SALON EVENT

Invisible, by Paul Auster

Saturday, February 6th at 3pm

For more information please contact: jean@nysalon.org

From Publishers Weekly (Nov. 2009)

“Adam Walker, a poetry student at Columbia in the spring of 1967, is Auster’s latest everyman, revealed in four parts through the diary entries of a onetime admirer, the confessions of his once-close friend, the denials of his sister and Walker’s own self-made frame. With crisp, taut prose, Auster pushes the tension and his characters’ peculiar self-awareness to their limits, giving Walker a fractured, knowing quality that doesn’t always hold.

The best moments from Walker’s disparate, disturbing coming-of-age come in lush passages detailing Walker’s conflicted, incestuous love life (paramount to his education as a human being, but a violation of his self-made promise to live as an ethical human being). As the plot moves toward a Heart of Darkness–style journey into madness, the limits of Auster’s formalism become more apparent, but this study of a young poet doomed to life as a manifestation of poetry carries startling weight.”

SALON EVENT

Lush Life: A Novel, by Richard Price
Saturday, October 17, 3pm

For more information please contact: jean@nysalon.org

“No one has a better ear and eye for the American city than Richard Price, and in Lush Life, his first novel in five years, he leaves the fictional environs of Dempsy , New Jersey , where Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan were set, for a few crowded blocks of Manhattan ’s Lower East Side.

There’s a crime at the heart of the story, but you don’t read Price for plot. Instead, you listen as he peels apart layers of class and history through the way his characters talk to each other: hipster bartenders who tell people they’re really writers, homeboys from housing projects named after the Jewish immigrants who have long left the neighborhood, and cops, cops, cops, circling the streets looking for a collar, disappearing into their cases as their own lives go to ruin.”

From Amazon.com

SALON EVENT – President Obama’s Energy Plan
Tuesday, July 21, 7pm
Venue:
Norwood Club, New York

Introduced by Professor James Woudhuysen, Professor of Forecasting and Innovation, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK and coauthor of Energise! A Future for Energy Innovation

Rather than disputing the nature and extent of climate change Professor Woudhuysen will analyze humankind’s response to it. Why have we so far failed to deliver an intelligent response to the problem?

Statement from Professor Woudhuysen:

“In L’Aquila, Italy, China’s Hu Jintao had to leave the G8 summit to try to fix unrest back home. But the Summit’s commitment to lower greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 would have been unconvincing even if Hu had stayed the course. Nobody has yet found computer models that can correctly predict the world economy for next week, let alone 41 years away.

“Obama’s recent Bill to deal with climate change, running to 1300 pages and passed by the slenderest of majorities, is equally unconvincing. His central, market-based ‘cap and trade’ mechanism, designed to penalize emissions, will be regulated by no fewer than three different federal authorities. Based,
bizarrely, on the European Union’s torrid experience with its Emissions Trading System, Obama predicates his scheme on a price per ton of CO2 of $13 in 2012 – a triumph of capitalist ‘hope’ over sober rationality. Likewise, his plans for one million plug-in hybrid vehicles will do little for America’s fleet of 240 million cars, minivans and pick-up trucks.

“In March, Obama proposed that the US become the world’s leading exporter of renewable energy. Again he lacks realism. With the Pickens Plan for wind turbines cancelled for Texas, leadership in wind and solar power has already been ceded to Beijing – quite decisively, and despite the suits heading the Chinese Communist Party.

“Unlike China, Obama is ambivalent about nuclear power and indecisive about cleaning up coal – not least, with Carbon Capture and Storage. Similarly, the G8’s refusal to believe that human societies can adapt to temperature rises higher than 2 degrees reveals a fashionable alarmism and, just as zeitgeisty, an underestimation of mankind’s capabilities. But one can be both hopeful and realistic in forecasting that, by 2050, millions of Chinese and Indian engineers will have developed technologies to bring cheap, forget-about-it energy to billions – and, in the process, technologies both to check and adapt to global warming.”

Other readings

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/us/politics/27climate.html?_r=1
http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/energy_and_environment/
http://www.pddnet.com/news-obama_biden-new-energy-for-america-plan-061609/
http://www.energycurrent.com/index.php?id=2&storyid=18736
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/economy/markets-mainmenu-45/1221-obamas-energy-plan

Introduced by Tama Starr

Saturday, May 30, 2009, 3pm
The beloved, bestselling international author of The Alchemist returns with another haunting novel—a thrilling journey into our constant fascination with the worlds of fame, fortune, and celebrity.

A profound meditation on personal power and innocent dreams that are manipulated or undone by success, The Winner Stands Alone is set in the exciting worlds of fashion and cinema. Taking place over the course of twenty-four hours during the Cannes Film Festival, it is the story of Igor, a successful, driven Russian entrepreneur who will go to the darkest lengths to reclaim a lost love—his ex-wife, Ewa. Believing that his life with Ewa was divinely ordained, Igor once told her that he would destroy whole worlds to get her back. The conflict between an individual evil force and society emerges, and as the novel unfolds, morality is derailed.

Meet the players and poseurs behind the scenes at Cannes—the “Super Class” of producers, actors, designers, and supermodels, as well as the aspiring starlets, has-been stars, and jaded hangers-on. Adroitly interweaving the characters’ stories, Paulo Coelho uses his twelfth novel to paint an engrossing picture of a world overrun by glamour and excess, and shows us the possibly dire consequences of our obsession with fame.