just imagine how much he enjoyed being vouched for by norman mailer. america's nobel laureate was allowed into the room. it was a very contentious time but i think one of the reasons it was contentious is that all of us, writers believe that the role of the public, the role of the writer was important and needed to be argued out and was not kidding around. people took it very seriously. three years before the fall of the soviet union the brazil two years before charter 88, led the way towards communist downfall, a time when writers around the world were in many ways at the center of the national argument in a way we mayfield is no longer the case. and what should be done about it. there are clearly part of the world in which it is still the case and we recognized in earlier sessions of this festival the problems are rising in china, our colleague wu was not able to be here. yesterday received in various forms and translated and have replied to that letter and there's a press release going out today about that so we should have a look at that. he was ve

there was a time when congress there were the writers like norman mailer and gideon and robert stoneand writers who consciously looked for a public voice, and i'm not sure who the equivalence would be today. that might be the thing to talk about. what's gone wrong when we started the festival if you liked the public faith. sorry, this is nice -- my spinach, you can hear the popeye music. we felt at that time seven years ago that there was a place for writers, a rule in restarting a public conversation between the united states and the rest of the world which at that moment the bush administration seemed to have been quite seriously the railed. america wasn't listening to the world of voices and the world of voices were increasingly hostile to what america was saying and doing at that time, and we particularly good for america or for the rest of the world either but you needed to start rebuilding the bridge in which these conversations even if they were tough conversations could take place. i remember in the first year we invited a number of writers so those voices at the moment could