Disappointing Speaker

Abby and I went to see Azar Nafisi speak at Cal Performances earlier this week. Who is Azar Nafisi? She is the author of, among other titles, Reading Lolita In Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Neither of us had read any of her work, but hey, we're literary types and it certainly sounds interesting. (It's an account of her and other women reading Western books in the rigid fundamentalist Iranian world.)

In light of the recent news that Iran suspended it's nuclear program in 2003, as well as the general drumbeat towards war our administration seems taken with, it seemed like a really relevant lecture, and I was looking forward to it.

Unfortunately, it sucked.

Sucked is too strong of a word - certainly, Nafisi wasn't offensive - despite her Wikipedia entry suggesting she's a neoconservative, she derided the Bush administration several different times. The problem, in fact, was closer to the converse:

She sounded, at least to me, like an idealistic idiot.

You see, her new book - still a work in progress - is tentatively titled "The Republic of Imagination." It's an interesting title, and certainly there's something there. But to hear her talk about it, she sounded to me like a college freshman who suddenly discovers that, "We're all the same kind of person, regardless of where we came from!"

She asked rhetorical questions like, "If we see suffering on the streets of America, why do we not care about the suffering elsewhere?" (Um...who says we don't?) She implored the audience to not be limited by lack of an imagination. She literally said nothing I hadn't heard before, mostly from stoned classmates sometime in the late 1980s.

That being said, I'm glad I went - it's always good to be disappointed every now and again, since it makes the good lectures we've attended this year (Eric Schlosser, Richard Ford, Michael Krasny among others) all the more enjoyable.