The weather was gorgeous today. Not a cloud. Not too hot, not too cold. Yeah I know we get more than our fair share of such days year round in Southern Cal, but it can still be hit and miss sometimes, especially on those rare weekends when I actually have plans to be outside for an extended time period. The throngs of my fellow readers were as teeming as ever.
Here are the panels I attended, their building locations, the times, the authors on the panel, as well as any notes/thoughts on each.
Science: Mind Matters
Humanities A51 - 10:30 a.m.
Sandra Blakeslee - Specialist in the brain sciences, regular contributor to the New York Times. She's co-written a lot of books, most recently with her son Matt. It's called The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better.
Matt Blakeslee - Sandra's son. He's a freelance science writer in L.A. and the fourth generation of Blakeslee science writers. The book he cowrote with Mom is his first. On a side note, his wife just gave birth to their first little tiny baby a few weeks ago.
Christine Kenneally - She was one of the nominees at the Book Prizes last night for her book The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language. Chris has written for The New Yorker, Slate, and the New York Times.
Daniel Lord Smail - Another of last night's nominees, for his book On Deep History and the Brain. He teaches history at Harvard.
Moderator: K.C. Cole - Author of popular science books like Mind Over Matter and The Universe and the Teacup. She's also churned out several collections of sci-fi stories.
Fascinating stuff for someone like me who positively sucked at science in school. Sandra and Matt talked about mind mapping. From what I can recall, it has to do with how certain objects that are in your possession for long enough will become part of your sphere. This helps explain why, when you drive into a parking garage, you sort of have the instinct to lower your head a bit. The car has become a sort of extension of you. This also applies to how people who've just lost a lot of weight can still feel fat after a big meal. Meanwhile Christine Kenneally, a New Zealander, talked about language. She told us this story about a Collie in Germany named Rico. He was taught the names of certain objects in a room over an extended period of time. Then a new object was introduced into the room. When Rico was told to fetch an object called X, he knew to get the new object. He figured it out the first time. She also told us about how chimps have certain words for things. They have a specific word for birds that is clearly distinct from their word for land-based predators. Humans know an average of 60,000 words, and it's a big deal if an animal can identify as much as 200 words. As for Dan Smail, he was a guru on something called deep history. He told us that things like poverty and stress are inventions, something that ties back to what Christine was telling us about certain matriarchal societies of chimps where stress is a necessary invention to escape predators.
Current Interest: Defining American Character
Ackerman Ballroom - Noon
Howard Fineman - Senior Washington correspondent and columnist for Newsweek, NBC News analyst, and author of The Thirteen American Arguments.
Amy Goodman - Investigative journalist and principal host of Democracy Now! on Pacific Radio. Among the books she's cowritten is Standing up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times, written with her bro Dave.
Tom Hayden - Sociology prof at Pitzer College in the Claremont Colleges. He's written stuff like Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader, Street Wars, and Irish on the Inside.
Hugh Hewitt - Author of eight books, including the bestseller Painting the Map Red: The Fight to Create a Permanent Republican Majority. Dude scored three Emmys during his decade as anchor of a nightly news and public affairs show for KCET (L.A.'s PBS station). He's also executive director of Townhall.com.
Moderator: Jon Wiener - History professor at UC Irvine and contributing editor of The Nation. He has also written articles for the L.A. Times Book Review, The New Republic, and the New York Times Magazine. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower.
This was my least favorite panel. It was just a lot of political ideologues blowing Hindenburgian amounts of hot air. They were far too preachy. The only compelling part of it was what Amy Goodman had to say about soldiers in Iraq disobeying orders for ethical reasons. In general it was extremely frustrating in that each and every author spoke much more than they were supposed to. Jon started out by giving each one of them eight minutes to sum up what they wrote about. I doubt any of them spoke for less than ten minutes. And then, for whatever unfathomable reason, Jon went back around and gave each of them three minutes to add to whatever their previous verbosity had left out. You think any of them actually stuck to three minutes? Hell to the no. The end result was that no one in the audience had a chance to ask questions, a big no-no at the Book Fest. You're always supposed to allot ten to fifteen minutes at the end for questions. And in this case to boot, with the political hot bloodedness on the panel and in the audience, people all around were clearly jonesing to ask stuff. Despite time running out, many stepped up to the two microphones toward the front that are set up specifically for Q&As, just in case there'd be some leeway with the clock. There wasn't.
Biography: The Explorers
Young CS 24 - 1:30 p.m.
Tim Jeal - Author of three biographies of Victorian adventurers: Livingston, Baden-Powell, and Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer. That last one was a finalist last night at the Book Prizes. Tim's a past winner of Great Britain's John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
Robert Morgan - One of last night's Book Prize finalists for his biography on Daniel Boone. He's also the author of eleven books of poetry and eight volumes of fiction, including bestsellers like Gap Creek and Brave Enemies.
Richard Reeves - Syndicated columnist and USC prof. His latest work is A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford. Other books include President Kennedy: Profile of Power and President Nixon: Alone in the White House.
Moderator: Robert Weil - Executive editor at W.W. Norton. Among the tons of authors he's edited are Oliver Stone, Henry Roth, and D.M. Thomas.
This was much better than the previous panel. It was downright fun! Each of these cats were so smart, knowing their subject matter backward and forward. I attended a biography panel last year and, like now, thoroughly enjoyed hearing articulate writers discuss the lives of such unique people. It really makes you want to go out and buy their stuff. Robert Morgan comes from western North Carolina, where he lived on a farm and did all that stuff you hear about frontiersmen doing: trapping fur, fishing, hunting, plowing, the whole bit. And he's a big guy too, so it's not a stretch imagining him carrying a farm on his shoulders. He's not even a nonfiction guy, but he'd heard that the whole thing about Boone and his coonskin cap was simply not true. So he did some digging and found that, lo and behold, so much about Boone reinforced in pop culture (and by Boone himself) was simply inaccurate. Even more intriguing, he found out that his and Boone's families have a common ancestor in the north of Wales, which is where Stanely came from, the subject of Tim Jeal's book. Amazing, huh? Tim Jeal, by the way, is a balding, middle-aged, most unassuming little Englishman. His breadth of knowledge on his chosen subject is staggering. I was so jacked by all the amazing stuff he talked about, about Stanley's horrible childhood in Wales and his amazing accomplishments in Africa, which barely did anything to help the poor boy's self-esteem and abandonment issues, that afterward I went straight to the bio tent, scooped up a copy of Stanley, and had Tim sign it for me.
This was much better than the previous panel. It was downright fun! Each of these cats were so smart, knowing their subject matter backward and forward. I attended a biography panel last year and, like now, thoroughly enjoyed hearing articulate writers discuss the lives of such unique people. It really makes you want to go out and buy their stuff. Robert Morgan comes from western North Carolina, where he lived on a farm and did all that stuff you hear about frontiersmen doing: trapping fur, fishing, hunting, plowing, the whole bit. And he's a big guy too, so it's not a stretch imagining him carrying a farm on his shoulders. He's not even a nonfiction guy, but he'd heard that the whole thing about Boone and his coonskin cap was simply not true. So he did some digging and found that, lo and behold, so much about Boone reinforced in pop culture (and by Boone himself) was simply inaccurate. Even more intriguing, he found out that his and Boone's families have a common ancestor in the north of Wales, which is where Stanely came from, the subject of Tim Jeal's book. Amazing, huh? Tim Jeal, by the way, is a balding, middle-aged, most unassuming little Englishman. His breadth of knowledge on his chosen subject is staggering. I was so jacked by all the amazing stuff he talked about, about Stanley's horrible childhood in Wales and his amazing accomplishments in Africa, which barely did anything to help the poor boy's self-esteem and abandonment issues, that afterward I went straight to the bio tent, scooped up a copy of Stanley, and had Tim sign it for me.
West Coast Publishing: Rethinking the Model
Rolfe 1200 - 3 p.m.
Eli Horowitz - Managing editor of McSweeny's for five years now. Authors he's edited include Dave Eggers, William Vollmann, Nick Hornby, Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, Chris Adrian, and Salvador Plascencia.
Elaine Katzenberger - Editorial director of City Lights Books. She's edited a ton of works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Occasionally she lectures on issues related to writing, publishing, and bookselling.
Lee Montgomery - Editorial director of Tin House Books and executive editor of the literary magazine Tin House. She wrote a memoir called The Things Between Us.
Charlie Winton - Chairman and CEO of Counterpoint, a leading independent publisher. Counterpoint's imprints include Soft Skull and Sierra Club Books. Before that he was the CEO of Avalon Publishing Group and Publishers Group West.
Moderator: Davd Ulin - L.A. Times book editor. He's also written stuff like The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and The Fault Line Between Reason and Faith. He was also the editor for Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which scored a California Book Award in 2002.
My supervisor subscribes to McSweeny's, so I sort of know them by reputation. Every issue comes packaged in a completely different way. It's not clear to me if the packaging design is completely random or coincides with a certain theme of the issue. One time he said an issue came dressed as a cigar box. Eli Horowitz, by the way, is practically a child. I'd say he's twenty-five or so. To save money, he's sleeping on the couch of a friend in L.A. while attending the Book Fest. Besides this panel, he's manning the McSweeny's tent. Yes, McSweeny's is one of the 300 or so sponsors. Lee Montgomery looked like she hadn't slept in a month. She confessed to not knowing very much at all about the publishing business. Or at least, she entered into it not knowing anything. She's still convinced that at some point people will catch on, and she'll go to jail. Elaine was an adorable brunette who, in stark contrast to Lee, had her shit together. She talked about another gal named Cecilia, who is apparently the one and only buyer for Barnes & Noble in the U.S. No kidding, Cecilia does all the buying for that giant chain for this country. Other people on the panel have had dealings with Cecilia as well, but no one's met her. No one knows her last name. Yeah, it was kind of weird. Elaine also said it was extortion how publishers have to pay the likes of Barnes & Noble and Borders those huge sums of moolah to have their books displayed in a window or facing outward on bookshelves and whatnot. Independent publishers like City Lights simply cannot afford that. They each talked about the advances they give their authors, or lack thereof. Suffice it to say that none of them can afford to pay much of anything up front, which is why, with no exception, all of the publishing companies represented on this panel are last resort houses for agents who are trying to score the best deals for their clients. Eli said the McSweeny's way is to give their author an advance of one dollar per however many books are printed on the first run. This made Charlie, an old timer who was probably twice Eli's age, laugh and say that wasn't a bad idea.
Here are some photos I snapped with my Blackjack II.
Gay Talese is asking for directions.
Book (and politics) lovers file into Royce Hall for a panel called Current Interest: Right & Left, one of the authors for which was Arianna Huffington.
And now a word from some sponsors.
