Photo after the jump—I love my fancy new template, but am still experimenting with images on the homepage. Smith’s in the foreground and Austen in the background, in the form of glass flowers from a Cambridge, Mass., museum collection. That’s how Smith reads her, anyway, enviably beautiful and well formed though “cold to the touch.” Not quite how I’d characterize Austen’s writing, but that’s precisely Smith’s point, or one of many of them. Gorgeous, engaging, challenging, galvanizing lecture. A mighty event, worth repeating as a Dickensian tour of North America, not that Smith doesn’t have other things to attend to. Her PowerPoint presentation was as charming as a PowerPoint presentation can get, with uncentered pixely Courier intertitles an appropriately low-tech complement to her armchair-reader aria. And it kept the listeners lively, also appropriate to her warnings against sleepwalking through either one’s sentences or one’s entire life.

Photos: Bill Davila/startraksphoto.com