Just to add to Ta-Nehisi Coates day at the blog, one last reminder: any Balloon Juicers in the greater Boston area are more than welcome at Ta-Nehisi’s reading/talk at MIT tomorrow night — Tuesday, 29 November. The festivities start at 7 in MIT’s building/room 6-120. (Interactive map here.)
Ta-Nehisi will be starting from his work-in-progress, a historical novel set before during and after the Civil War, told through multiple voices — of slaves and former slaves, slave-holders and more. Readers of this blog will remember Ta-Nehisi’s exceptional work on recovering some of the willed forgetting that marks so much Civil War history during “Confederate History Month” a year or so ago – DennisG highlighted that work as he added his own contributions to the effort. This latest work is the next iteration of that inquiry — and Ta-Nehisi will talk about some of the specific challenges he’s facing as he tries to write through facts into the sound and texture of the past.
Should be a great time. Come if you’ve the necessary proximity and the interest. (BTW: in response to a question on my earlier announcement of this event: it’s free and open to the public, no tickets required.)
Aimai
Cool. I’ll try to come and be a groupie for both of you. What a great evening it will be.
Aimai
J.W. Hamner
Cool. I’ll definitely be there and I’ll bring my camera.
Tom Levenson
@Aimai: @J.W. Hamner:
Looking forward to seeing you both.
SFAW
Tom –
6-120? What is that, a 30-person room? Why not 10-250?
(Yes, I know 6-120 holds somewhat more than 30, I’m just being a pain in the neck. And I would hope TNC would draw more than it holds.)
Best place to park? Mass Ave? Kresge lot? Mem Drive?
I hope I can make it, thanks for posting about it.
Tom Levenson
@SFAW: 150 or so. And why not 10-250? Because I have no idea how many TNC will draw at an engineering school the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. I had Lewis Hyde draw 50, and just after I got to MIT, I was there when Haruki Murakami so overwhelmed 10-250 that the cops came and cleared out half the room. To invoke William Goldman: No One Knows Anything.
Mem Drive is the closest. Mass Ave.’s OK — so is Ames. If you’ve got an MIT sticker, you can park right on the campus main lot.
SFAW
Tom –
Engineering school? Is that what they do there?
I was only kidding about 10-250 – it’d be nice to think he’d draw 400+, but I don’t know if that’d be a reasonable expectation.
No sticker, so I guess I gots to drive around for a bit. I hope I can make it.
TheMightyTrowel
I’m sending my dad (a Baltimore native) along. :)