Graduate students like me, and other bookish folks in this economy, love to find events that combine cultural cachet and entry fees of $0.00. If you like the sound of that, too, you can’t do better this weekend than the Brooklyn Book Festival, now in its fifth year, and taking place in and around Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. The main day is September 12th, but the event is ‘book-ended’ with activities on September 10th and 11th, too, and features 170 publishers and booksellers with displays filling Borough Hall Plaza and Columbus Park.
Described as “hip, huge and free,” this event has a long list of scheduled authors, including Salman Rushdie, Naomi Klein, the poet John Ashbery, celebs like Venus Williams, and people you might see on the streets of Brooklyn year-round, like novelist Paul Auster. A few of the programs center on graphic novels, one moderated by Columbia University’s Karen Green, whom I mentioned in a previous post on comics for iPhones. Another panel I want to see includes The Daily Show’s John Hodgman and Kristen Schaal. Some of the events take place elsewhere in Brooklyn and do have a fee, such as Russell Banks talking about books being made into movies (his novel The Sweet Hereafter was made into a film that really stuck with me, by Atom Egoyan) [$12 at BAM].
Sometimes I feel as if I live not only in the most culturally rich city in the world, but at the very epicenter of cool, right here in Brooklyn. There may be a lot of other worthwhile things to do on the anniversary of September 11th, 2001, but this one offers an upbeat reminder of some reasons why we live here. This is a kid-friendly event, with children’s book authors and workshops, including one that teaches kids how to write their own comic book.
Here’s a video a friend of mine made with quick views of a number of authors who will be there.
Check out the complete schedule for the Brooklyn Book Festival here.
Well, Wendy, if any post has ever brought me close to crying, yours did.
It also made we wonder whether “writing my chapter” does provide enough of an alibi for missing out on important cultural events in one of the “most culturally rich” cities in the world. I certainly hope so, otherwise I would feel even more embarrassed.
Anyway, as just a feeble attempt at following up on this post, I do recommend the Matisse exhibition at MOMA, which I did check out. (Again, MOMA is free to CUNY students, and I take my class with me once per semester as well.) I found this exhibition pertinent to my teaching composition this semester because it highlights the artist’s continuous revising and reworking and shows the process in any act of drawing/painting/writing.