Intro
Do I need to say it? Do I really need to point out what a gorgeous Sunday it was on UCLA campus in Westwood? Sure, Westwood, like the rest of the Westside, gets a healthy dose of marine layer coming off the ocean, but that iron-gray blanket's no match for the Southern California sun. By noon, the sky was pure azure.
Publishing: The Editors Speak Out
Broad 2160 - 10:30 a.m.
Sarah Crichton - Crichton is a former Newsweek editor and publisher of Little, Brown. She is now the publisher of Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sarah Crichton Books publishes a wide variety of literary and commercial fiction and nonfiction, including Blame, a 2009 Book Prize finalist in Fiction.
Eli Horowitz - Horowitz is a managing editor at McSweeney's. Over the past five years he has edited books and stories by writers including Dave Eggers, William Vollmann, Nick Hornby, Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, Chris Adrian and Salvador Plascencia. Horowitz cowrote the book Clock Without a Face.
Jack Shoemaker - Shoemaker was the editor-in-chief at Berkeley's late lamented North Point Press and later served as West Coast editor of Alfred A. Knopf. He is the vice president and editorial director of Counterpoint Press. Shoemaker lives in Berkeley, California.
Moderator: Sara Nelson - Nelson is currently the books director of O, the Oprah Magazine. She was the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly from 2005 to 2009 and won several awards for her re-launch of that magazine. Nelson is the author of So Many Books, So Little Time, a reading guide/memoir.
Notes
The first panel I attended yesterday was on the movie biz, and I believe I said in the notes that at every Book Fest I usually attend a Hollywood panel of one sort or another, there being many different angles from which to examine the biz. Well, the same could be said for panels on publishing. Since I, at the old age of thirty-three, still aspire to be a published novelist, panels that examine the business of publishing from any angle tend to be of interest of me.
I'm of two minds about panels like this. On the one hand, getting published as an unknown writer is so tough that attending one of these panels couldn't possibly make things worse. On the other hand, it can be incredibly frustrating listening to a group of so-called veterans and experts espouse a lot of useless shit that not only doesn't help anyone, but only reinforces the wide-held belief that in the publishing industry, as in Hollywood, no one knows anything.
After today's panel, I am of that latter state of mind. I'm not saying I'll never again attend a panel of blowhards emitting lots of steam. Like I said yesterday, I never say never. But I think after this, I'm sort of done with publishing panels for the time being. Before you think I'm totally down on this panel: No, not at all. For one thing, what I really loved about these kats was how they unanimously made fun of the "publishing is dead" pronouncements that have been around since the day after Gutenberg invented the printing press six hundred years ago. That one old guy Jack Shoemaker, he especially had fun with "publishing is dead." As the former West Coast head of Alfred A. Knopf, one of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses around, you know this guy's been there and done that. Today he said how vividly he could recall everyone pronouncing publishing's death back when publishers started churning out more trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks. We're talking decades ago for Pete's sake. "Supposedly publishing died with the advent of mass market paperbacks," Jack said. "Remember that? No, you weren't around then." He went on to say how publishing supposedly died with the advent of photocopiers, and then with book groups. Nowadays people are saying publishing will be killed by e-books and e-readers like the Kindle. But the data simply doesn't support that, Jack said. E-book sales are still far too low for publishers to forgo the hard copy. As for Kindle, Jack said it's a nice idea, but the technology is still too nascent to be a worthy substitute for the real thing. He cracked everyone up when he called the Kindle the reading equivalent of a sex doll. Nice. The moderator Sara Nelson, meanwhile, had this to say about publishing being dead: "It was ever thus."
Another topic they touched on that I would obviously be sensitive to is that of author submissions. We had a wide range of views here. Technically, they all take unagented manuscripts, but there's obviously a big difference between sending your unagented manuscript to a behemoth like Knopf versus a smaller house like McSweeney's. When he was at Knopf, Jack said that out of the approximately fourteen thousand manuscripts sent "over the transom," as he put it, meaning unagented stuff, perhaps two of them would be published. Ouch. Eli, on the other hand, who runs McSweeny's, says they publish about one out of every two unagented manuscripts that come in. That's unbelievable. Half of the unsolicited, unrepresented material gets published? Hmmmm, as much as I'd love to believe that, I've been so frustrated querying my stuff, a healthy dose of cynicism is inevitable. No matter, what the hell do I have to lose giving it a shot, right? I forgot to say that I've seen Eli before. At the 2008 Book Fest, I attended a publishing panel called West Coast Publishing: Rethinking the Model. Then as now, he was my favorite panelist. He's definitely young to be running a publishing house, practically a kid for Christ's sake. But he's so down to earth and straightforward and utterly without pretense, a nice balance on a panel of mostly older so-called experts. And I don't mean to come down hard on Jack. The guy's a grizzled vet, and I respect that. I love what he said about publishing's death. But whereas he and Sarah had these complicated, writer's-caveat-laden answers on how authors should submit their manuscripts (e.g. look for just the right agent, do your research, etc.), Eli said simply: "If you want to submit your manuscript, then mail it to us. How else are you going to do it?" Exactly!
They also talked about the relationship between editors and their authors. Sarah said she's a therapist to her writers two-thirds of the time. Wow, really? Interesting. I don't think I've ever heard an editor say that. On the other hand, I have heard agents on past panels say something similar, which probably speaks to why editors prefer authors to have agents, so they don't have to do the ego soothing. Since Sarah's the head of an FSG imprint, I have to assume the vast majority of her authors are agented. I mean, FSG's a prestigious house. Nonetheless, they all agreed that authors, no matter how successful, have delicate egos. Indeed, the more successful an author becomes, the bigger and therefore more sensitive their ego gets. When Jack was still at Knopf, they published a book by Gay Talese, who's a pretty reputable writer. Back in the sixties he was one of the writers who pioneered the so-called New Journalism, also called literary journalism or creative nonfiction. His wife Nan's a long-time reputable publisher with her own imprint at Doubleday. Anywho, Gay Talese is a name to conjure. But even names to conjure have their down days. I'm not sure which book it was, but Jack said when they published this one book by Gay, the reviews were beyond scathing. To wit: "Even the printer didn't read it." Ouch! Suffice it to say Jack had to step in to do some emotional damage control with Gay. It's hard to picture Gay being reduced to a puddle. When I was a student at USC's masters of creative writing program in the late nineties, he and his wife were guest speakers in one of my classes. Actually, I think he teaches there every spring, or used to. He's kind of up there in years now. Anyway, I didn't take his class, but he did make a cameo toward the end of the semester in this other class I was taking. Dude was one of the most polished and well-dressed gentlemen I'd ever met. Seriously, the kat was right out of a 1940s flick with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. His silver hair was all combed back and polished. He even had one of those cool film noir hats to go with his suit. At any rate, the panel's bottom line was: Editors are not dictators. Every book requires collaboration. The editor is there to be the writer's partner, and that includes therapy.
I have to say I was surprised to hear Sarah poo-poo distinctions between literary and commercial fiction. This was in response to an audience question at the end from a woman who, like me, has manuscripts she wants to submit. She asked the panel how to determine if what she'd written was literary or commercial. Just to fill those of you in who aren't writers, when you look through a guidebook of agents and publishers, each one has a list of genres they look for (e.g. horror, action, romance, cookbooks, etc.). Quite a few agents and publishers are very broad and simply say they're looking for "literary and commercial fiction." Unlike the young woman asking the question, I've never thought too hard about the distinction. I suppose there are some books that are obviously one or the other (Pride and Prejudice versus Cujo), but otherwise, I feel it can be so subjective. And I guess Sarah Crichton agrees. She told the woman at the mic not to worry about it, that there's really no such thing as literary versus commercial. Commercial just means it's easier to sell, and all publishers want that, right? But if you go back up and look at Sarah's little bio, which I copied out of the Book Fest program, it says her eponymous imprint at FSG publishes a "wide variety of literary and commercial fiction and nonfiction..." Ooops.
This being L.A., it was inevitable someone in the audience would ask about optioning movie rights. Again, just to fill in those of you who live completely outside the world of writing, when you publish a book, a movie studio may choose to option it. What that means is, they pay you a nominal fee for the exclusive right to adapt your book into a movie. It's usually for a certain finite time period, like a year or two years. So they may pay you a fee for the option, and if they can't make it into a movie after, say, a year (or whatever the contract says), then the movie rights go back to you, or the studio can renew the option for another year or whatever. Screenplays can be optioned as well. In fact, I've heard of screenwriters making a very handsome living simply letting studios option their material. None of their stuff ends up getting produced, but they're sitting pretty on a lot of dough from all that optioning. Studios don't always pay a lot for optioning, though. Jack said when he was at Knopf, there was a time when literally every single book published by Knopf was optioned, but the option fees were only a couple hundred bucks or something per book.
Sarah Silverman
Los Angeles Times Stage - Noon
Sarah Silverman - This funny-ass comedienne is here to plug her memoir The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee, which just came out last week.
Notes
I was a bedwetter. Yes, it's true. No, I'm not kidding. I don't say this to just anyone. I wet my bed all the way into junior high. It wasn't until I was in seventh grade, at the age of twelve, a ripe old age to be pissing my sheets, that I finally outgrew it. You might not think twelve is a ripe old age for that, but I'd have these moments during that era when I'd think to myself, "Holy shit, I'm going to suffer this problem for the rest of my life." I didn't wet the bed every single night, perhaps one night out of every two or three. Suffice it to say sleepovers were a roll of the dice. What made it extra tough was the inconvenience it caused my family. There was this one night, when I was in second or third grade, when my brother Doug positively flipped out when he saw I'd wet the bed. He almost literally went bonkers, marching up and down the bedroom going "Why, why, why, why!"
Suffice it to say those first dozen years of my life were a wee bit on the slow side. It didn't help my self-esteem or self-confidence very much. What's worse, I couldn't find anyone else with the same problem. Most folks who have problems can find others in the same boat, right? That's how you get support groups and whatnot. Not so with bedwetting. We all know they're out there, but it's such an incredibly painful topic, no one dares admit the truth. Each of us becomes our own private universe of shame.
It's too bad, therefore, that I didn't know Sarah Silverman growing up. She was a bedwetter too. And she had it worse than me. I read in an interview not long ago that her bedwetting lasted until she was a junior in high school, when she was sixteen or seventeen. That's fucking unbelievable. Can you imagine? All comedians cry on the inside, right? There ya go.
I'm trying to think of when I discovered Sarah Silverman. I was a big fan of The Larry Sanders Show, on which she played a recurring character, but I can't remember her at all. I also loved Star Trek: Voyager, on which she guest-starred on a two-parter. Nope, no memory of that. She was a regular on Saturday Night Live during the 1993-94 season. That was my senior year in high school. I've never watched SNL consistently, but I do catch it now and again. If I caught it at all that year, again, I didn't pick up on Sarah. She was also in There's Something About Mary, but not in any capacity that her face stuck with me. Her first big gig, in terms of the gig that gave her a steady paycheck, was Mr. Show, which ran on HBO for four seasons, 1995-98. But I didn't discover Mr. Show until just this year thanks to a friend at work lending me all four seasons on DVD, so we can't count that. Nope, in spite of all the times I saw stuff with her in it, I'm pretty sure Sarah Silverman didn't register on my radar until she did Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic about five years ago. If you haven't seen that, you must. It's probably the first time Sarah got to do everything she wanted to do. It was all-out Sarah, so it's no accident that's when I finally sat up and noticed her. Shit, I even noticed her during the preview. The movie didn't come out until November of '05, but they started showing previews during the summer. When I first saw the preview, I was like, "Who's that?!" So yes, I saw it when it came out a few months later, and I've been following Sarah ever since. When I found out she struggled with bedwetting longer than me, my admiration for her went way up. Behind her adorable smile and razor wit, she's a warrior. A grizzled survivor who didn't let the worst get her down. What was extra cool about Jesus Is Magic was that it was made barely five miles from where I live in the Valley. Some of the skits are outside on location somewhere, but the whole thing is bracketed in a standup show she did at the El Portal Theatre on Lankershim Blvd. in North Hollywood.
Sarah wasn't on one of the indoor panels or anything. No one was interviewing her. Nope, like a good standup, she had the whole stage to herself, in this case the Los Angeles Times outdoor stage, where two years ago I saw director John Landis interviewed by Tim Curry. Funny, in my eleven-year history of being a Book Fest regular, I've almost never attended any outdoor stage events. And that Tim Curry thing was incidental. I'd attended my four panels for the day and decided to catch the last half of that because, well, why not? And now look. At this Book Fest I've gone to two: Yesterday's Alicia Silverstone event at the Cooking Stage (I never thought I'd attend anything at the Cooking Stage, cooking just isn't me) and now this one with Sarah Silverman. Funny how habits change, and you don't notice it until afterward.
Sarah didn't talk too much about the book itself--the title's fairly self-explanatory, I reckon--but she did talk quite a bit about her life in general, going back to her childhood. Like me, Sarah's folks split when she was still very young. Unlike me, they've stayed fast friends and live within a couple miles of each other in the same Bedford, New Hampshire neighborhood where Sarah grew up. Sarah compared her parents' camaraderie to that of war vets from formerly opposing countries. They went through hell together and lived to tell about it. Both parents eventually married other people, and get this: The two couples hang out together. Well, I should say used to hang out. Sarah's stepfather passed away recently.
As for her real dad, Sarah's impersonations of him leaving messages on her voicemail were my favorite part of her standup routine. Obviously I've never met the guy so I can't say how close she came to sounding like him, but you can see brilliance when it's right in front of you. Although she comes from what she calls a "New Hampshire Jewish family," her father's originally from Boston, and that Boston accent is thick. Watch any movie set in Boston, like The Departed or Good Will Hunting or Gone Baby Gone, and you'll know what I mean. It's very distinctive. Sarah's impersonation of the "old Jewish guy with a Boston accent" was awesome. And she did several, a whole series of messages her dad apparently left on a single Saturday. I was practically in tears with sore sides when she was done. And yes, they do normally talk on Saturdays, which is probably why her dad was sorta worried when she wasn't home on the Saturday in question. I'm the same with my mom. We talk every Sunday around 5pm California time. And if I'm not there, or if I call her and she's not there, you can't help but worry just a little. Sarah was actually visiting her dad in New Hampshire just yesterday. She was probably exhausted, but she hid it well, although she couldn't hide that cold. Anyway, her father's already read the first hundred pages of her new book, which isn't bad considering the thing's been out only five days, but Sarah considers that slow. Really? As slowly and deliberately as I read, tackling twenty pages a day would be a healthy pace for me. Oh and speaking of her impersonations of Dad, she also imitated him harassing rich people in Boca Raton, which is something he likes to do when he stays there during winter. Man, I wish I could've recorded all the shit Sarah said in her dad's voice, making fun of other retirees in coffee shops or what have you.
As for her stepdad, his passing was fairly recent, within the last few months or so. Sarah went back to New Hampshire for the funeral. Her niece asked her to help write a eulogy. Sarah agreed, but it was a struggle. I'm not sure how old the niece is, but at one point while writing the eulogy, the niece said she felt like Lois Lane writing about Superman. That got a lot of "awwws" out of the audience. Sarah's mom hasn't been outside much since the stepdad's death.
Sarah shared some of her experiences as a starving comedienne in the nineties. First up, her SNL gig sucked. Because she sucked. Hey, I'm going by her word, not mine. Like I said above, I'm not even sure I watched SNL that year. With nearly twenty years of hindsight, she sees how overly self-confident she was. After a full season on the show, not a single one of her sketch ideas got made. Not sure if you know, and I didn't until I saw a 60 Minutes piece on SNL a few years ago, focusing mostly on head honcho Lorne Michaels, but each cast member on the show is expected to generate their own sketch ideas. If you're Lorne, you obviously want more ideas than you need so you can pick and choose. Accordingly, each cast member has to come up with x number of ideas every week. This includes sketch ideas for the celebrity guest hosts as well. During the 60 Minutes piece, Jude Law was the host. It was that same week Ashlee Simpson was the guest musician and was caught lip-syncing. 'Member that? I was so embarrassed for her. But anyway, at one point they showed Jude standing in a meeting room at the head of a huge table with all the cast members sitting around it pitching their ideas at him, in some cases with mixed excitement and desperation in their voices. Jude, meanwhile, would decide yea or nea on the spot. At one point, someone pitched an idea, and Jude laughed it off with a sarcastic "I don't think so." Ouch. Comedians, like all writers, are sensitive. Didn't anyone teach him that? I thought of the 60 Minutes bit when Sarah shared her SNL suckness. With all the hindsight now, she can see how that painful season was just what she needed to grow. One interesting thing to note is that Sarah never called them skits. She called them sketches, just like Carole Burnett.
Another painful anecdote she got us to laugh about was her guest stint on Seinfeld. This was an episode during the eighth season, three or so years after SNL. The main thing she took away from that was how much of an asshole Michael Richards (Kramer) is. Remember all the hot water he got into a couple years ago with his racist rants at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood? Sarah wasn't surprised that happened. He yelled at her all the time on set. It was hard to figure out why, based on her anecdote, but I think Michael Richards is a control freak and/or has a very short temper, so that if you have to do more than one or two takes, he'll get pissed at whoever messed up. That would have to mean he got pissed off a lot since nailing a scene the first time is pretty tough to do.
Some of the folks in the audience asked Sarah about Jesus Is Magic. Someone asked her about her guitar skills. If you've seen the film, you'd know why. Sarah said she took up the guitar about twenty years ago, and while she does play it now and again, she would never pursue it as a career. "That would suck if that were my only career," she said. When someone asked her if she believed in Jesus, she said she's not sure, but she loves the idea of him. If he's real, Sarah is sure he wouldn't like to see some of his followers with so much money. Prime example? The Vatican. She thinks the Pope should sell the Vatican and use the proceeds to help poor people. That's actually a brilliant idea.
Another audience member asked for Sarah's take on Comedy Central. She's of two minds about Comedy Central. On the one hand, a lot of great stuff wouldn't happen without them, but she thinks they've gotten too corporate for their comedic britches. Those in charge should cede some of the programming decisions to the comedians and especially the comedians' fans. Bottom line: Comedy Central has plenty of room for improvement, and she has hope it's heading in the right direction.
This one guy asked Sarah if she has any interest in taking a break from comedy to try her hand at drama, which lots of comedians tend to do once they've done everything they can in the comedy realm. Sarah? Not so much. She said the documentary The Aristocrats is the closest she's come to being dramatic. Did you see that? It's pretty hilarious. I actually saw it the Friday it came out during the summer of 2005. Director Paul Provenza, a comedian himself, was at the ArcLight Hollywood for a Q&A afterward. The premise is this: Paul and that guy Penn Jilette of Penn and Teller fame interview about a hundred or so of their comedian friends. We're talking every single famous and sorta famous comedian you've ever--or never--heard of, from George Carlin to Robin Williams to Drew Carey to Billy Connolly and everyone in between. And each one is supposed to give their version of the Aristocrats joke, this really old burlesque standup joke that's too nasty to be delivered on most standup stages. Everyone in the film agreed my fellow Temple University alum Bob Saget had the nastiest version. Jesus Is Magic was still a few months away from coming out, so Sarah wasn't on my radar yet. I can't recall her version of the joke. No matter, her performing the joke on the documentary is as close to drama as she's gotten. That's not to say she doesn't want to do at least a little drama once in a while. This brings me to another parallel with Carol Burnett. Like Carol, Sarah is a big fan of Damages. She'd love to be on it. That's amazing! Here you have two comediennes, one a legend, the other, in my opinion, not having reached her zenith yet, both united by their love of this show. Of course, this makes me feel pretty validated for loving it myself. I've been hooked on Damages since the first episode aired in July 2007.
One last question was if Sarah had plans to have younglings. The person who asked wants to be sure Sarah passes on her comedic genius through her bloodline. Sarah's pretty ambivalent about it right now. She's not sure she could handle the responsibility and also fears how attached she'd get, that she'd never let her child out of sight. Right now her maternal instinct is getting fulfilled by her pet doggie. The mutt's sixteen years old, though, and could drop dead anytime. She's gotten so attached to him that she'd rather die first than have to deal with the grief. But then she said: "Although...."
And that's a wrap, kids. Sarah warned us she wouldn't be shaking any hands at the book signing due to her cold. Since I had to haul ass to my next panel, I'd already given up on the idea of getting her to sign my copy of The Bedwetter. The tent where you buy the book is right by the signing tent. The line was incredibly long. It reminded me of the line I stood in ten years ago for Michael Crichton. I waited for an hour, and when I was almost there, Crichton's publicist whisked him away to the airport. It's just as well I didn't have time to get the book signed. While buying it, I overheard one of the Book Fest volunteers telling those in line that they'd stop the signing exactly at 1:40 p.m. WTF? That couldn't've been Sarah's decision, but I reckon they had to get the area ready for the next round of signings and so on. That sucks because, based on the Michael Crichton experience, I'm sure not everyone in line got their book signed in the measly forty-minute deadline.
Herman Wouk in Conversation with Tim Rutten
Broad 2160 - 1:30 p.m.
Herman Wouk - Wouk's career as a writer spans nearly six decades and has brought him international acclaim and numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of the classics The Caine Mutiny and War and Remembrance. His latest book is The Language God Talks.
Tim Rutten - Rutten's career as a journalist spans more than 30 years at The Times. Prior to becoming a columnist for the Calendar section, his contributions to the paper included participating on the Pulitzer Prize-winning team coverage of the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
Notes
If you think going from Carol Burnett to Alicia Silverstone was whiplash worthy, try this on for size: From Sarah Silverman to Herman Wouk! What's that? You've never heard of Herman Wouk? Well, you may not be old enough, but just look at his little bio up there: The Caine Mutiny and War and Remembrance. 'Nuff said. This guy isn't just some guy. He's an icon. Truth be told, I didn't know he was still alive until I saw this event in the Festival program, which came with last Sunday's paper. Dude turns ninety-five next month, and he's still ship-shape enough to leave his Palm Springs enclave and wow us with his presence at the Book Fest. Pretty cool, huh?
I should admit something right now: I've never read a single word by Herman Wouk. Yet, thanks to my father, an avid World War II buff (he was born on September 1, 1939, as the Nazis were marching into Poland, starting the war), I have watched bits and pieces of the movie version of The Caine Mutiny, which came out in the mid fifties, just a few years after the novel, and stars just about every well-known male actor of the time: Bogie, Lee Marvin, E.G. Marshall, Fred MacMurray, and Van Johnson, just to name a few.
Like any good writer, Herman was just writing what he knew when he wrote The Caine Mutiny. He served in the Navy during WWII, on what had to be every sailor's least favorite kind of ship to serve on: Destroyer minesweeper (DMS). Herman served on two different DMSes. As happens during war for those who live long enough, he was eventually promoted to executive officer. And besides writing what he knew, Herman practiced the other trait of all great writers: He wrote all the time. I have a few relatives who served in the military. I know from them that the experience can swing wildly from lots of excitement to extreme boredom. Herman took full advantage of the downtime to practice his craft.
He didn't even wait for the war to end to start looking for agents and editors. In fact, Herman didn't even wait to finish the book. After he wrote the first couple chapters, he airmailed them to his old philosophy professor at Columbia, the closest person he had to an industry contact. It worked. The professor had a friend who was a book editor, so he called him up and read a few pages over the phone. Next thing ya know, the editor airmails Herman a publishing contract. At the time, Herman's minesweeper was anchored off the coast of Okinawa, just as good a place as any to sign a contract, I reckon. The novel, Aurora Dawn, was published a couple years after the war ended and did fairly well by first novel standards. Indeed, it was a pick by the Book of the Month Club.
The Caine Mutiny was Herman's third novel. He didn't write the other two big novels he's known for, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, until the seventies, when he was in his late fifties and early sixties. Those two required an enormous amount of research. It was obviously worth it, considering the landmarks they've become in the annals of war literature. After he finished War and Remembrance in the late seventies, Herman was so spent that all he could say about the book was, "This is the main tale I have to tell." Even though they're fiction, they're generally considered accurate depictions of what the war was like. Henry Kissinger called those two novels, which have the same main character, Captain Pug Henry, "the war itself." The Caine Mutiny attracted similar praise. Again, even though it's fiction, to this day it's considered one of the most accurate depictions of life aboard an American warship during World War II.
Herman wrote lots of other stuff too, other novels as well as plays and nonfiction. He was in his mid forties when he made his first foray into the latter arena with this book called This Is My God: The Jewish Way of Life. From what I know, This Is My God is basically Herman's attempt to explain his Orthodox Jewish faith, not just to non-Jews but to other Jews who may not be as devout as Herman. He also seems to have written it for himself, one of those books that serves as therapy for the writer while educating the reader. That's another thing I didn't know about Herman's backstory until today: Herman's parents were Polish Jews who emigrated to the U.S. in the early twentieth century. Growing up in New York, he didn't practice Judaism as much as his folks would've liked, but he certainly made up for it later in life, embracing his faith around the time he enlisted in the Navy in his mid twenties or thereabouts. The claim is that every single morning since then, from circa 1940 to present, the first thing Herman does when he wakes up is read Scripture in Hebrew. Every morning without exception. We're talking seventy years, kids. That's a lot of Scripture. A famous quote from This Is My God: "Zionism is a single long action, of snatching great masses of people out of the path of sure extinction." Forty years after This Is My God, Herman came back to religion with 1999's The Will To Live On: The Resurgence of Jewish Heritage.
While Herman's relatively healthy for his age (that is, his heart still beats), he's not a Dick Clark type of person who never ages. He turns ninety-five in a month, and he looks like someone turning ninety-five in a month, if you catch my drift. By the way, let me not give Tim Rutten short shrift. That I finally got to see him in person is pretty cool too. He writes for the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times. That's the section covering the arts and, as such, is one of my main avenues for keeping tabs on the movie biz, not to speak of the theater and opera scene, what's coming up on TV, all that stuff. Calendar's my favorite section of the paper. The Sunday edition is quite comprehensive.
As soon as the interview started, Tim didn't waste a minute telling us they were here strictly to talk about Herman's new book, The Language That God Talks: On Science and Religion, which just came out three weeks ago. They weren't going to talk about all the awesome stuff I mentioned above. Tim announced this in a curt, somewhat sharp-edged manner, as if someone in the audience had already dared bring up The Caine Mutiny or whatever. While that was an awkward way to kick things off, Herman brought us back down to Earth in his chummy, thick New York accent: "Well first of all, Tim, thanks for doin' this." No kidding, that accent really strikes you at first if you’ve never heard him talk. Kind of accent you normally only hear on one of those innumerable New York-set crime procedurals. Kind of attitude you only see on those shows as well. That whole thing about only talking about the new book and nothing else? That sure as shit wasn't Herman's rule. Later on in the panel he made fun of Tim for saying that.
Nonetheless, The Language That God Talks was the focus of the interview. The book's about the friendship between Herman and the legendary physicist Richard Feynman. The late Feynman, if you've never heard of him, was basically to the generation just before mine what Carl Sagan was to my generation. He made science, especially astronomy and astrophysics, accessible to the lay folk. The title The Language That God Talks comes from something Feynman said to Herman when they first met. Feynman advised Herman to learn calculus because calculus is "the language that God talks." Feynman said something else that has stayed with Herman over the decades: "The stage is too big for human drama." In fact, Herman repeated both of those quotes several times during the hour, such was the impact they had on him and his faith. Now you might think someone like Herman could never get along with someone like Feynman because of their seemingly opposite worldviews. But I guess, to borrow an adage from science, opposites attract. Herman and Feynman were friends for decades. And yes, while Feynman constantly challenged Herman's faith and made him ask a lot of questions, Herman has emerged on the other side all the stronger for it. That seems like what his new book is about in a nutshell, how science strengthened his faith.
While Feynman was the inspiration for the book, Herman credits his nephew for the actual writing of it. That is, when Herman was in the middle of writing it but was losing steam and inspiration, his nephew provided what Herman called the "final shove." He's obviously proud of his nephew, based on how he talked about him. Apparently this guy started out without much direction. He was a "ne'er-do-well," Herman said. That's great. How often do you hear people use the phrase "ne'er-do-well" anymore? Exactly. Not often enough. To straighten him out, Herman made the guy study the Talmud with him. Today his nephew's a proud father of twins and practices law in Washington, D.C.
Now the Talmud. Herman and Tim talked a lot about that. Unless you're Jewish, you may not know what the Talmud is. As one of the least religious people you'll ever meet, I must confess to not being too familiar with it. Basically the Talmud is one of the main texts of Judaism. It's got all the stuff you need to know about Jewish faith: The history, philosophy, laws, ethics, all that stuff. If you're Jewish, you gotta know the Talmud or you're just a poser. In his research for the book, Herman discovered that a lot of brilliant scientists were not only Jewish, but were devoutly so. They were "Talmudic," he said, meaning they knew their Jewish faith backward and forward to the point that they could be teachers of the faith. You take Isaac Newton for instance. We all know Isaac Newton. But what a lot of people don't know, including me until today, was that Newton was a Hebrew scholar. Another thing Herman discovered about scientists during his research is their wicked sense of humor. In fact, their humor became such a common denominator in their otherwise varied and sometimes clashing personalities, Herman seriously wonders if those brilliant scientists hear something extra out there in the cosmos that ordinary folks like us don't hear. That would at least explain their out-of-this-world brilliance, if not their sharp humor, he said.
Speaking of big brains, Herman himself was selected as a big brain to attend the annual Forstmann Little conference in Aspen, Colorado. He described it as a conference of big brains and big money. Forstmann Little, speaking of big money, is a company in New York City that specializes in leveraged buyouts. Their conferences are super secret. At least, they're supposed to be. It's funny. Technically, no one's supposed to know they're even happening, let alone what they're about. But if you live in Aspen, how can you not notice the sudden influx of famous people? Seriously, it's like, suddenly there's Herman Wouk crossing the street or whatever. Check out some of the names from the 2007 edition of Forstmann Little: Comedian Dennis Miller, Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto, Senator Fred Thompson, NBC anchor Brian Williams, Redskins owner Dan Snyder, tennis champ Monica Seles, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, CBS honcho Les Moonves, Queen Noor Al-Hussein of Jordan, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Steve Forbes, Pete Coors, Mayo Clinic boss Dr. Denis Cortese, Michael Dell, Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft, General Colin Powell, Google chair Eric Schmidt, and eBay CEO Meg Whitman.
Getting the picture? So Herman went to one of those. Sounds incredibly cool. And judging by the way his eyes lit up as he talked about the experience, he thought it was cool too. Now you and I may not be able to recognize folks like Les Moonves or the South Carolina governor on sight, but lots of journalists can. That's how the locals usually know when Forstmann Little's in town. A reporter will start blogging about it. Like: "We don't know what's going on, but we know it's happening now." Herman said the gist of the conference is that you've got these incredibly smart and accomplished people from just about every known discipline you can think of, all converging on Aspen to work together on devising solutions to really big global problems.
Tim asked Herman why he thinks Muslims seem to be wrestling with their faith more than Christians and Jews. Herman said one possibility could be their failure to adapt to modern times. Christianity and Judaism were impacted directly by the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. Sure, adapting meant plenty of pain. Let's not even get started on all the wars born out of Christian in-fighting. The Hundred Years War, anyone? Not to speak of the Thirty Years War, or the smaller, but no less brutal, episodes of religious backwardness, such as the Salem Witch trials. So yes, Christians and Jews have toughed out more than their fair share of evolutionary pains, but at least they have evolved. Islam, meanwhile, according to Herman, hasn't been able to keep up. In other words, psychologically, Islam is still back in the Middle Ages, a period sometimes referred to by historians as the Dark Ages because of the level of ignorance by which people lived relative to what came next. That's why in some Muslim countries today you still have punishments like stoning, thieves getting their hands lopped off in front of large stadium crowds, and other barbaric things analogous to what used to be commonplace in the West about a thousand years ago or so. Of course, the next question begs, doesn't it? How did Islam miss the Enlightenment boat? Was it simple geography? It can't be that simple. This is one of those conundrums that could fill an entire book, and which has no doubt filled many.
That does it for Tim Rutten's interview with Herman Wouk. Pretty cool, huh? I hope I could get across how salt of the earth Herman is. Like I said about his New York accent being very noticeable right away, another thing that strikes you off the bat is what a normal guy he is. And a very interesting man, clearly. I'm honored and thrilled I got to see him in person. Indeed, this panel's one of the best examples of serendipity I've ever experienced. I'm going to have to read his books someday, especially the Big Three.
Fiction: The Illusion of Being Ordinary
Dodd 147 - 3 p.m.
Jill Ciment - Ciment received her MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine. She's the author of Small Claims, a collection of short stories and novellas. She's written several novels, including Heroic Measures, a 2009 Book Prize finalist in Fiction.
Elizabeth Crane - Crane is the author of three collections of short stories, the latest of which is You Must Be This Happy to Enter. Her work has been featured in a variety of publications and has been adapted for the stage by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater Company.
Dylan Landis - Landis is the author of the debut novel-in-stories Normal People Don't Live Like This, a Newsday Best Book of 2009. A former journalist and author of six interior design books, Landis has a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Moderator: Susan Salter Reynolds - Reynolds previously worked as an assistant editor at the New York Review of Books and staff writer at the Los Angeles Times. While at the Times, she wrote the Discoveries column for the Sunday Book Review and was a regular contributor to the Calendar section.
Notes
Okay! Now for the fourth and final event of the day, and the eighth and final event of my Book Fest 2010 weekend. What a ride, huh? Carol Burnett, Alicia Silverstone, Sarah Silverman, Herman friggin' Wouk, and a bunch of fascinating panels spanning the spectrum, including this one. Like I said about the Hollywood panel yesterday, it's almost obligatory for me to attend a fiction panel of one sort or another at each Book Fest. Again, like Hollywood and the movie biz, you have so many angles from which to talk about this stuff. Past fiction panels I've attended include finding an agent, writing while holding down a job, writing the second novel, writing about the west, writing mysteries, you name it.
Another thing I said yesterday was that I feel like these panel subtitles are sometimes throwaway labels that serve as an excuse to talk about whatever people want to talk about related to the umbrella topic. Yesterday's Hollywood panel on "Life in the Biz" was okay for the most part. They covered a lot of hardcore biz stuff like talent agents and distribution and depictions of African Americans. Now this panel's subtitle, "The Illusion of Being Ordinary," what do you suppose that means? Exactly. I'm not sure either, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to be here.
The bigger reason I selected this panel, though, was moderator Susan Salter Reynolds. She’s awesome. As you saw up in her bio, she wrote for the L.A. Times Book Review for a long time. I’m not sure how many years, but seriously, her Discoveries section in the back of every Book Review was one of the sections of the Sunday paper I would never miss. As the section title implies, Discoveries was all about the books that wouldn’t get coverage otherwise, either because the authors were first-time authors and/or weren’t well known, or perhaps their subject matter was esoteric. I started following Discoveries as soon as I landed out here in ’98, so I’d been familiar with Susan’s name for four years when I finally saw her in person at the 2002 Book Fest. She interviewed Steve Martin in Royce Hall, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, venue on campus, which also does double duty for the UCLALive theater company. In fact, it may be because of UCLALive that the Book Fest hasn’t used Royce Hall in a couple years now. Anyway, what struck me about Susan during her interview of Steve Martin was how composed she remained throughout. If you’re even a little bit familiar with Steve Martin, you can imagine what he was like in front of a live audience. A wild and crazy guy! Actually, he was there to read a couple chapters from an early draft of his novella The Pleasure of My Company, the follow-up to Shopgirl. Susan never let him get to her. She wasn’t humorless, mind you, just composed. And she’s a great speaker. You can tell she’s an avid reader because of her skill with words. She’s also very down to earth, which tends to be one of my favorite qualities in people. Ever since that Steve Martin interview, I’ve tried to make sure I attend a panel she’s moderating every year. Seriously. She’s here every year, even though she’s no longer with the Times. I can’t tell you how weird it is that I don’t see her name every Sunday. On the other hand, I had a sick feeling it would happen. Unless you live in a cave, you know that among the hardest hit during the Great Recession were newspapers.
It sucks when incredibly smart folks like Susan lose their jobs, because as their readers, we benefit from their knowledge. At least she's still at the Book Fest. Last year I attended a panel she moderated called Fiction: New West. Speaking of repeat appearances, one of the authors on today's panel, Dylan Landis, was part of a Sunday panel I attended last year called Fiction: Exiles and Outsiders. See what I mean about panel subtitles? It's hit and miss. Actually, though, both of those subtitles were indeed relevant. Those were meaty panels, from what I recall. If you want to see for yourself, I blogged about the Book Fest last year.
Susan, who generally likes to quote people as part of her moderating duties, started out this panel quoting some guy who said "fiction was dead." Like the "books are dead" pronouncements they cited at this morning's pubilshing panel, "fiction is dead" should be taken with a healthy pinch of salt. Suffice it to say that, as a fiction writer hoping to be published someday, granting such sweeping pronouncements even a little bit of validity just isn't an option.
Now how about these authors on the panel? I haven't read a single word by any of them, which tends to be the case with most of the fiction panels I attend at the Book Fest. I go to these panels partly because of the subject matter, sometimes because of the moderator, and other times because of the big name factor, like Sarah Silverman, Alicia Silverstone, and of course Carol Burnett. As I said, Susan's moderating this played a big role in my being here, but so did the subject matter. The Illusion of Being Ordinary resonated with me the way last year's Exiles and Outsiders did. Since I grew up sort of an outsider (actually, there was nothing "sort of" about it), I tend to identify with (and in my own stories, write about) people who are outsiders, or who do a great job blending in while secretly feeling like an outcast.
The author I liked most from this panel was Jill Ciment. In her mid fifties with a loud head of black, untamed (and untamable) hair, Jill was absolutely hilarious. Remember how I said Susan was down to earth? Jill's even more so. She's the very soil for Christ's sake. I loved her candor. Check this out, right? When Susan asked the panel about their writing habits, Jill said she begins every morning by smoking a joint and reading what she wrote the day before. She did insist that she writes sober, but reading her stuff stoned is, for her, akin to reading it with a fresh pair of objective eyes. Speaking of objective, another question Susan threw out to them was about getting feedback on their writing before showing it to their agent. Some writers, for instance, belong to a writing group, a sort of informal workshop for folks to read their stuff aloud and get critiqued. Jill said she’d “rather be dead” than be part of a writing group, which made everyone in the room, including the others on the panel, roll on their asses. If she thinks her stoned eyes aren’t objective enough, Jill said she might solicit feedback from her hubby and/or from a handful of writer friends, but that’s it. After they recovered from giggling, Dylan and Elizabeth said they were a little more flexible with whom they showed their drafts to.
That whole thing about writing groups and workshops made Jill think about the MFA program she graduated from, and MFA programs in general. She got her MFA about thirty years ago, when the idea of a graduate degree in creative writing was still a novel idea (pardon the pun). Today, though, you’ve got MFA programs in creative writing all over the place. What strikes Jill is that reading seems to be down amongst most of the demographics. I mean yeah, kids are reading a lot more these days thanks to Harry Potter and what have you, but Harry’s the exception that proves the horribly depressing rule. I don’t have access to the stats right now, and it’s just as well, because it would just bum me out. Last time I read something about America's reading habits, they polled adults about how many books they’ve read in the past twelve months. The vast majority said either one or none. You fucking believe that? Jill's question was, why is the number of MFA programs in this country going up while the number of readers is going down? Of course, as my economist father would say, the MFA programs are cropping up to the meet the demand of those who aspire to write. Jill was ready for that because she rephrased her question accordingly: Why are there so many people who want to write while the number of folks who read is falling? Fair point. Actually, a scary point. This is taking us back to the deadly territory where “fiction is dead” and “publishing is dead.”
Jill then talked about how much harder it is to make a living as a writer than it used to be. Even as recently as the nineties, Jill said, you had a lot more people who could make decent money as writers. Or at the very least, you had more writers who publicized in such a way that they appeared to earn a decent living as writers. The point being, you could write stuff and still get paid an appreciable amount, even if you did have to hold down a day job. Today you have less of that. And even what little of that is left is a fad, Jill said. It’s a fad for a publisher to hold up a writer as successful even if they still have to make ends meet as a teacher or what have you. The bottom line, Jill said, is that writers in general can almost never make a living on their writing alone. Exhibit A: The three fiction writers on this very panel. Jill's 2009 novel Heroic Measures was an Oprah pick, which is kind of like getting your book minted gold. Sure, sales picked up, but not so much that Jill could give up being an English prof at the University of Florida.
Another question Susan threw out to the group was about character versus plot. That is, do they prefer writing character-driven stories (e.g. A Catcher in the Rye) or plot-driven stories (e.g. pick any murder mystery)? Dylan said the first thing she does is come up with the characters. The plot of the story is then born out of those characters' traits and personalities, the way they relate to each other (or don’t). Elizabeth is definitely a character person as well. Like Dylan, she creates her characters to see where they’ll lead her. Jill’s answer to plot versus character was perfect: “Why is everyone against plot?” This made a lot of us in the audience crack up because we know exactly what she’s talking about. As with movies, the artsy, well-reviewed books tend to be light on plot. Some don't seem to have a plot at all.
Having been a reader and writer for so long now, I can’t let a topic like this go by without adding my two cents. I’m of the mind that a plot-driven story and a character-driven story are not mutually exclusive. If the storyteller does their job right, they’ll write compelling characters who populate stories with plots born out of the characters’ actions. The whole thing’s a single organic structure, in other words. If you have a story, simply tell it, and when you’re done, if you were true to your story, you’ll have awesome characters and an awesome plot. Granted, some plots might not stand out as much as others. You might stumble a bit if someone asked you what A Catcher in the Rye’s plot is, but it definitely has a plot. You get the idea.
Another thing they talked about was the inspiration for their stories. As someone who's written quite a bit of material, both fiction and screenplays (none of it sold yet, but that doesn't change the fact that I wrote it!), it's inevitable that I mix in some stuff from my personal life. I mean, how can't you, right? So it wasn't surprising to me that, when Susan asked the panel if their personal lives bleed into their stories, they all said sure. Elizabeth talked about how her carpenter husband back in Chicago is supposed to build a bunch of shelves but keeps procrastinating. On the one hand, she can relate to that, being a writer. Writers procrastinate better than anyone. On the other hand, though, it's driving her nuts. It must be, if she's bringing it up here. She said she might just repurpose this little drama into one of her stories. Elizabeth's more a short fiction person than a novelist, by the way.
Jill shared a fairly compelling anecdote that inspired one of her stories. Right after 9/11, she was walking down the street near her home in New York when she came across a lamppost that was wallpapered with missing person's fliers. These were most likely people who died in the towers but whose loved ones weren't ready to accept their being gone. No room was left for any more fliers. While she stood there, an elderly couple came up with a flier showing a photo of their child, someone who worked in the towers. One of them wanted to put the flier over a flier about a missing cat. The other spouse was adamantly against it. Jill stood back a ways and watched these two get into a spat about whether or not their child should go over the missing kitty. Ultimately the kitty lost. They put their kid on top and walked away. Jill felt so incredibly depressed watching that little scene play out. Like any good writer, though, she didn't let it go to waste. She went home and wrote a story from the point of view of a cat. Jill likes writing stuff from an animal's point of view. See her 1999 novel Teeth of the Dog. I wonder if smoking pot every day helps her get into the animal character's head. It must. Now I think about it, that could be why she's so damned good at it.
To finish off the panel, Susan quoted someone again. This time it was her editor when she was at the Times. Doing the Discoveries column meant reading and reviewing three books every single week. A lot of books, right? Just to hammer home how subjective writing can be, she talked about how she reviewed this one book, loved it and wrote a glowing review. Then her editor came up to her and said that she already reviewed that book a month ago. He showed her the review she wrote, and it was scathing. That's hilarious, and kind of scary, how a critic even of Susan's intellect and experience could flip so wildly between hating a book at first, and then loving it a month later. If she's like that, I can only imagine that kind of thing happens with agents all the time. You could show them a query for A Catcher in the Rye for Christ's sake, and if you're catching the agent, or more likely their unpaid intern, on an off day, you'll get some stupid form rejection letter or postcard, assuming you get anything back at all. But Susan's bigger point was to bring back the quote she cited at the beginning, about fiction being dead. No, she said, far from it. Fiction is hardly dead. Everyone's got a story to tell, and within that, you've got a healthy subset of folks who are great at telling their stories. And, Jill's citing those stats notwithstanding, you will always have another subset of folks who love reading stories. The statistics can't do anything about that. Ever since cave dwellers started drawing on cave walls, we've always loved stories.
Do I need to say it? Do I really need to point out what a gorgeous Sunday it was on UCLA campus in Westwood? Sure, Westwood, like the rest of the Westside, gets a healthy dose of marine layer coming off the ocean, but that iron-gray blanket's no match for the Southern California sun. By noon, the sky was pure azure.
Publishing: The Editors Speak Out
Broad 2160 - 10:30 a.m.
Sarah Crichton - Crichton is a former Newsweek editor and publisher of Little, Brown. She is now the publisher of Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sarah Crichton Books publishes a wide variety of literary and commercial fiction and nonfiction, including Blame, a 2009 Book Prize finalist in Fiction.
Eli Horowitz - Horowitz is a managing editor at McSweeney's. Over the past five years he has edited books and stories by writers including Dave Eggers, William Vollmann, Nick Hornby, Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, Chris Adrian and Salvador Plascencia. Horowitz cowrote the book Clock Without a Face.
Jack Shoemaker - Shoemaker was the editor-in-chief at Berkeley's late lamented North Point Press and later served as West Coast editor of Alfred A. Knopf. He is the vice president and editorial director of Counterpoint Press. Shoemaker lives in Berkeley, California.
Moderator: Sara Nelson - Nelson is currently the books director of O, the Oprah Magazine. She was the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly from 2005 to 2009 and won several awards for her re-launch of that magazine. Nelson is the author of So Many Books, So Little Time, a reading guide/memoir.
Notes
The first panel I attended yesterday was on the movie biz, and I believe I said in the notes that at every Book Fest I usually attend a Hollywood panel of one sort or another, there being many different angles from which to examine the biz. Well, the same could be said for panels on publishing. Since I, at the old age of thirty-three, still aspire to be a published novelist, panels that examine the business of publishing from any angle tend to be of interest of me.
I'm of two minds about panels like this. On the one hand, getting published as an unknown writer is so tough that attending one of these panels couldn't possibly make things worse. On the other hand, it can be incredibly frustrating listening to a group of so-called veterans and experts espouse a lot of useless shit that not only doesn't help anyone, but only reinforces the wide-held belief that in the publishing industry, as in Hollywood, no one knows anything.
After today's panel, I am of that latter state of mind. I'm not saying I'll never again attend a panel of blowhards emitting lots of steam. Like I said yesterday, I never say never. But I think after this, I'm sort of done with publishing panels for the time being. Before you think I'm totally down on this panel: No, not at all. For one thing, what I really loved about these kats was how they unanimously made fun of the "publishing is dead" pronouncements that have been around since the day after Gutenberg invented the printing press six hundred years ago. That one old guy Jack Shoemaker, he especially had fun with "publishing is dead." As the former West Coast head of Alfred A. Knopf, one of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses around, you know this guy's been there and done that. Today he said how vividly he could recall everyone pronouncing publishing's death back when publishers started churning out more trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks. We're talking decades ago for Pete's sake. "Supposedly publishing died with the advent of mass market paperbacks," Jack said. "Remember that? No, you weren't around then." He went on to say how publishing supposedly died with the advent of photocopiers, and then with book groups. Nowadays people are saying publishing will be killed by e-books and e-readers like the Kindle. But the data simply doesn't support that, Jack said. E-book sales are still far too low for publishers to forgo the hard copy. As for Kindle, Jack said it's a nice idea, but the technology is still too nascent to be a worthy substitute for the real thing. He cracked everyone up when he called the Kindle the reading equivalent of a sex doll. Nice. The moderator Sara Nelson, meanwhile, had this to say about publishing being dead: "It was ever thus."
Another topic they touched on that I would obviously be sensitive to is that of author submissions. We had a wide range of views here. Technically, they all take unagented manuscripts, but there's obviously a big difference between sending your unagented manuscript to a behemoth like Knopf versus a smaller house like McSweeney's. When he was at Knopf, Jack said that out of the approximately fourteen thousand manuscripts sent "over the transom," as he put it, meaning unagented stuff, perhaps two of them would be published. Ouch. Eli, on the other hand, who runs McSweeny's, says they publish about one out of every two unagented manuscripts that come in. That's unbelievable. Half of the unsolicited, unrepresented material gets published? Hmmmm, as much as I'd love to believe that, I've been so frustrated querying my stuff, a healthy dose of cynicism is inevitable. No matter, what the hell do I have to lose giving it a shot, right? I forgot to say that I've seen Eli before. At the 2008 Book Fest, I attended a publishing panel called West Coast Publishing: Rethinking the Model. Then as now, he was my favorite panelist. He's definitely young to be running a publishing house, practically a kid for Christ's sake. But he's so down to earth and straightforward and utterly without pretense, a nice balance on a panel of mostly older so-called experts. And I don't mean to come down hard on Jack. The guy's a grizzled vet, and I respect that. I love what he said about publishing's death. But whereas he and Sarah had these complicated, writer's-caveat-laden answers on how authors should submit their manuscripts (e.g. look for just the right agent, do your research, etc.), Eli said simply: "If you want to submit your manuscript, then mail it to us. How else are you going to do it?" Exactly!
They also talked about the relationship between editors and their authors. Sarah said she's a therapist to her writers two-thirds of the time. Wow, really? Interesting. I don't think I've ever heard an editor say that. On the other hand, I have heard agents on past panels say something similar, which probably speaks to why editors prefer authors to have agents, so they don't have to do the ego soothing. Since Sarah's the head of an FSG imprint, I have to assume the vast majority of her authors are agented. I mean, FSG's a prestigious house. Nonetheless, they all agreed that authors, no matter how successful, have delicate egos. Indeed, the more successful an author becomes, the bigger and therefore more sensitive their ego gets. When Jack was still at Knopf, they published a book by Gay Talese, who's a pretty reputable writer. Back in the sixties he was one of the writers who pioneered the so-called New Journalism, also called literary journalism or creative nonfiction. His wife Nan's a long-time reputable publisher with her own imprint at Doubleday. Anywho, Gay Talese is a name to conjure. But even names to conjure have their down days. I'm not sure which book it was, but Jack said when they published this one book by Gay, the reviews were beyond scathing. To wit: "Even the printer didn't read it." Ouch! Suffice it to say Jack had to step in to do some emotional damage control with Gay. It's hard to picture Gay being reduced to a puddle. When I was a student at USC's masters of creative writing program in the late nineties, he and his wife were guest speakers in one of my classes. Actually, I think he teaches there every spring, or used to. He's kind of up there in years now. Anyway, I didn't take his class, but he did make a cameo toward the end of the semester in this other class I was taking. Dude was one of the most polished and well-dressed gentlemen I'd ever met. Seriously, the kat was right out of a 1940s flick with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. His silver hair was all combed back and polished. He even had one of those cool film noir hats to go with his suit. At any rate, the panel's bottom line was: Editors are not dictators. Every book requires collaboration. The editor is there to be the writer's partner, and that includes therapy.
I have to say I was surprised to hear Sarah poo-poo distinctions between literary and commercial fiction. This was in response to an audience question at the end from a woman who, like me, has manuscripts she wants to submit. She asked the panel how to determine if what she'd written was literary or commercial. Just to fill those of you in who aren't writers, when you look through a guidebook of agents and publishers, each one has a list of genres they look for (e.g. horror, action, romance, cookbooks, etc.). Quite a few agents and publishers are very broad and simply say they're looking for "literary and commercial fiction." Unlike the young woman asking the question, I've never thought too hard about the distinction. I suppose there are some books that are obviously one or the other (Pride and Prejudice versus Cujo), but otherwise, I feel it can be so subjective. And I guess Sarah Crichton agrees. She told the woman at the mic not to worry about it, that there's really no such thing as literary versus commercial. Commercial just means it's easier to sell, and all publishers want that, right? But if you go back up and look at Sarah's little bio, which I copied out of the Book Fest program, it says her eponymous imprint at FSG publishes a "wide variety of literary and commercial fiction and nonfiction..." Ooops.
This being L.A., it was inevitable someone in the audience would ask about optioning movie rights. Again, just to fill in those of you who live completely outside the world of writing, when you publish a book, a movie studio may choose to option it. What that means is, they pay you a nominal fee for the exclusive right to adapt your book into a movie. It's usually for a certain finite time period, like a year or two years. So they may pay you a fee for the option, and if they can't make it into a movie after, say, a year (or whatever the contract says), then the movie rights go back to you, or the studio can renew the option for another year or whatever. Screenplays can be optioned as well. In fact, I've heard of screenwriters making a very handsome living simply letting studios option their material. None of their stuff ends up getting produced, but they're sitting pretty on a lot of dough from all that optioning. Studios don't always pay a lot for optioning, though. Jack said when he was at Knopf, there was a time when literally every single book published by Knopf was optioned, but the option fees were only a couple hundred bucks or something per book.
Sarah Silverman
Los Angeles Times Stage - Noon
Sarah Silverman - This funny-ass comedienne is here to plug her memoir The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee, which just came out last week.
Notes
I was a bedwetter. Yes, it's true. No, I'm not kidding. I don't say this to just anyone. I wet my bed all the way into junior high. It wasn't until I was in seventh grade, at the age of twelve, a ripe old age to be pissing my sheets, that I finally outgrew it. You might not think twelve is a ripe old age for that, but I'd have these moments during that era when I'd think to myself, "Holy shit, I'm going to suffer this problem for the rest of my life." I didn't wet the bed every single night, perhaps one night out of every two or three. Suffice it to say sleepovers were a roll of the dice. What made it extra tough was the inconvenience it caused my family. There was this one night, when I was in second or third grade, when my brother Doug positively flipped out when he saw I'd wet the bed. He almost literally went bonkers, marching up and down the bedroom going "Why, why, why, why!"
Suffice it to say those first dozen years of my life were a wee bit on the slow side. It didn't help my self-esteem or self-confidence very much. What's worse, I couldn't find anyone else with the same problem. Most folks who have problems can find others in the same boat, right? That's how you get support groups and whatnot. Not so with bedwetting. We all know they're out there, but it's such an incredibly painful topic, no one dares admit the truth. Each of us becomes our own private universe of shame.
It's too bad, therefore, that I didn't know Sarah Silverman growing up. She was a bedwetter too. And she had it worse than me. I read in an interview not long ago that her bedwetting lasted until she was a junior in high school, when she was sixteen or seventeen. That's fucking unbelievable. Can you imagine? All comedians cry on the inside, right? There ya go.
I'm trying to think of when I discovered Sarah Silverman. I was a big fan of The Larry Sanders Show, on which she played a recurring character, but I can't remember her at all. I also loved Star Trek: Voyager, on which she guest-starred on a two-parter. Nope, no memory of that. She was a regular on Saturday Night Live during the 1993-94 season. That was my senior year in high school. I've never watched SNL consistently, but I do catch it now and again. If I caught it at all that year, again, I didn't pick up on Sarah. She was also in There's Something About Mary, but not in any capacity that her face stuck with me. Her first big gig, in terms of the gig that gave her a steady paycheck, was Mr. Show, which ran on HBO for four seasons, 1995-98. But I didn't discover Mr. Show until just this year thanks to a friend at work lending me all four seasons on DVD, so we can't count that. Nope, in spite of all the times I saw stuff with her in it, I'm pretty sure Sarah Silverman didn't register on my radar until she did Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic about five years ago. If you haven't seen that, you must. It's probably the first time Sarah got to do everything she wanted to do. It was all-out Sarah, so it's no accident that's when I finally sat up and noticed her. Shit, I even noticed her during the preview. The movie didn't come out until November of '05, but they started showing previews during the summer. When I first saw the preview, I was like, "Who's that?!" So yes, I saw it when it came out a few months later, and I've been following Sarah ever since. When I found out she struggled with bedwetting longer than me, my admiration for her went way up. Behind her adorable smile and razor wit, she's a warrior. A grizzled survivor who didn't let the worst get her down. What was extra cool about Jesus Is Magic was that it was made barely five miles from where I live in the Valley. Some of the skits are outside on location somewhere, but the whole thing is bracketed in a standup show she did at the El Portal Theatre on Lankershim Blvd. in North Hollywood.
Sarah wasn't on one of the indoor panels or anything. No one was interviewing her. Nope, like a good standup, she had the whole stage to herself, in this case the Los Angeles Times outdoor stage, where two years ago I saw director John Landis interviewed by Tim Curry. Funny, in my eleven-year history of being a Book Fest regular, I've almost never attended any outdoor stage events. And that Tim Curry thing was incidental. I'd attended my four panels for the day and decided to catch the last half of that because, well, why not? And now look. At this Book Fest I've gone to two: Yesterday's Alicia Silverstone event at the Cooking Stage (I never thought I'd attend anything at the Cooking Stage, cooking just isn't me) and now this one with Sarah Silverman. Funny how habits change, and you don't notice it until afterward.
Sarah didn't talk too much about the book itself--the title's fairly self-explanatory, I reckon--but she did talk quite a bit about her life in general, going back to her childhood. Like me, Sarah's folks split when she was still very young. Unlike me, they've stayed fast friends and live within a couple miles of each other in the same Bedford, New Hampshire neighborhood where Sarah grew up. Sarah compared her parents' camaraderie to that of war vets from formerly opposing countries. They went through hell together and lived to tell about it. Both parents eventually married other people, and get this: The two couples hang out together. Well, I should say used to hang out. Sarah's stepfather passed away recently.
As for her real dad, Sarah's impersonations of him leaving messages on her voicemail were my favorite part of her standup routine. Obviously I've never met the guy so I can't say how close she came to sounding like him, but you can see brilliance when it's right in front of you. Although she comes from what she calls a "New Hampshire Jewish family," her father's originally from Boston, and that Boston accent is thick. Watch any movie set in Boston, like The Departed or Good Will Hunting or Gone Baby Gone, and you'll know what I mean. It's very distinctive. Sarah's impersonation of the "old Jewish guy with a Boston accent" was awesome. And she did several, a whole series of messages her dad apparently left on a single Saturday. I was practically in tears with sore sides when she was done. And yes, they do normally talk on Saturdays, which is probably why her dad was sorta worried when she wasn't home on the Saturday in question. I'm the same with my mom. We talk every Sunday around 5pm California time. And if I'm not there, or if I call her and she's not there, you can't help but worry just a little. Sarah was actually visiting her dad in New Hampshire just yesterday. She was probably exhausted, but she hid it well, although she couldn't hide that cold. Anyway, her father's already read the first hundred pages of her new book, which isn't bad considering the thing's been out only five days, but Sarah considers that slow. Really? As slowly and deliberately as I read, tackling twenty pages a day would be a healthy pace for me. Oh and speaking of her impersonations of Dad, she also imitated him harassing rich people in Boca Raton, which is something he likes to do when he stays there during winter. Man, I wish I could've recorded all the shit Sarah said in her dad's voice, making fun of other retirees in coffee shops or what have you.
As for her stepdad, his passing was fairly recent, within the last few months or so. Sarah went back to New Hampshire for the funeral. Her niece asked her to help write a eulogy. Sarah agreed, but it was a struggle. I'm not sure how old the niece is, but at one point while writing the eulogy, the niece said she felt like Lois Lane writing about Superman. That got a lot of "awwws" out of the audience. Sarah's mom hasn't been outside much since the stepdad's death.
Sarah shared some of her experiences as a starving comedienne in the nineties. First up, her SNL gig sucked. Because she sucked. Hey, I'm going by her word, not mine. Like I said above, I'm not even sure I watched SNL that year. With nearly twenty years of hindsight, she sees how overly self-confident she was. After a full season on the show, not a single one of her sketch ideas got made. Not sure if you know, and I didn't until I saw a 60 Minutes piece on SNL a few years ago, focusing mostly on head honcho Lorne Michaels, but each cast member on the show is expected to generate their own sketch ideas. If you're Lorne, you obviously want more ideas than you need so you can pick and choose. Accordingly, each cast member has to come up with x number of ideas every week. This includes sketch ideas for the celebrity guest hosts as well. During the 60 Minutes piece, Jude Law was the host. It was that same week Ashlee Simpson was the guest musician and was caught lip-syncing. 'Member that? I was so embarrassed for her. But anyway, at one point they showed Jude standing in a meeting room at the head of a huge table with all the cast members sitting around it pitching their ideas at him, in some cases with mixed excitement and desperation in their voices. Jude, meanwhile, would decide yea or nea on the spot. At one point, someone pitched an idea, and Jude laughed it off with a sarcastic "I don't think so." Ouch. Comedians, like all writers, are sensitive. Didn't anyone teach him that? I thought of the 60 Minutes bit when Sarah shared her SNL suckness. With all the hindsight now, she can see how that painful season was just what she needed to grow. One interesting thing to note is that Sarah never called them skits. She called them sketches, just like Carole Burnett.
Another painful anecdote she got us to laugh about was her guest stint on Seinfeld. This was an episode during the eighth season, three or so years after SNL. The main thing she took away from that was how much of an asshole Michael Richards (Kramer) is. Remember all the hot water he got into a couple years ago with his racist rants at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood? Sarah wasn't surprised that happened. He yelled at her all the time on set. It was hard to figure out why, based on her anecdote, but I think Michael Richards is a control freak and/or has a very short temper, so that if you have to do more than one or two takes, he'll get pissed at whoever messed up. That would have to mean he got pissed off a lot since nailing a scene the first time is pretty tough to do.
Some of the folks in the audience asked Sarah about Jesus Is Magic. Someone asked her about her guitar skills. If you've seen the film, you'd know why. Sarah said she took up the guitar about twenty years ago, and while she does play it now and again, she would never pursue it as a career. "That would suck if that were my only career," she said. When someone asked her if she believed in Jesus, she said she's not sure, but she loves the idea of him. If he's real, Sarah is sure he wouldn't like to see some of his followers with so much money. Prime example? The Vatican. She thinks the Pope should sell the Vatican and use the proceeds to help poor people. That's actually a brilliant idea.
Another audience member asked for Sarah's take on Comedy Central. She's of two minds about Comedy Central. On the one hand, a lot of great stuff wouldn't happen without them, but she thinks they've gotten too corporate for their comedic britches. Those in charge should cede some of the programming decisions to the comedians and especially the comedians' fans. Bottom line: Comedy Central has plenty of room for improvement, and she has hope it's heading in the right direction.
This one guy asked Sarah if she has any interest in taking a break from comedy to try her hand at drama, which lots of comedians tend to do once they've done everything they can in the comedy realm. Sarah? Not so much. She said the documentary The Aristocrats is the closest she's come to being dramatic. Did you see that? It's pretty hilarious. I actually saw it the Friday it came out during the summer of 2005. Director Paul Provenza, a comedian himself, was at the ArcLight Hollywood for a Q&A afterward. The premise is this: Paul and that guy Penn Jilette of Penn and Teller fame interview about a hundred or so of their comedian friends. We're talking every single famous and sorta famous comedian you've ever--or never--heard of, from George Carlin to Robin Williams to Drew Carey to Billy Connolly and everyone in between. And each one is supposed to give their version of the Aristocrats joke, this really old burlesque standup joke that's too nasty to be delivered on most standup stages. Everyone in the film agreed my fellow Temple University alum Bob Saget had the nastiest version. Jesus Is Magic was still a few months away from coming out, so Sarah wasn't on my radar yet. I can't recall her version of the joke. No matter, her performing the joke on the documentary is as close to drama as she's gotten. That's not to say she doesn't want to do at least a little drama once in a while. This brings me to another parallel with Carol Burnett. Like Carol, Sarah is a big fan of Damages. She'd love to be on it. That's amazing! Here you have two comediennes, one a legend, the other, in my opinion, not having reached her zenith yet, both united by their love of this show. Of course, this makes me feel pretty validated for loving it myself. I've been hooked on Damages since the first episode aired in July 2007.
One last question was if Sarah had plans to have younglings. The person who asked wants to be sure Sarah passes on her comedic genius through her bloodline. Sarah's pretty ambivalent about it right now. She's not sure she could handle the responsibility and also fears how attached she'd get, that she'd never let her child out of sight. Right now her maternal instinct is getting fulfilled by her pet doggie. The mutt's sixteen years old, though, and could drop dead anytime. She's gotten so attached to him that she'd rather die first than have to deal with the grief. But then she said: "Although...."
And that's a wrap, kids. Sarah warned us she wouldn't be shaking any hands at the book signing due to her cold. Since I had to haul ass to my next panel, I'd already given up on the idea of getting her to sign my copy of The Bedwetter. The tent where you buy the book is right by the signing tent. The line was incredibly long. It reminded me of the line I stood in ten years ago for Michael Crichton. I waited for an hour, and when I was almost there, Crichton's publicist whisked him away to the airport. It's just as well I didn't have time to get the book signed. While buying it, I overheard one of the Book Fest volunteers telling those in line that they'd stop the signing exactly at 1:40 p.m. WTF? That couldn't've been Sarah's decision, but I reckon they had to get the area ready for the next round of signings and so on. That sucks because, based on the Michael Crichton experience, I'm sure not everyone in line got their book signed in the measly forty-minute deadline.
Herman Wouk in Conversation with Tim Rutten
Broad 2160 - 1:30 p.m.
Herman Wouk - Wouk's career as a writer spans nearly six decades and has brought him international acclaim and numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of the classics The Caine Mutiny and War and Remembrance. His latest book is The Language God Talks.
Tim Rutten - Rutten's career as a journalist spans more than 30 years at The Times. Prior to becoming a columnist for the Calendar section, his contributions to the paper included participating on the Pulitzer Prize-winning team coverage of the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
Notes
If you think going from Carol Burnett to Alicia Silverstone was whiplash worthy, try this on for size: From Sarah Silverman to Herman Wouk! What's that? You've never heard of Herman Wouk? Well, you may not be old enough, but just look at his little bio up there: The Caine Mutiny and War and Remembrance. 'Nuff said. This guy isn't just some guy. He's an icon. Truth be told, I didn't know he was still alive until I saw this event in the Festival program, which came with last Sunday's paper. Dude turns ninety-five next month, and he's still ship-shape enough to leave his Palm Springs enclave and wow us with his presence at the Book Fest. Pretty cool, huh?
I should admit something right now: I've never read a single word by Herman Wouk. Yet, thanks to my father, an avid World War II buff (he was born on September 1, 1939, as the Nazis were marching into Poland, starting the war), I have watched bits and pieces of the movie version of The Caine Mutiny, which came out in the mid fifties, just a few years after the novel, and stars just about every well-known male actor of the time: Bogie, Lee Marvin, E.G. Marshall, Fred MacMurray, and Van Johnson, just to name a few.
Like any good writer, Herman was just writing what he knew when he wrote The Caine Mutiny. He served in the Navy during WWII, on what had to be every sailor's least favorite kind of ship to serve on: Destroyer minesweeper (DMS). Herman served on two different DMSes. As happens during war for those who live long enough, he was eventually promoted to executive officer. And besides writing what he knew, Herman practiced the other trait of all great writers: He wrote all the time. I have a few relatives who served in the military. I know from them that the experience can swing wildly from lots of excitement to extreme boredom. Herman took full advantage of the downtime to practice his craft.
He didn't even wait for the war to end to start looking for agents and editors. In fact, Herman didn't even wait to finish the book. After he wrote the first couple chapters, he airmailed them to his old philosophy professor at Columbia, the closest person he had to an industry contact. It worked. The professor had a friend who was a book editor, so he called him up and read a few pages over the phone. Next thing ya know, the editor airmails Herman a publishing contract. At the time, Herman's minesweeper was anchored off the coast of Okinawa, just as good a place as any to sign a contract, I reckon. The novel, Aurora Dawn, was published a couple years after the war ended and did fairly well by first novel standards. Indeed, it was a pick by the Book of the Month Club.
The Caine Mutiny was Herman's third novel. He didn't write the other two big novels he's known for, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, until the seventies, when he was in his late fifties and early sixties. Those two required an enormous amount of research. It was obviously worth it, considering the landmarks they've become in the annals of war literature. After he finished War and Remembrance in the late seventies, Herman was so spent that all he could say about the book was, "This is the main tale I have to tell." Even though they're fiction, they're generally considered accurate depictions of what the war was like. Henry Kissinger called those two novels, which have the same main character, Captain Pug Henry, "the war itself." The Caine Mutiny attracted similar praise. Again, even though it's fiction, to this day it's considered one of the most accurate depictions of life aboard an American warship during World War II.
Herman wrote lots of other stuff too, other novels as well as plays and nonfiction. He was in his mid forties when he made his first foray into the latter arena with this book called This Is My God: The Jewish Way of Life. From what I know, This Is My God is basically Herman's attempt to explain his Orthodox Jewish faith, not just to non-Jews but to other Jews who may not be as devout as Herman. He also seems to have written it for himself, one of those books that serves as therapy for the writer while educating the reader. That's another thing I didn't know about Herman's backstory until today: Herman's parents were Polish Jews who emigrated to the U.S. in the early twentieth century. Growing up in New York, he didn't practice Judaism as much as his folks would've liked, but he certainly made up for it later in life, embracing his faith around the time he enlisted in the Navy in his mid twenties or thereabouts. The claim is that every single morning since then, from circa 1940 to present, the first thing Herman does when he wakes up is read Scripture in Hebrew. Every morning without exception. We're talking seventy years, kids. That's a lot of Scripture. A famous quote from This Is My God: "Zionism is a single long action, of snatching great masses of people out of the path of sure extinction." Forty years after This Is My God, Herman came back to religion with 1999's The Will To Live On: The Resurgence of Jewish Heritage.
While Herman's relatively healthy for his age (that is, his heart still beats), he's not a Dick Clark type of person who never ages. He turns ninety-five in a month, and he looks like someone turning ninety-five in a month, if you catch my drift. By the way, let me not give Tim Rutten short shrift. That I finally got to see him in person is pretty cool too. He writes for the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times. That's the section covering the arts and, as such, is one of my main avenues for keeping tabs on the movie biz, not to speak of the theater and opera scene, what's coming up on TV, all that stuff. Calendar's my favorite section of the paper. The Sunday edition is quite comprehensive.
As soon as the interview started, Tim didn't waste a minute telling us they were here strictly to talk about Herman's new book, The Language That God Talks: On Science and Religion, which just came out three weeks ago. They weren't going to talk about all the awesome stuff I mentioned above. Tim announced this in a curt, somewhat sharp-edged manner, as if someone in the audience had already dared bring up The Caine Mutiny or whatever. While that was an awkward way to kick things off, Herman brought us back down to Earth in his chummy, thick New York accent: "Well first of all, Tim, thanks for doin' this." No kidding, that accent really strikes you at first if you’ve never heard him talk. Kind of accent you normally only hear on one of those innumerable New York-set crime procedurals. Kind of attitude you only see on those shows as well. That whole thing about only talking about the new book and nothing else? That sure as shit wasn't Herman's rule. Later on in the panel he made fun of Tim for saying that.
Nonetheless, The Language That God Talks was the focus of the interview. The book's about the friendship between Herman and the legendary physicist Richard Feynman. The late Feynman, if you've never heard of him, was basically to the generation just before mine what Carl Sagan was to my generation. He made science, especially astronomy and astrophysics, accessible to the lay folk. The title The Language That God Talks comes from something Feynman said to Herman when they first met. Feynman advised Herman to learn calculus because calculus is "the language that God talks." Feynman said something else that has stayed with Herman over the decades: "The stage is too big for human drama." In fact, Herman repeated both of those quotes several times during the hour, such was the impact they had on him and his faith. Now you might think someone like Herman could never get along with someone like Feynman because of their seemingly opposite worldviews. But I guess, to borrow an adage from science, opposites attract. Herman and Feynman were friends for decades. And yes, while Feynman constantly challenged Herman's faith and made him ask a lot of questions, Herman has emerged on the other side all the stronger for it. That seems like what his new book is about in a nutshell, how science strengthened his faith.
While Feynman was the inspiration for the book, Herman credits his nephew for the actual writing of it. That is, when Herman was in the middle of writing it but was losing steam and inspiration, his nephew provided what Herman called the "final shove." He's obviously proud of his nephew, based on how he talked about him. Apparently this guy started out without much direction. He was a "ne'er-do-well," Herman said. That's great. How often do you hear people use the phrase "ne'er-do-well" anymore? Exactly. Not often enough. To straighten him out, Herman made the guy study the Talmud with him. Today his nephew's a proud father of twins and practices law in Washington, D.C.
Now the Talmud. Herman and Tim talked a lot about that. Unless you're Jewish, you may not know what the Talmud is. As one of the least religious people you'll ever meet, I must confess to not being too familiar with it. Basically the Talmud is one of the main texts of Judaism. It's got all the stuff you need to know about Jewish faith: The history, philosophy, laws, ethics, all that stuff. If you're Jewish, you gotta know the Talmud or you're just a poser. In his research for the book, Herman discovered that a lot of brilliant scientists were not only Jewish, but were devoutly so. They were "Talmudic," he said, meaning they knew their Jewish faith backward and forward to the point that they could be teachers of the faith. You take Isaac Newton for instance. We all know Isaac Newton. But what a lot of people don't know, including me until today, was that Newton was a Hebrew scholar. Another thing Herman discovered about scientists during his research is their wicked sense of humor. In fact, their humor became such a common denominator in their otherwise varied and sometimes clashing personalities, Herman seriously wonders if those brilliant scientists hear something extra out there in the cosmos that ordinary folks like us don't hear. That would at least explain their out-of-this-world brilliance, if not their sharp humor, he said.
Speaking of big brains, Herman himself was selected as a big brain to attend the annual Forstmann Little conference in Aspen, Colorado. He described it as a conference of big brains and big money. Forstmann Little, speaking of big money, is a company in New York City that specializes in leveraged buyouts. Their conferences are super secret. At least, they're supposed to be. It's funny. Technically, no one's supposed to know they're even happening, let alone what they're about. But if you live in Aspen, how can you not notice the sudden influx of famous people? Seriously, it's like, suddenly there's Herman Wouk crossing the street or whatever. Check out some of the names from the 2007 edition of Forstmann Little: Comedian Dennis Miller, Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto, Senator Fred Thompson, NBC anchor Brian Williams, Redskins owner Dan Snyder, tennis champ Monica Seles, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, CBS honcho Les Moonves, Queen Noor Al-Hussein of Jordan, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Steve Forbes, Pete Coors, Mayo Clinic boss Dr. Denis Cortese, Michael Dell, Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft, General Colin Powell, Google chair Eric Schmidt, and eBay CEO Meg Whitman.
Getting the picture? So Herman went to one of those. Sounds incredibly cool. And judging by the way his eyes lit up as he talked about the experience, he thought it was cool too. Now you and I may not be able to recognize folks like Les Moonves or the South Carolina governor on sight, but lots of journalists can. That's how the locals usually know when Forstmann Little's in town. A reporter will start blogging about it. Like: "We don't know what's going on, but we know it's happening now." Herman said the gist of the conference is that you've got these incredibly smart and accomplished people from just about every known discipline you can think of, all converging on Aspen to work together on devising solutions to really big global problems.
Tim asked Herman why he thinks Muslims seem to be wrestling with their faith more than Christians and Jews. Herman said one possibility could be their failure to adapt to modern times. Christianity and Judaism were impacted directly by the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. Sure, adapting meant plenty of pain. Let's not even get started on all the wars born out of Christian in-fighting. The Hundred Years War, anyone? Not to speak of the Thirty Years War, or the smaller, but no less brutal, episodes of religious backwardness, such as the Salem Witch trials. So yes, Christians and Jews have toughed out more than their fair share of evolutionary pains, but at least they have evolved. Islam, meanwhile, according to Herman, hasn't been able to keep up. In other words, psychologically, Islam is still back in the Middle Ages, a period sometimes referred to by historians as the Dark Ages because of the level of ignorance by which people lived relative to what came next. That's why in some Muslim countries today you still have punishments like stoning, thieves getting their hands lopped off in front of large stadium crowds, and other barbaric things analogous to what used to be commonplace in the West about a thousand years ago or so. Of course, the next question begs, doesn't it? How did Islam miss the Enlightenment boat? Was it simple geography? It can't be that simple. This is one of those conundrums that could fill an entire book, and which has no doubt filled many.
That does it for Tim Rutten's interview with Herman Wouk. Pretty cool, huh? I hope I could get across how salt of the earth Herman is. Like I said about his New York accent being very noticeable right away, another thing that strikes you off the bat is what a normal guy he is. And a very interesting man, clearly. I'm honored and thrilled I got to see him in person. Indeed, this panel's one of the best examples of serendipity I've ever experienced. I'm going to have to read his books someday, especially the Big Three.
Fiction: The Illusion of Being Ordinary
Dodd 147 - 3 p.m.
Jill Ciment - Ciment received her MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine. She's the author of Small Claims, a collection of short stories and novellas. She's written several novels, including Heroic Measures, a 2009 Book Prize finalist in Fiction.
Elizabeth Crane - Crane is the author of three collections of short stories, the latest of which is You Must Be This Happy to Enter. Her work has been featured in a variety of publications and has been adapted for the stage by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater Company.
Dylan Landis - Landis is the author of the debut novel-in-stories Normal People Don't Live Like This, a Newsday Best Book of 2009. A former journalist and author of six interior design books, Landis has a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Moderator: Susan Salter Reynolds - Reynolds previously worked as an assistant editor at the New York Review of Books and staff writer at the Los Angeles Times. While at the Times, she wrote the Discoveries column for the Sunday Book Review and was a regular contributor to the Calendar section.
Notes
Okay! Now for the fourth and final event of the day, and the eighth and final event of my Book Fest 2010 weekend. What a ride, huh? Carol Burnett, Alicia Silverstone, Sarah Silverman, Herman friggin' Wouk, and a bunch of fascinating panels spanning the spectrum, including this one. Like I said about the Hollywood panel yesterday, it's almost obligatory for me to attend a fiction panel of one sort or another at each Book Fest. Again, like Hollywood and the movie biz, you have so many angles from which to talk about this stuff. Past fiction panels I've attended include finding an agent, writing while holding down a job, writing the second novel, writing about the west, writing mysteries, you name it.
Another thing I said yesterday was that I feel like these panel subtitles are sometimes throwaway labels that serve as an excuse to talk about whatever people want to talk about related to the umbrella topic. Yesterday's Hollywood panel on "Life in the Biz" was okay for the most part. They covered a lot of hardcore biz stuff like talent agents and distribution and depictions of African Americans. Now this panel's subtitle, "The Illusion of Being Ordinary," what do you suppose that means? Exactly. I'm not sure either, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to be here.
The bigger reason I selected this panel, though, was moderator Susan Salter Reynolds. She’s awesome. As you saw up in her bio, she wrote for the L.A. Times Book Review for a long time. I’m not sure how many years, but seriously, her Discoveries section in the back of every Book Review was one of the sections of the Sunday paper I would never miss. As the section title implies, Discoveries was all about the books that wouldn’t get coverage otherwise, either because the authors were first-time authors and/or weren’t well known, or perhaps their subject matter was esoteric. I started following Discoveries as soon as I landed out here in ’98, so I’d been familiar with Susan’s name for four years when I finally saw her in person at the 2002 Book Fest. She interviewed Steve Martin in Royce Hall, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, venue on campus, which also does double duty for the UCLALive theater company. In fact, it may be because of UCLALive that the Book Fest hasn’t used Royce Hall in a couple years now. Anyway, what struck me about Susan during her interview of Steve Martin was how composed she remained throughout. If you’re even a little bit familiar with Steve Martin, you can imagine what he was like in front of a live audience. A wild and crazy guy! Actually, he was there to read a couple chapters from an early draft of his novella The Pleasure of My Company, the follow-up to Shopgirl. Susan never let him get to her. She wasn’t humorless, mind you, just composed. And she’s a great speaker. You can tell she’s an avid reader because of her skill with words. She’s also very down to earth, which tends to be one of my favorite qualities in people. Ever since that Steve Martin interview, I’ve tried to make sure I attend a panel she’s moderating every year. Seriously. She’s here every year, even though she’s no longer with the Times. I can’t tell you how weird it is that I don’t see her name every Sunday. On the other hand, I had a sick feeling it would happen. Unless you live in a cave, you know that among the hardest hit during the Great Recession were newspapers.
It sucks when incredibly smart folks like Susan lose their jobs, because as their readers, we benefit from their knowledge. At least she's still at the Book Fest. Last year I attended a panel she moderated called Fiction: New West. Speaking of repeat appearances, one of the authors on today's panel, Dylan Landis, was part of a Sunday panel I attended last year called Fiction: Exiles and Outsiders. See what I mean about panel subtitles? It's hit and miss. Actually, though, both of those subtitles were indeed relevant. Those were meaty panels, from what I recall. If you want to see for yourself, I blogged about the Book Fest last year.
Susan, who generally likes to quote people as part of her moderating duties, started out this panel quoting some guy who said "fiction was dead." Like the "books are dead" pronouncements they cited at this morning's pubilshing panel, "fiction is dead" should be taken with a healthy pinch of salt. Suffice it to say that, as a fiction writer hoping to be published someday, granting such sweeping pronouncements even a little bit of validity just isn't an option.
Now how about these authors on the panel? I haven't read a single word by any of them, which tends to be the case with most of the fiction panels I attend at the Book Fest. I go to these panels partly because of the subject matter, sometimes because of the moderator, and other times because of the big name factor, like Sarah Silverman, Alicia Silverstone, and of course Carol Burnett. As I said, Susan's moderating this played a big role in my being here, but so did the subject matter. The Illusion of Being Ordinary resonated with me the way last year's Exiles and Outsiders did. Since I grew up sort of an outsider (actually, there was nothing "sort of" about it), I tend to identify with (and in my own stories, write about) people who are outsiders, or who do a great job blending in while secretly feeling like an outcast.
The author I liked most from this panel was Jill Ciment. In her mid fifties with a loud head of black, untamed (and untamable) hair, Jill was absolutely hilarious. Remember how I said Susan was down to earth? Jill's even more so. She's the very soil for Christ's sake. I loved her candor. Check this out, right? When Susan asked the panel about their writing habits, Jill said she begins every morning by smoking a joint and reading what she wrote the day before. She did insist that she writes sober, but reading her stuff stoned is, for her, akin to reading it with a fresh pair of objective eyes. Speaking of objective, another question Susan threw out to them was about getting feedback on their writing before showing it to their agent. Some writers, for instance, belong to a writing group, a sort of informal workshop for folks to read their stuff aloud and get critiqued. Jill said she’d “rather be dead” than be part of a writing group, which made everyone in the room, including the others on the panel, roll on their asses. If she thinks her stoned eyes aren’t objective enough, Jill said she might solicit feedback from her hubby and/or from a handful of writer friends, but that’s it. After they recovered from giggling, Dylan and Elizabeth said they were a little more flexible with whom they showed their drafts to.
That whole thing about writing groups and workshops made Jill think about the MFA program she graduated from, and MFA programs in general. She got her MFA about thirty years ago, when the idea of a graduate degree in creative writing was still a novel idea (pardon the pun). Today, though, you’ve got MFA programs in creative writing all over the place. What strikes Jill is that reading seems to be down amongst most of the demographics. I mean yeah, kids are reading a lot more these days thanks to Harry Potter and what have you, but Harry’s the exception that proves the horribly depressing rule. I don’t have access to the stats right now, and it’s just as well, because it would just bum me out. Last time I read something about America's reading habits, they polled adults about how many books they’ve read in the past twelve months. The vast majority said either one or none. You fucking believe that? Jill's question was, why is the number of MFA programs in this country going up while the number of readers is going down? Of course, as my economist father would say, the MFA programs are cropping up to the meet the demand of those who aspire to write. Jill was ready for that because she rephrased her question accordingly: Why are there so many people who want to write while the number of folks who read is falling? Fair point. Actually, a scary point. This is taking us back to the deadly territory where “fiction is dead” and “publishing is dead.”
Jill then talked about how much harder it is to make a living as a writer than it used to be. Even as recently as the nineties, Jill said, you had a lot more people who could make decent money as writers. Or at the very least, you had more writers who publicized in such a way that they appeared to earn a decent living as writers. The point being, you could write stuff and still get paid an appreciable amount, even if you did have to hold down a day job. Today you have less of that. And even what little of that is left is a fad, Jill said. It’s a fad for a publisher to hold up a writer as successful even if they still have to make ends meet as a teacher or what have you. The bottom line, Jill said, is that writers in general can almost never make a living on their writing alone. Exhibit A: The three fiction writers on this very panel. Jill's 2009 novel Heroic Measures was an Oprah pick, which is kind of like getting your book minted gold. Sure, sales picked up, but not so much that Jill could give up being an English prof at the University of Florida.
Another question Susan threw out to the group was about character versus plot. That is, do they prefer writing character-driven stories (e.g. A Catcher in the Rye) or plot-driven stories (e.g. pick any murder mystery)? Dylan said the first thing she does is come up with the characters. The plot of the story is then born out of those characters' traits and personalities, the way they relate to each other (or don’t). Elizabeth is definitely a character person as well. Like Dylan, she creates her characters to see where they’ll lead her. Jill’s answer to plot versus character was perfect: “Why is everyone against plot?” This made a lot of us in the audience crack up because we know exactly what she’s talking about. As with movies, the artsy, well-reviewed books tend to be light on plot. Some don't seem to have a plot at all.
Having been a reader and writer for so long now, I can’t let a topic like this go by without adding my two cents. I’m of the mind that a plot-driven story and a character-driven story are not mutually exclusive. If the storyteller does their job right, they’ll write compelling characters who populate stories with plots born out of the characters’ actions. The whole thing’s a single organic structure, in other words. If you have a story, simply tell it, and when you’re done, if you were true to your story, you’ll have awesome characters and an awesome plot. Granted, some plots might not stand out as much as others. You might stumble a bit if someone asked you what A Catcher in the Rye’s plot is, but it definitely has a plot. You get the idea.
Another thing they talked about was the inspiration for their stories. As someone who's written quite a bit of material, both fiction and screenplays (none of it sold yet, but that doesn't change the fact that I wrote it!), it's inevitable that I mix in some stuff from my personal life. I mean, how can't you, right? So it wasn't surprising to me that, when Susan asked the panel if their personal lives bleed into their stories, they all said sure. Elizabeth talked about how her carpenter husband back in Chicago is supposed to build a bunch of shelves but keeps procrastinating. On the one hand, she can relate to that, being a writer. Writers procrastinate better than anyone. On the other hand, though, it's driving her nuts. It must be, if she's bringing it up here. She said she might just repurpose this little drama into one of her stories. Elizabeth's more a short fiction person than a novelist, by the way.
Jill shared a fairly compelling anecdote that inspired one of her stories. Right after 9/11, she was walking down the street near her home in New York when she came across a lamppost that was wallpapered with missing person's fliers. These were most likely people who died in the towers but whose loved ones weren't ready to accept their being gone. No room was left for any more fliers. While she stood there, an elderly couple came up with a flier showing a photo of their child, someone who worked in the towers. One of them wanted to put the flier over a flier about a missing cat. The other spouse was adamantly against it. Jill stood back a ways and watched these two get into a spat about whether or not their child should go over the missing kitty. Ultimately the kitty lost. They put their kid on top and walked away. Jill felt so incredibly depressed watching that little scene play out. Like any good writer, though, she didn't let it go to waste. She went home and wrote a story from the point of view of a cat. Jill likes writing stuff from an animal's point of view. See her 1999 novel Teeth of the Dog. I wonder if smoking pot every day helps her get into the animal character's head. It must. Now I think about it, that could be why she's so damned good at it.
To finish off the panel, Susan quoted someone again. This time it was her editor when she was at the Times. Doing the Discoveries column meant reading and reviewing three books every single week. A lot of books, right? Just to hammer home how subjective writing can be, she talked about how she reviewed this one book, loved it and wrote a glowing review. Then her editor came up to her and said that she already reviewed that book a month ago. He showed her the review she wrote, and it was scathing. That's hilarious, and kind of scary, how a critic even of Susan's intellect and experience could flip so wildly between hating a book at first, and then loving it a month later. If she's like that, I can only imagine that kind of thing happens with agents all the time. You could show them a query for A Catcher in the Rye for Christ's sake, and if you're catching the agent, or more likely their unpaid intern, on an off day, you'll get some stupid form rejection letter or postcard, assuming you get anything back at all. But Susan's bigger point was to bring back the quote she cited at the beginning, about fiction being dead. No, she said, far from it. Fiction is hardly dead. Everyone's got a story to tell, and within that, you've got a healthy subset of folks who are great at telling their stories. And, Jill's citing those stats notwithstanding, you will always have another subset of folks who love reading stories. The statistics can't do anything about that. Ever since cave dwellers started drawing on cave walls, we've always loved stories.
