Lawrence Weschler + Walter Murch
Is there a new way to see the stars?
Saturday, February 4, 2017
6:00 PM–7:30 PM Sold Out
Pulitzer Prize nominee Lawrence Weschler’s newest book, Waves Passing in the Night, is a profile of Walter Murch, a film legend and amateur astrophysicist whose investigations could reshape our understanding of the universe. In this rare conversation between writer and subject we learn what it takes to pursue the seemingly quixotic goal of changing the perceptions of mainstream science.
Book signing to follow the program.
Brainwave is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Walter Murch, hailed by Roger Ebert as “the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema,” also pursues interests in the science of human perception, cosmology, and the history of science. Since 1995 he has been working on a reinterpretation of the Titius-Bode Law of planetary spacing based on data from the Voyager Probe, the Hubble telescope, and recent discoveries of exoplanets orbiting distant stars.
Murch published The Bird that Swallowed Its Cage (2012), a selection of previously untranslated works by the Italian poet and novelist Curzio Malaparte (1899-1956). He has also written a book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye (2001), and been the subject of two other books, The Conversations by Michael Ondaatje (2002) and Behind the Seen by Charles Koppelman (2004). Murch has received awards and nominations for his work on The English Patient, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, Julia, Ghost, The Godfather Part III, and Cold Mountain.
Lawrence Weschler is a critic, journalist, and author who was a staff writer at the New Yorker for more than twenty years. His books include Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, for which he was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Boggs: A Comedy of Values; and Everything That Rises, which received the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Nation, Salon, Truthdig, and Harper’s among others.