![]() ![]() ![]() The conversation is riveting, and somehow more informative than the many interviews in which Obama is the one fielding the questions. Here was the president asking Marilynne Robinson for her views on the role of fear in American politics, how her interest in Christianity converges with her concerns about democracy, and why she ended up a writer after growing up in small-town Idaho. Judging from the response online, it would seem that one of the things the American public doesn’t get a chance to do as often as we would like, is see, or rather read, our president in an uncontrived, non-primetime, philosophical, even theological meeting of the minds with a public figure he reveres. “One of the things I don’t get a chance to do as often as I’d like,” he says, “is just to have a conversation with somebody who I enjoy and I’m interested in.” Robinson was “first in the queue.” Typically when he travels to a place like Des Moines, Iowa, where Robinson lives, he must immediately make a speech, attend a town hall, visit a factory, or do some other similarly scripted thing, Obama explains. ![]() “This is an experiment,” the president says at the outset. ![]() What a pleasure it was when, earlier this week, the Internet was overtaken with the news that President Obama had conducted an interview with Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead, Lila, and many other novels and collections, for The New York Review of Books: Precious few are the moments when brilliant, cult-y fiction writers ascend to the all-important status of Trending Topic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |