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01.20: David Shields & Caleb Powell
2014-12-18 20:04:24| Powells Books Events Calendar
Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life (he's a stay-at-home dad to three young girls), whereas his former professor David Shields always wanted to become a human being, but he overcommitted to art (he has five books coming out in the next year and a half). Shields and Powell spent four days together at a cabin in the Cascade Mountains, playing chess, shooting hoops, hiking to lakes and an abandoned mine, rewatching My Dinner with Andre and The Trip, relaxing in a hot tub, and talking about everything they could think of in the name of exploring and debating their central question (life and/or art?): marriage, family, sports, sex, happiness, drugs, death, betrayal — and, of course, writers and writing. Their book, I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel (Knopf), seeks to deconstruct the Q&A format, which has roots as deep as Plato and Socrates and as wide as Laurel and Hardy, Beckett's Didi and Gogo, and Car Talk's Magliozzi brothers. I Think You're Totally Wrong also seeks to confound, as much as possible, the divisions between "reality" and "fiction," between "life" and "art." There are no teachers or students here, no interviewers or interviewees, no masters in the universe — only a chasm of uncertainty, in a dialogue that remains dazzlingly provocative and entertaining from start to finish.
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Category:Textiles and Nonwovens