Texas Book Festival Is This Weekend!
Saturday & Sunday, November 1-2
Texas State Capitol (1100 Congress Ave)
Sessions are FREE and open to public
[info]
Besides, word around the internets is that Books are making a serious cultural comeback. In a BIG way. Like, Kardashian’s caboose kind of way. Like a bridge to nowhere in a nowhere state with leaders who don’t know where news comes from kind of way. THAT kind of big.
Enter: The Texas Book Festival, going on this Saturday and Sunday.
The festival itself is broken up into smaller venues, mostly centered on The Capitol grounds (House Chamber, Senate Chamber, Capitol Extension rooms, various Tents about the grassy knolls of the lawn, etc), with a few satellite events at The Alamo Ritz, Austin Museum of Art, Dell Jewish Community Center, The Continental Club, and the Austin Bat Cave (satellite locations are mostly for evening events).
So it is a festival on books, in Austin, for you, this weekend!
Here is the schedule for both Saturday and Sunday. Check some of these panels:
Market-Fresh Mixology: Cocktails for Every Season (YES)
Peter Post & Cindy Post Senning: All About Etiquette (whuzzat?)
Do You Mean Gay as in Happy? (seriously, which is it?)
And then there’s a healthy smattering of politically bent discussion panels, all of which appear more useful to us than what we glean from cnn. America- United We Stand?, The War Over American Ideals, and Memo To The President-Elect.
We are not trying to stir up anything on the international political scene here in our meager web space, but this particular discussion rings crazy interesting: The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradoxes of Modern Iran (2-2:45pm on Sunday). Sweet Mary, Austinist has some friends and relatives who seriously need to learn a thing or two about Iran just in case our next President chooses to sprinkle more bombs in the area. Check out the event description:
The grandson of an eminent ayatollah and the son of an Iranian diplomat, Hooman Majd, now an American citizen, combines an insider’s knowledge of how Iran works with a remarkable ability to explain its history and its quirks to Western readers. In The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, he paints a portrait of a country that is fiercely proud of its Persian heritage, mystified by its outsider status, and scornful of the idea that the U.S. can dictate how it should interact with a community of nations. With wit, style, and an unusual ability to get past the typical sound bite on Iran, Majd reveals the paradoxes inherent in the Iranian character which have baffled Americans for over thirty years. Majd has also written about Iran for GQ, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.
That is a definite GO.
And then there are events like Babar’s Party: A Tribute to Babar and Laurent de Brunhoff (10-10:30am, Saturday, Family Life Center). Love that elephant. Anything for the kids, right?
Books! Word!
