reports from the field

Another lovely day at the Festival of Books...

When oh when will I remember the best place to park? I've only gotten it right one year, and this was not the year. The only consolation for parking lot #3 is that you have to walk through the beautiful sculpture garden to get to the booths and panels.

As a result of my parking snafu, I arrived about 15 minutes late for Inland Empire Fiction: The Other California.

Tod Goldberg moderated this panel inspired by the Inlandia anthology, which includes Tod and the other three panelists: Susan Straight, Michael Jaime-Becerra, and Gayle Brandeis. Some of the topics discussed were the changing environment around the peace movement, Darby Crash, secretive mother-in-laws, tract homes (natch), National Novel Writing Month, self-storage auctions, folk art dinosaurs, bad air (natch), the Salton Sea, parrots, the evil god of Tahquitz Canyon, the nudist colonies of Riverside, summer homes of the KKK, citrus groves (natch), Hell's Angels, White Front, and Trafficula. The mythologies around the Inland Empire are still being formed (and certainly, not enough has been made of its designation as an empire), so the panel (and presumably the anthology) have begun the discussion as a survey with the analysis sure to follow as the genre develops.

Favorite quote:

"The wind blows; that's sex." (Susan Straight discussing The Sex Life of the Date)

I wandered around a bit before attending the conversation between David L. Ulin and Jane Smiley. I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I've never read a single book by Ms. Smiley, but I am intrigued by her latest - Ten Days in the Hills - a contribution to my growing bookshelves of contemporary LA fiction. For that reason alone, I am likely to read it, but I will now make it a priority because I was impressed and entertained by almost everything Ms. Smiley had to say (and that Ulin's no slouch). Topics discussed included the Decameron (to be expected considering Ten Days is structurally based on Boccaccio's classic) and the lesser known Heptameron, the idea of writing overtly about sex as a political statement, the idea of being apolitical as a political statement, exchanging structure for plot as organizational framework, the finger of the plot in one's back, Robinson Crusoe, confessions of hanged men, empathy, chick lit, paperback originals, dating yourself through topical subjects, Zola's The Ladies' Paradise, fiction after September 11, and whether the administration's reaction to Hurricane Katrina would have been different if they had read Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Favorite quote:

Jane Smiley: "[Sex] sells papers."
David Ulin: "Something has to."

I left a bit early to get over to the purported smackdown panel, Litblogs: Words Online, once again moderated by Tod Goldberg. Andrew Keen has seemingly enraged the blogging community with his forthcoming polemic, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture. Keen was in attendance, and litbloggers Carolyn Kellogg and Ron Hogan rounded out the discussion. Work obligations prevent me from doing this panel justice at this time, so thoughts will follow tomorrow.

The audience was full of local bloggers, and while I missed Callie (do you look like your photo?), I had the chance to chat with Carolyn at the Book Soup booth later. You can read her report of the panel here.

The rest of the day involved a surprisingly delicious chicken caesar wrap with a friend, spending way too much money, running into random acquaintances, and starting the countdown of another 51 weeks until the next Festival of Books.

sunday! sunday! sunday!

After a crazed day of nonstop work yesterday, I am now free to enjoy the Festival of Books! Reports from the Inland Empire and litblog panels to come as well as the talk between David Ulin and Jane Smiley.

Losanjealous has an amusing list of "editorial picks" for the panels, such as Saturday's 3:30 offering "Book Fair Panels: How to Monopolize the Q&A portion with Your Inane Questions" and today's don't-miss panel "How to Write 'L.A. Fiction': Sunshine, Traffic, Superficiality, Hollywood, blah, blah, blah…"

stories from the book shelf scan

Callie at Counterbalance reflects on a subject that hits close to home: book snobs and the lies they tell.

I know several bloggers of all stripes (lit, design, music, etc.) who don't list certain books in their "just read" or "currently reading" columns. Sandra at Book World (who has just made a lovely shift in her blog from covering books to covering writing and books about writing) mentions that she would never place these books about writing in her left-hand column. Instead of gasping at her declaration, I thought: my god, I do the same thing...

My next thought was: well at least I don't pretend to have read books that I haven't. That seems a far worse offense. Or is it? Isn't the shame -- for those who haven't read something they feel they should & those who've read something they'd rather not advertise -- and the hiding of said shame, equal on both sides? I wonder. While I continue to probe this question & my own guilt (no doubt induced by a brand of crazy that only my christian school education could provide), I reserve the right to leave these aforementioned read-but-not-going-to-admit-it books off my public "Books I've Read List."

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. I am actually trying to meet a somewhat difficult goal for someone with two jobs - 52 books in 52 weeks - and when I delve into the occasional self-help book because let's face it, I need help, I don't list it! What kind of help is that? And boy, do I check out other people's book shelves. I've yet to end a friendship over it, but one friend's Nelson DeMille collection haunts me. I thought I was at least off the hook for lying about things that I haven't read when I realized that just the other day I was asked if I had read a particular classic, and I replied, "Parts of it." Parts of it?? Where do they publish parts of a novel? Did I travel back to the nineteenth century and read it in serial form? For that matter, am I in the habit of beginning books and not finishing them? Not even. Ah, I have seen the lying book snob and the lying book snob is me.

time is a strange mistress

Spinal Tap reunites to call attention to climate change.

portable night pots carried in ladies’ muffs

At the OUPBlog, Anatoly Liberman looks at the etymology of the word "loo":

French l’eau “the water” has been offered as the etymon (source) of loo. In the 19th century, it was common to invent French etymons of English words and explain the discrepancy in the pronunciation as the result of English speakers’ inability to produce foreign sounds. But surely, law or low are more accurate renderings of l’eau than loo. And why should loo have been borrowed from French, a language that lacks its equivalent? Engl. ablution contains the syllable loo, and so does Latin ablui “I have washed off.” If loo originated at Oxford and Cambridge, bookish word play could be considered. However, as noted, we do not know the social stratum in which loo was coined.

Since the abbreviation for water closet is WC, loo resembles the second half of double u, but loo, definitely not an “Americanism,” has never been pronounced like British lew (that is, with the sounds of few, pew, cue) even in the United States, let alone England or Scotland. The same objection holds for the attempts to derive loo from lee “shelter,” reportedly pronounced somewhere as lew, and from the phrase in lieu of. Lavatories are often named for people. Engl. john is a classic example; its predecessor was jakes. In Germany, Tante Lotte “Aunt Lotte” and many other similar names have been attested. It would be nice if Uncle Lou, the eponymous ancestor of British toilets, were discovered, but so far he has not turned up. According to one version, during a house party in Ireland, about 120 years ago, Lady Louisa Anson’s two younger sons put her name card on the guest lavatory. Henceforward, highbrows (or so we are informed) talked of going to Lady Loo. Perhaps they did, but, to the best of our knowledge, this piece of aristocratic slang has left no trace in any story or newspaper article, and no member of the British nobility seems to remember it. We may forget it too.

bowie nicked all your stuff

Didn't we all slave away in an '80s band before we settled into our office jobs?

Via Newspeak!

one of the more noble functions of human intelligence

Hermione Lee looks at a stack of books on the Novel.

The novel's entanglement in "the prose of the world" can also be its justification and its pride. The novel's virtue, it has often been argued, lies in its egalitarianism, its very commonplaceness. And the novel's everydayness need not be an enemy to its aesthetic integrity. In his wise, deep, and witty essay on the novel, The Curtain, Milan Kundera, a follower of Flaubert in his critique and practice of the European novel, celebrates "the everyday" ("it is not merely ennui, pointlessness, repetition, triviality; it is beauty as well") while writing in praise of the novel's essential self-sufficiency:

It...refuses to exist as illustration of an historical era, as description of a society, as defense of an ideology, and instead puts itself exclusively at the service of "what only the novel can say."

Kundera's celebration of the novel's freedom and self-sufficiency makes essential reading in a long history of debates about the genre. Ethical and aesthetic controversies over the novel have gone on for many centuries—the number of centuries depending on whether you think the novel came into being in the early eighteenth century, or (as Walter Benjamin does) coincided with the invention of printing at the end of the fifteenth century, or was lurking in Egyptian demotic narratives of the seventh century BC or Greek romances from the first century AD. Every so often these long-running debates are accompanied by prophecies of doom: the novel is dead, the novel is drowning in a dizzying virtual universe of instantaneous, interactive information, the novel is having to compete for readers in "a world in which millions of books are dumped in the market place at once."

they don't praise the shadow

Are you able to tell the difference between machine-translated German text and Faulkner?

Via Metafilter

sidewalks in the sky

At 3qd, Jaffer Kolb cites the High Line and a project in my hometown in his exploration of off-the-ground development.

The problem is simple: most cities contain tall buildings (though, ironically, I’m writing this from Los Angeles), and yet despite sharing scale and parallel planes, these buildings rarely connect or contain any physical relationship to one another. The average city dweller only really enters vertical space for specific purposes, whether to go from his 16th floor apartment to his 42nd floor office or from his friend’s basement flat to the observation deck on the top of Rockefeller Center. That is to say, from private space to private space. This isn’t about rooftop restaurants or mid-building showrooms, but rather the problem of urban circulation that forces pedestrians down a stairwell, across the street, and up an elevator—ultimately and forever bound to move over a singular plane at the feet of the city.

the real artichoke

Wittgenstein, explained:

Wittgenstein's glamour was Garbo-esque. When Wittgenstein was in the room, even Isaiah Berlin was at a loss for words. He placed such an emphasis on precision of language that he made the merely eloquent feel slovenly. To get Wittgenstein in perspective, it required first of all his death, and then some unsentimental reflection on the breathtaking scope of what he had never talked about. He received credit for giving away the large amount of money he had inherited, and thus detaching himself from his social privileges and from the involvements and distractions of everyday life. But he also detached himself from everyday life by ignoring what was going on in Europe. The advantage to his philosophical position was that by not saying much, he never said anything ill-considered.

un wap-doo-wap

VSL: On the Parisian Website La Blogothèque, photographer and filmmaker Vincent Moon regularly contributes a video feature called Les concerts à emporter (“The Take-Away Shows”) in which he films emerging bands in distinctive locations around France, performing songs in one continuous take.

hush hush keep it down now

I've been feeling incredibly taciturn this week, so I'm just going to embrace it.

From Indexed:


From Strange Maps:

White Chicks & Gang Signs

the right word

Sunday's LA Times reprinted Jonathan Safran Foer's foreword to The Diary of Petr Ginz, 1941-1942, the journal of a 14-year-old Czech Jew who died in Auschwitz in 1944.

It can be dangerous to treat a diary like this as literature — to find beauty in it, and symbolism and structure. But how can one not? Here is the beginning of the passage in which Petr recounts learning that he would soon be parted from his family:

"Don't think that cleaning a typewriter is easy. There is cleaning and there is 'cleaning.' If you want the typewriter to shine on the inside and on the outside, you have to remove the carriage and wipe the most invisible corners with a small brush. Then you have to use a blowpipe to clear it out. The most difficult part are the spaces between the typebars."

When Theodor W. Adorno speculated about the possibility of literature after the Holocaust, he wasn't asking something about art (as is commonly misunderstood), but about language itself. What meaning can words have in the light of such destruction? Can "loss" have any use? Can "war"? Can "love," for that matter? Will we ever again be able to find the right word?

the children of hurin

Am I implying that Suge Knight killed J.R.R. Tolkien in order to take his unreleased material, produce it under the pseudonym "Christopher Tolkien" and reap the benefits of the high-selling novels? No, but I'm not saying it's out of the realm of possibility.

trying to find what was lost

The director of the creative writing program at Virginia Tech reflects on yesterday's horrific events.

A few months ago, when I returned from a trip to Sierra Leone, a country I lived in for years and one still reeling from the effects of a brutal civil war, I was filled with relief to be returning to a crime-free place like Blacksburg. As usual, I was welcomed by the Blue Ridge Mountains, and by the friends I’ve grown to love during my 22 years on the faculty at Virginia Tech.

It’s a quiet place. The town is full of turkeys — statues of our mascot, the Hokie Bird, painted in garish colors — as if being a Hokie were not a sports metaphor but a way of life. There’s a 5-foot-tall turkey just outside the bank; one near the police station; another in the parking lot of a Cleaner World, where I take my clothes. We have a sense of humor in Blacksburg — it’s part of our charm.

Blacksburg is a misnomer, of course. It’s the whitest town I’ve ever lived in. And although I’m not white, I’ve grown used to the fact that we can, for the most part, live in relative harmony — black and white, town and gown, young and old together. It’s a place that lulls you into believing you can predict what will happen next.