Words failed and images overwhelmed many witnesses of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But organizers expect many of the 300-odd authors and artists scheduled to speak at this year’s “Words & Pictures”-themed Chicago Humanities Festival to try to respond to the attacks and their aftermath.
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On that morning Spiegelman and his wife, Francoise Mouly, left their Tribeca apartment and were on their way to vote. “We heard this jet roar over our heads,” he says. “By the time we turned around and understood what we were looking at, we were looking at a large hole that just appeared in these neighbors of ours, the towers. Then we saw the second tower go up in flames and ran to get our daughter out of school.”
Seeing the towers disappear into a pile of dust and debris left a startling impression on another festival speaker, Paul Levinson. “The image that took over my mind more than all the others was those antennae at the very top pointing upward, and then the whole thing just falls down on itself–for me it looked like a spaceship crumbling back on itself,” says Levinson, who teaches communication and media studies at New York’s Fordham University. “For some reason it reminded me of when I was a kid in 1957 seeing the Vanguard rocket trying to launch at Cape Canaveral and it fell back on the pod.”
