Martin Schneider writes:
The interview/concert with Ian Hunter and Graham Parker at (Le) Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street on Saturday night was ridiculously entertaining, and the most atypical New Yorker Festival event I’ve ever seen. I’d hazard a guess that the audience included more non-subscribers than usual. Why? Because the Mott the Hoople crazies were out in force.
Preliminary lubrication included free rounds of margaritas and tequila, which I recommend become standard practice for all future New Yorker Festival events. The first half of the show was talk; the second half, rock (albeit acoustic). The songs were good, but the really entertaining bit was the talk, because Hunter and Parker are cut from the same mold, irreverent, fun-loving, aged rock and roll scamps. I wouldn’t say they took Ben Greenman’s queries very seriously, but they aimed to entertain (with great success), and Greenman gleefully went along for the ride.
If this event had occurred in a movie, the governing conceit would be of two ridiculous washed-up old farts, basking in former glory and totally ridiculous. Fortunately, life isn’t so pat, and there was nothing to suggest that Parker and Hunter ever stopped being formidable creatures; they’re too talented and headstrong for that—and they know it. And besides, the idea that dissolute rock heroes of yore have anything to apologize for isn’t very interesting—or true.
I mentioned that the crowd was a bit raucous. The fans’ identification with both men, but particularly Hunter, was such that virtually every remark was met with either laughter or an intimate form of hostility: this last because when Hunter wasn’t being scurrilous, he was being blunt, as when he revealed that he often doesn’t relish performing or when he temporized about bringing the recently announced reunion of Mott the Hoople to New York City. So in between the laughs, you’d hear cries of “Aw c’mon!” and boos, but with not the slightest whiff of rejection. It was more like bargaining.
Moments after Parker said that the Beatles launched a million British bands, Hunter disagreed, noting that there was a brief window of time when the Beatles’ success didn’t appear to be all that remarkable; other acts had had two successive hits, after all. Besides, Hunter’s a Stones guy.
Both men apparently opened for big ’80s American rock acts. Parker related the difficulty of such gigs: crowds would yell “Fuck off, English faggots!” and then Steve Perry would launch Journey’s set with the statement, “Are you ready for some real rock and roll!?” (Puke.) But even worse was Styx (everyone present seemed to agree). Hunter called Dennis DeYoung of Styx a “prat” and a “pillock.” Ah, British invective.
Asked about the urge to keep writing songs after so much success, Hunter obliquely addressed the compulsion of the blank page with an odd (and American) comparison: “It’s like, Rickey Henderson…. he didn’t have a brain, he had a baseball field….”
I think very few people left disappointed. Kudos to the Festival for thinking outside the box here: this wasn’t the usual Festival fare, but it was a highly enjoyable event that belies the elitism The New Yorker is always accused of.
Set List:
Graham Parker:
[Didn’t catch the name — new song?]
“Silly Thing”
“Things Are Looking Up Of Late” (?)
“New York Shuffle”
Ian Hunter:
“I Wish I Was Your Mother”
“Irene Wilde”
“Man Overboard”
“Once Bitten Twice Shy”

Martin Schneider writes:
Exhilarating day of four New Yorker Festival events stretched across 14 hours. I’m beat, and yet I have to get at least one of these accounts down now, or they won’t happen at all. I might not be as verbose as I was for Shteyngart/Saunders, but I’ll do my best. (Then again, maybe I’ll write on and on. We’ll see.)
Let’s start with New Math, with Nate Silver, Nancy Flournoy, Sudhir Venkatesh, and Bill James, hosted by Ben McGrath.
I scored a choice seat front row center fairly early, and after a few moments an older gentleman with what I took to be a British accent inquired about the vacant seat next to me. Having ensconced himself in the seat, he asked me what had interested me about this event, and thus began a good quarter-hour of pleasant and stimulating discussion with Graham Gladwell, Canadian mathematician (Ret.) and (of course) father of Malcolm.
Graham showed a lively interest in every subject on offer, as I explained the back stories of James, Silver, Venkatesh. Talk drifted to Malcolm’s latest article about the permanent neurological effects of violent NFL play, and he took the opportunity to reminisce about his youthful days of playing “rugger” and boxing. I must say that this professorial chap looked like just about the last person I could imagine trading jabs in the ring, but that was more or less his point, in his day that was what young men once did at the better schools. Anyway, he’s a wonderful fellow, and I greatly enjoyed chatting with him. (Come to think of it, I enjoy just about every conversation I have at every NYF.)
On to the main subject. I have to preface this by saying that I have only two real intellectual heroes who were important to me in my formative years, and one of them is George Orwell (deceased, 1950), and the other one is Bill James. I think there’s literally no other person on earth the NYF could have enlisted to speak who has more personal meaning to me. And yesterday morning I got to see the man up close, in person. It was obviously a heady moment for me. And I’m going to write about him to the exclusion of the others, if you don’t mind. (After pointing out the grace and wit with which Ben McGrath ran the panel.)
If you don’t know, Bill James has been writing about baseball statistics (and other aspects of baseball) since about 1975, and through a huge amount of work and persistence and insight and originality, was able to teach a new, educated generation of fans a way of looking at the sport that deviated from the rather platitudinous fashion of the previous few generations.
James spoke the least of the four panelists (by far), which fact I ascribe to a kind of reticence and shyness that may—perversely—be typical of the kind of self-directed, bold, irreverent genius (if I may put that out there) James is. Bold on the page, tentative in the flesh, something like that. It might have something to do with the Midwest, too. (James is a Kansan to the bone.)
James had one very good moment, which went almost entirely unnoticed, and one very bad moment, which likely made more of an impression. Let’s start with the misstep.
At a certain point, Venkatesh was discussing the role of statistical analysis in the history of ideas, good and bad, and he made reference to the use of statistics by eugenicists, obviously a pretty bad idea. James actually interrupted Venkatesh to say, no no, eugenics didn’t come out of statistical analysis, at all. Venkatesh countered, Certainly it did—look at Sir Francis Galton. And James said, quote, “Who the hell is Francis Galton?”
(Wince.)
After a bit of exposition by Venkatesh, James recovered with a rather good point, that if the conclusion was so pernicious and agenda-driven, then it can hardly be said that impartial statistical analysis was occurring.
What’s interesting about the exchange is that the mistake, of making such a sweeping statement without command of all the facts, is rather typical of James and yet is also part of what made him such a powerful advocate in the areas in which he knew his shit and was dead right, of which there were many. James sometimes uses the reach of his own knowledge as the measure for the subject, and a lot of times that’s OK but when it’s not you really notice it, as was the case here. If you don’t know about Sir Francis Galton, you probably shouldn’t make sweeping statements about eugenicists. I still find such blunders a small price to pay for his general fearless attitude toward cant. But that’s just me.
The good moment he had was every bit as interesting, I think.
The subject of political ends in relation to statistics was raised, and climate change had already been mentioned as an area in which statistical work is important. James pointed out that something is amiss in a debate in which the statistical basis for the conclusion that humankind is contributing to rapid climate change is essentially the private property of the tiny minority who can actually understand the debate (who all agree about it). If those conclusions are so rock-solid, there must be a way of distilling the arguments/data in such a way that regular people can understand it, and that manifestly has not happened at all. James added that he’s looked into the matter a bit, and he works with statistics every day of his life, and he can’t understand the data either. Something’s wrong here.
I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a pretty trenchant and profound point. Right or wrong, the argument is dysfunctional. The responses of the panelists who tackled James’s point actually dodged the issue. Flournoy made reference to the general heating of the earth since the last Ice Age, and said that the question is whether humans are compounding it, which seems to be the case. Silver made a rather good point, which was that when you have a sound scientific theory (adding carbon to the atmosphere heats the atmosphere) that the data is decidedly corroborating, that makes it far more difficult to dismiss either the data or the theory—but none of that alters the fact that the climate change crowd has failed to create models of the problem that people—the people who vote and could possibly be mobilized to solve the problem—can understand.
In a sense, it’s the scientists who are unwilling to give up their cherished intellectual superiority or whatever institutional perks come with keeping science specialized and arcane, the property of a certain kind of well-paid professional class. And (if the problem is as dire as all that) that’s an awfully high price to pay for such fleeting fame, status, salary, whatever. Just like SUV owners of only a few years ago, that’s the luxury they don’t want to give up. That incomprehensibility isn’t an accident, it has a clear institutional history (specialization etc.). As with Darwinism, the scientists’ attitude has been, basically, “Trust us.” And that kind of thing isn’t going to help us jettison the political static that has been souring the debate—which we’re going to have to do if we want to solve the problem.
I don’t think the panelists, so generally convinced that climate change is a sound theory (perhaps on a second-hand basis), quite grasped the point James was making. He wanted to argue about what’s wrong with the nature of the debate and the data, and what he got in response was the reasons to believe the experts—without a word about how we can, in practical terms, bring the debate to the people so that they can accept it (if it’s such a sound theory).
Afterward, in that random milling about that always occurs after such panels, I bounded on stage and told James how important his work had been to me, and I shook his hand. That felt really good!
So there you have it. James is my intellectual hero, and warts and all, I’ll pit mine against yours and I’ll win best three throws out of five, dammit. (Is that the expression?) Maybe Professor Graham Gladwell (Ret.) can be the referee.

Martin Schneider writes:
I have a friend who generally misses out on the first rush of New Yorker Festival ticket-buying and then finds himself disinclined to purchase tickets to the more readily available Friday author events because “why pay when you can see them at Barnes and Noble for free?” A fair point, for which there are sound responses, the main one being that not everyone who attends the Festival lives in New York (even if he does, and I do). But beyond that, the author events are not usually “just” readings, there’s often a conversation or a moderator livening things up.
But on some level I grant the premise. However you cut it, the Saturday and Sunday events are much more “value-packed” than the Friday author evenings, which the Festival recognizes by charging more for them. And truth be told, I would prefer an interview/conversation to a reading. And with two such great talkers as George Saunders and Gary Shteyngart—it’s quite possible that they would break my brain, or I would topple over in laughter, or something.
As I say, I was expecting talk, so when it became plain that Shteyngart and Saunders would be reading rather than talking, I was a bit crestfallen.
But not for long. It turns out that both men read just as well as they talk, and they talked afterward anyway.
Shteyngart read from his recently completed novel—if the name was mentioned, I didn’t catch it. It sounds like a humdinger, though, and I have a hunch it’ll be superior to his second novel Absurdistan, which I liked, and his first novel The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, which I haven’t gotten to but everyone else seemed to like. (Quick note: Shteyngart, who conforms to the archetypal “card” figure, can’t resist messing with the names of his books when he talks or writes about them. Anyone who’s read Absurdistan knows that he likes to refer to his first book as “The Russian Debutante’s Handjob,” or some such variation, and tonight I learned that he calls his second book “A-blurb-istan.”)
Anyway. The new book is set a year or eight into the future and features heightened and nightmarish versions of our contemporary life, a bit like Infinite Jest, perhaps. As Cressida Leyshon explained in her introduction, in the new book (paraphrasing) “America has defaulted on its debt to China, every citizen is defined by their credit rating, and nobody reads anymore.” As I say, this is a most promising brew. Shteyngart’s excerpt involved the protagonist bringing his new girlfriend to meet his Russian-immigrant folks out in Long Island, and it was very funny.
Afterward Shteyngart related that he had been fiddling with his initial plot elements in 2006 or so, among which were such outlandish possibilities as the collapse of the financial system as well as the Big 3 automakers—as well all know, events rendered that particular vision trite, so he had to find ways to make it all even worse….
Saunders read, as I was hoping, from his most recent New Yorker story “Victory Lap,” which, as Jonathan Taylor noted, is one of those stories that really sticks with you. I heartily agree! Saunders said it was the first time he had ever read it to an audience. (Nice!) The story is a mite confusing on the page, to be frank, but no less affecting for that. To hear Saunders channel a teenage girl, a teenage boy, a malevolent fellow, two sets of parents, and a baby deer was quite breathtaking and did much to clarify the precise course of events as well. So far as I could tell, the audience was rapt.
The discussion portion was full of quick wit and insight. My favorite bit came when Shteyngart explained the backstory of a scene from one of his novels, an event from his own life in which the brandishing of an American Express card was enough to stave off a pack of Czech skinheads. Instantly, Saunders: “Now that’s a commercial!”

Martin Schneider writes:

According to the New Yorker Festival’s Twitter feed, tickets to most events are available today at the Cedar Lake Theater at 547 West 26th St. (One hour left to buy!) This will presumably mean that there will be a few more tickets available at individual events.
“Tailing Tilley,” the interactive walking game involving Eustace Tilley, has been cancelled due to inclement weather. Dommage! The Festival “will be restaging it at a future date and tickets will be honored or refunded.”
For Festival veterans, note that there is no “Festival HQ” this year. As a substitute, the Festival is using the Conde Nast Building for quite a few of the Sunday events. The book signings are happening at McNally Jackson Books at 52 Prince Street.

Martin Schneider writes:
Unfortunately, the Annie Proulx event on Saturday morning has been cancelled due to Ms. Proulx being “under the weather.” We hope that it’s just that and not something more serious. Get better soon!
Ticketholders for the Proulx event will receive a refund.
The Proulx event has been replaced, with some alacrity, by the following event:
In Conversation With
Jhumpa Lahiri
Interviewed by Deborah Treisman.
Saturday, October 17 at 10:00AM
at Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street
New York, NY 10022
Between Park & Madison Avenues
4/5/6 to 59th Street & Lexington
Buy tickets here!