The High Line Ballroom is a very interesting venue. It’s not very big, yet still a ballroom. All that dancing space taken up by a modest yet dense grid of rectangular tables. I was fortunate to get a table right in the front. I recommending arriving early at High Line Ballroom events; proximity may make the difference.
You will be seated with others; at my table was a young couple discussing Pamuk’s brief contributon to the Food Issue and James Watson’s “ornery” appearance a few days ago. (How often do you hear the phrase “This is the second Nobelist I’m seeing speak this week”?)
Pamuk and Rushdie thankfully ignored the Bushian undertones of the word “homeland,” opting instead to focus on the place of one’s upbringing, the place where one’s mother lives. (Rushdie pointed out that Pamuk’s oft-invoked mother, meant as a symbol for familiar trappings, loomed large over the proceedings.) The two men saw eye to eye on many matters; it was telling where they differed. Rushdie observed that a man who never leaves home is “sad”; Pamuk dissented, preferring to pity the man who is widely traveled and yet finds home in every foreign artifact. Pamuk made a point I found quite penetrating, to the effect that one can be sure one is not at home when one feels no responsibility for the state of affairs where one is. Rushdie impishly said, “I find Orhan’s sense of responsibility comforting; I’m in favor of irresponsibility.”

Pamuk’s English is strongly accented (and largely article-free) and yet, as befits a man of very wide reading, he had an uncanny knack for choosing the correct word. Where Rushdie was delightedly puckish, Pamuk was well-nigh sermonic, and yet charmingly so. Pamuk ventured some wisecracks, none of which went over; yet his “straight” discourse was often more effortlessly amusing, not least when he explained how much it pisses him off when westerners feel compelled to pigeonhole his accessible works as self-evidently limited to “Turkish” love or politics.
Rushdie’s easy whimsy manifested itself in several good anecdotes, such as when he described his mother as a “Garcia Marquez” of local gossip. He also told a wonderful story about the eye-opening feats of New Yorker fact-checkers, who requested that he alter a stray name reference so as not to coincide with the actual contents of the Bradford, UK, telephone directory. Rushdie demurred (in my view rightly).
Perhaps the most startling moment in a very diverting evening was when Rushdie pronounced Updike’s The Coup as “one of the worst novels ever written.” —Martin Schneider

As of 6pm Friday at the New Yorker Festival headquarters (which had closed for the day), the following events were sold out. To the best of my knowledge, tickets to all other events are still quite readily available.
Saturday:
Anthony Lane/Simon Schama
Seymour Hersh/David Remnick
Steve Martin/Susan Morrison
Samantha Power/Darfur
Sigur Ros
“The Kite Runner,” Khaled Hosseini
“Encounters at the End of the World,” Werner Herzog
Sunday:
Bagels with Bob
Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Come Hungry
Inside the Artist’s Studio
The Next Century’s Newsroom
Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen/David Denby
Oliver Sacks
Susan Orlean/Mark Singer
I saw a college-aged woman let out a loud yelp when she noticed that the Fiona Apple event wasn’t sold out yet. And then ran over to the ticket table.
Again, some tickets are also being held at the individual venues for each event. Good luck!

I’m actually at Festival HQ before it’s “officially” open. Out front throngs of people are clamoring for the tickets that the Festival has set aside. I noticed that all of the pricey Sunday morning events are now sold out, which is perhaps to be expected, as are the Pamuk/Rushdie event plus Sy Hersh, Simon Schama, Steve Martin and a few others. Plenty of good events, left though, even if they’re vanishing by the half-hour.
The chaos out front is only somewhat mirrored in the headquarters itself. I’m comfortably ensconced in the “Acura Lounge,” where it is posted that complimentary coffees will be made available. Not that I’m partaking—I’m wired enough as it is. According to the Festival Wire cellphone updates, Acura will actually be ferrying people from HQ to events, which I find rather remarkable (I think I’ll take them up on that!).
I’m currently seated amid a welter of controlled hubbub, as motivated young people scurry hither and thither, arranging the Cartoon Bank displays, wiring banks of lights, distributing attractive candles to all tables, and the like. I extend thanks to Josh at Scharf Weisberg and Melissa and Lisa at the New Yorker for helpfully ensuring me WiFi access even though HQ isn’t “officially” open yet. They can all add “liveblogger wrangler” to their resumes.
BoingBoing Gadgets was touting a T-shirt today that actually lights up when you are near a strong WiFi signal.

What I wouldn’t give for one of those for this weekend! (This assumes that Josh, Melissa, and Lisa won’t be catering to my every whim for the next three days, which admittedly seems like a longshot.)
—Martin Schneider

The New York Post today reports that tickets for this weekend’s Festival—make that for tomorrow’s Festival!—are in hot demand, and even well-known actors are being told to line up with everybody else. Shudder! Some individuals are trying the desperate measure of “sliding ticket requests under the door” of David Remnick’s apartment. Festival stalking! Now that’s a new one. (There’s also some scurrilous blind dishing about festival attractions participating in events under the influence. My attorneys have informed me that further comment on this subject is inadvisable.)
In a classic case of burying the lede, the Post lets four whole paragraphs go by before letting readers know that “Ten percent of all tickets have been held back for sale at 3 p.m. tomorrow [this means Friday], only at festival headquarters at 125 W. 18 St.” Indeed. There will also be a small number of tickets available before each event at the respective venue. If you’ve been shut out, we urge you to keep trying—you never know what opportunity will suddenly present itself!
Good luck to all ticket-seekers, and if you see or hear anything during the weekend that you think is worthy of comment here, we urge you to send it on to us. —Martin Schneider

Newest news: Not only are there still tickets for some New Yorker Festival events, but for those of you who can’t get to them in person, videos of a bunch of the events will eventually be online. The lineup hasn’t been announced yet, but the videos will be rolled out on newyorker.com the way they were for the New Yorker Conference earlier this year. Oh, and you can subscribe on iTunes, too.
Which reminds me that I clicked around my own podcast subscription to the animated cartoons, just to see how things are going in that odd little realm. To my surprise, I found myself laughing at a bunch of them, and they don’t take any time to load in iTunes. Jeff Simmermon, still want to write that guest post about the animations? (He’s been writing about Boing Boing TV.)

There are still New Yorker Festival tickets available, so act fast! Not to mention a busy trade in festival events going on at Craigslist. As they say in The Scarlet Letter, “We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest,” and vice versa. That said, give up now on getting into “Come Hungry”—you must remain hungry for another year, I’m afraid. Read some of Trillin’s books instead; they’ll fill you up!
Meanwhile, Lilit at Save the Assistants has a snappy account of her interview with New Yorker editor Jeffrey Frank. They’re even giving away a couple of copies of his new novel, Trudy Hopedale. Read on.