Kitty Carlisle once said to me when she was about 85: "Have you noticed, Lewis, that as you get older time appears to go faster and faster? For me at 85 it seems like I'm having breakfast every 15 minutes." And as I write this spring blog the fall seems to have just flashed by. Of course this is an illusion created by the fact that I am productive and enjoying myself. It will surprise you how time will viscerally slow down if you set up a bridge chair in an empty, windowless room and just stare at the wall.
But since fall 2012 at The Hunter College Writing Center was amazing, spring should be the next superlative up. Our lead-off speaker for our Best-Selling-Author Series, A.M. Homes, is an extraordinary writer, think "The Safety of Objects", or "The End of Amy", and the rest of the roster is equally exciting. You probably just saw Tom Cruise playing Jack Reacher in the first blockbuster film based on Lee Child's novels. We are lucky enough to have Lee Child visiting us on March 6 and I hope you will join us. In April we will host Yiyun Li, a MacArthur Fellow who was named by the New Yorker Magazine as one of the top 20 writers under forty in the country. Steve Berry the mega-selling suspense writer will conclude our series on May 13.
This spring we will again run our Great Thinker's Series and here superlatives may not even be enough. Lewis Lapham, who will visit us on February 19, is the founder and editor of Lapham's Quarterly and was the brilliant editor of Harpers' Magazine for 17 years. I can hardly say enough about Edward Witten who is one of the world's leading string theorists, a mathematical physicist who along with Alan Guth, another of our speakers, is one of the nine scientists recently awarded the Fundamental Physics Prize which carries with it a $3 million dollar stipend -- twice that of the Nobel Prize.
Speaking of the Nobel Prize, Sheldon Glashow, who will be visiting us in April, actually won the Nobel Prize in Physics for important work he did extending electroweak unification models. In case you are not into electroweak unification models, Shelly can also enlighten you on the subjects of quarks, leptons, charm and many of the other fascinating informatal denizens of the quantum world. By the way, don't bother to look up "informatal"; it's a mysterious portmanteau-adjectival-neologism I just created to mean the plural of various units of data and information that also allowed me to keep typing without having to go back and correct whatever word I started to write that seemed wrong at the time. If you can't follow that last sentence not to worry just pretend it didn't happen and go on to the rest of this blog directly.
So where were we? Ah yes, the Great Thinker's Series which should be outstanding. I wouldn't want to miss it. And then there are all our courses taught by Daphne Merkin, Sidney Offit, Sharon Johnson, Grace Edwards, the poet Danielle Blau, etc. etc. It's a hell of a spring if I do say so myself.
I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention our third annual Writers Conference coming up on Saturday June 8 at Hunter. Adam Gopnik and Erica Jong are the keynotes and Alan Furst, Edward Hirsch and Ben Cheever are teaching the intensives. The 70 other luminous writers, editors and publishers on the dozen panels will hold forth on the new transformations taking place in publishing, the inside scoop on self-publishing, fiction, agents et al. Do contact us at 212-772-9292 or 212-650-3850 to register for courses, RSVP for events, or find out more information. Or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or our website, or send an e-mail to twcce@hunter.cuny.edu.
