds, neither left those who came feeling warm and aglow. This was people facing it.

Two nights later, Tariq Ali was in his new book, The Duel: Pakistan in the Flight Path of American Power (Scribner). Ali, like Levy, is a public intellectual and serious author of books without much of a parallel in the U.S. Gore Vidal, in a limited way, might be closest. Ali writes novels and plays, serves on the editorial board of The New Left Review and Verso, and writes spirited journalism and commentary. He's been through before, always engaging, but this time had the largest Seattle audience (in the hundreds) I believe he's ever had. Yes, what's going on in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Iran, the Middle East - it all still matters, it's still here, not going away for the sake of a news cycle.

Thursday night brought economist Robert Shiller, he of the earlier, Irrational Exiberance, in with The Subprime Solution (Princeton). This was a little closer to what's going on on the front page of the moment - though he brought a longer view to it all.

Other writers were also around, novelists (!) Chuck Klosterman, Daphne Beal, Padma Viswanathan, and Irvine Welsh, poet Emily Warn, motorcycle chronicler Mark Richardson, and activist Rinku Sen, with Fekkak Mamdouh with the politically relevant The Accidental American - all drawing audiences, interest, book sales.

On Friday night, bringing things to a memorable conclusion at Seattle Public Central Library was once-in-a-generation journalist Robert Fisk. His long-anticipated first visit to Seattle was affected by the debate. Appearing with a new book of short pieces, The Age of the Warrior (Nation Books), Fisk on coming to the podium received a spontaneous, strongly felt standing ovation from those on hand, people aware of what he's written over the past four decades, and where he has put himself to write what he has. Living in Beirut for thirty years, alone, says much.  The few hundred on hand would likely have been a multiple of that were it not for the debate (and the extra-dramatics around its happening). Still, to have the longer, deeper perspectives offered by a very-spirited Fisk helped everyone there (and anyone who reads his wirint) see the moment we're in now from a needed angle.

Posted by Rick Simonson on September 30, 2008 | Comments (0)