Counterbalance

BEAing from Bed

Heading back to BEA (albeit quite weary after 14+ hours of bookish conversation and a late, late night talking about dark, dark secrets) today after what I hope is a not-so-painful dentist appointment. There are some great literature in translation panels that I'd love to catch and there are many folks in town only for the day so as much as I'd love to blog in bed all day, it feels wrong to be only a few blocks from BEA and not drag my slack body on over there.

A few impressions from yesterday's festivities:

• I need to write. More. Now.
• It was excellent to meet Scott Esposito finally. Delightful, actually.
• It is odd to avoid writers whom you've said bad things about - and inevitably they are the ones that keep popping up, around every bend, around every curve of the massive convention floor and it begins to feel as if they are making a point of it...but of course, that's all my head, right?
• The question that is most equivalent to asking about the weather or the Lakers when there is a lull in conversation (and it inevitably comes, no matter who you are or who you're talking to) is "So doesn't it seem that there are less people here this year? It seems less crowded to me." You would be amazed at the depth and breadth of nothingness that can be spun out of this meme. I believe I've now spoken about this topic for a full 1.75 hours over the course of the first day.
• I'm sure this is news only to me but: The Paris Review Interviews III is coming out in November. Part Three! And...wait for it...there will also be a fourth book in the future. Yum.
• I hate when people indiscriminately take galleys and books that they clearly have no intention of reading - especially from small presses. It pisses me off and I hate that those books could be going to someone else that would discover a great new writer. These indiscriminate book-takers are kind of ballsy in their efforts - asking for two and three copies of the same book for friends and then not even waiting for answers but just swiping several books and spinning on their heels to hit up another booth. Disgusting.
• I am very much looking forward to Roberto Bolaño's 2666, translated by the excellent Natasha Wimmer, and I feel like a lucky, lucky girl for scoring an ARC. It was my "get" of the day.
• I tried very hard to say "send it" instead of taking books on the spot - but sometimes you gotta just accept what is being given out. Plus, isn't it somehow more eco-friendly to take them in person so they don't have to ship them all back to NY and then turn around and mail them out to me a few weeks later?  Yes, this is my flimsy justification for the five books I brought home yesterday.
• Free drinks in booths are good. Not eating all day and then drinking in booths=less good.
• I finally got up the nerve to chat with Steve Erickson at the Black Clock Party and I'm glad I did. On the way out of the party I had a great chat with someone about live music and the punk scene in LA  and as I walked away after that interesting conversation about who saw whom play when and where, I was told that I'd just been chatting with Janet Fitch for the past half hour. Crazy, right?
• It is strange when you like an author's agent better the author. Unexpected.
• Exciting/scary turn of events: so many new people started following me on Twitter yesterday that I wondered aloud (to myself, I believe) if there is a Twitterati. Does this exist? Can we create it? Am I nutso after one full day of BEA? You decide.
• But the real, real question...the question on everyone's mind at the parties last night: who went to the Prince party and what was it like?

Off to the dentist, then off to another day of BEA where I'm quite sure I'll be less polished then yesterday, more bleary-eyed and cranky. But this is me before coffee, so who knows what I'll be like post-dentist, post-caffeine.

Stay tuned to the Twitter at right, as that's the best bet for more coverage throughout the day.

BEA: Emerging Writers Panel

BEA has been excellent so far - with writers I've loved and finally met, publishers I've adored and finally met (I'm looking at you Richard Nash, you Dan Wickett) and attending panels of writerly friends and sending them text messages while they sit on the panel waiting for their turn to read.  Good times.

I'm currently sitting in the Emerging Voices Panel which includes:

Andrew Davidson - author, Gargoyle, Doubleday

Rivka Galchen - author, Atmospheric Disturbances, FSG

Rachel Kushner - author, Telex from Cuba, Scribner

Mark Sarvas - author, Harry, Revised, Bloomsbury

Barbara Suter - author, Dorothy on the Rocks, Algonquin Books

Nami Mun - author, Miles from Nowhere, Riverhead Books

I'm told it's the 7th year of this panel - and it seems that all the writers are only going to read their work. Hardly a "panel" - when I think of panel, I think of discussion - but we'll sit here (I'm with Pinky) until Rachel Kushner and  Mark Sarvas read and then we'll go back out for another beer. Yes, beer. It's a lot of books and there's only one way to get through it - low-rent Gordon Biersch beer. And then martinis with Tin House, then gin with Jules (Asner to you) and then off to Black Clock.

Surely I'm not the first to point out that books = drinking.  Right?

I must also say that I'm thrilled to have met the folks at Europa (as translations are my passion) and I will officially urge you to seek out more translations on your own. I will also officially state that I plan to focus even more on small presses, independent publishers and translations here at Counterbalance. When you see the big booths of all the big publishers, and you see the all the amazing books that deserve attention and will never get it if we don't speak up, it can crush you.

I don't want to be crushed, nor do I want all these books to be crushed. So - I've resolved to do more.  Is it the beer talking? Maybe - but...well...translations matter beers or no.

Keep checking my twitter feed at right - that is the best bet for your blow-by-blow at BEA.

 

BEAing

I'll be blogging (possibly) and tweeting (for sure) from BEA today.  There are many independent publishers and small presses I can't wait to meet, several authors I'm eager to see for the first time, and several that I'm looking forward to catching up with again.

There are great panels, great booths and who knows what else other than a massive gathering of people who love books - what can be wrong with that?

I've added the Twitter sidebar back in (removed it because Twitter kept crashing and taking Counterbalance with it) to the right, so please follow-along with today's events.  I'll have more when I return.

Lit Bits: The Pain Edition

The week in bookish LA is up at LAist.

If you attend one event tonight, it should be this.

Nam Le's The Boat would have blown me away were it not for the unfortunate mistake I made: beginning that first story as if it were a novel. I was so disappointed when that story ended, every story that came after was somehow tainted for me. I kept wondering how the characters in story #2 had anything to do with those in story #1. By story #3, my sadness was complete. Entirely my fault, not his. (Although where, I ask you, where on that book jacket or cover or spine does it say anything about stories?)

BEA is upon us and I'm in so much pain (five weeks of tooth/jaw pain will change you, possibly forever) I can barely hold my head up.  I cannot imagine navigating busy booths and smiling with lots of people I've been waiting years to meet with my head screaming in a hot rage.  This is a message to the universe: please let the pain subside.

Same Old, Same Old: Is the Critic Dead or is it Literature Instead?

Salon has an interview with Salon-book-critics Laura Miller and Louis Bayard which examines, for the umpteenth time, Who killed the literary critic? (sub. only) What I like about this take is that the reviewers turn it back on literature.  As in: Well, if the books were better, the criticism would be better.  An interesting angle I'm not entirely sure I buy...but I have read some awful dreck lately (Frey comes to mind) and, well, I'm game.  Here are a few of the interesting nuggets:

"If we want to bring the critic back to life, we first have to resuscitate the novelist."

"So the only critics left to evaluate most contemporary fiction are journalists, ranging in seriousness from someone like Wood to your average newspaper freelancer who mostly delivers plot summary. There are no critical movements evident today. James Wood has a well-formed, if rather austere aesthetic but he seems to be the only one who actually adheres in it. Of all the people I've met who admire Wood's criticism I've yet to encounter anyone who actually subscribes to his fairly restrictive standards or taste. They like his writing and seem to feel braced by his rigor, but at the end of the day, they go home with Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith instead."

And a somewhat refreshing take on those "amateur" critics:

"The problem with arguing for cultural gatekeepers is that, if you're a professional critic, you inevitably look self-serving -- 'Hey, that's my job!' -- and yes, elitist -- 'Don't try this at home, guys.' I myself don't have any particular training or qualifications to be a reviewer, other than my own experience as a reader and writer, so I feel silly arguing that someone else isn't qualified to deliver an opinion. And believe it or not, I've learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism."

Overall, it's worth a read, but I wish they'd delve a little deeper into the meat of some of the issues, rather than simply touching upon them as that is the very yardstick by which they measure the value of reviewers, critics, and writers.

Reader-Writer Moment #366

"The thing is not to write what no one else could have written, but to write what only you could have written. I recently found this fragment in one of my old notebooks. The person who wrote that couldn't have known what would happen: how time can hold itself against you, how a voice hollows, how words you once loved can wither on a page."

                                    -from The Boat by Nam Le

Book Cover Switch-Up: This Book Will Save Your Life

For the second installment of ridiculous book cover changes, I offer up This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes. How - on earth or in hell or in space or in the mind of anyone - is it a natural progression from Exhibit A (the original US hardcover) to Exhibit B (the US paperback reissue)?  I'll admit the original cover was vague and disappointing (what is that on the murky blue background?) and so offered much room for improvement. It was a chance for that rare moment when the reissue cover could have been better - could have communicated so much more about the book. Alas, it was not meant to be. The mountain lion image coupled with the title makes it seem like a book written by Jon Krakauer.  It should be noted that A.M. Homes commented on this (then) forthcoming cover when she did an LA reading and she thought it odd as well.

But let's be honest, the real crime here is the insane leap from Exhibit B (Penguin Paperback 2007) to Exhibit C (Granta Books, UK Paperback 2007). Yes, the protagonist in the novel does get donuts at the restaurant down the hilly street from his Hollywood Hills home. He hails a cab from there and has some very profound thoughts whilst pondering donuts. But again, the image + the title makes this seem as if it's not a work of literary fiction but that it is a diet book of some sort. The anti-thesis of Skinny Bitch or that French girls don't get fat book and more along the lines of...eating donuts will save your life.  I'll admit that it is at least quirky enough to catch one's attention.

So which is it? Mountain lions will save you or donuts? Or the book? None of these covers do the book justice - no matter what country you're living in. I may also have to start a separate series - the series of what the book covers should have looked like instead. For this book, as it is about living in glass houses and rarefied air in Los Angeles but being human anyway, why no dark & arty images of a Richard Meier house jutting out precariously over the hills? Perhaps that would be too obvious. I'd argue that it would at least be closer to the novel than any of these.

Previously: Book Cover Switch-Up: The View from Castle Rock

Not So + Literary LA

Two LAist pieces on the less literary end of the scale:

• The obligatory "it's so good, no, it's unreadable dreck" James Frey conundrum piece
• A compelling look at Touch Me, I'm Sick: The 52 Creepiest Love Songs You've Ever Heard

And two more decidedly literary bits for today:

• David Shields discusses The thing about life is that one day you'll be dead on Bookworm today @ 2:30pm
• The one, the only, Michael Ondaatje is reading tonight at the Hammer Museum. Listening to him read is...heaven. The man is a poet ten times over.

UPDATE: A healthy discussion about Frey's new book is currently underway at The Elegant Variation. I am pleased to see someone else point out what irritated me most about Maslin's NYT review of the book (after I got past what Sarah Weinman perfectly described as the blatant rip-off of Kakutani's style): how dare she compare Frey's book with Charles Bock's Beautiful Children and deem Frey's somehow greater.  Ugh. Bock's is an excellent book and is far more deserving of attention.

UPDATE II: Ed's Hazy Chintzy Afternoon is a must-read.

Twittering Again

Long story short (because this is about Twitter after all): I was a regular twitter-er several months ago.  Then I stopped because blogging plus twittering was just too much. I've started again.  Twittering instead of blogging...so much easer!

I'll continue to do both on a regular basis but I've noticed that many bookish (and not so bookish) observations don't merit a full blog post.  Follow or no, follow or lead.  My brand-spanking new twittering is @calliemiller or you can passively observe my recent twits at the column to your right.

RIP Rauschenberg

An artist I greatly admired - for his art as well as the fire that burned within him (crazy or no) - has died.

Moments to cherish: the 2006 MOCA exhibition of his Combines work which I visited too many times to count and watching Man at Work in the downstairs film room at the museum. I highly recommend this film (or this book) for anyone wishing to pay him tribute or wanting to learn more about this fascinating, fiery, ever-curious artist that made me laugh with his work and his words.

UPDATE: An excellent resource for viewing Rauschenberg's work online...

(Photo by eston via Flickr)