http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/03/reading_last_night_richard_powers 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... Copyright 2008 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:58:14 -0800 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:37:27 -0800 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.34 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 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.

]]> Fnarf http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/03/reading_last_night_richard_powers#c959264 http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/03/reading_last_night_richard_powers#c959264 Books Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:37:27 -0800