Thursday, January 31, 2008

Fun with Links: The Thursday Afternoon Chronicles

Can you feel the links tonight?

Jean Paul Yamamoto at Vroman's (and on YouTube)

Surfing around the interwebs yesterday afternoon, we came across this video of a performance by the local band Jean Paul Yamamoto from our "The Edge" Summer Music and Author Series. Jean Paul Yamamoto was paired with author James St. James, who read from his book Freak Show. (You might know James St. James as the famous club kid, played by Seth Green in the movie Party Monster, based on St. James' memoir.) The video is a little Blair Witchy (Isn't that the point of YouTube?), but it gives you an idea of how insane this performance was. Enjoy.

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Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Anne Applebaum Lightens Up

Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History, one of the saddest, heaviest books I've ever read has an interesting piece in Slate today about why Russian tennis players are so attractive. To say it's a bit of an about face for her would be an understatement, but she does offer an interesting theory:
To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa.
Makes sense to me. I can't wait until radical Islam is over in the Middle East and all those Saudi women start winning the US Open.

Charles Bock: Blowin' Up!

Last Friday I posted a link to a review of Charles Bock's debut novel Beautiful Children. Suffice to say that novel has blown up. Beautiful Children reaches bookstores today (and Bock will be at Vroman's on February 22) but the media blitz has already begun. Bock was the subject of a major writeup in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, and will be the cover story in this week's New York Times Book Review, a rare honor for a first-time novelist. I'm excited to read Beautiful Children, which has blurbs from heavyweights A.M. Homes and Jonathan Safron Foer. With all this attention, you can almost start an office pool as to when the backlash will begin. Luckily for Mr. Bock, he seems to have his head on straight. He worked on the novel for 10 years, living the hot-plate and coffee shop existence that seems to be mandatory for a young writer.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Remembering Heath, by Laura Payne

A couple years ago, I walked into The Arclight movie theatre here in Hollywood, to catch a small indie flick that was generating a ton of ‘buzz’ in the local and national media; entertainment media in particular. The film in question, Brokeback Mountain, had originally been penned as a short story by Annie Proulx, winner of both The National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her much beloved novel The Shipping News. And even more fascinating to me – serious bibliophile that I am – Proulx’s story had been co-adapted to film by Diana Osanna and yet another Pulitzer Prize winner: Larry McMurtry. (McMurtry took the Pulitzer in 1985 for his sweeping western epic Lonesome Dove.)

Proulx and McMurtry were long-time favorites of mine, and the director (Ang Lee, of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame) and casting was, at the very least, extremely intriguing. With a film starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two ranch hands, struggling to navigate the unmapped terrain of love and longing and who just happen to both be male, I was…well intrigued, yes, but also…somewhat concerned to be perfectly honest. No doubt in the talent department of either actor, but as a fan of the short story itself, I kept thinking: how exactly, was this going to play on screen? How was the emotional undercurrent, so clearly prevalent in the writing of the short story, ever going to be reproduced on film?

We all know that watching your favorite story or book get turned into cinematic compost is not an enjoyable experience in the least. As readers, we become very possessive of what our favorite writers have given us for our very own imagining. When we curl up and delve into a good story, we certainly don’t want anyone to come along and un-imagine it for us. We want to remain where our writers have transported us, and when others come along tinkering with that…well, it’s not a pretty sight. (Come on, you know what I’m talking about. You can name at least one film adaptation you disliked.)

But still, intrigued as I was, I drove out to Hollywood, shelled out my twelve bucks, buttoned my lip, and took my assigned seat.

On that day, the day I saw Brokeback Mountain, two things occurred: 1) terrible stomach cramps that left me squirming uncomfortably in my seat for two hours, and 2) the realization that I was seeing an “actor’s actor”, possibly one of the best of my generation. Ledger’s subdued portrayal of the brooding and deeply pained Ennis Del Mar, captivated and mesmerized at every turn. In scene after scene, Ledger managed to express the inexpressible with hardly a word: the crushing weight of longing and unspoken love and the burden of unsalvageable time were conveyed in every look, every gesture, and every silently aching moment.

I dealt with the cramps and stayed glued to my seat.

Some days later, I caught an interview on KCRW’s Bookworm broadcast with Michael Silverblatt and Brokeback Mountain author Annie Proulx. Discussing the uncanny experience of watching her characters move from page to screen, Proulx said, “…I found Heath Ledger’s performance totally frightening because he got right inside my head; he got stuff that I did not know about Ennis and he got it right…I was blown away by that performance. I thought it was indescribably excellent. I don’t know how he did it but he got that character to an impossible depth….”

As someone who read and fell in love with that story and the character of Ennis Del Mar years ago, I can honestly say: she was right. He did just that.

And now. Now, a very sad thing has happened.

The news of Heath Ledger’s passing which hit Tuesday afternoon brought a whirlwind of shock and grief to a great many people, me included. Working away here in my office, I half-overheard what I truly thought was a co-worker’s joke about “Heath Ledger’s death.” A passing moment and a quick Google later sadly proved me wrong. (I bet you’ll remember where you were too. I shall never forget.) The news caught like brushfire amongst the bookstore’s staff and the shush-shushing of lowered voices and rapid whispers of disbelief and horror followed me throughout the offices, where I found myself aimlessly wandering for a time, thinking, as others were thinking: surely, there has been a mistake; this can’t have happened; this can’t be true.

But there was no mistake. And it did happen. And it was true.

Like many others, I’ve been compulsively watching and listening to the news, trying to patch together any and all scraps of information that might explain the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of what happened to Heath, and, like many others, I’ve been frustrated with the tabloid reportage, and with the talking heads which say a great deal about altogether, very little. The vagaries and questions that come with an inexplicably sudden loss are difficult to understand, if one can ever truly understand them at all.

I never knew Heath Ledger. I never met him or saw him in person. Never knew what his hopes or his fears were. And I never imagined I would. But still. It hurts. Such is the experience for me, someone who has watched an artist breathe life and all the joys and sorrows of living it, into a much beloved character.

At home the other day, I dug through my tilting and toppling book piles looking for my beat up copy of Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx. I curled up on the couch in a comfy blanket and flipped to the last story in the collection, Brokeback Mountain and quietly delved in. And once again, I was transported by what the author was giving me for my very own imagining. But this time, when I encountered Ennis Del Mar on the page, his face was strangely familiar to me and I thought to myself:

Heath, you shall always be Ennis Del Mar… to me.

Heathcliff Andrew Ledger

April 4th, 1979 – January 22nd, 2008

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Laura Payne
is the customer service manager at Vroman's Bookstore. She curates the popular Vroman's Art on the Stairwell series.

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Friday, January 25, 2008

If it's Friday, it Must be Links

It's a miracle I'm here today, since it's raining outside, and everyone knows that Southern California comes to a standstill whenever it rains. But here I am, and here are a couple of quick things to get you a head start on the weekend:


Get linking, folks. Enjoy your weekend!

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Thursday, January 24, 2008

Sudhir Venkatesh in the House

Last night, folks braved the wind and rain to hear Sudhir Venkatesh discuss his book Gang Leader for a Day. I was one of them...OK, so I was already here, but you get the point. Venkatesh came to national prominence after his story was told in the runaway bestseller Freakonomics. While working on a PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago, Venkatesh insinuated himself into the life of JT, the leader of a crack-dealing gang that dominated the Robert Taylor Homes, one of Chicago's most notorious housing projects. Venkatesh shadowed JT, learning about life in the projects from the inside.

His reading was riveting, combining the most incredible stories with a great deadpan sense of humor. He stressed that his book was more of a memoir than a treatise on public policy, though many in the audience were obviously interested in hearing his thoughts on the urban poor. Most interesting to me was his discussion of what happened to the residents after the Robert Taylor Homes was torn down. According to Venkatesh, many of the residents of the projects lived a sort of communal existence by necessity. Often there would be a group of families who would come together because only one family would have an apartment with hot water, another family would be the only one with gas for the stove, etc. These families came to rely on one another, and when it came time to be relocated, they wanted to move together. The Chicago Housing Authority refused their request. Why? Because it's illegal to relocate members of the same race, ethnic group, socio-economic group, etc., because of federal statues against "re-ghettoizing."

Even more disheartening were the stories of residents who distrusted the world so much that after they had moved to the suburbs, they didn't call 911 during an emergency, electing instead to try and contact their former building manager from the Chicago Housign Authority, the woman who controlled many aspects of life in the project. Unfortunately that woman had passed away. Several people died specifically because they didn't believe 911 would help them. Why should they have believed in it? It had never helped them in the projects.

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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

(What I Hope is) A Presidential Candidate's Reading List

Where do presidential candidates get their information about the issues facing the country today? I know they're privy to classified reports, academic studies, and other sources that aren't available to the average guy like me, but do they ever just read a book? Each of these books deals with an issue that's important to me. Most of them aren't overtly political books -- they couldn't really be labeled "liberal" or "conservative"-- but they each detail a problem facing the country, and in some cases, a potential solution to that problem. Oh, and there's a novel, because everybody should read a little fiction, even the President of the United States.


The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food
Michael Pollan

No issue is of greater importance right now than the food we eat. It’s interconnected with the issues of climate change (bovine flatulence accounts for more greenhouse gases than automobiles), health care, immigration, and the economy. These two books show how industrial agriculture, the demand for cheap meat, and the “nutritionism” movement have changed the way Americans eat for the worse. While The Omnivore’s Dilemma illustrates the current American food culture, In Defense of Food offers a way out of it.


Cradle to Cradle
William McDonough and Michael Braungart

Are hybrid cars and t-shirts made from old water bottles good for the environment? Not according to McDonough and Braungart. These products and the “Reduce, Recycle, Reuse” mantra they embody aren’t really good for the environment, they’re merely less bad. McDonough and Braungart advocate overhauling how we make things – from factories to books (their book is printed on a plastic polymer, not paper made from a tree). After reading their argument, you’ll never think about the man-made objects in your world the same way again.


The World Without Us
Alan Weisman

If human beings were to disappear completely, how long would it take for the world to recover from our impact? How long before wild animals and plants reclaimed Los Angeles, for instance? Weisman imagines a scenario in which mankind is gone, but his legacy remains in the billions of tons of plastics and rubber tires that will take thousands of years to degrade. In thinking through this “thought experiment,” Weisman reveals what we’ve done to the earth and what it would take to undo it.


Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Tim Weiner

The failure to create a first-rate intelligence service has haunted every American president since Harry Truman, and it will haunt the next one if he or she doesn’t do something to fix the CIA. In a driving, focused style, Weiner shows exactly where the CIA went astray (a constant emphasis on covert action at the expense of intelligence gathering, for instance), and what could have been done to stop it. With accurate intelligence, a great many lives can be saved.


A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
Samantha Power

Once again, America has stood by while genocide occurred. Perhaps if we hadn’t been fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq we’d have done something about the massacre in the Sudan. Or maybe if the genocide had been happening in Europe, we’d have stepped in. Probably not, argues Powers, whose critique of American foreign policy stretches from Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton. Every American president of the last hundred years has promised “Never again.” It’s a shame none of them has made good on this vow.


The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Lawrence Wright

Whoever is going to be president will need to know a thing or two about radical Islam. This gripping history of the modern extremist movement in Islam is a great place to start. Wright begins his story with the prophet Ibn Qutb and continues through Zawahiri and bin Laden, detailing the philosophical and spiritual tenets of the movement and how they dovetail with the political and economic concerns of the Middle East. While the book reads like a thriller, it never falls into the trap of sensationalizing the men who planned and executed the 9/11 attacks.


Random Family
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Nickel and Dimed
Barbara Ehrenreich

In every election, there’s a great deal of lip-service paid to the “working poor.” Here are two books that take a look at what it’s actually like to be poor in America. LeBlanc spent ten years with a family in the Bronx while Ehrenreich went out and took jobs as a waitress, housekeeper, and a Walmart cashier to find out what it was like living on a salary of $6 to $7 an hour. Both books get beyond statistics and sensationalism to the heart of what is often the unspoken issue on the campaign trail.

Maxed Out: Hard Times in the Age of Easy Credit
James D. Scurlock

We’re heading for a major financial crisis in this country, and consumer debt is a big reason why. With “subprime” fast becoming the “junk bond” of our generation, everybody could stand to read this examination of America’s addiction to credit. The companion to the documentary of the same name, this fascinating and frustrating book exposes the immensely amoral business of lending money.


Hyper-Border: The Contemporary US-Mexico Border and Its Future
Fernando Romero

Here in Southern California, immigration has long been a political flashpoint. Now the rest of the country is starting to pay attention to this issue. This book presents a multi-discipline examination of the US –Mexico border. Bipartisan in its politics, this exhaustively researched book delves into the future of the region. Can it withstand a 700-mile fence? How about gangs of vigilantes? What is the economic and political future of the region on both sides of the border?


American Tabloid
James Ellroy

Yes, this book is about the Kennedy assassination (and the Kennedy election...and the mob...and the CIA...and the connections between all of these), but that's not why it makes this list. It's here because, well, I want a president that reads fiction! And besides, this is a really, really good book. It's a page-turner without being fluff. This is Ellroy pushing his style to its limits, but not going to the extremes that he will in the sequel, The Cold Six Thousand. This is the kind of book that will take you all of a weekend to read, but that you'll remember for the next ten years. The perfect book for a Camp David retreat!


Academy Awards Looking Very Bookish

The Academy Award Nominations were announced this morning, and three prominent literary adaptations led the way in the Best Picture category. No Country for Old Men, adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, and There Will Be Blood, a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's Oil! earned eight nominations each, while Atonement, adapted from Ian McEwan's novel, was nominated for seven awards. Other adaptations up for awards include Charlie Wilson's War (Philip Seymour Hoffman got his annual Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor), Into the Wild (snubbed in every category except Supporting Actor, where Hal Holbrook was nominated), The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, which earned nominations for director Julian Schnabel and writer Ronald Harwood, and Away From Her, Sarah Polley's adaptation of an Alice Munro story, which won nominations for Polley (Adapted Screenplay) and Julie Christie (Best Actress).

I was happy to see the thriller Michael Clayton nominated for a few awards, but where is The King of Kong: A Fistful of Dollars? Okay, it wasn't the best movie I've seen all year, but it was definitely the most enjoyable. I suppose I should be used to the yearly mockery that is the Best Documentary category by now, but I'm not. Another big snub (although not one I'm surprised by) was The Lookout, a terrific film about a former golden boy with a brain injury.

In other Oscar-related news, UCLA and Harvard wasted some time and money explaining that it's easier to be nominated for an award in a dramatic role than a comedic one. Other findings of the study included "Winter is generally colder than summer," and "Night: darker than day."

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Monday, January 21, 2008

National Book Critic Circle Awards Finalists Announced

We're a little late on it, but the National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalists have been announced. The major surprise was Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, a book that adorned many Top 10 lists in 2007 and won the National Book Award for fiction, wasn't nominated. Joyce Carol Oates was nominated in both fiction and autobiography, proving that if you write ten to twenty books a year, a few of them are bound to get nominated for something. In the non-fiction category, Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, the National Book Award winner, leads the way, followed by Vroman's staff favorite The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. My bold predictions in a major categories:
As for poetry, your guess is as good as mine. Read some blog reaction to the nominations here and here.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Vroman's Represents at the Beijing Book Fair


As I mentioned yesterday, our President, Allison Hill, was lucky enough to attend the Beijing Book Fair as part of the American and British delegation of booksellers put together by Book Expo's Lance Fensterman. Now that she's back stateside and recovered from jet lag, she agreed to sit down with me and discuss her experiences.

Patrick: You were part of the delegation of American and British booksellers attending the Beijing Book Fair. Who else was with you on the trip?


Allison: There were three other American booksellers -- Karl Pohrt, owner of Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor, MI [Karl blogged about the event here], Paul Yamasaki of City Lights, Sarah McNally of McNally Robinson, and Rick Simonson of Elliott Bay Book Company -- one American librarian, three British booksellers, and one British librarian...so ten of us in all.

Patrick: Were there other Westerners at the Fair?

Allison: It seemed like we were the only Westerners in the entire city, let alone the fair! We saw very, very few non-Asians during the entire trip, maybe a handful of folks at the Great Wall, but that was it. There wasn't the racial or ethnic diversity that we in the West have come to value or expect, although by the end of the trip, I realized that the Chinese themselves could see great diversity that a Western person just couldn't see. Also, we might've been the only people dumb enough to go to Beijing in January. It was so cold! You know it's cold when the guy from Michigan is complaining! On the day we went to the Great Wall, I think it was around 10 degrees Fahrenheit and windy. I had to buy a ski mask at the Great Wall. That's how cold it was.

Patrick: What were your impressions of Beijing?

Allison: It wasn't the most beautiful city I've ever seen. There was the sense that you were in a nondescript big city. There weren't that many architectural flourishes that made it seem distinctly "Chinese." Beijing was very clean. There were people everywhere with old-fashioned straw brooms sweeping the pavement even though there was nothing there to sweep. It was definitely polluted. The first day I was there I could feel the pollution in the back of my throat.


Patrick:
How did the fair run? What were the speakers like?

Allison: The fair itself was pretty much exactly like BEA but in China -- a huge room full of booths from publishing companies. The panels ran all day for one of the days in a big room full of people eager to hear the speakers. We had to listen to most of the speakers through headsets that provided translation, and sometimes the translations were a little bit off. At the end of my talk [which was about how independent bookstores can survive and thrive in a competitive environment], the MC of the event asked everyone in the room to stand up and say what they had learned from my talk as a way of thanking me. At first I thought, "My god, there are so many people in here. Even if each person only speaks for a minute, we'll be here for hours." But it was really quite moving.


Patrick: What did you know about the Chinese book market before you went to the fair? What were the Chinese bookstores like?

Allison: I knew nothing at all about the Chinese book market before the trip. I did some preliminary research when I learned I'd be speaking at the fair, but that was it. Luckily, we visited some stores pretty early in the trip, so that was helpful. We visited four independent shops and a few state-run bookstores, too. Chinese bookstores are really amazing. One store we went to, the owner asked how we make do with a staff of only 120 or so people. His store employs 500 people. When I saw the store, I understood why. It was 355,000 square feet! I asked about the buying strategy, and they told me they buy every single book published in Chinese. They also buy lots of titles in English, since one of their bestselling categories is books about learning English. Most Chinese books have both Chinese and English on the title. Since we sell a lot of non-book items at Vroman's, I asked about that at the stores we visited. The major independent store had a small glass case of calculators, fountain pens, etc. that the government "allowed him to have." But at the state-run store, the manager told me he had a "small selection" and showed me the third floor of his shop. It was like a Best Buy store! He had vacuum cleaners, electronics, everything. The other thing that amazed me was that booksellers are the same everywhere. We would walk into a room full of Chinese people, and we could all pick out the booksellers. They just looked like booksellers.

Patrick: What issues were the Chinese booksellers you met most interested in?

Allison: Mostly profitability (and cutting staff, which is understandable considering the size of some of the staffs) and the internet. The internet is just now becoming an important tool for bookselling in China. Amazon isn't in the market yet. There's an equivalent Chinese site, but it's a little bit different from Amazon; it's very involved in the bookselling community. Very few bookstores have any kind of internet presence. Everyone is terrified of Amazon, which I suppose they should be. They were interested in how we've coped with the internet and used the internet to our advantage.

Patrick: What did the Chinese know about the American book market?

Allison: They knew Amazon, of course, but they didn't have a great level of knowledge about American independents. They'd never heard of Powell's or Vroman's. The one independent store that had a profile there was City Lights in San Francisco. They knew about the history of it, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat movement, and I think the socio-political aspect of it appealed to them. There was a photo of City Lights hanging in one of the independent stores we went to there.

Patrick: Did you feel any level of repression while you were there or did it seem that most people were free to do and say what they pleased?

Allison: I'd forget about if for a long time, then something would happen and I'd realize that we really have no idea what pressures these people must be feeling. I asked a few people about the Olympics, and most people would give me the party line: "We're very honored to be hosting..." But Xue Ye, the executive director of their booksellers association, told me "Some of our members think the Olympics are a mistake, that money is being misspent, and the city will suffer for it." There was always the sense that the country was at a sort of tipping point, but the more I talked to people, the more they told me they didn't think much would change after the Olympics. One interesting area where the censorship or repression reared itself was bookstore events. We were at this terrific independent store called Sage, and we were asking the owner if he held events. He didn't seem to understand what an event was. We explained about author signings and readings. Eventually, someone explained to us that the government is suspicious of gatherings like readings, as they could be the basis for dissent. That was a sobering moment.

Patrick: I have to ask about the food. It's become a cliche to say that Chinese food in America isn't like real Chinese food. So what was the "real" Chinese food like?

Allison: Well, I'm a vegetarian, which made things difficult. I would ask if something was vegetarian, and they would say, "Yes, vegetarian. Only pork." I think vegetarian was being translated as "containing vegetables." The food was definitely not as deep fried as American Chinese food, not as sugary. Things would be lightly fried. There was a lot of meat, most of which was pork. Lots of dumplings. The last dinner we had was a traditional Peking duck. Our hosts did a good job of showing us all the various regional cuisines, doing a different area each night. Rice is really an afterthought there, which surprised me. We would be offered noodles or rice at the end of a meal, as a palate cleanser, but not as a staple or accompaniment. There was also a lot of juice, some of which was good, like a pomegranate juice or a fruit juice. Once I was served juice that was described as "fruit juice." When I smelled it, I realized it was corn juice. Mmm. Like a can of cream corn. I have to admit that after ten straight nights of Chinese food, I found myself craving cheese and other Western foods that they just don't eat. The last night there, we went to a place called Bookworm, which was a bar/restaurant and lending library. They also had two bays of books for sale, which was like filling two bays with your absolute favorite books. Whoever did their buying was doing great job. Unfortunately, some of our British friends got a bit too loud, and one of the other diners had to "Shh!" us, explaining that we were in a library bar, and as such, we would need to keep our voices down.

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Thursday, January 17, 2008

Thursday Linkishness

A few things caught my eye while fluttering about the interweb today:

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Something You Won't See on American Idol

Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef himself, is probably best known in America for his cookbooks of simple recipes prepared in relatively straight-forward style. He's a bigger deal in the UK, which makes this article in the NY Times this morning all the more intriguing:
Last Friday, in front of 4 million television viewers and a studio audience, the chef Jamie Oliver killed a chicken. Having recently obtained a United Kingdom slaughterman’s license, Mr. Oliver staged a “gala dinner,” in fact a kind of avian snuff film, to awaken British consumers to the high costs of cheap chicken.
I don't want to get into the ethics of eating meat, since, frankly I like all you, and I want you to continue reading this blog, whether you're a carnivore, vegetarian or hardcore vegan. I will say that this sort of thing seems necessary to me --the world has been eating way too much cheap meat--and if you look around the bookshelves of your local bookstore, I think you'll agree that I'm not alone.

America, or at least the publishing industry, has begun to take a closer look at what it eats. Books like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, David Kamp's The United States of Arugula, and Barbara Kingslover's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, examine the American system of food production and consumption, either through journalistic reporting, sociological study, or personal memoir. These books, each exploring the issue in a different way, hope to detail a revolution that's afoot in America, and I guess, in England as well. Whether they'll be able to change the way we eat remains to be seen.

What these writers also represent is a golden age of food writing. Their work, along with that of authors like Michael Ruhlman, Bill Buford, Jeffery Steingarten, and even Anthony Bourdain, makes me wonder: has there ever been a better time to read about food? It's fitting that 2007 saw the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism given to a food critic for the first time, LA Weekly's own Jonathan Gold. While it probably won't lead to Rachel Ray decapitating chickens (would she wear a special sweater for that?), I hope it at least makes her discuss where those drumsticks came from.

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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Rounding Up "The Wire"

When I started writing this blog, I promised myself I would wait at least a month before posting anything about "The Wire." I mean, it's a TV show, and this here is a book blog, right? Anyway, today, I'm breaking that promise. There's simply too much going on out there not to comment on it.

With the 5th and final season debuting two weeks ago, "The Wire," HBO's crime drama cum social novel, has been lauded by critics and written about in nearly every major media publication, electronic or otherwise. Making the most noise are Mark Bowden's critique of the show's creator, David Simon, in The Atlantic and Simon's essay about his time at The Sun, appearing in this month's Esquire . Even the Freakonomics blog gets into the act, with a piece by Sudhir Venkatesh (appearing at Vroman's on January 23), one whose prescience might become more and more evident as we move through this season.

What interests me most about the media storm surrounding "The Wire" is the way it has captivated the literary and book blog scene. Novelist James Hynes (Kings of Infinite Space) is officially obsessed, penning three straight blog posts about the show, including an excellent plea to return to the series inspiration and read a novel. Languagehat had some fun with the technicalities of the show's language. There was even lit-blog representation at the Season 5 premiere, as Maud Newton made the trip down to Baltimore. I can't remember a TV show, even something like The Sopranos, getting this kind of ink from folks like this. Maybe this is a book blog post after all.

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Monday, January 14, 2008

"The Academy Awards of Children's Publishing"

Since the Golden Globes came and went with all the excitement of a Tuesday night episode of Extra, you'll forgive us if we're a little fired up for some awards that matter, at least to booksellers, that is. The Caldecott and Newbery Medals were announced this morning. The Caldecott went to The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, while Laura Amy Schlitz won the Newbery Medal for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village.

Selznick's win was something of a surprise, as it was suspected to win the Newbery, not the Caldecott. Paper Cuts, at the NY Times, notes a major difference between these awards and the ones given to books written for adults:
One main difference between prizes like the Caldecott and the Newbery and, say, the National Book Award or the Pulitzer, is that the children’s prizes actually sell books. Those familiar gold medals on a children’s book cover mean lasting honor for the author or illustrator and dollars to the publisher, because libraries and schools will order thousands of additional copies. (They also impress parents at the bookstore).

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Friday, January 11, 2008

Bananas? Bananas!


Last night I stuck around to hear Dan Koeppel read from his new book Bananas: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World. Food writing like this -- deeply focused and researched writing on a single subject, moving from the micro to the macro -- has really taken over the publishing world in the past few years. Mark Kurlanksy (Salt, Cod) has made a cottage industry of it, and Michael Pollan's fabulous The Omnivore's Dilemma (a book with a slightly broader scope) continues to appear on Vroman's bestseller list on a weekly basis.

While the reading (the first for the Banana book) opened my eyes to bananas in a whole new way (Did you know the banana is in danger of going extinct? You see, every banana is an exact genetic replica of every other banana, so they're all susceptible to the same diseases, and ...well, read the book), what most interested me about Koeppel's talk was how the banana fit (or didn't fit) into contemporary food politics. As a guy who tries to eat as much organic, locally grown food as possible, what should I do with the banana? Can I justify eating a fruit that, by necessity, travels thousands of miles to get to my fruit bowl? My concerns were shared by some in the crowd.

Koeppel was good enough to address these issues in his post-reading Q&A. According to him, the banana was the first fruit to be shipped across seas in refrigerated shipping containers. This practice is common now, as anyone who's ever eaten a spear of asparagus in February in Buffalo, NY can attest. Much of our produce now travels the high seas (or the skies, occasionally), making just about everything available year round, but also contributing to global oil consumption and climate change. Unlike asparagus, however, it's pretty much impossible to grow a banana in Buffalo, even in summer. On the issue of food miles, the banana doesn't seem like a very "eco-friendly" fruit, at least not for Americans to eat.

Food miles is really only part of the issue, though. In America, the push to grow more and more organic food grows stronger by the day. But the banana, again, stands as an exception to the rule. Due to its unique genetic identity (every banana is a genetic twin of every other banana), the banana is incredibly vulnerable to diseases, most notably the dreaded Panama Disease. The only defense against many of these diseases is chemical spraying. An organic banana, left to its own devices, stands no chance of survival. Even worse, once a field of banana trees has been infected, no bananas can grow there again, meaning that even more land --usually rain forest-- must be cleared for banana farming. So no organic bananas.

Where does this leave the eco-conscious, health-conscious American banana eater? Koeppel's answer was pretty simple -- decide for yourself. If you feel comfortable eating a banana, know where it comes from, how it's grown, etc., then go to town. If not, don't. Koeppel pointed out that, as much as we'd like to eat organic fruit, keeping the banana alive is vitally important in certain parts of the world, particularly eastern Africa, where the crop sustains millions of people on its own.
Koeppel's talk was a good reminder that we produce food globally now, and that, when it comes to food politics, not every part of the world has the same concerns as Americans.

Check out Dan on Good Food and On Point.

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