Posts From Author: susan orlean
Curtain Call: Falling For Perfection
How far we’ve come. The House of SpeakEasy opened its doors on a snowy January night with a guest list including Uma Thurman, Andy Borowitz and Susan Orlean. Since then, we’ve featured some thirty of the best and brightest writers in the literary firmament. Tonight, two days after the summer solstice, and with temperatures firmly lodged in the eighties, we’re delighted to feature a super-cool guest list for our season finale. The Daily Show‘s Elliott Kalan, the New Yorker‘s Bob Mankoff, maestro Christopher Mason, poet Jeffrey McDaniel, polymath playwright and novelist Adam Rapp, Barnard College president and writer Debora Spar, and novelist Emma Straub will all take the mic to tackle the pleasures and pitfalls of Falling For Perfection. We’re delighted to introduce them to you… Elliott Kalan has been the head writer at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart since he took over from Tim Carvell in January. “Writing for Jon Stewart… is the number-one job in the world,” he says, and it’s easy to see why. In this presentation sponsored by the Eagleton Institute of Politics, Elliott analyses the use of humour in politics: Bob Mankoff is the cartoon editor at the New Yorker. He recently published an excellent memoir, How About Never — Is Never Good For You?: My Life […]
Read MoreSeriously Entertaining Gala Sets Social Pages Alight
“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.” — Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice” (1923) So wrote Robert Frost in 1923, eerily prescient in his choice of imagery of this past Monday night. For inside the walls of City Winery NYC, as temperatures outside dipped into the low 20s, the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala night turned out to be a sizzling-hot celebration of writers and their art. For Page Six, the evening marked the coming-together of “a pride of literary lions”. For the House of SpeakEasy team, it marked the successful start of a series of Seriously Entertaining shows to come in the months ahead. Playing emcee for the night was comedian Andy Borowitz, creator of The Borowitz Report. In the words of Vogue: [The show] opened with writer and host Andy Borowitz regaling-slash-horrifying the legions of literary-minded folk in attendance with a tale of being asked to live-tweet the Oscars last year by an unnamed newspaper owned by “an Australian man” and turned the offer down once informed it was for no actual fee. “They said they would mention my website,” he dryly quipped. Borowitz’s elliptical anecdote laid bare one of the House of SpeakEasy’s […]
Read MorePlays with Matches: A Brief Meditation on Fire & Literature
This coming Monday, the House of SpeakEasy’s inaugural special guests — Andy Borowitz, Uma Thurman, Adam Gopnik, Susan Orlean, Simon Winchester and Dar Williams — will be stepping onto the stage at City Winery to ruminate on the theme “Plays with Matches”. I don’t know what they’re going to say. But it’s a fantastically potent theme — fiery metaphors abound in world literature, and fire has played a major role in the history of literature. So, in advance of gala night, I thought I’d share some of my own thoughts and a few excerpts from my reading notes. To start with, fire is of course the metaphor of choice for all kinds of passion, noble or ig-: “Love is a spirit all compact of fire, Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.” Venus attempting to sway the passions of Adonis in William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” Humbert Humbert in the opening lines of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Even when said passions turn out […]
Read MoreCurtain Call: Meet Our Special Guests
It’s now just five days till our opening gala, “Plays with Matches”, and now seems a good time to bring all our hosts and special guests together. So, without further ado… Meet Andy Borowitz, our host, talking here about sex education and the difference between “continuously” and “continually” at the 92nd Street Y: “I guess I failed to ask a key follow-up question because I came away from this explanation thinking that all this transpired between a man and a woman while the couple was asleep. And it wasn’t until years later that I realised that one of you has to be awake…” Andy will be joined by Hollywood superstar Uma Thurman, who hosts our literary quiz, “The Tip of My Tongue”. Here’s Uma sharing a $5 milkshake with John Travolta in 1994’s Pulp Fiction. “I’ll tell you what. I’m gonna go to the bathroom and powder my nose. You sit here and think of something to say…” Storytelling collective The Moth has featured writer Adam Gopnik as a guest several times. Here he is in 2006 on how he learned to LOL. “…and I thought to myself, This is the real nature of every communication between parent and child: we send them […]
Read MoreSusan Orlean Does Her Own Stunts
Over the last three weeks it’s been my pleasure to introduce you to the line-up for the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala: comedian and host Andy Borowitz; Hollywood superstar Uma Thurman, who will host literary quiz “The Tip of My Tongue”; writer Adam Gopnik; historian Simon Winchester; singer-songwriter Dar Williams; and finally, the author Susan Orlean. Susan Orlean hails from Ohio and is typically direct and witty in her assessment of the Buckeye State in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (ed. Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey; Ecco, 2008). “The flatness, it turns out, is a myth,” she begins, before going on to dispel other such preconceptions: The vast cornfields are also a myth […] The hard, nasal, cawing accent is mostly a myth, though now and again, as you roam through Ohio, you will certainly hear words shaped without any roundness or melody […] Even the Midwesternness of Ohio is a myth. She finds in the character of Ohio “a certain regularness, a lack of wild distinction, a muting of idiosyncratic extreme”, and feels the need to make it sound livelier. At summer camp as a child: I boasted that Sam Sheppard, the osteopath who murdered his wife in […]
Read MoreFive Minutes with Andy Borowitz
Happy new year, friends! Welcome to the first blog of 2014. Now the holidays are over, we’re all getting tremendously revved up ahead of the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala at City Winery NYC on January 27! The theme for said gala is “Plays with Matches”, and we’re lucky enough to be joined by two amazing hosts to guide us through this fiery subject: comedian Andy Borowitz and Hollywood megastar Uma Thurman. In the weeks leading up to opening night, I’ll be introducing you to Andy and Uma as well as our special guests, Adam Gopnik, Susan Orlean, Dar Williams and Simon Winchester. I spoke to Andy Borowitz over the holidays to get his views on the year past and his hopes for the year ahead. Something of a comic polymath, Andy has to his name credits including TV’s The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (creator), 1998 movie Pleasantville (co-producer) and hit satirical website The Borowitz Report (founder). He is the primary host of The Moth, a storytelling platform launched in New York that has now gone nationwide and recently spawned a New York Times bestseller. Andy won an NAACP Image Award for The Fresh Prince and the inaugural National Press Club Award for Humor in 2004. You might have seen his face […]
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