Panel Nerds: Is Kindle The Future Of Culture?

Who: Wallace Shawn, Tony Kushner, and Walter Mosley, moderated by Gene Seymour.

What: The Nation’s “What Will Become of Our Culture?”

Where: Symphony Space

When November 18, 2009

Thumbs: Up

Something as broad as the subject and role of “culture” demands an abstract discussion of ideas and implications. If this were another event, we would have been critical of the general questions that moderator Gene Seymour lobbed at the panel. But faced with such a huge and daunting task as predicting where “culture” is headed, open-ended solicitations like “Is imagination under siege?” were everything but light.

The headliner was supposed to be Toni Morrison who fell ill at the last minute. Her substitute, Wallace Shawn, filled in nicely as he drew inspiration from his long career as an actor, playwright and essayist. Between Shawn and fellow panelists Tony Kushner and Walter Mosley, this panel possessed a huge wealth of experience, thought and consideration for the written word and its impact on our culture.

Perhaps the most surprising thing that they all agreed on was that in order for literature to survive, it must adapt to technological advances. Kushner was quick to point out that it was a bookseller — Amazon — that revolutionized online marketing. And it’s the Kindle that has people most excited about innovation. Mosley hopes that as his generation ages they will avoid the trap of looking back at how things were in the past and believing that simpler was ostensibly better.

It was an audience member, though, who reminded everyone that sometimes we forget what we’re leaving behind with progress. He half-jokingly pointed out how gadgets make it more difficult to be a “nosy reader” these days; you can’t as easily strike up a conversation with a stranger after being struck by his or her book cover. It left us all with something to continue to think about, especially faced with Mosley’s belief that there’s an onus on all artists to connect with as many people as possible.

What They Said
“When was the Golden Age in the 50s under McCarthy when people were reading ‘Moby Dick’?”
– Walter Mosley wonders if there is anything to the claim that there was a time when people had a deeper appreciation for books

“Somebody was paying writers to write about subjects no one was interested in.”
– Wallace Shawn remembers when the New Yorker used to be able to tell the public what to care about

“I love the current President. I think he is the first genuinely progressive person in the White House since Roosevelt.”
– Tony Kushner couldn’t help but interlock the cultural with the political

“Almost every day there is at least one interesting thing on television.”
– Walter Mosley says that with 300 channels to pick from, odds are one of them is airing something worth watching. The hard part is finding it

“I would personally trust more sophisticated and cultural people.”
– Wallace Shawn had some disparaging things to say about past administrations whom he calls “limited” in their scope

“In a healthy culture, everyone’s an artist.”
– Walter Mosley inspires us ere completion to compose this caption as an ode: O’ hark!  To be words/ written by Panel Nerds

What We Thought

• We liked Wallace Shawn’s point that e-mail has evolved to become more professional-sounding, even literary. Chances are if we look back at e-mails we sent a decade ago, we’d find the voice of people who deserved to be left in the past. We’ve, together, (albeit subconsciously) changed the tone of e-mails to reflect a more glamorous side to us.
• Kushner gave as good an explanation for the success of blogs as we’ve ever heard. Americans, he says, like secondary, digested sources. We tend to trust someone who’s scrutinized the original document more than we do the person who put it together.
• The only debate that emerged from the discussion was between Mosley and Kushner about whether “America” could be treated as a character with consistent behavioral patterns. We got the feeling that both would consider writing that character into their next works.

PANEL RULES!
Some audience behavior seems to repeat itself panel after panel. We’ll be updating a running list of “PANEL RULES!” that will help ensure that you are not the dweeb of the Panel Nerds.

Panel Nerds don’t like…Confusion
Three of the eight questions taken at the event left the panelists speechless. Not because the questions were so excellent they took their breath away. Rather, it was extremely unclear what the question was. On all of these occasions, after dealing with a brief, awkward silence, Mosley stepped up and said, kindly, “I’m not sure I understand your question.” We’d have thought that after the first warning that audience members would have tailored their ensuing questions to come across clearly and succinctly. Not so. We sat through cries about capitalism, aesthetic beauty and political theory that were so lofty and complicated that we began to seriously contemplate whether considering the future of our culture was worth the labor.