« An Attractive Distance | Main | Getting Home »

Fri | April 28, 2006

the PEN American Center

In NYU's Hemmerdinger Hall at 100 Washington Square East, a panel of academics and an audience of alleged intellectuals assembled for "Writing Faith," a part of the PEN American Center's Festival of International Literature.

A young Asian woman sat to the side, scribbling notes on a piece of paper. She wrote down some of the ideas tossed into the air by the panel, and also wrote notes about the room and her impressions of the people.

The six grey columns, she wrote, were positioned down the middle of the room like symbols on a playing card. The pointy shoes of the woman next to her, she wrote, were too trendy. No one that fashionable could maintain any sort of intellectual life.

Colm Toibin sat on the far right of the panel. A charcoal ring of hair circumscribed his head and his amber reading glasses dropped low on his nose. The PEN event boasted hundreds of illustrious writers, but this was the only one she had heard of, and read.

The next day, another group of intellectuals gathered at the Columbia University Faculty House. This time, the topic was "Translation and Globalization." Steve Wasserman, through geniality and intellect, anecdote and thought, did his best to make the atmosphere social as well as academic.

The girl inadvertently sat in the "reserved" section. She scribbled to pass the time. The woman behind her kicked her chair. It confirmed her suspicion that the audience was not comprised of intellectuals, but of individuals who had nothing better to do. She did not want to become one of them-- even though at the moment, she was.

She thought about the chair-kicker, and about the woman who had honked at her while she was crossing 116th.

The room on the second floor had a New England flavor, due to the two ceiling-high bookcases flanking the panel of academics, and the dark oil portrait pantings on the wall.

Perhaps there were individuals in the audience or on the panel who could have been helpful to the aspiring, and struggling, writer, but she had no way of knowing. They might as well have not been there.

« Previous | Posted by Lily in journal | on April 28, 2006 05:34 PM | Next »