Lawrence Weschler

Lawrence Weschler discusses True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney.

A writer who has been visiting and delighting Elliott Bay audiences for almost twenty years now, Lawrence Weschler makes this welcome return this evening. Anything he has written and held forth about has been fascinating—few in nonfiction annals have written as variously and widely as Ren Weschler has. The 2007 recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, he is here with two books on art and artists. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees is an expanded edition of an earlier work on artist Robert Irwin (first published in 1982). That initial book led to an exchange and dialogue with artist David Hockney, and that talk now leads to publication of the new book, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney (both books, University of California Press). (KingRat)… (more)

BLAISE AGUERA y ARCAS; JOHN W. McCARTER JR.; KELLY OVERLY; MARTHA ROTH; LAWRENCE WESCHLER

(NOTE: Tickets $5.00 EA / FREE for Educators & Students)

DESCRIPTION: Humankind has an apparent urge (need?) to collect, collate, categorize, and catalogue everything about a subject. Dedicated scholarship and, more recently, advances in information technology are now permitting compendiums of monumental scale: Martha Roth, University of Chicago dean of humanities and professor of Assyriology, is currently guiding the completion, after 87 years of work, of the Oriental Institute’s 26-volume Assyrian Dictionary Project; John McCarter, president and CEO of the Field Museum, is serving on the steering committee of the E.O.Wilson-inspired, web-based Encyclopedia of Life (with a single genome-packed page devoted to every single type of organism on the planet); Kelly Overly, research alliance manager for the Allen Institute for Brain Science, is helping spearhead a web-based atlas mapping gene activity in the human brain and spinal cord; and Blaise Aguera y Arcas is the Microsoft-based cocreator of the technology behind Photosynth, a powerful software capable of grafting multiple images together into an interactive, three-dimensional space. Panel moderator and Festival artistic director Lawrence Weschler wonders what these people will have to say to each other. (bookjones)… (more)