Green is no longer the color of envy. The new black, green is the color of smart and aware, vibrant, verdant, and vigilant. As the 3rd annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature kicked off at Cooper Union’s Great Hall last night, 11 writers read works from other authors evoking environmental images, or put more plainly, to let us know landscapes and wildlife we have come to know and love are now an endangered species. When T.S. Eliot proclaimed April the cruelest month, he may have meant more than creating a downer out of Chaucer’s optimism. Will we soon be reading of Hamlet’s “unweeded garden” with nostalgia?
Gary Shteyngart said he was radicalized after seeing “President” Gore’s film, Roxana Robinson read from that great “proto-environmentalist” Anton Chekhov, Billy Collins read a sonnet about gated communities named after the wildlife they supplant, Jonathan Franzen read from Jane Smiley’s epic novel The Greenlanders, Pico Iyer read from Peter Matthiessen;s The Snow Leopard, Marilynne Robinson read from her own essay “Wilderness,” Salman Rushdie read a passage involving a “poisonous spill” from Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Other fine voices included Geert Mak from The Netherlands reading in Freesian, Moses Isegawa from Uganda, the Danish novelist Janne Teller reading from Knut Hamsen’s Pan, and Colson Whitehead reading from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
And speaking of Al Gore, he’ll be on hand at tonight’s opening of the Tribeca Film Festival. Talk about timing . .
Comments