The seven kinds of people you get at an arts/culture Q&A

But will it be a question or statement?

Years ago I asked a friend whether he’d like to go see Noam Chomsky give a talk on… the usual stuff Chomsky talks about. My friend’s balloon-popping response was, “Why, is he meant to be better live?” Chomsky is now 94 by way of transforming into anarchist Father Christmas so I reckon I missed my last chance. But what did I miss exactly?

Why do we go see authors and artists do talks, panels, Q&As? Is it for access to the (heavy quotation marks) celebrities? Since the ascension of the Blue Ticks into their gated online communities few remain you can accost on Twitter; attending a panel you at least get to see them popped from 2 to 3-D. Which isn’t unsalutary, yet neither is it as grounding as you’d think. There’s still something uncanny about a celebrity seen in the flushed flesh, and even after that’s worn off they keep at a point of remove, on the stage, ahead of the seats. Unless, that is, during the Q&A your pick-me!-pick-me! hand wins out. Then is it for the chance to ask a Q, get some As, to converse, discuss? But if you gathered the wittiest, most articulate and thoughtful panel to sit there fiddling with their papers and bluish plastic cups, they’d still suffer the same problem as a televised culture show: never enough time for the discussion to catch fire. (And that assumes a discussion was ever on the cards; a fun game to play with your friends during a Q&A is to guess before the microphone gets to each person with their hand up whether it’s going to be a Question or Statement.) Most Q&As stay at the scattergun level of that scene in Breathless where Jean Seberg attends an outdoor panel with the novelist Mr. Parvulesco (none other than Jean-Pierre Melville), who’s asked a barrage of such killer questions as, “Are women more sentimental than men?”, “Does the soul exist?” and “Do you like Brahms?” (“Like everyone, no.”) So then is it just for the free frigid spicy red wine and subsistence diet of Kettle Chip crisps? What kind of a person would that appeal to?

First off:

1. The know-it-and-say-it-alls

I was once at a Q&A where the very first hand to go up was picked inappropriately easily, seeing as it’d been a talk on Kafka. The louche young man held and talked into the mike like a seasoned TV journalist. (You’d be forgiven for thinking all Q&As were, “Hi, posh person with a microphone,” followed by, “Hi, posh person with a microphone,” like press conference newshounds introducing themselves and their papers.) He asked a panellist the question, “Are you familiar with Marcel Schwob?” which really was the statement, “I’m familiar with Marcel Schwob.” PhD flopped out, he then tried mounting the driest-ever academic discussion, full of unasked-for abstract nouns and off-hand mentions of monographs published in close-circuit journals. I recognised him now: he was the guy in the audience with the one jarring booming laugh each time a panellist made a dud joke about Kant or literary translation.

The more the Schwob-advocate talked the more I think he saw himself slowly swapping places onto the panel. No one’s immune to the desire for a short cut, to becoming a notable, an Important Thinker by association. Afterwards I spied him in reception trying to draw out his colloquy with one of the famous professors while she was halfway out the door: angling for the autograph, the sign that is fellow-thinking, likemindedness: approval.

2. The ghost at the intellectual feast

When Žižek launched his tower of Hegel, his publishers billed it as a 60s style happening or sit-in. The Big Ž was going to read out the whole book, declaim it rather, in one go, in one night. You could bring sleeping bags! In practice, he read out a couple of pages; the rest were read by harried Verso interns wandering the café with their printouts like a German Idealist version of a Punch Drunk live theatre piece.

Then again Žižek might’ve been sped on his way by the old man in shorts who’d only ever unfolded his arms to put his hand up. He’d asked Žižek whether intellectuals like him could explain why they’d betrayed the working class.

You can spot the ghost at the feast early by their impatient look at having to wait on the mike to rove their way. Some have gotten annoyed by the panel; others came annoyed. Often their spouse is sitting next to them, nodding during the axe-grind of a question and/or heckling the answer and/or shaking their head. It’s like BBC Question Time for LRB subscribers.

Don’t think, though, panellists can’t be axe-grinders too. I once saw a man address a panellist whose name he’d not caught (it’s not like she was world famous) as “the lady from America…” To a Brit the word ‘lady’ is, if anything, too genteel; to American ears however it must’ve had the same prissy contempt as ‘sir’. He didn’t get to his question before she told him she was not some lady but a PhD so how about he address her as doctor? She was on the panel defending drone strikes.

3. Full-on fruitcakes

Something about the world of arts and letters drives or attracts eccentricity. Most are benign, even sweet: a little more talkative than average perhaps, a little lonelier. Most but not all. Once at the AGM of a world-renowned cultural organisation an elderly woman - voice reedy with outrage - asked why the panel wasn’t discussing the secret committee that suppressed any book warning of the UK’s imminent takeover by “shariah creeps” (which I think is a b-side from Massive Attack’s Mezzanine.) Fortunately the chair dispatched her Islamophobia with a Dr. Evil-style “riiiiiight”. Others aren’t so deft. At the launch of one biography, the chair was paralysed at which way he ought to split when a questioner accused the panel of racism for imputing Malcolm X was bi.

The focus in the arts on semiotics, subtext-digging, iconoclasm was always going to attract, among others, the mystical if not conspiratorial-minded. Plus for some there’s that galling contradiction between these events’ low bar for spectation and the rarified status of those you spectate: cultural gatekeepers, tastemakers, the Made-Its. Come see for free or cheap those whose ranks you don’t ever seem to join!

4. The petitioners

And they’re off, to the front table, bearing a clutch of manuscript pages or their home-burnt CD. They run the range from the precocious young to the nerve-wracked inverts, determined hustlers, through to bitter old weirdos. The digital revolution hampered them to some extent - who’d plug in a stranger’s thumb-drive? - but many of them aren’t actually looking for a break.

One consequence of treating artists as role models and spiritual guides is people come to them for life advice. But why’s an author or artist got more to tell you about life than a scientist or for that matter a lawyer or accountant?

Whether it’s on life or art, advice is seen by the petitioner as a magic word, a password. But more often than not, asking advice is really a craftier form of procrastination. I can’t remember which I was after when I petitioned the late great Alasdair Gray for advice on being a novelist. In any case his answer was, “Don’t do it.”

5. The ol’ muckers

A harder-core version of the eccentric fan is the crony, the familiar face, the ol’ mucker. They attend fairs and cons with the dedication of owl-eyed Acid-cases who still gig it every weekend. Their tell is that they address the panel by first names. (And your kinder panellist might respond with a “Hello mate.”) The ol’ mucker asking the multi-part question or hogging the signing table is often even a parallel panellist. If any discussion is to be had it’s quick-fire and exclusive: ancient beefs, fallen reputations, in-jokes, in-insults. They’re like scene queens where the scene is comics or books.

They have an important role: they remind you how much of their life people can dedicate to art, how hermetic and petty those people can nonetheless be, and how the practice of art is always closer to muck than it is to airier things.

6. Nabu

One real character never absent from an arts and letters Q&A is Nabu, the ancient Akkadian god of writing. Ten-feet-tall, bearded, capped like a priest, hands clasped to conceal the power they’re charged with, the power to mean. Bow before his, the original logos! He was there when the first human totting up mammoths pressed handprints into the mud so he could double the number of fingers to count with. He was there for the cuneiform carving of the Code of Hammurabi and for the feather quill inscribing, ‘We hold these truths...’ Anything written is but a measly instantiation of his divine script magic—from the curly curs and kicking kuz penned by toddlers to an old drunk master’s calligraphy. Yet the arrival of the printing press didn’t pervert or shackle Nabu; it was a simultaneous abstraction and enrichment, like the move from tribal chants to contrapuntal choir music. Become Mercury in the Roman pantheon, he is the god of those mercurial messages called texts. He presides over every manual and post-it note, over all toilet graffiti and late-night sexting, over the blurb read in the basement of a second-hand bookshop and the MARRY ME JILL seen sky-written by a hired pilot across the heavens. His hymn the scratchy silence of the scriptorium, the skeletal click-clack of keyboards in an open-plan office. Ink his blood! His mark the callused middle finger! His stigmata RSI! Akkadian-Sumerian ‘Nabu’ from which comes the nabiyy of Arabian prophethood. Panellists his priestly intermediaries, draughty local arts spaces his Mithraeums, the seven kinds of people at a Q&A his unwitting cultists. Nam dub sar-ra-ama-gù! Dé ke e ne-a a-um me a-ke eš!

7. The audience plants

Sometimes an audience at a Q&A reacts like a classroom too bored or scared to speak. In which case the manager, editor or other such professional colleague will ask a question. These as it were publishing houseplants are well-meaning, and honourable enough not to ask anything in the line of “How do you make art so well?” They’re more like the person heading to the buffet first so everyone else won’t feel like a glutton. Or, in asking a question later on, the plant plucks the thread of a discussion starting to sag and whips it back into shape.

Other audience plants are more distorting. At university I went to a debate on Emily Dickinson and marginalised voices in poetry, where one of the speakers, as she let on to me later in her mortified post-mortem, had secretly arranged for an out-of-town friend to act as a sort of anti-plant. The plan was the friend would heckle her, like the inverse of a paid mourner, and so prove her side of the debate about silenced voices.

What she’d forgotten was she’d invited her mum, who was in town, to come to the debate too. Just as the “heckler” started to play his role, the mum shushed him violently. She continued to shush and glare, to the point she came across as a no.2 on this list if not a no.3. By the end, the chair had to ask the mum to keep her voice down.

Failed hoax notwithstanding, what the Dickinson-fan knew was that panels, talks, Q&As are best when they’re performances. At an event at the British Library once Will Self picked a questioner by saying “the woman in the hat”. As her preamble, she reminded him she was more than a woman in a hat, and so he went on a spiel addressing her as “a rounded human being with a past and inner life and hopes and dreams.” This wasn’t prickly prickishness on his part so much as playing to type. He was going for a laugh. Which usually is the best you can hope for.

Except for rare cases when a panel fulfils its otherwise deluded ambitions. After the premiere of the restored print of Naked, writer/director Mike Leigh, cinematographer Dick Pope and female lead Lesley Sharp were available for questions. A journalist from The Times took them up on the offer in order to stir shit. Referring to a scene in the film where a flyposter pastes the word “cancelled” over ads for various concerts and gigs, he asked Mike Leigh the groaner, “What do you think of cancel culture?”

Mike Leigh - not snootily, but not cravenly either - asked back, “Well what do you think of it?” And this kicked off an actual considered, sustained discussion. The cinema lights appeared to dim, the audience to gather closer, as though before the start of another film. But no longer did it just spectate. People stopped waiting for the mike and instead spoke up as and when, and still the discussion didn’t get rowdy or hard-to-follow. It was like a pub-style lock-in or being backstage after a play—it wasn’t far off the best kind of talking during a film. Here were artists who could discuss their work with you, without any pretension or false no-nonsense. They reminded you artworks exist in a continuity with the culture and the artists’ body of work. Look, we did this: ask us anything.

Writing might be godlike magic, as the Akkadians would have it, the mother of speakers, father of scholars. Or it might be mundane work, and arts and letters as comprehensible as any other commodities. But it’s a rare Q&A that’ll provide you a decent answer, a rare artist who’ll give you proper advice: that it’s got to be both.