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Ten Brooklyn Book Festival Panels to Visit
Kafka, sports, sexy sex—it’s all here
Last year’s Brooklyn Book Festival (Photo: Facebook.com)
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We told you about Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Brooklyn Book Festival panel; here are 10 more worth checking out:
Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose: Sports and Power in America
St. Francis Reading Room, 10 a.m.
Michael Weinreb (Bigger Than the Game), Dave Zirin (Bad Sports), and Will Leitch (Are We Winning?) show us the money, unmask the juiced-up, ego-fueled game of professional sports, and salvage what’s left to love.
Kafka on the Block
St. Francis Maroney Screening Room, 11 a.m.
In conjunction with BAM’s Next Wave Festival performance of Metamorphosis (Vesturport Theatre, Iceland) directed by Gísli Örn Gardarsson, BAM hosts a panel discussion on Kafka’s legacy with Joshua Cohen (Witz); Francine Prose, (Reading Like a Writer), and Matthew Sharpe (The Sleeping Father; Nothing Is Terrible; Jamestown). Moderated by Liesl Schillinger, contributor to the New York Times Book Review.
Pop Life: Music, Memory, and America’s Coming of Age
St. Francis Maroney Screening Room, 12 p.m.
Rob Sheffield (Talking to Girls About Duran Duran), Joshua Clover (1989), and Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Beautiful Struggle) discuss the ways that memory and personal and political meaning inhabit the most ephemeral music and popular culture. Moderated by Julie Burstein, creator of public radio’s Studio 360 and the author of the forthcoming Spark: How Creativity Works.
The Problem with Music
St. Francis Maroney Screening Room, 1 p.m.
Does music have the same role in our lives it once did, or has it become mere background noise in our more-now-again age of oversaturation? Do rock, punk and hip-hop still provide a voice and a sense of community to the alienated and disaffected? And what of technology’s role in these changes? Four music writers discuss the state of the art. With Sara Marcus (Girls to the Front), Greg Milner (Perfecting Sound Forever), Elijah Wald (How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll) and Thomas Chatterton Williams (Losing My Cool).
Brooklyn’s Cookin’
North Stage, 1 p.m.
Brooklyn is the cherry on top of the foodie movement. Join Edible Brooklyn’s Rachel Wharton and popular Brooklyn chefs Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo (The Frankies Spuntino: Kitchen Companion & Cooking Manual), Ramin Ganeshram (Sweet Hands: Island Cooking from Trinidad & Tobago) and Amy Besa (Memories of Philippine Kitchens) for some Brooklyn cookin’ talk.
Culture vs. Cash
St. Francis Maroney Screening Room, 2 p.m.
Explore the breach between the role of the musician as artist and the role of the record companies as a business. Oftentimes music rises up out of subcultures that are about much more than profits, but ultimately the industry is a business that must support itself financially. Dan Charnas (The Big Payback), Will Hermes (The Big Bang), Kristin Hersh (Rat Girl) and moderator Greg Tate (James Brown’s Body and the Revolution of the Mind) look at the conflicting interests of artists and executives.
You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby—Or Have You?
St. Francis McArdle Hall, 2 p.m.
Mad Men has done a lot to remind audiences of the inequalities women faced prior to the feminist movement of the seventies, and the 2008 election was a powerful eye-opener to many about the continuing existence of sexism and its effect on our lives. Rebecca Traister (Big Girls Don’t Cry), Leora Tanenbaum (Slut!) and Jennifer Baumgardner (Abortion & Life) discuss the excitement and frustration of the run-off, the historic election, and the issues they raised.
Sarah Silverman and David Rakoff in Conversation
Main Stage, 3 p.m.
Humorists Sarah Silverman (The Bedwetter) and David Rakoff (Half Empty) discuss their work.
The Pleasure Seekers: Salman Rushdie in Conversation with Tishani Doshi
St. Francis Auditorium, 4 p.m.
Salman Rushdie talks to novelist, poet and dancer Tishani Doshi about her acclaimed new novel The Pleasure Seekers and about Indian-Pakistani literature and diaspora-Indian literature in general, poetry, dance and, perhaps, the delights of Goan fish curry and chocolate Ganeshes. Introduced by Paul Holdengräber.
War, Torture and the Death and Birth of Meaning
St. Francis McArdle Hall, 5 p.m.
Nick Flynn (The Ticking is the Bomb), Feryal Ali Gauhar (No Space for Further Burials) and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto (Hiroshima in the Morning) talk with Amy Goodman (Democracy Now) about their own deep engagement with the atrocities of conflict and discuss their depiction in both fiction and non-fiction, and the way these events can shape both our identity and engagement with our everyday lives.