Lawrence Weschler

Lawrence “Ren” Weschler will present a special lecture “Convergences” in advance of his visit to Bookshop Santa Cruz to promote his latest book, Uncanny Valley.  In his talk Weschler will consider a spectrum of such convergent effects, from apophenia (the tendency of humans to see patterns where none exist) through co-causation, fractalization, influence (forward and backward, direct and unconscious), homage, apprenticeship, allusion, quotation, appropriation, cryptonesia (verbatim appropriation without realizing you’re doing so), through outright plagiarism.

A graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz (1974), Weschler was for over twenty years (1981–2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Awards—for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992—and was also a recipient of Lannan Literary Award (1998). Beginning in 1999, his “Convergences” essays appeared regularly in McSweeney’s Quarterly; a collection of these essays, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, was published in 2006 and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

Since 2001, Weschler has been the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. He taught throughout the 1990s at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

In 2003, Weschler organized and edited a pilot issue of Omnivore, a prospective periodical described by Steven Heller as a “biannual (but hoping to be quarterly) magazine of writing and visual culture from The New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University.”[1] As of 2007, no subsequent issues of Omnivore have been published.

In February 2006, Weschler took on the position of artistic director for the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Light refreshments will be served.  Closest parking is OPERS lot.