I covered my first New Yorker Festival for the generous and dedicated Ron Hogan (a.k.a. Galleycat) at Beatrice. To get a taste of life back in the fifth year of the new millennium, and the thrills that emanate from the festival generally, take a trip in our Just a Little Bit Back Machine and enjoy!

Festival! Emdashes reporting for duty. Tomorrow I’ll begin what I hope will be fanatically detailed coverage of the New Yorker Festival, because that’s when I’ll know which events I’m definitely going to. Sadly, I must miss Calvin Trillin’s tour of Chinatown…

Ready, set… go forth into the New Yorkerness of it all! Here’s the lineup—the sparkliest bunch of people I’ve ever been around in the course in one weekend, except maybe for the Saturday Night Live cast party my friend Scott, a tall short-filmmaker, took me to a number of years ago…

Chang-Rae Lee is going to have to knock my socks off… to sway my gaze from Lorrie Moore, of whom I have long been an ardent fan. He’s great, don’t get me wrong. But Lorrie Moore: When, like, life makes you wonder who the heck will run the frog hospital…

Live from the 57th St. McDonald’s Jonathan Franzen: “Sometimes we worry that the novel will become like poetry in a few years.” Cressida Leyshon on Zadie Smith…

Themes so far: Birds, Gates Tomorrow morning, more about Chang-Rae Lee, Lorrie “American Idol” Moore, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, and Star Question Girl of the Night. These themes have emerged: birds…

Hey other journalists covering the New Yorker Festival! Have you been wondering why can’t download any photos of the events on StarTraks? I called them. They checked and found out…

Live from Saturday afternoon! It’s going to be a bit easier to blog many-venued events like this when New York becomes (surely it will?) an all-WiFi-city, like the pleasingly cutting-edge Salem, Mass., or, soon if controversially, Philly. Anyway, I’m in Bryant Park, having just heard an intriguingly academic, consciously nonpolitical, occasionally contentious dialogue between Mikhail Baryshnikov and New Yorker dance critic…

A reader writes: “But today, more to the point of my writing, what is a “fuckable shame cycle”? And how exactly is Franzen in this what-ever-it-is? Read the previous info on your site about Franzen, and the link takes me to a laudatory review of a non-fiction essay of his.” Hello, reader! You mean shame spiral, right? Oh, you know…

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Cujo Gentle giants sign their books as fans go wild. Check out Chabon’s grin…

30% juice in the iBook and there’s still Steve Martin and the cartoonists to go. I want you to know that in the interest of maximum New Yorkerness and blogger/performer ratio, I’m passing up Nancy Franklin interviewing Ricky Gervais—that’s two of the cleverest, bitingest people I know of…

Updike with people: “Was John Updike full of elegant ideas and excellent elocution? Did a nicely suited David Remnick ask respectful questions and gently tease the Rabbit raconteur about his stellar work ethic and multiple writing desks facing the sea?”…

Note: no blinking. [See photo of Malcolm Gladwell and friend.]

On beauty Zadie Smith is seriously talented and she has great clothes…

The curious incident of the quotes in the night-time “Someone once said to me that reading Lorrie Moore is like being tickled to death.” —Deborah Treisman, New Yorker fiction editor…

Not ersatz, RZA! I am really very bummed…

So was it the greatest night of my life? It was pretty damn great. Seeing and hearing Earl Scruggs and Steve Martin (pictured, with Pete Wernick; all the musicians there were fantastic) playing banjo together did indeed turn out to be sublime, as sad as Martin happily advertised the banjo sound to be…

Remnick with clarinetist From “Parting the Waters,” the big Saturday night Katrina relief benefit…

The song is over, but the melody lingers on The festival is done. But I’m not. (Did you think I would be?) For another day or so, or as long as Ron will let me, I’ll post the carefully selected best of my copious notes and a few wrapups of all the events I attended, plus sketches of some of the characters I encountered…

Chast & Nancy I love this photo. I’d been thinking, during the Ricky Gervais talk the previous night, that there’s something Chast-y about the fabulous Franklin—albeit, on the stylish end of Chast dames—and clearly others have had the same thought…

A sleep trance, a dream dance, a shared romance, synchronicity New Yorker Festival wrapup quiz! Match the statement with the speaker…

Last stand I’ll probably post once or twice more before Ron returns. For now, here’s a funny exchange from David Remnick’s talk with John Updike on Saturday…

Alchemy of New Yorker cartoons revealed! All you need to know about this astonishing revelation is…