Shock of the New

Bumbershoot blows the library dust off its literature program, and traditionalists are steamed.

The Literary Arts program has vanished from this year’s Bumbershoot Festival (September 4–6 at Seattle Center), replaced by the trendy new Words & Ideas program, which features a more web-and-pop-culture-conscious, interactive, polymorphous if not perverse lineup. “It’s a little like the TED [Technology, Entertainment, Design] Conference,” says curator Chris Weber, “but every program has a writer attached to it.”

Illustration by Sean Alexander for City Arts.

The festival’s big reading is no tweedy traditional affair. Hosted by Tacoma prosecutor/Brat Pack novelist and former six-figure Hollywood screenwriter Mark Lindquist, it features the Twitter-loving Rick Moody, who will screen The Crawling Hand, the cheesy sci-fi flick that inspired his new 736-page novel The Four Fingers of Death. Other Words & Ideas programs include “Why Failure? Why Cuteness? Why Now?” (about Internet memes and the success of the Seattle-based Cheezburger Network), “Why Vampires? Why Abraham Lincoln? Why Now?” (about the current crazes for bloodsuckers and Lincoln), and “Why Bacon? Why Cupcakes? Why Now?” (about successful local bacon and cupcake entrepreneurs). A program entitled “MeTube” features luminaries like David Schmader, the Stranger editor famed for the DVD commentary to Showgirls, screening YouTube videos that remind them of their own lives. “And the Vis-à-Vis Society will interview the audience and graph their response on overhead projectors – instant feedback,” says Weber. “For a trend program, that makes sense. Trends change quickly!”

The literary luminaries appearing at Words & Ideas include veterans of McSweeney’s, David Letterman, The Office, the Cartoon Network and Big Love, as well as three writers each from the New Yorker and Saturday Night Live (one of whom wrote for both).

Not everyone is pleased by the change in programming. “If ‘Literary Arts’ implies a painstaking synthesis, an attempt at creating some higher level of coherence,” says Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, “‘Words & Ideas’ suggests more of a Las Vegas–buffet approach to culture. Cultural products and events are being reshaped to fit the expectations of a Web-saturated audience. The assumption, increasingly, is that no one can pay attention to one thing for more than a few minutes, so we get multimedia, interactive experiences that keep us pleasantly distracted and require little in the way of deep intellectual or emotional engagement.”

“Why shouldn’t people reflect on popular culture?” retorts Hugo House’s Alix Wilber. “Sometimes you want a cupcake and sometimes you want a main dish – and between Words & Ideas and Elliott Bay and Town Hall and Hugo House, there are plenty of opportunities for a five-course meal.”

“The shift in programming is indicative of the changing landscape of writing,” adds Hugo House’s Brian McGuigan, who joins Cienna Madrid and Elissa Washuta for a Words & Ideas reading/slide show about weight and body image. “I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, especially considering how run-of-the-mill Bumbershoot’s literary programming has been.”

All over Seattle, literary programming has gotten less run-of-the-mill, but with no decline in traditional readings. Hugo House didn’t get a whit less serious when it invented fun stuff like the Dead Poets Society, Cheap Beer and Prose, and its recent Zine event. “It would make me sad if fun trendiness completely replaced true intellectual rigor,” says Wilber, “if it were all bacon and no Moody.”

Perhaps Bumbershoot was wise to add a side of bacon. “Although I go for the big-name writers,” says slam poet and novelist Karen Finneyfrock, “it seems like the festival’s audience is teens and early twentysomethings. I’m not sure the Bumbershoot crowd reads Jonathan Raban.”

Wilber thinks we should focus on the literary message, not the medium. “I think we are all getting too caught up in the new modes of delivery (Internet! Kindle! interactive Web stories!) and forgetting that no matter how we deliver them, what people are still looking for is good stories.”

Some will prefer literature without the multimedia chaser. “I think real lit events take place when someone, alone, has his or her nose in a book,” says Raban. “At least that’s when mine do.” •

Read last month’s Tacoma cover story on Mark Lindquist in the archives here.