In this grave new world of new media—an Amazonian world of Kindles, iPads, and Nooks—the Ideas Fest showed a willful disdain of the evolution of literature into new forms, even as session after session extolled the virtues of Twitter, Facebook, and “Living Digitally.” Given a global think-fest where new ideas do the bump (or was it the hustle?), hearing these writers talk about the future was like showing up too late to a wake for the written word.  The future-blindness has spread to the corporate cousin of the Ideas Fest, the Aspen Writers’ Festival. At the Writers’ Fest this summer, there was a session called “Written Word In A Digital World,” a throwaway panel featuring local Colorado writers with no particular purchase on the future. At a time when conferences and confabs across the media are all dealing with the new realities of self-publishing and social media, the Aspen Writers’ Festival had its head buried in hourglass sand up to its neck.   

One attendee told me a panel of agents and business types ignored the “elephant in the room”—the fact that Amazon and Apple could become the most important players in publishing, electronic or not. Instead the Writers’ Fest, like the Aspen Ideas Festival, seemed happy to muck about with a fading map of the world and a portable GPS device that blinks happily in anticipation of the good old days that never were.  For the record, this year the Aspen Writers’ Fest is celebrating the American South. A couple of years ago it was the West. No doubt the other body parts of literary American are in the hopper. Continents await. And the beauty of this approach is that you can just start over when you fall off the edge of the world. The final event this summer’s conference was Colum McCann “Back By Popular Demand.” The recycling has already begun. Keep in mind that all this cyclical celebration of literary tradition in Aspen comes at a time like no other in writing and literature and media—a time in the widening world when the Ideas Fest and the Aspen Writers’ Festival can still take point on future of fiction. Instead both have taken a curiously curatorial approach, looking backward when the future of literature beckons every writer forth as never before. What a pain! 

Entry Filed under: Books, Aspen, Con Games, Fiction, United Post