It's three days later, and I'm still trying to get a handle on the most important elements of the Festival of Books "#book: new media meets publishing" panel discussion. And I think I should have figured it out by now, because I wasn't just at the panel, I was on it -- that's me, the moderator, at the far right.

The important people on the panel were Dana Goodyear (poet, New Yorker writer and founder of the upcoming Figment), Pablo Defendini (new media producer and designer, formerly of MacMillan's Tor.com) and Wil Wheaton (actor, author, blogger, Twitter force, mensch).

The broad discussion began with intersections of new media and publishing. Goodyear explained that Figment will be a self-publishing electronic platform directed at teens, much like Japanese cellphone novels she wrote about in the New Yorker. Wil Wheaton answered a question that had been submitted via Twitter, about why he'd become involved with Twitter in the first place (short answer: Sean Bonner first, Warren Ellis second). Soon Wheaton, who sold thousands of copies of his book "Sunken Treasure" in PDF,  explained that he isn't worried about book piracy: "People who don’t want to give a creator money," he said, "are never going to give a creator money."

There have been a few write-ups of the panel: Department H at Collier Comics captures the spirit of the discussion and catches all the e-book design geekery; Publishing Perspectives heard the drumbeat of self-publishing; the Book Smugglers loved Defendini; and Publishers Weekly cast the discussion as e-book extremists versus a moderate Goodyear.

"I am unsurprised that the 'mainstream' media completely missed the point of our #LATFOB panel," Wheaton Tweeted Tuesday, "while several bloggers totally grokked it." 

What almost everyone missed was Wil Wheaton's clear, direct and pointed remarks against DRM. DRM, for those who don't know, stands for Digital Rights Management -- which in this case referred to proprietary e-book formats that can be used only on certain devices. Wheaton directed his remarks to Amazon and major publishers, knowing there were reporters in the audience. Sadly, only Deparment H picked up the thread. Who knows, maybe they were the only ones who recognized that when Wheaton said "mobi" he was talking about .MOBI, an encrypted file format. 

In the past, the L.A. Times has made audio of the panels available. If it does in this case, I'll listen and report back. Because what Wheaton said -- and Defendini applauded -- is worth hearing in more detail than my moderator's memory can recount.

Somewhere early in the discussion, Defendini talked about his experience moving from advertising to publishing; his most "headdesking" moment came when he realized that publishers saw book buyers for the major chains as their customers, rather than readers. After his lament that no one in publishing talked to readers, the only thing to do was open the session up to questions from the readers in the room.

The questions were interesting and wide-ranging, but one cropped up again and again -- an old standard with a new twist. Instead of the classic, "How do I get my book published?" people are now asking, "How do I publish my ebook?"

-- Carolyn Kellogg, with reporting by Dima Alzayat

(Further clarification: "grok," is a made-up word meaning to understand deeply and completely; it's from Robert Heinlein's science fiction classic, "Stranger in a Strange Land." I thought everyone knew this but ran into someone last week who'd never heard it. I may be lousy at French, but my Geek is still pretty good.)

Photo, from left: Dana Goodyear, Pablo Defendini, Wil Wheaton and moderator Carolyn Kellogg. Credit: Dima Alzayat

Writer Tayari Jones, an assistant professor of creative writing at Rutgers-Newark University and author of the novel "Leaving Atlanta," has joined the politicians, lawyers and others planning to boycott Arizona in protest of its recently enacted anti-immigration law, SB1070.

Jones was scheduled to appear at the Pima Writers Workshop at Pima Community College in May. It's not a huge event, and Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has said he won't enforce the law, which he calls "stupid." But that's not the point. In a letter to conference organizers, which she has posted on her site, Jones writes:

Due to the passage of the Senate Bill 1070 which sanctions racial profiling and police harassment against brown people, I cannot return to the state of Arizona. Yesterday, I spoke with a dear friend who is an American citizen of Mexican descent who said that he would not feel safe in Arizona, although he (like me) used to call the state home....

My sentiment is captured in James Baldwin's famous letter to Angela Davis: "If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night."

One single author declining to attend a weekend workshop will not make much of a dent in Arizona's economic status; it is bound to more deeply affect her own. Which is perhaps what makes it notable.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Tayari Jones teaching in Uganda in 2009. Credit: Tayari Jones

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Two months ago, the corner of the Internet devoted to books went crazy for actor Zach Galifianakis' appearance in a book trailer for John Wray's "Lowboy." Slumped on a red couch and drinking beer, Galifianakis pretended to be Wray. Wray sat on the other end of the couch, pretending to be a bright-eyed, Charlie Rose version of Galifianakis. As far as book trailers go, it had more Hollywood sheen ("The Hangover"!) and was softer-sell than most.

But was it the best book trailer of the year?

That may be determined at Melville House's first-ever Moby Awards. The independent publisher has decided that the strange and spotty field of book trailers needs some measure of success. Or is it failure? The awards, dedicated to the year's best and worst book trailers, will be presented in New York in May.

Judges for the awards will be OR Books publisher Colin Robinson, Slate's Troy Patterson, Jason Boog from GalleyCat, Megan Halpern from Melville House and me.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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On Tuesday, publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux announced that it would be publishing Marilyn Monroe's writings in a new book, "Fragments," this fall.

"She was a great reader and someone with real writing flair," editor Courtney Hodell told the Associated Press. "There are fragments of poetry that are really quite beautiful, lines that stop you in your tracks."

Monroe was married three times: to James Dougherty, four years her senior when she was just 16; later, to baseball great Joe DiMaggio; and then to playwright Arthur Miller. Rumors of affairs abound -- particularly one spurred by her sexy birthday song for John F. Kennedy -- and editor Hodell is being tight-lipped about what hints might lie in the upcoming book, saying only, "there's stuff about all of her relationships here."

Even if the book doesn't reveal any long-held secrets, chances are Marilyn devotees will still want to pick it up, as it will include a handful of never-before seen Monroe photographs.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Playwright Arthur Miller with his new wife, Marilyn Monroe, in 1956. Credit: Sam Shaw

At the L.A. Times Festival of Books Saturday panel “Fiction: In Brief,” moderated by Mark Rozzo, the three panelists defended the short story’s morose appeal. Antonya Nelson, author most recently of the collection “Nothing Right” -- now there’s a depressing title -- said her students had been complaining for years that the short story brings them down, but it’s one of the aspects that draws her to reading and writing them.

Ron Carlson, who published the 2007 instructional, “Ron Carlson Writes a Story,” thinks of the ending of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” “Is that depression or dark bliss?” he asked. Depends on your temperament, your desire for traditionally resolute endings. Dark bliss is in the eye of the beholder.

“Alone with You” author Marisa Silver, who studied with Nelson, said that so much of the story is about what you don’t tell. Endings can be deceptive in the short story, maybe more than any other form. You reach the conclusion and realize the story was actually about something else.

Rozzo read a quote from Steven Millhauser’s contemplation of the short story in the New York Times. “The novel is the Wal-Mart, the Incredible Hulk, the jumbo jet of literature,” Millhauser wrote. “The novel is insatiable -- it wants to devour the world.... The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.”

It’s exactly the novel’s giant, unwieldy quality that fills Nelson with dread whenever she’s had the misfortune to begin writing one (though they’ve all worked out quite nicely for her, it should be noted). Due to their size, the paralyzing sense of free form, the novel allows you to be sloppy, Nelson said.

The short story, often grounded in the lyrical moment as opposed to the narrative arc, can’t be a totally known thing. Silver said if you start a story and know exactly where it’ll wind up, something’s off.

Carlson seconded that notion: “You need to be a savage to write a story… writing is done in the dark.”

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo: Antonya Nelson photographed at home in New Mexico in 2009. Credit: Bill Faulkner / For the Times

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The Sunday afternoon panel of nonfiction writers Pico Iyer, David Grann, Melissa Milgrom and Stephen Elliott promised to reveal how these writers uncover their stories, how they go about creating narrative from collected details. Well, that’s what the panel was supposed to be about -- but halfway through the allotted hour, a unified discussion hadn’t yet emerged.

Each author read five minutes from their most recent project, books about the Dalai Lama (Iyer), real-life Sherlock Holmes characters (Grann), taxidermy (Milgrom) and taking Adderral (Elliott).

The works have many and deep differences, in both subject matter and methodology. Perhaps they started at the same point, with a question. "Curiosity plus enthusiasm equals wonder," Iyer said. The question, “Who is the best giant squid hunter?” sent Grann to New Zealand for an article for the New Yorker. “Curiosity is the driving factor,” he said. And curiosity leads to unexpected discoveries and unlikely characters, like the stereotype-busting gentle, nature-loving taxidermists that became the subject of Milgrom’s book.

Starting points aside, what about narrative? Within a single story, Elliott said, “you have all these details and you start writing away from them, see where they take you. I never know what I’m writing until I’m 80% done with it."

I felt his pain -- 45 minutes into the panel, I still couldn’t find a central tenet, a nugget to take away from these tales of squid hunters and taxidermists. I didn’t yet have a story.

But then an audience member asked a broad, unanswerable question: In this new media landscape of twitter and flash blog posts, what’s the future of journalism? The panelists collectively paused, until moderator Geoff Nicholson joked, “How much time you got?”

Finally David Grann jumped in. Yes, he acknowledged, the business of publishing and writing is changing, and yes, advertisers are advertising less and threatening the viability of publications like the New Yorker. Yet there's something else. “The hunger for stories and the magic of stories isn’t going to go away," he said. "People still want to be moved and you don’t get moved in a tweet and you don’t get moved in a blog post.”

And that, I suppose, is the story of a book festival (as written on a blog).

-- Megan Kimble

Photo: Pico Iyer in 2003. Credit: Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times

“If you’ve come for a fancy cooking lesson, you’ve come to the wrong place,” said Alice Waters at the Festival of Books cooking stage. Dwarfed by her friend and collaborator, who held a pink parasol aloft to keep her shaded, Waters held an avid audience transfixed on Sunday.

Fans didn't mind braving the sun for Waters, the famed chef behind Chez Panisse and advocate for eating organic and local. They had snatched and saved all the seats more than 40 minutes before her demonstration began.

Waters began with only an empty counter and a compost bucket for peelings. She carefully unpacked cloth bags filled with fresh radishes, organic cage-free eggs, pomelos, cara cara oranges, Meyer lemons, garlic, fresh herbs, chard and mixed greens.

On the menu for the day’s demonstration was a fresh mixed green salad with vinaigrette, fava bean paste, and homemade aioli. 

Simplicity is the key ingredient for Waters’ recipes. Her collaborator, who was playing sous-chef, pointed out that a piece of hot grilled bread elevates a soup to another level.

The spotlight of the demonstration fell on one of the most basic kitchen tools: a mortar and pestle. Although it is old, they agreed it's one of the best. Grinding together garlic, salt, pepper and vinegar, Waters blended a vinaigrette in a few minutes while the sous-chef quickly mashed up fava beans into a hummus-like paste.

Waters was not afraid to get her hands dirty: Her sous-chef stressed that it's a great way to ensure that each of the leaves of lettuce is well coated with dressing. A perfect balance between sweetness, tartness and saltiness is essential in a dressing for Waters, and hers delivered -- she dipped her finger in her finished dressing and let out a delicate “mmm.”

Two other simple brunch meals that Waters confessed she couldn’t get enough of right now are a garden salad taco on an organic tortilla and grilled bread with slices of avocado.

Ten percent of Sunday's sales of Waters’ new book “In the Green Kitchen” went toward the Chez Panisse Foundation.

-- Casey Chan

Photo: Alice Waters, in purple, unloads her ingredients at the Festival of Books on Sunday. Credit: Casey Chan

Author and UC Irvine professor Amy Wilentz met a 2-year-old boy in Haiti who had lost both of his hands in the January earthquake that ravaged the capital city of Port-au-Prince. “He wasn’t even crying anymore, he was beyond pain,” she said. The boy and his mother were waiting in line at an overwhelmed clinic for more medication. Upon seeing that he’d barely advanced in the line after several hours, she drove him to another hospital.

She has since lost track of him but speculated that, given the current lack of resources, he might become a street beggar. But she urged the crowd at the panel “Haiti and Recovery from Disaster” at the Festival of Books to have optimism all the same. Without hope, what is there?

At the Saturday afternoon panel moderated by L.A. Times Managing Editor Davan Maharaj, panelists Wilentz, Mark Danner and Rebecca Solnit kept returning to this point, though not always in obvious ways. The rich political history of the country and the nature of communities in disaster provided context, the backbone on which to build hope.

The media predicted early on that looting might run rampant, but Solnit, author of “A Paradise Built in Hell: "The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster," analyzed it as almost a case of semantics: Is it looting when all your stuff is in rubble but a store down the road has formula for your baby? No, it’s survival skills at work.

Haiti has estimated that it needs $11.5 billion to rebuild, but the question is: How do all those funds get allocated? Wilentz and Danner, journalists who have reported extensively from Haiti, want that money to land in the pockets of actual Haitian citizens to ensure better fates than begging.

Danner stated that the spirit of the Haitian people, doggedly resistant to outside intervention, for better or worse, should serve as a guidepost for how important it is that funds land in the hands of the people so they can learn skills to pass down to future generations.

Though affection exists in Haiti for the U.S., despite a relationship that Wilentz characterized as sick and dysfunctional, our country time and again has not saved Haiti. The take-away message of the panel: For this Caribbean nation built up from the only successful slave revolution, it will ultimately be most satisfying for Haiti to have the biggest role in saving itself.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo: Patients line up at a hospital at the Petionville camp in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Credit: Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times

 

After several flights of stairs, multiple sets of double doors, one elevator ride and a few minutes of UCLA student volunteers explaining that Korn Hall doesn’t actually exist and I must be mistaken, I finally made my way to the far reaches of UCLA's campus and joined a sea of fans heading into Saturday’s discussion with young adult authors David Levithan ("Boy Meets Boy"; "Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist") and John Green ("Looking for Alaska"; "An Abundance of Katherines").

The teenaged girls seated behind me, who claimed they weren't "fangirls or anything," spent the minutes prior to the panel chatting about the latest John Green Facebook group, their favorite John Green moments from his YouTube vlog (originally intended as a way to communicate with his brother Hank), and how absolutely cool John Green is. I tried my best to keep up -- these young women were doing a much better job of filling me in on John Green than the research I had done -- but they were soon interrupted by the entrance of Green himself, holding a video camera and taping us for an upcoming vlog.

 "Good morning, Hank. It's Monday!" we all cheered, as Green had instructed us to do.

In California, "the stories find you," says author Thomas Steinbeck. In the Festival of Books' panel The California Way on Sunday, moderator Antoine Wilson started by asking each author to read the first page of his book, which allowed the audience to hear the widely different myths, realities and experiences of California that exist in their work.

Victoria Patterson read her collection of short stories, "Drift," which deal with the "unmined territory" of her hometown Newport Beach, Calif., and deepening an understanding of Orange County beyond the stereotypes of popular culture. She also revisits Newport Beach in her new novel due out next spring, because like "a dog shaking a rag doll in its mouth," she’s not quite done uncovering the complexity of the O.C.

Anyone who knows baseball also knows that baseball is more than just a game. It can serve as a vehicle for other parts of life, which was the topic of “Beyond Baseball: The Sport of Dreams” panel at the Festival of Books on Sunday

The panel, moderated by David Davis, included Edward Achorn, author of “Fifty-Nine in '84,” Jesse Katz, author of “The Opposite Field” and Mark Kurlansky, who wrote “The Eastern Stars.”

All three  books are about baseball, but each tells a much bigger story. “Baseball was a gimmick to get into other stuff I care about, like family, children and relationships,” said Katz, whose book recounts his experience of becoming the commissioner of his son's Little League in Monterey Park, Calif., and all the life lessons he learned along the way.

For Kurlansky, whose book is about the town of San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic, he didn't start out with the intention of writing a book about baseball. “It started out as a book about the Caribbean,” Kurlansky said. “It came to me: Why not write about a town that's produced 79 Major League Baseball players?” Kurlansky showed that in this small Caribbean town, baseball was the chance for opportunity.

Achorn spoke of his book about life in 19th-century America, using baseball, specifically the pitcher Old Hoss Radbourn, as a way to personify the hard times before the Industrial Revolution. “Every season tells you so much about America,” Achorn said, in explaining why he chose Radbourn's workman-like season of 59 wins in 1884 to personify the world then. “People had to be gritty during the 19th century," he said. "Baseball was a dangerous game, but it was better than the alternative of working in a mine or factory.”

Katz stated what all three authors attempted to get across in their books and the discussion: “A park is not just a park and the game is not just a game,” he said. “It is a mirror being held up.”

Joshua Sandoval is a television producer, most recently on “Latino 101.”

Photo: From left, David Davis, Edward Achorn, Jesse Katz and Mark Kurlansky at the Festival of Books on Sunday. Credit: Joshua Sandoval

In the session "Life Stories" at the Festival of Books on Saturday, moderator David Kipen deftly referenced  passages in several of the authors’ most recent books and facilitated a lively discussion between Rafael Yglesia, Paul Harding, and Colson Whitehead on voice, autobiographical elements in fiction and their educational experiences.

Applause broke out in response to the Friday night announcement that Rafael Yglesia’s “A Happy Marriage” won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and last week Paul Harding’s dark horse novel “Tinkers,” published by the fledgling Bellevue Literary Press, scooped up a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Paul Harding said 20 publishers contemptuously rejected “Tinkers,” and years later, when the tiny New York publisher finally accepted it, editor Erika Goldman called and spoke with him for three hours about the novel. She was the second person to read it, and told him, “I just want to make sure that I’ve read the book that you wrote.”

In the Festival of Books' Sunday panel “Unstoppable Voices,” moderated by author Susan Straight, the voices were not, as billed, unstoppable. Rather, they were frequently interrupted by laughter.

Jane Smiley, Mona Simpson, Maile Meloy and Marianne Wiggins joked about how to create characters with strong voices, and they often used a number of automotive metaphors. “Finding the voice is like getting the car in gear,” Meloy said. Wiggins talked about how it was necessary to get the “key in the ignition.” Whatever trope used, they all agreed on the difficulty of creating an authentic voice. But Meloy argued that the difficulty in creating voice, far from being an obstacle, was actually an indicator of the worthiness of the story.

Book critic Susan Salter Reynolds, who’s been reviewing books for 20 years, opened the “Fiction: The Illusion of Being Ordinary” panel Sunday afternoon by reading from each of the three author’s books.

First was Dylan Landis’ “Normal People Don’t Live Like This,” which I had read and think is great. Soon, the whole room knew that, as evidenced by the man in front of me ardently nodding his head in approval during the reading.

Salter Reynolds then used just the right amount of humorous animation when reading from Elizabeth Crane’s “You Must Be This Happy to Enter,” an excerpt about a character’s awesome life. Next up was  “Heroic Measures” by Jill Ciment, much of which is told through the eyes of a dachshund. Salter Reynolds described the book as “quiet”, and went on to explain how “wildly different” each book was and yet they’re all “products of our culture.”

Bill McKibben came to the Festival of Books to talk about “Eaarth,” his new book about civilization’s need to learn to cope with a dire environmental reality, but the talk Sunday pivoted more on the crucial point of hope. As in, do we have any?

McKibben, whose journalism and books like “End of Nature” have helped propel awareness of global warming, argued that, regardless of political posturing, global warming is a matter of fact, not speculation,  and that the world could well have already passed a crucial turning point. Island nations such as the Maldives likely will not survive even with great and fast strides in halting the escalation of the world’s temperature.

In the 1970s, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing the name Herman Wouk. Already popular for such novels as “The Caine Mutiny” and “Marjorie Morningstar,” Wouk’s two novelizations of World War II -- “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance” -- seemed to single-handedly launch the television miniseries.

Fame, in Wouk’s case, was not fleeting. He spoke Sunday afternoon to a full house at UCLA’s Broad Art Center about his new book, “The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion,” an examination of the splits and overlaps between faith and fact.

Befitting his early history as a radio gag writer, Wouk -- a month shy of this 95th birthday -- traded one-liners and wry observations with L.A. Times staff writer Tim Rutten while recalling his friendship with legendary physicist Richard Feynman and how it influenced his own view of faith.

 

At the Festival of Books on Sunday, Michael Silverblatt launched his discussion with Yann Martel by addressing the elephant in the room: “Beatrice and Virgil,” his third book, received an enormous bandwidth of critical response, some ecstatic and some expressing, in Silverblatt’s parlance, a feeling of “Grrrrrrr.”

Martel first defended why he choose the genre of allegory —  along with two stuffed animals with the names Beatrice and Virgil — to represent the Holocaust. “The moral of a fable is eternal,” he said, while “the moral of a story is temporary to a story.” He also argued that we shouldn’t assume that reality-based fiction is the best way to transmit information about reality.

Even though “Beatrice and Virgil” isn’t set in the 1940s or Germany, Martel did a great deal of research about the era and World War II. He briefly discussed such notable Holocaust titles as Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” Primo Levi’s “If This Is a Man” and Art Spiegelman's “Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale,” a graphic novel that uses animals to describe the Holocaust. Although Martel disliked the Hitler-era movie “Inglourious Basterds,” citing a longstanding dislike for director Quentin Tarantino, he admired the way that the movie rewrote that period of history.

There was a big turnout Sunday afternoon at the Festival of Books session featuring Bret Easton Ellis in conversation with music journalist Erik Himmelsbach. Ellis’ seventh novel, “Imperial Bedrooms,” will be published later this year — the occasion for his “first public appearance in four to five years.” The book has been described as a sequel to his first novel, “Less Than Zero,” though Ellis insists the new book is more a continuation of the life of the character Clay than a sequel (no matter how much that might sound like a sequel).

Himmelsbach asked whether Ellis views himself as a screenwriter, having adapted his novel “The Informers” into a 2008 film. This led to an extended discussion of Ellis’ views on adaptations of all his novels, past and forthcoming. He feels the film version of “Less Than Zero” got everything wrong – for example, all the blonds were turned into brunets – but he did develop a sentimental fondness for the film.

He most likes Roger Avary’s 2002 adaptation of “The Rules of Attraction,” but he feels Mary Harron’s adaptation of “American Psycho” in 2000 did not succeed as well because film is forced to clarify things that a novel doesn’t.  He said he's most disappointed in “The Informers” and hated seeing his best intentions “destroyed,” regretting not having learned more about the perils of screenwriting from F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner.

What's so fascinating about Warren Beatty? 

"I’ve always been a fan of Beatty’s films,” said Peter Biskind, who penned the biography “Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America.” The two met in 1989 while Biskind was working at Premiere magazine and Beatty was making the film "Dick Tracy." Biskind found him to be smart and a good storyteller. “Hanging around with Beatty is a real trip,” he said.

People these days may recognize Buzz Aldrin as a rapper with Snoop Dogg or a dancer on “Dancing With the Stars,” but first and foremost he is the astronaut who in 1969 was the second man, after Neil Armstrong, to set foot on the moon — and that's exactly how the Sunday crowd at the Festival of Books acknowledged him.

Aldrin was interviewed by L.A. Times writer Patt Morrison about his new book, “Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home.” Morrison started the discussion by telling the crowd there was now only 1 degree of separation between them and the man whose footprint will remain on the moon for millennia.

Morrison kept the mood light during the conversation. Her opening question: Is "Toy Story's" Buzz Lightyear named after him?  “Shall we check with Disney’s lawyers?” Aldrin shot back.