intellectual sonic ephemera
These are quotes from the Q&A after Azar Nafisi’s keynote address about Al-Mutanabbi Street at Corcoran, in conjunction with the exhibition of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadside Project. I’m transcribing her talk right now for the anthology that’s coming out next year of essays and poetry responding to the bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street—-it’s a remarkable talk, really, and I’m enjoying taking out all the verbal artifacts to formalize and polish it up to be published, but I can’t help but feel as if something is being lost by doing so. I don’t know what the permissions are surrounding the lecture or distributing the mp3, but…
here are some things likely that won’t make it into the printed version…
(this was the first of four total questions):
male student: How many of the images next door were done by women? [he means the broadsides, one of which was printed by me, actually!]
Casey Smith (organizer of the conference, which is on science and the book arts): Quite a lot, I think. Quite a lot. Right now there is undergoing right now a letterpress revival that is led by women. So if you are a letterpress printer and you are over forty, you are most likely a man, but if you are a letterpress printer and you are under forty, you are almost certainly a woman.
…
(this was the third and most important, I think, question)
female student: Hi, thank you very much. Towards the beginning of your talk, when you were talking um, about people who were glued to the television in this 24-hour news cycle, you drew a distinction between provoking curiosity and affirmation. And I found your talk to be very affirming! And I think most people in this room found it very affirming And you end it with this kind of political call out—“Who’s going to bail out imagination and curiosity?” And I think that’s a beautiful question, but how do we actually create curiosity for people who aren’t like me, and who aren’t in this room? So that we don’t just, you know, continually—and I know this is an age-old question, but—affirm ourselves, and actually move outside of that.
Azar Nafisi: And, well, that is why I think that, well, you know, you know, every sort of—- I don’t want to call it a movement, I thought I left activism behind when I left Iran, but you know, it starts small and you don’t know when to stop. But one of the amazing things for me, over the past six or seven years, I have traveled this country, the smallest cities, red and blue, you know, and sometimes a thousand people come. And they are there because they are curious, because… or the National Mall, you know, ever time they have ah, I think that’s a good time for a demonstration, the National Book Festival every year, you know, the amount, the number of people who come. So, I think we need to maybe this time use the Internet for …for positive reasons, and try and create, and create a discussion, and I think that, um, wherever you are, especially at the universities, I think students should start asking questions. Everybody is defining this generation. The generation should define itself, and they should really, we should have conversations at this university, and around this town, asking the question of what do we want, you know? And not some politician up there responding to us, you know, of ourselves…I’m very bad at organizing anything, but I’m sure that if you have any suggestions please contact me at me, through my meager website or on facebook, or email.
