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As a bonus track, we went back to Lee’s talk from the 2005 Seminar on Humor. Smith’s tale of her high school English class re-enactment of Huckleberry Finn and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi (in a raft of their own construction which they built in a lumber yard in Paduka, Kentucky) and became outlaws, folk heroes and local media celebrities is astonishing, absurd, inspiring and altogether delightful.
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Pico Iyer delivered the annual John Hersey Memorial Address that kicked off the 2006 Seminar on The Literature of Travel, Adventure and Discovery. The talk, entitled "A New Kind of Travel for a New Kind of World: Stillness and Movement on a Fast-Turning Globe" was a dazzling, head-spinning example of Iyer's trademark verbal pyrotechnics.
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Gary Trudeau and Roger Rosenblatt had been travelling together for two days when they sat down to have their scheduled conversation at the 2005 Seminar, and Trudeau kicks it off by asserting that they're all talked out. They weren't. The consensus was that these two should start a talk show-and they could dispense with guests. Brilliant and hilarious. Right click on link and choose save as:
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Another podcast from the 2005: Humor Seminar features Wendy Wasserstein "Shiksa Goddess: Or, How I Spent My Forties". The panel that immediately
preceded Wasserstein that afternoon had concluded that writers must mask
the identities of family members who were the basis for comic characters
in their work. Wassertstein discussed her play "The Sisters Rosensweig"
which featured a character named "Gorgeous", who was remarkably similar
to Wendy's own sister. "When your sister is named Gorgeous, and you're
named Wendy, I think you get to talk about it," she laughed.
Sadly, Wendy Wasserstein, a Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning
playwright who chronicled the triumphs and travails of modern American
women, died a year later in Jan. 2006, of lymphoma.
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At the 2005 Seminar on Humor, Bruce Jay Friedman read his short story "A Change of Plan", originally published in Esquire Magazine. Friedman talked about how the story made the journey to the screen with the 1972 Elaine May-helmed "The Heartbreak Kid" (just remade starring Ben Stiller). It's a great tale of a young writer's seduction by Hollywood, the now-quaint notion of "prostituting yourself" and the consoling power of room service.
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