BOOKEXPO L.A.: too tired to think straight

After the Independent Booksellers Consortium meeting, I walk down Sunset Boulevard to Amoeba Music, a huge CD & DVD store where I spend an hour and a half in a post BookExpo trance. I purchase a DVD by the Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, a used CD of Wallace Shawn’s one-man play The Fever, and a Van Morrison CD.

Lori Tucker-Sullivan, the Executive Director of the IBC, and I have a quiet dinner in an Italian restaurant near the hotel. The dining room is very dark, Johnny Mathis is playing on the sound system and one of the waiters is wearing a pork-pie hat. It’s like we’ve drifted into a time warp and its 1955. I panic, imagining I’m in an episode of the Twilight Zone, but Lori points out the flat screen TV over the bar and reminds me that they didn’t have those back in the fifties.

BOOKEXPO L.A.: a fond adieu & decompressing at the Magnolia

I arrive at the Convention around 11 this morning after riding in on the Metro with Brandi Stewart, the children’s book buyer at Changing Hands. .

I like to walk the convention floor on Sunday. There are fewer people, and everyone who is here has slowed way down. It is actually possible to have a real conversation with someone.

I have a long talk with Jack Shoemaker, legendary publisher (Northpoint, Counterpoint, Shoemaker & Hoard) of Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry and a number of other fine writers. I touch base with Doug Voss from Baker & Taylor about a possible distribution program with Reading The World next year. Chad Post invites me to record a video interview for the German Book Office on Reading The World. I’m beyond tired at this point, but I manage to rally somewhat when the camera is turned on.

In my last lap around the floor I run into Eric Price (Grove/Atlantic) and Ruth Liebmann (Random House) who kindly invite me to join them for dinner tonight.

As I leave the building I see Lance Fensterman, who put this whole complicated show together. Lance tells me he’s about to thank his staff for their work. He seems very pleased that things have gone well and relieved that it is finally over.

I bid a fond adieu to what is probably my 28th BookExpo and stagger over to the Pico Blvd. Metro stop.

* * *

At 7:00 Eric and I meet Rick Simonson at the hotel and we walk to the Magnolia restaurant on Sunset Boulevard to join Ruth for dinner. We are seated in an enclosed patio in a corner at the back of the restaurant. It’s perfect, given the fact that we’re all very tired. Four women at a table near us have just seen Sex and the City, and it obviously worked for them. Eric is amused. Grove published Sex and the City before the television show, etc.

LETTER FROM HOLLYWOOD TO MY GRANDCHILDREN

Dear Natalie and Max,

I can’t even begin to communicate how exciting life has been for me these past few days. I’m in Hollywood, California, home of the American Film Industry, which has showcased and exported our fine way of life to people all over the world for so many years now.

I’m staying in a hotel right around the corner from the Chinese Theater, a famous old-time movie palace, and today the police blocked off Hollywood Boulevard for the world premiere of Kung-fu Panda, which I’m sure will be a blockbuster hit.

Your grandfather has even managed to meet a few celebrities. You may recall my fortuitous encounter two years ago with Dora The Explorer. I know it’s hard to believe, but I did not know how important Dora would become when I met her back then. At the time she was just emerging into the collective consciousness of American youth.

Yesterday I posed for a photo with Boom, who is an Emote—whatever that means. Even though he looks angry, he was actually quite nice. He did have a disconcerting habit of flinging his arms heavenward frequently, as if he found the world a strange and baffling place. Who could blame him if he did? He reminded me of the Fudo figures that guard Japanese Buddhist temples, but that’s probably a projection on my part.


Here is a very cool shot of your grandfather posing with various Star Wars pals. Note that I am holding a light saber. It’s no accident that I’m standing between Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker and Yoda and the Empire’s fascist Storm Trooper thugs. I tried to look as if I was sending the bad guys a message: Please do not hurt my friends!

Despite the blue skies and relentless sunshine, Hollywood looks a bit frayed around the edges to me. There are some tough looking types on the streets here. Too many tattoo parlors and trashy souvenir stores in the immediate neighborhood for my taste, but I’m beyond knowing what appeals to American young people these days. I’ll just be glad to be home soon!

Love,
Grandpa Karl

BOOKEXPO L.A.: the Booksellers Point of View & a fine dinner

I arrive at the Convention Center at half past 9. This is the second day and folks are pacing themselves. The Publishers Weekly Show Daily describes the crowd as mellow, which means that attendance is down slightly—no surprise given the depressed economy and the high price of gasoline.

I stop at the Coffee House Press booth in the Consortium aisle. Ray McDaniel, Shaman Drum Bookshop’s events coordinator, is signing Saltwater Empire, his recent book of poems on the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Roy Schonfeld is at the booth as is former Ann Arborite Molly Mikolowski, Marketing Assistant at Coffee House.

Roy, Molly, Ray

Just before I leave the ABA Lounge for Dedi Felman’s Global Literature panel at 1:30, I run into Elizabethe Plante and her husband Dan Chartrand (who has just been elected to the ABA Board), from Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, New Hampshire. Elizabethe hands me a pamphlet describing a program she’s developed called Voices from the World’s Women. The pamphlet includes descriptions of very interesting books written by women from around the world. This imaginative project (see http://waterstreet.booksense.com) is an example of the kind of creative work that proactive independent booksellers do so well.

At 3:00 Paul Yamazaki (City Lights), Rick Simonson (Elliott Bay) and I are on the dais for Translations: the Booksellers Point of View. Sarah McNally (McNally Robinson) was also scheduled to be a panelist, but she is about to give birth and has wisely elected to stay in New York.

I occasionally worry that our conversation about reading international literature involves the same small group of good people. After all, it is relatively easy to sell books in translation if you have a bookstore like I do that is about 100 steps from a major university, or (like Paul, Rick and Sarah) you have stores in major urban centers. How can we blow this open a bit? We invite our audience into the conversation.

Liz Ellen Vogan from Powell’s, Promita Chatterji from the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco, Lindy Hough, editor at North Atlantic Books in Berkeley, U Cal Professor and translator Michael Henry Heim, and Julie Lirot, a specialist in Latin American Women’s Literature, are some of the people in the room who join us in a spirited and interesting conversation.

After the panel, Pete Jaccarino and I walk over to the PEN American Center Reception in the Petree Plaza, where we are welcomed by PEN staffer Andrew Proctor. We join Texans Barbara Rast, Sarah Nawrocki (Trinity University Press) and Steve Bercu for drinks on the patio.

* * *

This evening I’m a guest at the Random House dinner at the Patina restaurant in the Walt Disney Concert Hall. I take the Metro in with Elizabethe Plante and Dan Chartrand.

I’m seated with two bookseller pals—Miriam Sontz (Powell’s Books) and Betsy Burton (King’s English Bookshop)—and Spiegel & Grau editor Cindy Spiegel. Ms. Spiegel tells us about her life in publishing. I am particularly struck by her moving description of the Chinese pianist Lang Lang’s autobiography Journey of a Thousand Miles, which will be published by Spiegel & Grau next month.

BOOKEXPO L.A.: the show begins, smoke is blown, a fine moment at the Hotel Figeroa, a celebrity dinner & the Hellfire Club

I arrive a few minutes after the show has opened, which I regret. I would have preferred to have been standing in line with my brother and sister booksellers when the gun went off precisely at 9. Everyone is terribly excited—sweaty—and people spill onto the floor in a kind of feeding frenzy for reader’s copies. I can’t imagine what its like to work in a booth on this first morning. If you are addicted to intensity, this is for you.

I walk around all morning looking at the new books and talking with friends.

* * *

This afternoon there are a series of panels on publishing in China. Marian and I attend the session on Chinese Reading, which is moderated by Rudiger Wischenbart, whom I met briefly in Beijing.

The keynote speaker is Du Dali. He speaks in Mandarin while a translator is simultaneously speaking in English. The English text of his talk is also projected onto a large screen. One of the power point slides reads

Faced with the huge demands of Chinese society for culture and publishing, Chinese government has made great efforts to create a favorable environment for the development of Chinese publishing industry.

Du Dali offers what he calls “three suggestions for co-operation” that he believes fit in nicely with the 11th Five Year Plan of the Chinese Communist Party:

A. Strengthen cooperation from multiple perspectives and aspects.
B. Strengthen cooperation in various forms.
C. Keep equal communication and mutual understanding which is the fundamental premise for the cooperation and win-win result.

Huh?

He finishes his speech with two posters for the film Babel side by side on the large screen. They are both the same image, but the text on one poster is in Mandarin, the other is in English.

“We all know the Babel story from the Bible,” Du Dali says. “We live in a diverse world. The more we understand each other, the better off we’ll be.”

Okay. So…what’s the next step? Du Dali’s speech is very disappointing. He says all the right stuff, but it feels like he’s just blowing a lot of smoke.

I propose a cultural exchange of Chinese and American booksellers, but Du Dali doesn’t understand what I’m talking about—or feigns confusion.

Marian, who spent a lot of time in the Eastern Bloc countries and Russia during the Soviet era, turns toward me and quietly says, “Apparatchik.”

* * *

I take a cab from the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel to the Hotel Figuero downtown to join Roy and Judy Schonfeld, Stu Abraham, Sam Dorrance (editor-in-chief of Potomac Books), and Jim and Robbin Botting for drinks.

This story requires some background, so please bear with me.

In 1970 I attended the Weather War Council, the last above-ground meeting of the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society. It was held in the Giant Ballroom, a decaying building in a tough urban neighborhood in Flint, my hometown. I knew Diana Oughton, who had moved to Flint to organize the local lumpenproletariat (motorcycle gang types).

A few months after the meeting, Oughton died in a townhouse explosion on 11th Street in New York while allegedly assembling a bomb. The Weather leadership went underground, indictments were issued and I was eventually visited by an FBI agent who tried to play the tough guy.

Too young to be intimidated and filled with self-righteousness, I was sarcastic and snippy right back at him.

Flash forward to late August last summer. At a family wedding my sister-in-law’s husband turned to me during dinner and said, “I bet people do this to you all the time, but I’ve got a manuscript I’d like you to look at.”

Uh-oh. This sort of thing happens all too frequently to anyone in the book business. The manuscripts are almost always awful.

As it turned out, this was not the case. Jim Botting, the author of the manuscript, was my sister-in-law’s husband’s brother, who worked as an FBI agent for twenty-five years. He was the team leader of the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Team and a supervisory member of its international Critical Incident Negotiation Team. And he knows how to tell a story.

The book is a collection of war stories. Jim was in Mississippi investigating Civil Rights violations, he exchanged gun fire with AIM militants at Wounded Knee, he was involved in the SLA shoot out in Los Angeles and the David Koresh stand-off in Waco, Texas. This guy was like the Woody Allen character in Zelig. He was everywhere. It’s an amazing read.

I especially admire his honesty. He admits feeling paralyzed at one point by the fear that his luck has run out, that the next bullet fired during a drug bust has his name on it.

I passed the manuscript on to Stu Abraham, who passed it on to Sam Dorrance at Potomac Press, who will publish the book in February ’09. The title is Bullets, Bombs and Fast Talk: Twenty-Five years of FBI War Stories.

So…I walk into the Hotel Figuero bar, I’ve never met Jim and I don’t have much time because I’m expected back in Hollywood in roughly forty-five minutes. I sit down with everyone and announce that in 1970 I was interviewed by the FBI because I was at the Weatherman War Council. I tell them that I’ve calmed down considerably since then, but that my politics haven’t changed all that much over the years (which is an exaggeration of course, but I’m on a roll). “And,” I say, “I’m going to do everything I can to try to make this book a success because it’s so good.”

Jim’s face just lights up. This is my best moment during BookExpo.


with Robbin and Jim Botting

* * *

I hop into a limo (teased into this over-the-top extravagance by Stu Abraham, who can’t stop laughing as the vehicle pulls away) and ride back to Hollywood for the Knopf party hosted by editor Sonny Mehta. The dinner is held at Lucques on Melrose Avenue, and a number of celebrity authors are here—Barbara Walters, Arianna Huffington, Anne Rice, Art Spiegelman among others.

I’m seated next to Anne-Lise Spitzer, VP for Marketing & Creative Director at Knopf, and Karen Long, the Book Editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. They are both lovely dinner companions. Once again, I’m struck by how lucky I am to be in this line of work.

* * *

After the Knopf Party we return to the hotel, and I talk Steve Bercu, his companion Ginger, and Mark Mouser (from University Books in Seattle) into showing some face at the Hellfire Club Party, which is being held at The Power House Bar just across the street.

The party invitation describes the Power House somewhat ungenerously as “a urinal attached to a keg.” Whatever.

The place is packed with booksellers and tough looking denizens of the Hollywood bar scene. Prince’s Little Red Corvette is playing on the sound system. The Hellfire Club’s so-called Board of Directors (Patty Berg, Carla Gray, Ruth Liebmann and Craig Popelars) are seated together in a small booth near the entrance looking cool. Shaman Drum Business Manager Pete Jaccarino is drinking with a friend next to the bar.

On first glance, it appears that I’m the oldest person in the room, which usually doesn’t bother me but I can’t hear a word anyone says.

Steve, Ginger and Mark—also a bit on the far side of 30—look somewhat ill at ease. Through a series of creative nonverbal hand signs, we signal each other that its time to split the scene (as we used to say).

BOOKEXPO L.A.: Living Green & Partying Down

I’m up in time this morning to attend the American Booksellers Association keynote session with the actor Ed Begley, Jr., who is a very effective and inspiring living green speaker. Clarkson Potter Publishers has just published Living Like Ed, which I intend to read.

The ABA has embraced environmental initiatives this year, and everyone here is talking about reducing their carbon footprint.

Following the speech I ride the escalator down from the fifth floor, but I feel guilty about it.

Marian and I take the Metro downtown to the Redcat Theater at the Hope Street entrance of the Walt Disney Concert Hall—a spectacular building designed by Frank Gehry. We’re here to do a pre-party walk-through with Chad Post before our Bookforum/Reading The World Party tonight.
Everything looks good, and we’re back at the hotel in time for the ABA luncheon. Our speaker is Amy Goodman, radio and tv host of Democracy Now! Ms. Goodman has written Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times with her brother David. She talks about knitting together an independent media network around the country to create “safe places to talk.” She proposes “a media kitchen table that stretches around the globe, where we can discuss issues of war and peace.” Goodman follows with stories of resistance against the political thuggery of the Patriot Act.

Again, the ABA staff have picked an excellent speaker on a compelling topic.

Marian and I leave for the Redcat Theater late in the afternoon to set up for the party. Chad Post and Tim O’Sullivan from Bookforum are already there. At 6:00 the hall quickly fills with people. From my vantage point the party appears to be a great success. Marian takes lots of photos (see some below).

I leave a bit early to attend the Farrar, Straus & Giroux dinner at AMMO on N. Highland in Hollywood, and I arrive just moments before Spencer Lee seats everyone. I sit between poet and Farrar editor-in-chief Jonathan Glassie and the novelist Amitav Ghosh. Booksellers Carla Cohen, from Politics and Prose, and Marie duVaure, from Vromans, are also at our table.

I recall seeing Mr. Ghosh, who is also an anthropologist, in Ann Arbor a number of years ago, shortly after he’d published In an Antique Land, his book about living in an Egyptian village. Farrar will publish his new book, Sea of Poppies, in October. This is a big novel about “the vexed colonial history of the East” that looks terrific.

After our entrees are cleared, the authors switch tables. I’m introduced to Ron Hansen. Again, another Ann Arbor connection. Mr. Hansen was in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan back in the early 80’s. One of Ron’s novels, Mariette In Ecstasy, explores life in a religious order, and A Stay Against Confusion is a book of essays on faith and fiction. In May ’09 Farrar will release Exiles, a novel about the shipwreck of the Deutschland, an event that moved Gerard Manley Hopkins to return to poetry.

BOOKFORUM/READING THE WORLD PARTY:


with Doug & Penny Dutton


with Chad Post & Mary Matze


Pete Jaccarino & Marian Krzyzowski


with BOOKFORUM people

BOOKEXPO L.A.: Cycladic figures and a prayer for Britney

This morning Marian and I visit two iconic independent bookshops in the Hollywood ‘hood. Bodhi Tree, in West Hollywood, specializes in spiritual books. It has a mid-sixties vibe that feels correct in the midst of all this California sunshine. And Book Soup, just down the street from the Viper Room, has an excellent collection of art and photography titles, as well as some sexual material that would probably be considered transgressive back in the Midwest (I didn’t look closely!). Everything is somewhat idiosyncratically organized, but it is charming.

* * *

We returned to the hotel in time to catch the ABA bus to the Getty Museum.

This is my fourth visit to the Getty. It’s built on the peak of a high hill overlooking Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean. The building is a kind of spectacular palace of art, with an open plaza separating the galleries

I was here once at twilight and saw the white marble change to a pink hue in the fading light. The gardens around the museum are gorgeous (see Robert Irwin Getty Garden, by Lawrence Weschler, an essential text).

What is most interesting to me however—and its why I keep coming back every time I’m in Los Angeles—are the Cycladic figures in the museum’s permanent collection. It turns out that they have been moved to the Getty Villa on the Pacific Coast Highway.

The marble sculptures are from small islands in the Aegean and date from the Bronze Age in the third millennium BC. The figures were discovered in grave sites and most of them are female. Archaeologists speculate they are fertility idols.

Many of them are very stylized, with folded arms and lyre shaped heads. The human figure has been reduced to a series of almost flat planes. They exude a kind of stillness. The figures are dignified in ways that remind me of formal photo portraits taken of people from traditional societies (see Fred Miller’s photographs of the Crow people, for example).

These figures are very old, but at the same time they feel contemporary. Brancusi obviously looked carefully at Cycladic art, as did Picasso (the way he painted eyes).

Almost nothing is known about the pre Greek culture that produced these figures beyond the evidence of the figures themselves. Stripped of context and history, they are displayed at the Getty Villa, watching and perhaps judging the visitors there, knowing them for what they are.

* * *

Marian is a fan of The Big Lebowski, a cult
film in which the Jeff Bridges’ character is constantly talking about eating at In N Out Burgers, a fast food chain in L.A. We decide to make a pilgrimage to the In N Out a few blocks from our hotel, on Sunset next to Hollywood High School.

“It’s iconic,” Marian says.

On our way back to the hotel I see Britney Spears’ star on Hollywood Boulevard, and I’m moved to offer up a short prayer there for the cessation of suffering of all beings.