Books Reading Last Night: Richard Powers
posted by on March 6 at 10:58 AM
Last night was the Richard Powers talk at Seattle Arts and Lectures, and it turned out exactly as I expected: an excellent reading, followed by an incredibly lame question and answer session. Powers, hiding his skinny frame in super-baggy business casual clothing and sporting an archetypically bowl-shaped bowl haircut, looked like the Bill Gates of literature (he actually did work as a computer programmer before becoming a novelist.)
Powers read a new story, “Modulation,” in its entirety. It was the story of four people: A journalist in Iraq, a retiring music professor, a former hacker now working for the RIAA, and a man who is on tour with a retrospective of 80s and early-90s video game music. In typical Powers form, music was examined in many different ways. It functions as a morale-boosting tool to improve enemy-soldier-killing performance and as something enslaved that begged to be freed from the malicious bindings of copyright. The professor regrets portable music devices, at one point realizing that “He should’ve known that music, like the most robust of weeds, would one day come in pods.” Everything builds to the creation of something utterly new, and we watch the different characters respond to the event with varying levels of disbelief. It was an amazing story, the best kind of science fiction, and hearing it read aloud really brought something wonderful to the experience.
The Q&A was mercifully brief. The only real high point was when Powers referred to both programming and writing as similarly “tweaking the ratios.” The final question was the windbaggiest, referring back to a 1999 article Powers wrote and quoting liberally from it for what seemed like forever, before finally asking the question: “Do you feel bleak or hopeful about the future?” Powers’ answer was long, though not as long as the question, but his answer was basically: “both.” Then everybody applauded as though he had bestowed the meaning of life upon us. It wasn’t a bad enough Q&A to dispel the power of the reading, but it sure wouldn’t convince any first-time SA&L-goers to come back to one of their readings.
This is the problem I have with readings: it's a different skill than writing, one not remotely related to writing, and one that frequently seems to come up in opposition to writing.
Expecting writers to be good talkers is like expecting baseball pitchers to be good hitters. It's not impossible, but you're not selecting for it, you're unlikely to get it.
Nabokov: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a idiot child". He did all of his interviews in writing.
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