This document provides information on three upcoming events: 1) Marina Abramović will discuss her new memoir "Walk Through Walls" with Tim Marlow at the Royal Festival Hall on November 5th. Abramović is considered the "grandmother of performance art" and her 2010 piece "The Artist is Present" attracted over 850,000 visitors. 2) Jon Ronson will discuss his book "The Psychopath Test" on tour from November 13th to 20th. The book details Ronson's encounters with psychopaths and his quest to understand them, starting with an elaborate academic hoax. 3) John Simpson, former chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, will

1. talks 5-11 Nov 2016 guide 38
Marina Abramović London
Marina Abramović is that rarest
of things: a performance art
superstar. The Artist Is Present,
the 2010 piece in which she sat
for three months in New York’s
MoMA and met the gaze of
audience members, attracted
more than 850,000 visitors, Lou
Reed and Björk among them. The
moment in which she raised her
eyes and found herself facing
former lover and collaborator
Ulay has been watched on
YouTube more than 14m times.
The self-styled grandmother of performance art
discusses her new memoir Walk Through Walls
Thoughtful as ever,
Ronson retraces the
steps he took in writing
The Psychopath Test
This month the self-styled
“grandmother of performance
art” turns 70. To celebrate,
she’s taken the surprisingly
conventional step of writing a
memoir. In Walk Through Walls
she distinguishes between three
Marinas, and hopefully all will be
in dialogue in this discussion with
the Royal Academy’s Tim Marlow.
We’ve still much to learn from a
woman who has so compellingly
made self-absorption her life’s
work. Bella Todd
Royal Festival Hall, SE1, Mon
Jon Ronson’s Psychopath Night
On tour
With the cosy self-deprecation
and thoughtfulness that
makes him one of journalism’s
most cherished guides, these
Psychopath Night events will
see Jon Ronson recount the
life-changing adventure that
led to his hugely successful
2011 book The Psychopath Test.
It was a quest that began with
an elaborate hoax played on
a community of academics,
which led Ronson to a chance
encounter with Bob Hare, the
founding father of psychopath-
spotters. From there Ronson
met Emmanuel “Toto” Constant,
a Haitian death-squad leader
who claimed Vodou and the CIA
were protecting him. He also had
afternoons with Tony, a patient
at Broadmoor, and heard the
methodologies of scientists who
believed that psychopaths could
be saved with LSD. Lara Enoch
Leeds, Mon Tue; London, Wed;
Sheffield, Thu; York, Fri; touring
to 20 Nov
An Evening With John Simpson
Oxford
When John Simpson joined
the Oxford English Dictionary
in 1976, the language’s primary
reference was compiled in
much the same way as it had
been under its great Victorian
editor James Murray: each
word had a file of index
cards, updated manually by
lexicographers and a network of
word-spotting correspondents.
In 1993, Simpson was appointed
chief editor. By the time of his
retirement in 2013, he had set in
train the most profound changes
in the OED’s history, not just
digitising it, but reviewing every
word in the 20-volume second
edition and widening the pool
of sources to embrace the rapid
evolution of English online. The
OED became more democratic,
less stuffily canonical, more
alive. Simpson’s memoir The
Word Detective sets out his
belief that defining words is less
important than understanding
the cultural changes that create
them. In a book punctuated by
nuggety did-you-know trivia
on individual words, he drily
dishes the dirt on the politics
of an office full of excessively
knowledgeable, impeccably
polite pedants. Simpson
dismisses those who “love
words” as sentimental and
lacking rigour, but if loving words
is an indulgence that you allow
yourself, he is a worthy guru.
Jack Seale
Waterstones, Tue
talks
Simpson’s 20-year editorship of the OED embraced
the rapid evolution of the English language
RemiChauvin