[caption id="attachment_526" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Harrison Candelaria Fletcher and two people who would be identifiable if not for the photography skills of certain blog posters."]
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Let's face it, these venues that Josh D's been getting us are a bit swanky for our purposes, but I could get way used to them. In these rarefied spaces you can hear; you can see; you can smell and taste and luxuriate. There's food and drink. Various delicacies like stuffed mozzarella and calamari and linen tablecloths, silver, Tangueray & tonics -- and some good, high-calorie talk from Harrison Candelaria Fletcher and Laura Hendrie, two of the new heroes of my growing cadre of heroes since Lit Fest started.
Let me back up.
Forty of us gathered to listen to Harrison and Laura take on the topic of "Writing in Changing Times" (a topic with "euphemism" written all over it). Laura was teaching a course on dialogue for Lit Fest, so I sent her an e-mail asking if I could have a drink waiting for her when she arrived for this salon talk. And she wrote back, "Sure! How about some wine or beer or scotch or vodka?" So when she arrived, of course, she ordered gin and tonic. She talked at first about a Tom Stoppard quote about what we as writers and people have experienced since 9/11:
"The world is in spasm. When societies are in spasm people let go of some of their habits and assumptions. This can be the mark of maturity and progress in certain instances but in others we are letting go of something hard-won, and something we ought not to let go of. It has never been more important that we should recognize the difference between cases."
and later, in explaining the above quote, Stoppard says:
"I guess it's pretty clear to me what I was thinking of, which is that out of fear -- not necessarily for oneself, but for family and so on, or one's fellow man, if you like, but out of some kind of fear --one lets go of certain principles, like the principle of free expression, of free assembly. One is encouraged to compromise in the direction of some kind of state security."
So, her argument was that out of fear, we were giving up our freedom, not just civic freedoms, but freedom of thought and action and, more to the point, literary freedom. Here Harrison came in and gave it a spin. I encouraged fisticuffs, but they ended up finding endless points of agreement. He said that during the Chicano movement (in the height of which his mother, a Chicana, was an artist and he was a wee lad), none of the artists cared who published or bought their art, or who accepted it. They just created it. Heedlessly. And that's what we should be doing now--in fact, comfort can be anathema to artistic discovery and freedom and pushing the boundaries. (I totally paraphrase, here. Not that that's not obvious.) Here was the money quote, as far as I'm concerned:
You have to decide what you can live with, what you really need, and what you can live without.
Laura agreed, and they talked about ridding yourself of the assumptions of what writers can and can't do. Can a writer work at Starbucks? In medical coding? As a ... nonprofit administrator? (Okay, I added that last part.) Of course, and it's because they're in the world (if not "of" the world) that they have material to write about. We've been spoiled over the years (or some of us have, they said) in thinking we can sit around and teach and write and be separate from the world. Get dirty and in it and say something about it.
Like the Ramones did? And the Clash. And the people of the Chicano movement. For over an hour, they smartly, provocatively, and wittily worked through and hashed out ideas. Ultimately, they said this: we're on the cusp of something, and that's when great art is created--if you don't succumb to fear (cf. Stoppard, above). A lot more that's really smart was said, but we'll get others to post about it. (Check out Laureen's live tweets, por ejemplo.)
The story's not completely over. One loss: it's final, the fate of the Lighthouse microphone and speaker. They... didn't make it. They're both kaput. In our infectiousness, I think we also ruined Baur's audio system, which as far as I know has worked since the beginning of time. So... let's leave it at that until someone smart can post.
Thanks, Laura and Harrison, for your inspiring and inspired talk tonight. And thanks to Gary S., Rosemary L., Jan M., our intern Laurel S. (NOT Laurelle), Laureen our New Media Czarina, and everyone else who helped with this event. Our waiter was really nice. Hope to see you all at Alexandre Philippe and Garrett Ammon's talk on "My Obsession" tomorrow at 910 Arts, 910 Santa Fe, 7:30 drinks/ 8:00 PM program.
