Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Scott Simon at PAL 3.17.09


So it was NPR night at Portland Arts and Lectures. Portland loves its OPB and NPR and almost always responds in a PAL sell-out when one of their personalities appears. In years past we have had evenings with the likes Ira Glass or Terri Gross. This year that programming honor went to Scott Simon. It didn't seem like the must-see evening of this year's series and the additional factor of being downtown on St Patrick's Day did not seem terribly promising, but we avoided the pre-show crowd by making sure we went to Dragon Fish instead of Jake's, and turned out to enjoy a pretty pleasant evening at the Schnitz.

I spent a lot of Saturday mornings listening to Simon on my pick up and delivery route throughout the late eighties and early nineties. I even heard some of his commentaries and interviews repeated as the hours of the shift moved towards CarTalk and quitting time. He has a great set of pipes, quite often a passion, and a quick wit, although his sports fan schtick would run a little thin with me some mornings.

The first thing that impressed everyone in his appearance was this striking pin striped suit he wore made more over the top by a contrasting engineering grid shirt with green handkerchief flowing out of his pocket. Most importantly, the suit gave him an opportunity to warm the crowd up with anecdotes about it. Nice icebreaker.

The main part of the evening's talk involved Simon's transition from journalist to novelist. I am always a little suspect of when a professional writer does this, as when I see an actor or media personality do this, because often it isn't done very well. I have not read Simon's two novels, Little Birds about Sarajevo, or Windy City about Chicago politics, and I don't know how good they are, but I certainly can't dispute his sincerity in their creation after seeing his talk.

"Sarajevo changed my life and Little Birds allowed me to become a novelist." He was appalled that the world did not respond with complete and total outrage to the siege and ethnic cleansing of the early nineties in the Bosnian region. So he created his novel of teenage girl snipers because he wanted to get to a level of his story that journalism would not allow. He saw fiction as being the form for telling this story "after the door closes" on journalism and that it was a story that needed to be told because "the world looked away." The passages he read from Little Birds were indeed sobering and compelling.

By comparison, his discussion of his novel on Chicago politics, Windy City was much lighter and bouyant, but still shows his compassion for the human condition and a deep interest in the pluralistic, multicultural nature of Chicago politics and culture, as well as it being a reflection of the world at large. The book certainly has not been hurt by the recent national focus on Governor Blagojevich, Senator Burris and our President. The book will be coming out soon in paper and Simon says it has been more or less a non-stop tour. He commented that critics have called the book prescient, but Simon said that was a bit like calling any novel set in the Gulf prescient if it happened to feature a tropical storm.

Some of the best comments by Simon came during the question period, especially when he addressed issues of new media. He wonders how long we will be listening to radio on the radio and tended to be positive about the demise of newspapers, believing that new options and opportunities will appear. The positive result is that "There is very little reason for a voice to go unheard these days." He has used Twitter tweets to field questions from the public for forthcoming interviews and has been pleased with the results. "There is a lot of strength in the wisdom of the crowd."

I was glad that the evening with Simon was so pleasant, especially after the horrific couch talk presentation by Anne Patchett and Elizabeth Gilbert last month. It probably was made more so because I had to take an emergency nap to recover from the first class final grade-a-thon. I told Pam afterwords that I would prefer a Portland Arts and Lecture speaker who was more media savvy and less literary, because, you know, it is nice to be entertained as well as edified.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:25 PM
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