Glamour Bar’s mini lit line-up promises clever conversation

"A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet,” Truman Capote once mused. It would take a bold person to argue with that (or Truman Capote), so let’s just say that this month the insufficiency of good conversation is about to be temporarily alleviated thanks to Glamour Bar’s ‘Cosmopolitan Conversations’ series.

The four-dialogue series, hosted in conjunction with CET Academic Programs, will be chaired by respected China history professor and author Jeff Wasserstrom of the University of California. Wasserstrom is a Shanghai Lit Fest alumnus and well known in these parts, having lived in Shanghai in the late 80s and been a regular visitor ever since. He has written a slew of interesting China books, notably his two most recent, Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.

The spark for the conversation series was, in fact, a single conversation which Wasserstrom had a year ago with Pankaj Mishra, the popular Indian essayist and novelist. When asked by Wasserstrom to give a pair of public talks at UC Irvine, Mishra’s response was that he’d love to, but would rather take part in conversations – dialogues or roundtable discussions with other people, perhaps novelists or historians, or a mixture of both. “That way,” he said, “I’ll also learn something from the events.”

Mishra’s dialogues proved a great success and Wasserstrom has since taken every opportunity to be part of similar public conversations. So, too, have others involved in the UCI-based ‘China Beat’ blog. In fact, ‘China Beat’ editors Kate Merkel-Hess and Maura Cunningham recently moderated a series of dialogues that put historian Kenneth Pomeranz into conversation with The New Yorker’s Peter Hessler, journalist Angilee Shah into conversation with Pulitzer Prize winner Ian Johnson, and Wasserstrom into dialogue with freelance journalist and New Republic contributor Mara Hvistendahl.
“Mishra’s dialogues and the later ones at UCI all had amusing as well as edifying parts, as I hope can be said of the upcoming conversation I’ll be part of in Shanghai,” says Wasserstrom.

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