Oh Baby!! The good stuff is coming back, at IPFW's beautiful Auer Performance Hall within the John and Ruth Rhinehart Music Center.


http://www.omnibuslectures.org/

First up is Henry Winkler and Marlee Matlin on September 17. This is another ticketed (free) event, and should be interesting... and then what should be a BARN BURNER - James Galbraith on October 14, talking about "the predator state" about macro economics, the "free market", and national politics.

Andrew Sullivan pops in November 10, for what should be a really interesting look at National Republican party and the tension between traditional conservative politics (which he's for) and religious ideology (which he's not for, in national politics)

Author Jamaica Kincaid shows up February 10, talking about poetry and prose. I know nothing about her, but I have found (on C-SPAN, usually) that authors I know nothing at all about tend to be fascinating.

March 25 Neil LaBute will visit - he's the Fort Wayne fellow who made the film In the Company of Men. In addition to being a playwright, the blurb at the IPFW sight concludes thusly: "His most recent film, Death at a Funeral, is currently in post-production and will headline Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, and Tracy Morgan." I'm thinking he will be interesting.

And then April 8, Christopher Buckley pops in. He's a genuine treat - a very funny author, and a sharp raconteur. I recall laughing until my eyes watered, while watching Buckley on C-SPAn recently(!), when he told an exquisitely funny story about the time, when he was a speechwriter for then-Vice President George HW Bush, and he put the name "Thucydides" into a statement that the VP made to a quickly assembled, news-driven press conference (in response to some breaking event)....and the horrible moment when the Vice president came to that name and tripped over it horribly, and struggled mightily to say it, and all the while the young speechwriter stood in the back of the room sweating bullets, and then getting dressed down by an admiral! And of course, when Chris recalls his father, and his sometimes painfully awkward, youthful clashes with him.

I intend to attend every single one of these events, and indeed, I think I'm most looking forward to the Buckley one.

See ya there!!

James Galbarith is the son of John Kenneth Galbraith - this should indeed be a great session.

Well - I suggest we make an elaborate Game Night Crew plan right now, and block out the date and time.

So - how's about a cheeseburger and a salad at the Wendy's on Crescent and North Anthony, just before the lecture?

Well, go figure.

Not sure why, but sud­denly BOTH Grant and Shelby decided to accom­pany me to James K Galbraith’s lec­ture! Dunno about them — but I thought the lec­ture was mar­velous and thought-provoking. He took a brief, informed look at our late crash, and the government’s too-small reac­tion, and at the road for­ward from here — and all in terms that we could all understand.

Among other inter­est­ing con­cepts dis­cussed were IBG/UBG*, the inter­est­ing state of play at Gold­man Sachs, the incor­rect­ness of ter­mi­nol­ogy like “stim­u­lus” (which brings to mind amphet­a­mines in a nee­dle!), and the essen­tial nature of gov­ern­ment debt**.

Mark — you missed a goody! We bought a copy of one of his books — The Preda­tor State (sub­ti­tled “How Con­ser­v­a­tives Aban­doned the Free Mar­ket and Why Lib­er­als Should Too”)  — and had him sign it to Shelby. I joked with him that I may never be able to get her to come out in the rain to see an econ­o­mist again, where­upon he inscribed it with a warn­ing for her to “be care­ful about economists”!

*I’ll Be Gone/You’ll Be Gone, often said in wash­rooms in the glass tow­ers, as in — don’t worry about the wreck and ruin that’s com­ing to this bank and our coun­try, because we’ll be outta’ here by then

**He actu­ally, and enter­tain­ingly (and seri­ously) stated that pub­lic debt is a pos­i­tive good. Most of it is an auto­matic response to the cri­sis — unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits and the like — and mostly all of it soft­ens the cri­sis for real peo­ple, and breaks them from falling into actual hunger, unlike in the last big crash, in 1929.…sort of a side­ways update of Gor­don Gecko’s “Greed is good” soliloquy

The Andrew Sul­li­van lec­ture last night was, to use a some­what loaded word, inter­est­ing.

The stated pur­pose and sub­ject of the lec­ture was “Friendship” — through the ages. About half way through the talk, in which he dropped in Aris­to­tle (and a few other Greeks) and Shake­speare, he men­tioned Jesus Christ; and from that point to the end of the lec­ture, he remained on JC, mak­ing the point that fun­de­men­tal­ist Chris­tians are fun­de­men­tally wrong in their pro­nounce­ments about fam­ily.

As the real­iza­tion dawned on peo­ple that we had arrived at Dr Sullivan’s real sub­ject, more than sev­eral peo­ple around the hall got up and walked out. As for Grant and I — in for a penny, in for a pound, I say!; we stayed to the end, and we learned in the Q&A that indeed the death of his best friend — and the oddly wrong-headed reac­tion from some par­tic­u­lar sorts of reli­gious peo­ple is what prompted him to develop this lec­ture in the first place.

It was an altogether interesting, and unexpectedly challenging lecture

I enjoyed Jamaica Kincaid's talk very much; she struck me as a sort of Caribbean Julia Child; her accent is much the same, and her man­ner­isms were sim­i­lar, but with­out Ms Child’s matronly demeanor (Ms Kin­caid is some­what hot).

Going in with­out any idea what to expect, I found her talk inter­est­ing, funny, and infor­ma­tive — and alto­gether touch­ing. Nom­i­nally, she was going to talk about British impe­ri­al­ism and the effects of colo­nial­ism, but instead it was more of an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal talk about how she came to be who she is (a suc­cess­ful nov­el­ist and poet from Antigua, trans­planted* into Ver­mont).

As a father of daugh­ters, I was espe­cially taken by how she out­lined going from being her mother’s lit­tle princess to being a gawky pre-teen (she didn’t use pre­cisely those terms, but you under­stand), and then how her mother and her began clash­ing. (by then, a younger brother had been born, and she was supplanted)

The Q & A drew sev­eral more inter­est­ing com­ments about her rela­tion­ship with her mother; one lady asked about an argu­ment between the author and her mom in one of the books, and Ms Kin­caid made the point that the “dia­logue” was really a lec­ture her mom was giv­ing her, with her own (unspo­ken) responses in ital­ics.

She indi­cated that, at some point when she was 10 or 11, she began to view the colo­nial arrange­ments in Antigua as being exactly like her rela­tion­ship with her mom; and indeed, as the evening unwound she had sev­eral pos­i­tive things to say about mom and British impe­r­ial rule — so indeed, and at length, we learned that the ‘evils of colo­nial­ism’ over­lay was a metaphor for her real sub­ject — which was how she clashed with her mom and turned into an inde­pen­dent woman.

It was a fine evening out — although the young folks actu­ally bailed on me this time. They came with me to see James Gal­braith(!!), and skipped out on this one; go figure.

*When­ever flow­ers came up — whether in the course of her com­ments, or doing Q&A, her demanor changed and she became vis­i­bly more charged up. She absolutely loves gar­den­ing, and can expound in great detail about all man­ner and sorts of flow­ers and plants and what grows in her beloved Ver­mont and what can­not, etc etc

Next up is Niel LaBute, which should be a hoot (or a beaut). If anyone else plans to attend, and we can adjust plans to suit