92nd Street Y: April 29th, Liberties panel

It’s an honor to be a member of a small panel having a group discussion for a live audience on April 29th at the famed 92nd Street Y. Discussion subject: “the intersection of political and literary culture in America — and how a small cadre of magazines are helping to rekindle the art of intelligent cultural discourse in the age of social media.” The event is in honor of Liberties journal’s 5-year anniversary.

The panel will be hosted by journalist David Shipley, whose successful career includes stints as executive editor of The New Republic, editorial page editor at the New York Times, and editorial page editor at the Washington Post (he resigned in February after Jeff Bezo’s craven announcement that the op-ed page at the Washington Post will not host pieces “opposing” certain ideologies. And so the dominoes topple, and the institutions cave, as they always do, and it’s amazing to watch it happen in real-time, after reading about such things through history. There really is a playbook, isn’t there?)

Participating in the panel will be Liberties editor Leon Wieseltier as well as managing editor Celeste Marcus, and regular contributors: Arash Azizi, Sean Wilentz, my old pal James Wolcott from Vanity Fair, and me. My monthly column at Liberties has been on a brief hiatus, mainly because of the deadlines for the massive project I’ve been working on for a year, all of which came to a head January-March. But my column will be back up and running shortly. I have some fun plans for it. In fact the one-year anniversary of the launching of my column is tomorrow!

This is kind of a heady crowd to be involved with, to be honest! Just for my own entertainment, I’ll try to work in at least one reference to Elvis. After all, I did write about Elvis in my column. (Shocker.)

These are dark times, and in such times – again, as we know from history – culture is more important than ever. It’s hard to feel that way when you’re in the middle of it. I’ve had to really dig deep to immerse myself in the Romantics – the Shelleys, Byron, Keats, Coleridge – for this project, and half the time I have barely had the bandwidth to do what I need to do. My personal life is beyond busy. I had a manic bout from around November to February, and by the time I recognized what was happening the train had left the station. The Supernatural rewatch is how I’m coping. You have your strategies, I have mine. But still: there is much work to be done and my ingrained discipline as a writer has paid off. I can rely on the discipline. I don’t have to think about it. The muscles are highly developed. I write whether I feel like it or not, and it’s been that way since I first started keeping a diary at age 13. My column at Liberties has been an oasis, not an escape. It’s a place where certain things still exist, my personal touchstones and talismans, which hopefully reach out to an audience with their own touchstones, who love art like I do, and in the midst of chaos, I’ve been trying to create an archive of my continuum of inner/outer life, reflecting the culture – whatever it entails – that still matters.

So I am really looking forward to the event! If you’re in New York, consider attending, and find me afterwards to say hi!