On Thursday I went to LACMA to see Steve Martin talk about art. Dave Hickey, his interlocutor, had a hard time keeping up — but who can share a stage with Steve Martin? I wrote about it for Jacket Copy, and then the piece appeared in Saturday’s paper. Here’s how it starts:
If the events of a certain November 2010 night in New York City hung over LACMA Thursday, they did so not as a dark cloud, but as a punching bag.
The occasion: Steve Martin — actor, director, banjo player, author — in conversation with noted art critic Dave Hickey. The subject: Steve Martin’s book “An Object of Beauty,” and, by extension its subject, art and the art world. The rub: a similar conversation at New York’s 92nd Street Y in November did not go well, to the extent that a note was delivered to Martin’s interlocutor on stage asking, essentially, that they stop talking about art so much.
“It made New Yorkers look really bad,” said Jillian Spence, sitting in the front row at LACMA before Thursday’s conversation began. She’d come to get a copy of Martin’s book signed for her father, a big fan who is very ill; when she was a child, they listened to his comedy records together. A New Yorker herself with a tangible accent, she is a member of the 92nd Street Y — “an active, embarrassed member” who said people should expect Martin to talk about his book — “or you shouldn’t be here.”
The sold-out audience at LACMA knew what to expect, and included comedic luminaries Martin Mull, Ricky Jay, Eric Idle and Carl Reiner. The event, part of the 15-year-old peripatetic Writers Bloc author conversation series, was introduced by the organization’s Andrea Grossman. “We in Los Angeles want to hear Steve Martin talk about art!” she said to a round of applause.
There’s more here. I even cornered the oh-my-god-so-cool Carl Reiner and asked him what he thought.
This Friday I’ll appear on a panel at the annual conference of the Association of American University Presses, at the gracious invitation of MIT Press. The panel is on Social Networks as a Marketing Tool — if the presses are doing the marketing, that makes me… oh, nevermind. Here’s the panel info:
Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have become an incredibly powerful source for virtually all of our news and entertainment needs. A recent news story confirmed that Facebook is the second most popular site on the internet—only Google has more daily downloads. If our readers are getting information from social networking sites, it only makes sense that university presses participate in the conversation. How can university presses harness these incredibly popular and influential sites to reach our readers? How can we develop engaged communities of interested readers? This panel will demystify and navigate the social networking phenomenon to help us get the most bang for our tweet.
Chair: Colleen Lanick, Publicity Manager, MIT Press
Panelists: Laura Baich, Electronic Marketing Manager, Indiana University Press; Jennifer Howard, Senior Writer, The Chronicle of Higher Education; Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
I get to Salt Lake City on Thursday evening. That’s probably too late to investigate the other oil spill.
Say yes to the nice Twist & Shout people. Friday, the Village Halloween Parade, you and Cameron and that skinny girlfriend and a really beautiful car. Or really, just you.
Shake it up for Bueller.
I’ve gone to Book Expo twice before, and still I feel entirely unprepared for BEA 2008.
The first year, it was in Washington DC. I stayed at an unfortunately expensive shitty hotel; I had to wait in line as an intense guy checked in before me. I had never seen him before. But somehow I knew it was Ed Champion, and when he turned away from the desk, I tried saying “Ed,” loudly. He turned. Yep, it was Ed. This year, Ed will not be at BEA. Seems wrong, somehow.
Last year, in New York, I stayed with non-book friends in Brooklyn — they provided a welcome dose of sanity even though NY transit added hours to my travel time. (Strangely, those same friends will be in LA this year just in time for BEA. Maybe they’re all bookish after all). Last year, the LBC had a party, and I got to meet more fellow litbloggers and publishers and a logjam of authors. Running late the next morning, I worried that I’d miss the panel I wanted to see, but realized one of its members — Christopher Hitchens — was standing right in front of me on the escalator. I followed him. He was grumpy about morning. I walked onto the floor and was dazed by the enormity of it — or maybe by the heat (the air conditioning in Javitz was on the fritz). I had a marvelous time, sort of full-to-overflowing, all of it, including my bags, with books.
This year I have planned. I have a schedule. I am in my own town (yes, I am here, in LA, which I have reclaimed, by the way). I know when William Shatner is supposed to be signing his new book, that Alec Baldwin is speaking at a breakfast, that George Hamilton is throwing a party. That Salman Rushdie is going to be hanging out, cracking jokes. But there’s so so much that I don’t know. I might even see you there.
So the LA Times Festival of Books is coming up and it turns out I’ll be moderating two panels, both chock-full of wonderful novelists.
Saturday, April 25, 4:00pm
First Fiction: New Voices
- Antonia Arslan, Skylark Farm
- Rebecca Curtis, Twenty Grand
- Pamela Erens, The Understory
- Ellen Litman, The Last Chicken in America
These women are all nominees for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (along with Dinaw Mengestu for The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, who apparently can’t make it).
And then on Sunday, at 10:30am
Fiction: Unconventional Voices
- Ben Ehrenreich
- Keith Gessen
- Lydia Millet
- Yannick Murphy
Please come. I promise to keep my moderator self out of the way so you can get the best of all these great writers. When we’re done, after you go to their booksignings, say hello to me, the redhead standing around with my hands in my pockets.
Monday: Stewart O’Nan reads in the evening at Pitt, in the 5th floor room where we have workshop, featuring arching gothic windows and the occasional wintry breeze. Afterwards a few of us join O’Nan at Chuck Kinder’s house for beer and snacks. As we stand around Chuck & Diane’s new great room, Diane makes nachos that look entirely delicious, but they end up inaccessibly between Chuck and Stewart. I never got one. I really, really wanted a nacho.
Wednesday: Ann Pancake joins us for our evening fiction workshop (yep, same room). Afterwards, she reads from her lyrical novel, Strange as This Weather Has Been, about a West Virginia family dealing with local mountaintop removal mining. After that, a few of us join Pancake at Chuck Kinder’s house for beer and snacks. I stop for beer, which we’d mostly finished off two days earlier. This time I confess to Diane how good her nachos looked, and this time, I get a few. Thanks, Diane.
Thursday: Don Lee visits campus as the first Fred R. Brown Literary Award winner. He lunches with grad students (including me), reads from his work — in a different room! different building, even! — has a handful of story conferences, and does a craft talk (back in the workshop room) on getting published. As he was at Ploughshares for a gazillion years, I would have loved to get his feedback on a short story I’d written; too bad I don’t write short stories. And if beer and nachos were on the agenda again, I missed it — too pooped.
So much literariness in one week! You’d think this was New York or something.
… is reading about a BAD party you missed. Thank you, James Marcus. Thank you, Atlantic, for not sending me an invite.
Picture this: as you enter the auditorium at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, the first thing you see is 150 or so people on the stage. They’re having a cocktail party. You, the audience, are not.
My old high school is having an online party, webcasting the Exeter-Andover football game this Saturday. Alum John Irving will probably be too busy to tune in — he barely had time to type a paragraph on his latest project for the NBCC.
LAist is keeping up with the writers’ strike: photos of puppies, kids, and actor Jerry O’Connell.
Also in LA, a sad party/commemoration: on November 19, Laila Lalami, Chris Abani and more read for Mutanabbi Street, the street of booksellers in Baghdad, which was bombed in March (30 people died and 100 were injured). It’s part of the Aloud series at the LA Public Library.
Dave Eggers returns to Pittsburgh with Valentino Achak Deng. They focused on What is the What, Valentino’s story, and showed slides and video from a trip they took to southern Sudan. Yep, that’s a broken plane Valentino is pointing to; apparently it’s hard to find an airstrip without one.
Mark Z. Danielewski read from both House of Leaves and his latest, Only Revolutions, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers last night in Pittsburgh. I’d put the crowd at 100+, and every single person stood in line to get books signed. Which was worth it, because Danielewski used brightly colored pens and personalized each autograph. Cool.
The Q&A session had a few clunkers, including a question about how to get famous authors to blurb your publish-on-demand book (huh?). But a few weren’t so bad.
Q: How do you describe House of Leaves to people?
MZD: It’s a story about a family that moves into a house that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside.
on the genesis of House of Leaves -
MZD: It’s how I see the world. I see stories as a compilation of narratives and viewpoints.
on what publishers want -
MZD: All they want is something that’s done, that they can put a piece of cardboard on, and a barcode.
on literary criticism about his work (like Writing Machines) -
MZD: The reality is, most of it’s right, in my experience. Very smart people are spending a lot of time digesting, analyzing these texts. It’s interesting how much of it is spot-on.
on writing -
MZD: I like to write. I like to sit down and talk to my gorillas.
I went to the Swink reading at Tangeirs to see Mark Sarvas (that’s him there in the pic, blurrily) and hear more from his new novel. I agree with everything Callie already said.
I thought I didn’t need anything but Word to write a novel. But today Andrew told me about Journler, which seems more bloggy but possibly helpful, and look, Gwenda is using Scrivener. Are these truly organizational tools, or are they just software-based stalling tactics?
Dammit, I just missed Aimee Bender. Again.
Which reminds me: I’m writing the LA book updates for a new company called 80108. Sign up for and get pithy book events news texted to your phone. In advance of readings happening.
Which reminds me, v.2: if you have a readings series, book launch, poetry slam, magazine party,or any other special event involving the written word, email me the deets at paperhaus (at) gmail.com.
