David Ulin will be on KPCC’s Air Talk with Larry Mantle today, around 10:30am Pacific — that’s 89.3FM in socal, online elsewhere. Ulin has also talked to Publisher’s Weekly about changes in book coverage at the paper.
Jul 282008
Jun 232008
I’m heading to the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study for my third day of research for my thesis. Stumbled across a 1926 letter from DW Griffith to Adolph Zukor, complaining for 10 pages about scripts being forced on him and changes he’d been bullied into, then ending with “no ill feeling.” Zukor took 10 days to send an unbending note back; Griffith followed up immediately with another long treatise. Ten years earlier he’d revolutionized the film industry, making long-running pictures with an astonishing level of artistry, but by 1926 he was getting the brush-off. His letters show he wasn’t taking it well.
This only has tangential connection to my thesis, I admit. But archival research is so much fun! And some things — like the elaborate Paramount budgets, written in pencil — are concretely related.
Meanwhile, Stop Smiling magazine talks to David Milch, the creator of Deadwood, for their gambling issue. In the excerpt online, they never get to Faro, which is the gambling that would have been played in Deadwood. Faro is in my thesis (and it was there before Deadwood, thank you very much), and I think it’s the strangest game of chance ever. It’s sort of like card-based roulette — you bet on a card or cards, and wait for the dealer’s draw to match yours. No skill at all — just guess and wait. And it was so insanely easy for the house to cheat at Faro, it’s a wonder anyone played it. But it was massively popular. Maybe Milch gets to it in the print version.
All of this seems to indicate that my MFA thesis is a work in progress. Indeed. My coursework is finished, but the thesis is due later this sumer.
May 292008
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.
Dec 012007
Tony Pierce, the enthusiastic, wild, obsessive, peerless* editor of LAist is moving on to manage the blogs of the Los Angeles Times.
Congratulations, Tony!
Photo: That’s Tony in the center, mid-Skooby’s hot dog, telling Rob Takata and Cecil Castellucci what’s what.
* not predecessor-less, though: his predecessor was me.
Nov 302007
The coolest thing I’ve read all day:
Mark Sarvas’s first novel is funny and sad, rueful, wised-up and curiously moving. A remarkable debut. – John Banville, winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Sea.
Although perhaps it should read John – fucking – Banville. The book is Mark’s upcoming debut, Harry, Revised.
Bukowski’s home will be saved after all. Eh. I like him as a dissolute icon, I do; but literary talent, not so much.
Tod demonstrates how to get on an FBI watch list.
Antoine Wilson is interviewed at Please Don’t, a new online quartlery. He describes his ideal audience — “I write to a version of myself, a literary doppelganger. I’d like that doppelganger to pick up my novel, read it, and say, ‘I wish I’d written that.’” — which is entirely appropriate for a guy who’s written a book about someone with an alter ego. Did I say excellent book? It is: The Interloper.
Truth is stranger than fiction, part 7,135,087: in the 1920s, a Memphis woman ran a sordid adoption ring. She’d trick unwed mothers into signing away their infants, bribe nurses to lie and say babies had been stillborn. One of her ill-gotten infants became Joan Crawford’s daughter (and you know how well that turned out). The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption sounds too good to pass up.
Aug 102007
So a bunch of us went to Musso & Frank’s for a martini, then across the street to Skooby’s for a hot dog. We see that they’ve got one framed thing on the wall – it’s a picture of Cecil’s book Beige with an excerpt (about, of course, Skooby’s) and WE LOVE CECIL CASTELLUCCI! in big letters. We’re all like Hey, Cecil, that’s your book! She was like, Oh my god! That’s me! That’s about when this photo was taken.
Still, they made her pay for her hot dog.
Jul 282007
Yesterday I sat in as guest editor at LAist. And there was much posting.
7/27 birthdays
a monkey in his pants
Hot Hot Heat comes to town
James Ellroy: HUSH HUSH
all that and a donut
USC’s photo archives
Phil Spector trial update
Eddie Murphy: Party All The Time
Johnny Depp likes good architecture
Bobcat scare in Silverlake
Tom and Katie vanquish enemies
A friend remembers the New Beverly Cinema
May 102007
The LA Times has been book blogging this month. The paper still has some details to work out (like getting the posts up the day they’re written, not 3 days later), but it’s still a welcome entry into the litblog sphere. Say hello to Jacket Copy.
Mark Sarvas reports on Michael Chabon’s LA Public Library appearance. Chabon, apparently, threw out his first 660-page draft of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. He told the capacity crowd, “There’s always more where that came from.”
Callie Miller is looking for LA short story collections. Nope, not essays, the woman already knows her Didion.
Speaking of essays, Ruined Music publishes true stories of songs that have been ruined (by breakups, overplaying, illness, appearing in an Adam Sandler movie). (via)
It’s that time of year again: the storySouth million writers award has announced its notable stories for 2006.
