MEGA litt 2010
The event I was blogging about the last time has now come and gone, and yes, Per Stig Møller was quoted for saying that somehow the ministry had ‘found’ (I am not shitting you, this is the wording I read on Politiken.dk) the money before, and now all of a sudden they had yet again found them. So clap, literati, clap for the fact that your whopping 16 million DKK got saved from the big bad corporate hyena and his big bad no-nonsense-gross-expenditure-flashdance-pack.
I was of course an hour late for the event, because me and hubby had some more urgent affairs finding webbings for our old and battered sofa. But when I got there, boy oh boy, the library was bustling with people. Old, young, hipsters, non-hipsters, people who actually had to use the library that day to study, a swarm of people hiding behind cameras, and of course, writers.
All in all it was a very quick experience. There was so much going on (over 200 writers reading from their works on 25 stages in a period of 2 hours) that I felt like a headless chicken, and thought I saw many with the same syndrome. But then again, it was a staged event to make a point, and the point came out loud and clear – there is diversity and a plurality of voices among the Danish writers (and this was just an itty-bitty fraction of what DK has to offer). MEGA litt was, in my opinion, not about enjoying the arts in a laid back fashion, letting the words sink in and mellowing out. It was about fighting for literature as a right in itself and standing up for themselves in a loud, cacophonous unison.
Let’s just hope this pugnacious attitude can bring some more debate about who and what and why.