Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett – From Under the Fig Tree

Word play 1

joselitNovember 14, 2011November 16, 20171 Comment

From last Monday evening through Sunday afternoon, my week has been of a piece. That usually doesn’t happen: Most of the time, Monday bears little relationship to Tuesday and even less relationship to Sunday.

But if upbringings have ‘themes,’ as Calvin Trillin once put it so beautifully in Messages from My Father, this past week had one, too, and that was the power of language.

On Monday evening, the Polish Embassy was the scene of a dazzling presentation by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett on the creation of a museum in Warsaw that will chronicle and interpret the thousand-year-old history of Polish Jews. The images that she brought to bear were splendid, but what really packed a wallop was the passionate and resolute prose that accompanied them.

Much the same could be said of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s campus talk on Tuesday evening, where the subject at hand was the fate of objects in an increasingly virtual world. Once again, her artful words and lively cadences compelled the audience to sit up and pay close attention.

And then, on Sunday afternoon, at Politics & Prose, the beloved author and GW professor of creative writing Faye Moskowitz read selections from her book, And The Bridge is Love, which enjoys the good fortune of being reprinted some twenty years after its first release.

All of us in the standing-room-only audience hung on each and every one of Faye Moskowitz’s finely wrought sentences, finding in them the kind of wisdom, humor, affirmation and solace that only words can bring.

A good week, then, for prose and those who keep it afloat.

Close Encounters 1

joselitNovember 6, 2011November 16, 20171 Comment

These days, when digital devices rule the roost, it’s often hard to make the case for the old-fashioned rituals of social interaction.

What seems to be going the way of the dinosaur is the kind of camaraderie and good fellowship that can only take place face-to-face, within the context of the public square and its institutions such as theatres and museums, where conversations are born of serendipity.

crowd — Flickr/Saskatchewan Jazz Festival

Yes, I know that texting is a marvelous way to keep in touch, but there’s something about watching a performance or looking at objects within the company of others that does a better job of bringing us together.

Last night’s performance of The Merchant of Venice at GW’s Bett’s Auditorium was a case in point. Though much to my dismay, several students seated right in front of me spent much of the show texting away, most of the audience – especially those who stayed for the post-performance talk-back – forged a relationship with the play and its actors that was alive, rather than mediated. For several hours on a Saturday night in November, a disparate group of people found common cause in a 400 year old play.

Much the same can be said of visiting a museum and of looking at the real thing rather than at simulacra or avatars. There’s an immediacy to the experience, a sense of belonging to something larger than one’s self, that is well worth celebrating, much less preserving.

But don’t take my word for it. This Tuesday evening, November 8th, at 7 p.m., at GW’s Jack Morton Auditorium (School of Media & Public Affairs), NYU University Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will be speaking on “The Elusive Object: The Meaning of Things in a Digital Age.” Be there.