From Page Six:

HIGHLY eclectic is the best way to describe this year’s lineup for the eighth annual New Yorker Magazine Festival, set for Oct. 5-7. Among its components will be conversations with Steve Carell, Steve Martin, Bill Nighy and opera director Peter Sellars. Performers will include Fiona Apple, Rosanne Cash, Yo La Tengo and Iceland’s Sigur Ros. There’s also a panel discussion with TV masterminds Jenji Kohan (creator of “Weeds”), Ronald Moore (“Battlestar Galactica”), David Shore (“House”), David Simon (“The Wire”) and David Milch (“Deadwood”).

I can’t wait. The full lineup’s being announced on September 3. I forget everything that’s not in my gmail, otherwise known as my brain’s external hard drive, so I just signed up for the Festival Wire, which reminds you when tickets go on sale and sends you updates when they suddenly add new events, which does happen. The signup’s at the festive-al homepage.

Really! That was at the cocktail party after the whizbang New Yorker Conference yesterday; I’m using the festival illustration to the left there because I love this portrait of me by Carolita. I’ll post proper notes later, and I’m writing up the conference for PRINT‘s website, too. For now, I’ll say the conference was very well organized and run (no technical glitches in all twelve hours, as far as I could tell, except when the hit predictor balked), the Frank Gehry IAC building is beautiful, and the laptops on hand for compulsive email checking were from the Dark Star, but I confess I liked them anyway—superfast, with freakish, alive-seeming screensavers. Anyway, some of the high points for me were watching the events with Yves Béhar, Tim Wu, Jonathan Haidt, and Younghee Jung; talking to David Denby (who probably thought I was tracking him with a GPS, but I was just giddy to be sitting near him) and Cressida Leyshon; laughing at the antics of Barry Diller, Arianna Huffington, and Craig Newmark; seeing David Remnick do an ace interview with Cory A. Booker, the plucky mayor of Newark; and meeting Judith Thurman, Ken Auletta, Jeffrey Toobin, John Seabrook, and the unimpeachable Michael Specter. The Spore demonstration was hasty but tantalizing, and the drinks were delicious. What a treat!

Don’t forget that you can see videos of a bunch of events from the festival on the New Yorker website, namely, these:

Islam and the West
The second annual New Yorker Town Hall Meeting, with Omar Ahmad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mahmood Mamdani, Azar Nafisi, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, and Lawrence Wright. George Packer, moderator.

 
Comic Turns
Steve Martin interviews Roz Chast.

Fiction Night
Gary Shteyngart and George Saunders read from their work.

Justice for All
The Honorable Stephen G. Breyer interviewed by Jeffrey Toobin.
This video will be posted Monday, October 16.

The Case Against Secrets
A talk by Malcolm Gladwell.
This video will be posted Wednesday, October 18.

I’m glad the Shteyngart and Saunders evening is one of the events on video, because that’s the one I reluctantly ducked out of in order to have the mind-blowing experience of having Tony sing me (in tune) Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play,” and watching him kiss women’s hands as the fired-up crowd greeted their star and, nearly, friend. Michael Apted, who also introduced the film, seemed a lot nicer in person than I thought he would be given his slightly sour and flat commentary on 42 Up, and that was reassuring.
 
Also unrelated to the festival, I just saw the hysteria that was the Union Square B & N crowd for the final Lemony Snicket book, and here is a little New York Observer interview with Stephin Merritt (whose CD with Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Snicket, a person of whom I have long been fond, is also just out), in which Sasha Frere-Jones is mentioned.

Not that I’m done with my own tidbits or anything, but I have lots and lots of other things to do this week as well as finish up my festival reporting, so in the meantime here are some other terrific accounts. The Amateur Gourmet, who possibly sold most of his organs to the festival organizers on the installment plan to get Calvin Trillin walking-tour tickets, summarizes the heck out of his magical experience, and has promised an exclusive to Emdashes as well, because there are some other questions still left to be explored. Emdashes friend and benefactor Ron Hogan at Galleycat typed up his excellent account too. Everyone in the world wrote about the Jon Stewart and David Remnick talk, so I’ll let you be your own Eustace Googles on that one. There’s a good wire report on the Pedro Almodovar interview, and Carrie Alison at the U2 fansite Interference went to the P.J. Harvey/Hilton Als evening:

Some tidbits that came out of Als’ gentle if not meandering interviewing style touched on her earlier days and “characters” in her records. At 20 or 21 Harvey put her first band together (a folk band in Dorset that performed Irish tunes) and her goal was “to do musically” what she “wanted to see in art.” And the “art” of it all was her course of study at university where she was an adept and unique sculptor who enjoyed casting her face and hands, and sticking them “on flying machinery.” Of Harvey’s individual records, Als posited that “each record is a character study,” and that “after ‘Dry’ each record was about different people in different societies.” Harvey didn’t seem to agree with this assessment, but did offer that as she gets older, she has “felt more comfortable” allowing her lyrics to be more biographical, as opposed to when she was younger, she “tried to shield herself with distance.” She also later noted that as she gets on in years, she is getting better at expressing herself in her personal life.

Speaking of music, ever since I heard the New Pornographers play live on Saturday after their interview with Jim Surowiecki (in which the band members were alternately as sweetly fidgety as the high school band and as elliptical and arch-Dada as Dylan or the Beatles in a press conference, but mostly just reticent in a harmless Canadian way), I love them even more, especially “Mass Romantic,” which they really knocked the stuffing out of.
 
Oh, and eCanada Now (I’m sure it’s a wire story, or possibly yet another subset of Ask.com) quotes two of the eight hundred-odd funny lines from the Robin Williams and Lillian Ross event, after noting George Clooney’s recent remark, “I couldn’t run for office. I’ve slept with far too many women”:

Robin Williams, a reformed alcoholic and drug addict, also admits he colourful past automatically rules him out.
 
He revealed at the New Yorker Festival: “I would never run for office — because I make Bill Clinton look Amish.”
 
However, Williams thinks Jack Nicholson should go into politics because he would be happy to be open about his past.
 
Impersonating ‘The Departed’ star’s voice, he said: “Jack would say, ‘Sex scandals? What do you want? I’ve done ‘em all. Twice. And I have it on tape!’”

A LiveJournalist went to the Jonathan Safran Foer/Edward P. Jones reading and took some brief, good notes; this guy enjoyed the festinis at the Steve Coogan and George Saunders talk. Anonymette from Movie News and Views wrote a detailed blow-by-blow of the Milos Forman and David Denby conversation (minus Forman’s incredible, elastic, tragicomic face).
 
Another blogger was at the Donald Antrim and Tobias Wolff evening, my first event of the festival, after which I was honestly prepared to go home and call it a day, happy as I can be. (Of course, a mere two hours later I was chatting with Tony from 49 Up, in person, which was…almost as incredible as talking to Antrim. A toast to you, Tony!)
 
It looks like Gabe Roth and I were at a few of the same events as well:

Other interesting factoids from the New Yorker Festival
 
New Yorker staffers who, at separate events, made gratuitous references to the Gnarls Barkley song “Crazy”: star reporter Malcolm Gladwell and features editor Daniel Zalewski.
How Roger Angell pronounces the last name of the late Donald Barthelme: BARL-mee.
How Zadie Smith pronounces it: BARTH-elm.

He was at the New Pornographers show too, and did a bit of eavesdropping on top of his laudably detailed reporting—want a job without any pay, Gabe? I like the way your mind works! Here are some New Pornographers photos, including a fetching one of Jim S. and Neko Case (who, it’s rumored, indulged in some serious karaoke afterward). Funny line from aforementioned roundup: “Suroweicki won me over immediately by being less good-looking than the photo on the jacket of his book, which is to say he’s only very good-looking, as opposed to intolerably good-looking.”
 

 

 

This just in, a dispatch from a correspondent we shall call C.R.B.D. Special to Emdashes! With photos after the jump.
Anyone wondering where all the British guys in New York were Saturday night, wonder no more: All of them were at the Cedar Lake Dance studio basking in the reflected funniness of Steve Coogan (as interviewed by the equally smart and funny George Saunders). Saunders introduced Coogan sweetly, saying Coogan shares his feeling that “comedy is not just fun, but important” and, incidentally, that he and his wife had to turn off a Coogan DVD recently because they were “laughing so hard that we had stopped breathing.” Then Coogan himself was with us, and did impressions. “There’s a lot of people who think they can do Michael Caine,” he said, before doing Caine to a T. He said his French teacher used to order him up to the front of the class to imitate other teachers at the school; the guy would go sit at the back of the class with the students and yell out people for him to do.

Lots of clips followed—Alan Partridge, 24 Hour Party People, Tristram Shandy, and his latest show, Saxondale, about a former Jethro Tull roadie-turned-pest-controller. (If you haven’t seen any of these, please, Netflix them all immediately. Really, do it now. Don’t even read the rest of this!) Coogan had already perfected cringe-inducing character-based comedy when Ricky Gervais was still cleaning toilets, or whatever he did before The Office. And Coogan has this to say about the form: “You have to be careful, otherwise it’s partly creative sadism.”

The usual Q & A session followed, with the usual questions: “Do you think American comedy is doomed?” asked an American. The answer was sort of no, but Coogan did say it seemed like “the sofa in the middle of the living room and the wacky neighbor isn’t working anymore.” Also, apparently NBC is pumping him for ideas; expect more pond-hopper shows from them shortly. Meanwhile…are you still here? What did I tell you about the Netflixing? Go!

I may skip Pick of the Issue till next Monday, if that doesn’t cause too much turbulence in your mental waters, but of course there were a few standouts last week, so I’ll probably come back and note them here. This week there’ll be scads of New Yorker Festival wrapups—look forward to challenging bouts of Guess Which Crowd This Was? and Match the Quotation in days to come.
Meanwhile, this was one of my favorite festival moments; as Lillian Ross, Robin Williams, and Barry Levinson practically skipped offstage after a preview screening of Man of the Year, Williams sang an homage to the Foley page scandal that was also a riff on the event’s being at the Alliance Française (he became a fast-talking, pompous French emcee several times, and about thirty other people), “Sank Heaven for Little Boys.” Giddy photo after the jump. Williams live was better than I’ve ever seen him on TV, and that means he was phenomenally good. Meanwhile, the movie itself brought up a few disturbing thoughts for me about the so-called liberal spirit of dissent, specifically in contrast to the Stephen Breyer event the day before. I’ll explain.

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I was there, and heard that actual sentence being spoken. Isn’t that wild?
Jump to the photo (all the festival posts will share this feature) to recreate the moment for yourself. I spoke to Martin today and he was a gent, and furthermore was wearing a bicycle garter (modern and nonchalantly sporty) all through today’s superlative Editing Master Class with Dorothy Wickenden, Roger Angell, and the humbling Daniel Zalewski. Humbling because Zalewski’s description of his editing and collaboration process is instantly recognizable: It’s that of the great editors, great capital G great, editors to submit to gratefully, to emulate, and to follow. I’ve known one or two, and here was another sitting there explaining his greatness without being in the least stuck-up. (A word that cartoonist C. Covert Darbyshire suggested bringing back into the discourse when we were on the subway down to Barnes & Noble on Saturday.)
Anyway, Martin, who’d just finished the Saturday crossword with a satisfied snap of the downloaded paper, also carried a bicycle helmet. That’s good to know, because there’s a brain we’d be bereft without.

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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.

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