Ten Years, Ten Dollars
Last Thursday, under pressure from The Stranger to confirm or deny rumors that Northwest Bookfest was canceling the 2004 festival and suspending operations, Bookfest executive director Danielle Bennett spent the morning preparing a written statement on behalf of the organization. The rumors were true, as Bennett (and the statement) soon confirmed. [See "Bookfest Goes Bust," page 10.] Mostly the statement contained standard press-release stuff: "After carefully assessing [our] current financial resources...." "The determination was made that producing another large-scale event could potentially leave the organization facing another deficit...." "Seattle is a very vibrant literary town...." "We're sad that we are unable to deliver our 10th anniversary event...." Et cetera. Professional, non-specific, positive. But in the body of her e-mail to me, Bennett wrote, "P.S. You now owe me $10."
That P.S. was a reference to a long article I wrote a few weeks back comparing Bookfest to a (far superior) spring literary festival in Spokane ["The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Books Festival," April 29]. In that article, I described a recent Bookfest kickoff party at which Bennett announced some "exciting" plans for the 10th anniversary festival, one of which was to collect people's memories about Bookfests of years past to be incorporated into a "visual retrospective." This "exciting" plan, I thought, exactly epitomized Bookfest's infantilizing and increasingly irrelevant place in the Seattle arts scene. (In recent years, attendance has plummeted.) Instead of working to create more challenging programming or book interesting authors or find a venue more central to the city or rethink the admission fee, the organizers of Bookfest, I wrote, were "spending their time dreaming up plans for retrospectives of people's memories, which no one's going to pay $10 to see. (I'd pay $10 not to see that.)"
In the past, I have described Bookfest as "troubled," "self-satisfied," "cloying," "stagy," "sentimental," "commercial," "unaccountably smug," "depressing," "stupid," and "dead," which is why a lot of people expected I'd be happy last week about news of Bookfest's demise. (A friend answered a phone call from me the other day by saying, "Well, you killed that little festival, didn't you?") To them, I offer this: One way of demonstrating that you take something seriously, and that you seriously care, is by thinking critically. I never hoped Bookfest would die, I just hoped it wouldn't continue to suck. While its death might mean good things for the future of Seattle (every ending is a new beginning, if you close the door fate comes in through the window, and so forth), certain things I've written about Bookfest, on rereading, take me by surprise. At first I didn't even get what Bennett meant by my owing her $10. She had to remind me. "Because you said you'd give me $10 not to have to see people's visual retrospectives," Bennett explained, "and I am assuring you that that's not going to happen now."
