Festival of Books, Day 1

It was that time of year again, where I drop everything and spend the weekend traipsing around UCLA. I was choosier this year about panels, but still spent 8 hours at the Festival on Saturday.

My morning began with a trip around the grounds before heading to "Food Fight: When Did Eating Get Controversial?" moderated by Times columnist Russ Parsons. Joining him were three professors: sociologist Barry Glassner (USC), nutrition scientist Marion Nestle (NYU), and journalist Michael Pollan (Cal). Discussion ranged from GMOs to industrial farming to the rise of farmers markets to the cultural identities involved in eating. And probably more. Calories and corn made several appearances as well. I was utterly taken with Nestle, who was joyful and enthusiastic. I imagine she is amazing in the classroom (not to imply that the others aren't). Several books going on my list after this.

Next up, a trip across campus to the oddly named "Fiction: Jumping Off the Page," I guess referring to the vivid nature of these writer's prose. And the writers? A uniformly witty crew: Chris Bohjalian, Peter Orner, Gary Shteyngart (the only of the writers I knew before), and Marianne Wiggins, whose name was familiar but unplaced. The authors discussed their upcoming/most recent books, their writing habits and styles, how they are best friends with their editors, and... oh, and lots of comments about various quirks and neuroses. I want to read all of their books now. And I kind of have a crush on Orner.

Next came more wandering and time for reading the paper. And finally, a reading by T.C. Boyle. He read the story "Beat," a pulsing account of a adolescent boy's rendezvous with Jack Kerouac and his cohorts. He said, and I forget how often this is true, that there is something so valuable about hearing a work in the author's own voice. I would add that hearing it at all is a different and important way to experience fiction. Cadence and timing become important, and it's utterly unlike reading, where I see at least 5 or 6 words (if not more) at once. So that was cool, and of course he is himself an epitome of sorts of cool. And therefore a good way to end the day.

Day 1 Purchases:
"Save a Child, Save the World" t-shirt from Skirball, supporting International Relief Committee work in Darfur.

Day 1 Swag:
Ghiradelli chocolate squares
free copies of The Nation
soundtrack to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, coming soon to HBO (plus bookmarks!)
BookTV totebag
Walt Disney Concert Hall magnet
Organic basil seeds from Toyota
Shake and light flashlight (also from Toyota)

Foodie in Action

I made it to the end of The Omnivore's Dilemma. I partook, vicariously, of Michael Pollan's four meals: industrial, organic, local, and foraged. I thought about my own food choices, and how to reconcile (or at least recognize) the contradictions within those choices.

The book was often bedtime reading, and there is just something about food that makes me sleepy, so it took a while to get all the way through. And I was still reading the final pages with Michael Pollan on stage before me (more on that later). But it was worth the long haul.

The mix of fun facts and lively language kept the book moving briskly. I love random statistics and explanations, so parts that should perhaps have been boring weren't. On the other hand, you could tell that Pollan wrote the sections piecemeal, and the editing process didn't remove places where he explained or cited the same information again and again. Repetition can turn me off. (Yes, I can hear the snide laughter from all of you who have been subjected to my stories multiple times.)

Anyway, some fun passages:

The first bias predisposes us toward sweetness, a taste that signals a particularly rich source of carbohydrate energy in nature. Indeed, even when we're otherwise sated, our appetite for sweet things persists, which is probably why dessert shows up in the meal when it does. A sweet tooth represents an excellent adaptation for an omnivore whose big brain demands a tremendous amount of glucose [...] The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate.

Excellent to have an excuse for my sugar cravings. And, regarding pigs aerating manure into compost by rooting for corn kernels...

Buried clear to their butts in composting manure, a bobbing sea of wriggling hams and corkscrew tails, these were the happiest pigs I'd ever seen.

In fact, witnessing this "essential piggyness" is key to Pollan's philosophical coming to terms with eating meat. I can't do that chapter (number 17) to justice, but suffice it to say that I was impressed. Which goes for the entire book, really.

Ending Library Week with some stories on libraries

Libraries got some play in the front section of today's LA Times.

On page A17, "Chicago State's brave new library" made news with a series of crates and robotic bins instead of old-fashioned stacks. Users request a book online, and the appropriate bin is delivered to the librarian, who can quickly grab the right book. Elapsed time: 3 minutes. (This is impressive, seeing as how the Library of Congress used a similar system, and my waiting times were usually closer to an hour.)

Library and Information Sciences Dean Lawrence McCrank (McCrank?!) extols the new technology:

"We discovered that the average student took 30 minutes to find a book. Books would be misplaced or not filed correctly," McCrank said. "That's a lot of time that cuts into how long students can spend analyzing the material, focusing on work, or continuing to find even more research on a particular subject."

But I am sympathetic to critics "who note that these storage systems eliminate the tradition of students accidentally discovering new and sometimes better material while roaming through the stacks." And while that didn't happen to me that often, I did enjoy roaming down halls and coming across bizarre titles on the way to my book.

And on the other side of the page, not only is NYU getting my friend Jen this fall, but the university's Tamiment Library has recently received the US Communist Party archives. The process of cataloging all these goodies may take up to five years. (The print edition has some pictures that aren't online, of rallies and posters.)

And one more article for today: the New York Times discovers fair trade in their midst. And I discovered that I apparently have hipster cred. Or, as they put it:

Fair trade, like more familiar labels such as organic, cruelty-free and sustainable, is another in a series of ethical claims to appear on products — a kind of hipster seal of approval. The fair trade ethic is spreading eastward from the West Coast, where it has been promoted by well-financed activist campaigns and where progressive politics are more intertwined with youth culture.

This was a little bit of a surprise to me, b/c while plenty of cool kids do the fair trade thing, most of Fair Trade LA's members got involved through religious groups who focused on social justice. Upon a second reading, I'm feeling more generous, but on the first pass the article seemed pretty patronizing. But then again, it was in Fashion & Style.

Normally I like to be on time...

... but the New Yorker has gotten away from me. I'm finishing up the March 19th issue (it's the Spring Style issue, if you were wondering). And since today is April 19th, I'm only a month behind. Ugh - I need a reading sabbatical.

Of course, if I didn't spend so much time ogling this little guy, I would have more time for actual reading...

Re-discoveries, Obasan

In twelfth grade, I took the AP exam in English Language. It included a reading passage about a young girl getting on a train with her grandmother, and the accompanying preparations and observations. What made it spectacular was that it was not a voluntary trip - they were Japanese-Canadian, and being relocated to the interior.

This wasn't my first encounter with the internment of North Americans of Japanese descent during WWII; I had read Farewell to Manzanar in middle school. Perhaps more importantly, I was "in love" with Paul Kariya, whose father had been born in a Canadian internment camp.

The passage was gorgeous, and the topic was one that interested me, so I made a note of the novel - Obasan, by Joy Kogawa. That summer, during a drive to Vancouver, I read the book. And while I have yet to meet Paul, I did two projects on the Japanese internment camps while in college.

But I digress. The thing to know about Kogawa is that she writes lyrical, evocative prose. Opening at random, I find the following:

The handwriting in blue-black ink is firm and regular in the first few pages, but is a rapid scrawl later on. I feel like a burglar as I read, breaking into a private house only to discover it's my childhood house filled with corners and rooms I've never seen.

Or another:

I stand beside her and over the redness of my body she scrubs vigorously, like an eraser over a dirty page. The dead skin collects in little rolls and falls off into the water. She exclaims at the rolls.

And it builds to a painful, yet still poetic, crescendo. Lovely, just lovely.

Of Maize and Man

Everyone stop and groan at my awful pun.

But seriously, I am corn. So says Michael Pollan in The Omnivore's Dilemma. Because virtually every non-natural food item (even some organic ones) that I eat now embody our country's insane glut of corn. This isn't news to me, as I've been on a mission against high fructose corn syrup for awhile now, but it's still unbelievably depressing. And fascinating too, the way that corn and humans have achieved a symbiotic state - but a precarious one for both species.

Pollan's book is subtitled "A Natural History of Four Meals" and in the book he traces fast food, supermarket, organic, and "found" meals - one each - to their source, investigating the social, scientific, and political circumstances behind each. So far I'm still in the industrial meal, so I don't have a good basis of comparison, but I hope that the rest of the book is able to delve so fully into the basis of each meal. I've heard mixed - albeit overall positive - reviews about this, so we'll see.

(And also, um, stop shooting people. I mean, really.)

Best Week Ever!

I like to use hyperbole, but seriously, I am celebrating this week. Why?

It's National Library Week! A whole week of love for that great institution that contains books and knowledge - and shares them for free. The LA County library system is excited too, with speakers each night. Co-hosting, another of my favorite things: the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. It's only two weeks away, and tickets will be available starting at noon next Sunday - to help cure your blues and post-library week hangover.

The city's libraries are more circumspect, I guess, b/c I didn't see anything about it on their website. And didn't notice anything during my quick trip to my local branch Saturday. However, while I was searching, I did remind myself of the amazing events hosted regularly by the library. I signed up for a couple mailing lists. You should check out the site and maybe do so too.

Erin's Library will be celebrating the week by posting every day (or attempting to). So check back often.

What Other People Are Reading

There's a new addition to my blogroll at right: L.A. Stories. Don posted a comment about reading during commute and lunch - negating the need to combine reading and nightlife. Absolutely true, although I can no longer read on buses b/c I get sick, and now I spend my lunches with friends. So it doesn't quite work for me, but I am making efforts to find a better balance between the literary fun and social fun. So far it's working out.

But I checked out his blog, and discovered my new favorite kind of post: what books he notices on the bus. NICE. During my old bus commute, I pretty much only noticed people with the newspaper and the Bible. On BART in the Bay Area on the other hand, I noticed all sorts of random things.

Anyway, thanks Don for this peek into LA public transit readers. I'll be looking for more.

Reading under the influence

I never really figured out how to combine reading and a nightlife. But you know who has? Will Shamlian and Michael Leko, at their recently opened Library Bar, a short hop from the Central Library in downtown LA. (A couple good pictures are available here.) In addition to the wall of books - which was an eclectic mix including a few I'd actually read - there are comfy chairs and a fabulous selection of music. My apple beer (like a cider but without the fizz) was yummy even if a little pricey, and came in one of those awesome Belgian beer glasses.

If it were near my office, I'd be there every night after work. (I'd probably bring my own book though.)

Why fate doesn't always cooperate

I'm sad right now. I just finished reading Sally Beauman's The Sisters Mortland, on loan from Carolline, and it's one of those books that makes me want to mope around until I something distracts from the fact that life doesn't always finish happily ever after.

That said, it's gorgeous, and haunting - even if sometimes a little too pat. The eponymous sisters are the center of the piece, even though a good half of it involves them as they are seen by others, particularly in the painting of the same name as the novel. Three stunningly beautiful sisters, who have fatal flaws and family secrets; and the young men whose lives intertwine around theirs, during the summer of 1967. And whose lives continue to intersect in increasingly complicated ways even 23 years later.

Beauman employs a writerly trick that I always fall for, and thus tend to resent. We see characters perhaps better than they see themselves, and then root for them to figure out what we've already deduced. Because we, as readers, want the happy ending. Or at least the satisfying one. Life is difficult enough - can't we at least believe in satisfaction, at the end of the day?

too busy to read :(

It's been awhile since I've posted. Why? Well, it all started with Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, an intellectual history of the march to the Russian Revolution (well, the October one anyway). This book was on my list from my grad student days, and I thought it was time to get around to it.

But it's a loooong book, and I had a tendency to fall asleep while reading it. Just thinking about it makes me feel a little sleepy. French thinker after French thinker after... and then some utopian communes in America, and then finally Marx and Engels, and their rivals. And then Lenin. And Trotsky, who comes off as quite the peacock. (The original edition of the book came out in 1940, just before Trotsky was killed in exile.) This is the kind of book that I'm glad is around, but that I wish I could have read in a condensed form. In retrospect, I should have just started with Marx.

I digress. I wanted to get to the excuses for not writing. I was slogging through Wilson, and thus not blogging. And then I finally get through it, right in time for work to become INSANE. So there hasn't been time for reading, for writing, for checking e-mail, etc. (On the other hand, somehow I found time on Wednesday night to read a truly ridiculous chick lit novel - Some Nerve, by Jane Heller - about a journalist for a celebrity mag who loses her job when she can't get an interview with a superhot but elusive actor. She goes back home to the Midwest, and lo and behold finds the perfect opportunity to prove her journalistic chops. Unless love gets in the way. Oh, and she battles panic attacks, which are intermittently believable.)

I think that after tomorrow, work will calm down some. And then maybe I'll get to catch up on New Yorker's, and books, and posting. And springtime, damn it!

Searching for More

About a year ago, I wrote about Lisa Glatt's collection of short stories, The Apple's Bruise. She has a keen ear for intriguing titles, and A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That is quite possibly my favorite book title yet.

This one's a novel, but in almost short story form. Her main character, that she keeps returning to, is Rachel Spark, a 30 year old writing teacher who is losing her mother to breast cancer and not willing to let go. Partly to drown her despair, she hooks up with a string of random men. But - and this is a very nice stylistic touch that enriches Glatt's story - interspersed with Rachel's saga are the stories of 3 other women who lives intersect with hers in some way or another. And the men in the story all reappear as well. Their setting, a well-to-do corner of beachfront south Los Angeles (county at least), forms its own very small world.

I found myself trying to explain the title to a friend the other day. I didn't do a very good job, so I'll let Glatt do it:

... it occurred to me that I hadn't learned one damn thing in seventeen years of fucking. Since that first wrong boy on the bathroom tile took my new nipple between his teeth. I was worried even then about being unlovely, un loved, and on that black-and-white floor of h is, everything was slick and cold. Within minutes of my first kiss I was stripped like a squid and knew he didn't care whether I was Carol from third period or Christine from sixth or bad Brittany [...] and something inside me hardened, turned into a chunk of cement.
A girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong boy after wrong boy; she becomes a pause, something quick before the real thing. Even now, I am certain that the light coming from his parents' room was a warning that the sincere lovers of the world existed elsewhere, not where I was, and that it would always be like that...

Not so uplifting, no. But sincerely felt. And beautifully written. Reading how these women, as young as 16, strive to be something more and still sometimes push away those chances at more, it made me realize all over again how vulnerable we really are. And yet the connections we make, fleeting or otherwise, can simultaneously be so touching.

Desperado

Nick was fighting his way from deep under the sea. When he opened his eyes, the danger had passed, everything swam, blue and beautiful. If he could just shake the water from his skin, he would emerge. He had to break the surface. They might still be waiting, anywhere.

This is Nick, aka "the writer", emerging from an Ipazine trip that he didn't particularly want to take. In a way, I feel like it's an appropriate characterization of the entire second half of Joy Nicholson's The Road to Esmeralda. The novel begins as a journey into a relationship that is falling apart: the semi-alcoholic writer whose father psychologically abused him and who can't for the life of him get a decent page down, the angelic girlfriend who keeps secrets and may or may not be starting an affair with their German expat innkeeper. Nick seems paranoid, but Nicholson hints that he may have reason to be so.

And then, like falling down a rabbit hole, the tale, strange enough as it already is, takes an entirely different direction. Nick and Sarah's relationship may have been front and center before, but now it is just one aspect of the intrigue and crime of a small Mexican town, its drug runners, political rivalries, business opportunities, and violence.

I preferred the first half. I understood Nick, found him an interesting character. I think Nicholson liked him too - he is so flawed and complete. Then everything just gets wacky and confused. It was a very effective evocation of the madness of the plot, but it was also utterly exhausting. Just thinking of it now reminds me that it's getting close to bedtime...

Schools and Sabbaths

I'm dreadfully behind on the New Yorker (which is common enough, I admit). So I am still reading the January 15th issue. But here were a couple fun/interesting articles that I wanted to share:

"Expectations" by Katherine Boo. (it's not up on their site, but you may be able to read it here)
Since a lot of my work deals with "at-risk" youth, and since I am still mulling over teaching as a career, this article about Denver's Manual High School is especially compelling to me. MHS is mostly minority and poor, and rife with gangs. And... "for a decade, Manual High had been the object of aggressive and thoughtful reforms," none of which made any lasting improvements. In Boo's telling, along came new Superintendent Michael Bennet, whose plan to help the remaining student at Manual (which had dropped from 1100 students to about 600), was to close the school and transfer them elsewhere, offering extra mentoring and support. The students and community didn't buy it. I'm about halfway through the article, so not entirely sure where it's going to go. But I tend to have such conflicting thoughts about these kinds of articles: on the one hand, every time someone like a NYer reader is forced to face the ways we have failed public school students, that's a good thing. On the other, the wretchedness of the situation can become numbing, and I'm afraid that readers start seeing the students as symbols, rather than actual young men and women with dreams, aspirations, different skills and talents - they may not all be scholars, but that doesn't mean they're all failing.

"Playoffs" by Shalom Auslander (also maybe available here)
Auslander writes about the role of religion in his life, and how his childhood put literally the fear of God into him. Most poignantly for me, the crux of the story was whether God (hmm, since Auslander is Jewish, should I be writing G-d? He didn't in the article... but anyway, whether God) would allow his beloved Rangers to win their first Stanley Cup in 54 years. Playoff games kept happening after sundown on Friday or before sundown on Saturday; since finances had forced him and his wife out of Manhattan and into a Jewish suburb in New Jersey, he was under his neighbors' observant (pun, get it?) eyes all the time. The article catalogs Auslander's negotiations with God, which can be dizzying. He acknowledges that lighting a joint breaks two Shabbat taboos (Kindling a Fire and Baking, the latter of which made me chuckle); but also is keenly aware of God's (somewhat sadistic) onminpotence. Auslander has a great comedic voice (and hello? there's also hockey) so this was one of the more enjoyable NYer Personal Histories I've read in some time.

Also, during my search for online versions of the article, I can across this blog. Didn't read it much, but I'm quite intrigued.

Parking's a bitch

So Calvin Trillin has gotten a good amount of press lately for About Alice, his memoir about his late wife. I read the piece it was based on in the New Yorker last spring, and it broke my heart. But in the kind of way that puts in back together again.

When I got to reading Trillin this week, though, I chose a slightly older piece, Tepper Isn't Going Out. It was on my reading list, probably from early 2003, although I can't for the life of me recall what led me to put it on there. Which is strange because it's not like me to not remember extraneous details.

And yet, even though it wasn't About Alice, it was "...for Alice. Actually I wrote everything for Alice." (I literally swooned when I read that.)

Trillin's fiction is a lot like his non-fiction, humorous, whimsical, slightly self-deprecating. Murray Tepper is a sort of Everyman, who just happens to be a bit obsessed with parking. And now that he keeps his car in a garage, he gets his parking on by finding and staying in legal spots, usually reading the paper and shooing away people who are expecting him to leave any minute and open up the space. Harmless, until he starts to get press, draws a legion of fans, and draws the ire of Mayor Ducavelli, who is a pretty hilarious mildly-fascist Rudy Giuliani (at least, the pre-9/11 Giuliani known best for marital troubles and freaking out about controversial artwork).

It's not a very challenging read, but it's adorable. I had a smile on my face pretty much the whole time. And sometimes, that's all you need from a book.