Recent Stories with tag seattle arts and lectures

Last night Seattle Arts & Lectures invited to town Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and, more recently, Freedom--which is both "visceral and lapidary," says the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, whom Franzen once called "the stupidest person in New York."

If you subscribe to TIME, you have a recent copy featuring Franzen staring off-screen as he's lauded as the Great American Novelist. (Locally, Michael Upchurch would seem to agree.)

On the other hand, two of the most commonly used words last night were "torture" and "torment," so life is not yet a bowl of cherries for Franzen. SAL wanted a substantive talk, not a book reading, so Franzen obliged by reading a lecture he'd prepared for a German audience, thinking that this level of continental sophistication would go over well here. Kafka figured prominently.

It was also a year old, and when he came to references that had aged in the interim, he broke out a pen and updated them on the fly. Correction is constant in the Franzen weltanschauung; here he is laboring to answer a question later on in the evening: "So the project...the project becomes...to look in...inward...."

His talk centered on the four big question that authors are asked--which remarkably stopped no one in the audience from writing down variations of these on their question cards. For the record, the standard foursome are, Who are your influences?, What time of day do you write?, Do your characters "take over" the telling of the story?, and Is your fiction autobiographical?... (more)

Starting in 2008, actress, writer, and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini began producing a series of wacky but deeply touching short films called Green Porno for the Sundance Channel, each episode exploring the sex lives of the sort animals we interact with daily. The films have a charmingly low-budget sort of look, replete with lots of cardboard sets and nutty costumes, and reinforced with willfully cheesy cuts and Rossellini's guileless interest in her subjects' libidos. They're delightful on the one hand, passionate on the other, and one of the most compelling bits of educational filmmaking to come along in ages.

Tonight, Seattle Arts & Lectures is bringing in Rossellini to discuss Green Porno at Benaroya Hall at 7:30 p.m. (tickets available at the box office starting at 6). Rossellini has also recently released a book/DVD combo on the project, which is in its third season.

It's probably a happy coincidence, but the same week that CNN is launching its miniseries Latino in America, Seattle Arts and Lectures is welcoming the poet Martín Espada to town. Born in Brooklyn in 1957, Espada is either famed or notorious for his political views, derived from his Puerto Rican heritage. "The melting pot" is not his preferred metaphor.

In an earlier interview about his book, Republic of Poetry, Espada said: "The American history taught and published in this country all too often resembles a consensus on what to forget. This is especially true when it comes to Latinos, Latin America, and their history." Talking with Bill Moyers, he put it more bluntly: "I mean, we have to deal with this paradox that there are 40 million Latinos in this country and yet we're invisible."

The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer, and came on the heels of his collection Alabanza, which gathered selections written between 1982 and 2003. Both titles are taken from poems.

In Espada's "The... (more)

Seattle Arts and Lectures shared this on-the-scene photo from Writers in the Schools. Where? In the SunBreak Flickr pool. Your stuff should be there, too, whether or not it features artistic youth.