The Colbert event on Saturday night was likely to be the high point of the Festival, and certainly nothing that happened in the NYC Cathedral contradicts that. It was pretty great. Colbert and Jon Stewart hold a special place in urbane consciousness right now, and I hope they are able to maintain that status in an Obama presidency (knock wood). Colbert’s chops as an entertainer and as a kind of public moral authority (albeit skewed) are tough to beat right now. The love flowing from the audience in that room was considerable.
Looking at my notes, there is hardly anything that isn’t covered in Rachel Sklar’s exemplary and exhaustive account at _The Huffington Post_ so I’m going to “link you”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/05/stephen-colbert-at-the-em_n_132019.html to that! I concur on all particulars.
I have only one additional point to make about Colbert, and it’s a rather esoteric one. Seeing him in person drives home the extent to which Colbert is not only a product of the Chicago improvisational method but quite possibly its apotheosis as well. If you’ve spent any time at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and witnessed the improvisational concepts of “raising the stakes,” “finding the game of the scene,” and “promoting a yes-and ethic,” just about everything Colbert says—whether in character or out of it—will seem familiar and vital, in the very best sense.
I’m not an expert on improv, merely a consumer of it, but I venture that that’s part of the reason why he can conduct interviews so well _in character,_ he’s just the best improviser out there, and he’s raised the stakes in the best possible way (by getting a TV show, interviewing important people, running for president etc.).
Somewhere “Del Close”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del_Close is smiling.

Stephen Colbert, Ariel Levy

Stephen Colbert
(photo credit: Alex Oliveira/startraksphoto.com)

Art Spiegelman, denied cigarettes at the Ailey Citigroup Theater, had a pipe in tow but did not noticeably resort to it. Spiegelman’s brief was “Comics 101,” but his way of doing that was to delve into autobiography. This was as true in 1978, when _Breakdowns_ came out, as it is in 2008, when the remix of same is being published. In much of his work, Spiegelman presents himself as an overeducated and “fretting” neurotic urbanite (complete with “plewds”:http://emdashes.com/2008/09/the-wavy-rule-a-daily-comic-by-48.php), an image belied by the assured and witty lecturer on the stage Saturday afternoon.
As with “Alex Ross”:http://emdashes.com/2007/10/festival-alex-ross-will-get-yo.php explaining twentieth-century music at last year’s festival, Spiegelman knows so much about his chosen subject that it is difficult to think of a more qualified person to explain it (even though the field famously attracts completists and pedants). Spiegelman’s presentation of the history of comics hewed mostly to the standard landmarks (Rodolphe Töpffer, Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Charles Schulz, and so on) but perked up noticeably when he discussed the mindbending FDR-era misfire “Stardust: The Super Wizard” and the loopy LBJ years of Chester Gould’s _Dick Tracy_.
Spiegelman really liked Barry Blitt’s famous “fist jab” cover. In his view, Blitt was able to present that highly charged image in a way that resulted in its “toxins” being “removed. . . . like a vaccine.” The brilliance of the satire can be seen in the fact that it took the entire country two media cycles to arrive at the unavoidable conclusion that . . . Obama is not a radical. “That Obama cover was a real “Thomas Nast”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nast moment,” he said.
Spiegelman also showed some amusing covers that got rejected, like Bill Clinton facing a firing squad during the Year of Lewinsky. The running theme here was Spiegelman’s uncompromising tendency to push the avant-garde envelope whatever the circumstances. Interestingly, what appealed to him about his stint at _The New Yorker_ was the opportunity to meld low culture (his purview) with the loftier domans more usually associated with the magazine. With Spiegelman, elevating his beloved mongrel art form is always on his mind. (I suppose he views a movie version of _Maus_ as the opposite. Apparently he has had many offers to turn it into a film, and understandably has no interest.)
Spiegelman showed a “tribute”:http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2000/02/14/2000_02_14_061_TNY_LIBRY_000020205 to _Peanuts_ that appeared in the February 14, 2000, issue of _The New Yorker_ on the occasion of Schulz’s retirement. On the day that he died, Schulz called Spiegelman to tell him how much he liked the cartoon.
For all of his surface hand-wringing, the impression Spiegelman leaves behind is one of confidence, perhaps even egotism, albeit in an endearing form. To an audience questioner, he was quick to relate the recent rise of the graphic novel as an outgrowth of his own achievements (with some justification, of course), later commenting that “I didn’t go to art school. I had to invent postmodernism without knowing what it was.” That’s high self-regard, but in a modest package, or maybe it’s the other way around. In any case I’d gladly hear the man talk twice as long on the subject.

On Saturday afternoon the primary participants of _The New Yorker_’s delightful and “addictive”:http://emdashes.com/2008/09/i-think-i-need-the-campaign-tr.php “Campaign Trail” “podcast”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/podcasts/campaigntrail collected for a live version of same, sort of like when Monty Python did _The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball._ Ably guided by moderator Dorothy Wickenden, Ryan Lizza, Hendrik Hertzberg, and George Packer engaged in a spirited and relatively unepigrammatic discussion about the state of the 2008 campaign.
The most startling line of the session may have been Hertzberg’s image of McCain being reduced to “seeds and stems.” Later on, Lizza compared Palin’s impact on the McCain campaign to a fire on the deck of a ship that already had a large hole in the hull. With her adequate debate performance on Thursday, the fire has finally been put out, but the hole has yet to be addressed and will probably do the campaign in. Observing that Palin supplied the appearance of coherence without actually being coherent, Hertzberg and Lizza collaborated to come up with the Colbertian term _coherentishness_ to describe her performance.
Noting that the Democratic coalition this year will likely consist of the educated class, minorities, and young voters, Packer noted that some have begun to call Obama “George McGovern’s Revenge.” Packer fretted about the Democrats’ problems securing white working-class voters, while Hertzberg pointed out that unions still play a big role in the Democratic Party.
I have mixed feelings about all of this: white working-class voters play a talismanic role in American politics quite apart from their actual electoral importance, which has been decreasing over the years. In principle, if Dems can build a larger coalition without them, they should do so. And yet, and yet.
Packer did point out that it was union canvassers, not Obama campaign staffers, who were bringing the realities of McCain’s health care plan to voters. Unions still are that rare group with the ability to supply political education to a wide swath of society and the incentives to do it well.
On Obama’s famous equanimity, Lizza told an enlightening story that reassured beat reporters, hungry for stories of blowups or breakdowns, that the candidate was human after all. In Denver, when Obama was rehearsing his big convention speech, when he reached the section in which he invoked Dr. Martin Luther King, he choked up, stopped the speech, and had to leave the room.
Noting that about 80% of new registered voters who pick a party are Democrats, Lizza said mildly, “George Bush has not made the Republican Party cool for young people”—then, noticing the understatement, added, “This is the killing fields.”
Packer made a great point about Palin’s somewhat maddening speaking style (and I don’t mean all the _you betchas_). I had noticed that she favors passive constructions, but Packer zeroed in on something more fundamental: “The key is her syntax. There are no verbs in it. There are gerunds, there are participles, but no verbs. Identity politics is nouns—hockey moms.”
Lizza perceptively noted that “Sarah Palin is a phenomenon of a party in decline, a phenomenon of decadence.” Asked by an audience questioner how big a disappointment “liberals like me” are in for, Lizza joked, “Massive,” and Packer followed up with the nub: “The question is, is he FDR or Bill Clinton?” Indeed.

George Packer, Ryan Lizza, Hendrik Hertzberg, Dorothy Wickenden

Ryan Lizza, Hendrik Hertzberg
(photo credit: Debra Rothenberg/startraksphoto.com)

Jonathan Taylor, who has written about Merrill Lynch, New York City’s greenmarkets, and skybridges for us, writes:
Friday’s “Writing About Home” fiction panel, with foreign-born, U.S.-based writers Manil Suri, Yiyun Li, and Sana Krasikov, was low-key and revelatory. I’ve been reading a lot of fine travel writing lately, and the topic appealed to me as a reversal of that activity: going somewhere else and writing about where you came from. Perhaps more important, it’s a reversal of the choices made: rather than going abroad for the purpose of writing, each of these writers were forced or decided to come to the United States for other reasons, and each in their way later turned, as adults here, to fiction writing. (Suri took writing up initially as a hobby; he is a mathematician, and his description of his writing life sounded distinctly methodical if not almost absurdly logical.)
Deputy fiction editor Cressida Leyshon’s questions gradually drew out the way each writer’s work, even though inevitably focused on this or that specific set of stories, skilfully engages the social “ripples” of historic cataclysms.
Suri’s The Death of Vishnu created a microcosm of Indian society within one apartment building. Li views China through what she described as the “villager-like” mentality Beijing’s residents still possess, in which “politics is like the weather.” And Krasikov noted her admiration for fiction in which the shadows of “what’s happening beyond the story” creates tension within it, such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day or Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, where “we know now” the unspoken fates of their protagonists.
These historical earthquakes cause dislocations, not just geographical ones. In Krasikov’s stories, scientists and engineers from the former Soviet Union work as nannies or home health care aides—recalling a detail of Li’s “A Man Like Him,” in which a university professor disgraced in the Cultural Revolution is forced to become a school janitor. Each writer, interestingly, told with relish a story about being mistreated on returning to their home country. Suri humorously recounted the bureaucratic antics of an Indian bank teller. Krasikov described, with more outrage, being accused of shoplifting from a Moscow Sephora—and noted the blatant discrimination in Moscow against people of more obviously Caucasus origins. And Li observed that because she had two children, something forbidden to Chinese couples, she was universally assumed to be a nanny (and hence treated rudely).
The final audience questioner summed up the writers’ situation nicely—”to be both an insider and an outside observer”—and asked of each of them whether writing about his or her home country made them feel more “intimate” with it. The answers were appealingly direct and diverse: Krasikov said no, it “exacerbates distance.” For her, the process of digging deeper into former Soviet reality—which has of course changed unrecognizably since her family left in 1987—is a process of “discovering distance.” Suri’s experience was the opposite: he had long tried to leave India behind him, but when he took up writing, India forced itself on him as his subject, bringing him “closer” to it. And Li—who in response to an earlier question had said that she could no longer live with China, in the same way that, as an adult, she could no longer live with her mother—said that writing about China had not made her more “intimate” with it—just more “patient.”
In addition to Li’s “A Man Like Him,” two of Krasikov’s stories are available on the New Yorker website.

The head of the _New Yorker_ fact-checking department, Peter Canby, moderated the “Discussion Among Writers” with Hari Kunzru, Peter Carey, and Gary Shteyngart, on the subject of “Outlaws.” It was a less freewheeling session than the one in the same space “an hour earlier”:http://emdashes.com/2008/10/new-yorker-festival-klam-leona.php. Canby’s questions tended to be feature lengthy quotations from the writers’ works. And there was less crosstalk, the responses conforming more to the two-minute time limits imposed on the likes of Sarah Palin the night before.
Speaking of whom, about midway through Carey mischievously inquired what Ms. Palin would make of one of Canby’s hifalutin questions. It must be said, though, that Canby’s method worked, as all three writers supplied informative and engaging answers and Shteyngart supplied enough humor in an hour to power the next ten Festivals in the event that “angry Ted Stevens”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEXJV2P2ZIw takes the Festival over.
Indeed, I’ll succumb to a temptation to turn over the bulk of this post to his quips. Describing his homeland Russia as still in a “pre-therapeutic” phase, he plans to “airlift eight thousand Park Slope social workers” to the vast country to bring it up to speed. Musing on the domesticated status of American writers, hostage to 401(k) plans and health care fees, he contrasted his lot with that of the Lost Generation: If the Spanish Civil War reasserted itself, unlike Hemingway “I’d only go if Iberia had a good frequent flyer plan…. I’m not flying coach to a war.”
An audience question about each writer’s favorite book elicited groans from the panel–but also revealing answers (well done, questioner!). Kunzru stated that the last novel that made an impression on him was Joan Didion’s _Play It as It Lays,_ so he now wants to migrate to California and wear a dress. Carey expressed an admiration for droll and dyspeptic Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, and Shteyngart professed to read Vladimir Nabokov’s _Pnin_ once a month.
One thing about these panels–you do come away with a solid impression of the participants. The Friday author sessions remain the ideal way to kick off the Festival weekend.