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« A QUICKIE BEFORE BED | Main | LAT FESTIVAL OF BOOKS: CODA »

April 24, 2005

LIVE FROM UCLA - LATBR PANEL

Sw2

11:35 - Questioners seem to like to hear themselves speak … an unavoidable pitfall it seems … he’s being asked if readers can suggest what they want reviewed … perhaps via an 800 number with a tally … Wasserman quips “you can do that on Amazon” … Diehl quotes Goethe in his defense – consider three things: artist’s intention, how well he did it, and – the key – was it worth doing?

Now I’m up and I ask if he concedes he’s had boring dinner guests who he won’t have back, why not kill them before running them – more effective gatekeeping?

It would be foolish to defend everything we’ve published – it’s not the Steve Wasserman Review of Books, nor is it an act of ventriloquism – it’s hard to control a guest without being rude … Don’t agree with you … that what you consider to be tedious is tedious to others – and I put out the review largely for myself … (Diehl asks then why isn’t it the Wasserman Review of Books)  … Says he likes to have people who will dispute his preconceptions but “I choose my guests .. and don’t use an 800 number to consult on the menu that ought to be concocted - no good magazine can be run by committee … if you don’t like the review, go out and make one of your own …”  He’s talking about the internet and bloggers now – says he’s happy to hear their opinions “no matter how cranky and ill informed they may be” – but claims he’s all in favor of challenging hegemony – “The best piece I ever published was a 6000 word piece about the Spanish Civil War untethered to any existing book …” Is doing a Plimpton impersonation of a mash note the story invoked … Says it got more favorable reader reaction than any piece he’s ever published … “Length is in the eye of the beholder … no accounting for attention spans … one person’s tedium is another person’s Proust …”

Last questioners are asking about how to get reviews for the own books ... a little embarrassing ... the equivalent of "who's your agent" ....

OK, we're out of here, off to some other panels ... back this evening with a wrap up ... Tomorrow' thumbnail will be delayed due to the day's festivities ...

11:20 - Diehl says that Kirsch advised him that a name could be made for himself by picking the six biggest hitters and "kicking the shit out of them" ... Now it's question hour ...

11:19 - Second question:  What is the role of the review in the cultural life of Los Angeles?

Diehl: Treated it as a review for the readers of the L.A. Times ... did not consider it NYRB or NYTRB, which he calls a "trade magazine" ... Was also staggered by NY provincialism ... He started the Westward page two review devoted to L.A. history ... Disagrees with Steve ... in a town like L.A. "every local author deserves a review ... not necessarily a good review ... an honest review ... and there should be room" for such reviews ... He's invoking Kirsch as "accessible" and claims he sought to be the same ... Swipes do not seem veiled at all ... Schwartz is pressing him to be specific about the kind of reader he had in mind ... How is an LA Times reader different from a NY Times reader?  .... Diehl thought national and international aspirations were "ridiculous ... ultimately the L.A. Times failed in San Diego!" ... He suggests his public embraces academics, intellectuals as well as the "Balzac of her time" Jacqueline Susann - "I didn't expect her to write like Updike ... wrote stories of her time that entertained people and engaged them in their lives" ... He's oddly admiring of her ... He's bagging on Wasserman for overlong essays that "go on to prove how smart they are ..."

Miles:  He's talking about the expansion of the  L.A. Times into national and international bureaus and suggest California has benefitted ... He's talking about Clarke and the "dereliction of duty of the Bush administration" ... and "the more it can be discussed the better" ... Which gets a "hear, hear" from Diehl ... But he offers the other side, about the need to focus on local interest ... He says "any book review must surrender some of its space to negative reviews" ... He's reading from Rotten Reviews to prove his point ... Says he encouraged Eder to take novels and have at them, especially when they were getting lots of coverage elsewhere ... Eder replied "there are so many fine novels I refuse" to give up my space to taking down a book ...

Turan:  Your job as editor is to exercise your choice and your taste ... He suggests he always looked for books "that would make interesting reviews" ... for books he could match with a writer to get a good review out of ... not caring so much whether reviewer would like a book or not ...Miles just quips that the old NY story was "if the NY Times got a book about helicopters, they would get a helicopter to review it."

Bolle: Suggests there's a role for making "much of books that some others are not making much of" ... She suggests that although one may end up looking provincial by focusing on local interest, the provincialism, in fact, lies elsewhere ... She says she found it difficult to find agents who took the manuscripts she passed along seriously ....

Wasserman:  "I'm all for literary hygiene but it can go too far ... "  Telling a Doctorow anecdote ... who said "My God Wasserman, you're the Mengele of literature" upon seeing all the piles of bound galleys in his office ... He cites 140,000 "book-like" objects published a year ... the Times can get to about 1200 a year (including daily reviews) ... Compares it to triage and Verdun ... "There's no winning here" .... Says he decided long ago not to lose any sleep over it ... Is all for attending to the local ... defends Jonathan Kirsch's Westward column ... but is not a devotee of the mantra heard within the LA Times: see yourself in the Times ... that the paper ought to resemble a mirror of their interests ... He thinks that's exactly wrong ... that a paper ought to resemble a telescope ... Thinks highest obligation is to bring you the news from elsewhere or to put into ny relief the things you think you know ... Calls NYTBR "Terrible" and "I do not cede to the NYT that they are the paper of record" ... "flaccid and indifferent ... compromised by infinited corruptions ..." no longer read by many serious people and the territory seemed wide open ... High ambition and deep pockets needed to uproot NY Times supremacy - they pay $400 per review ... He says it's an "anemic" 12 or 16 pages ... We have no ads and "we will never get ads" ...  He conceives it as a "weekly dinner party" where the public gets to eavesdrope an interesting conversation ... is it always interesting? No, he says, but assures that droning dinner guests will not be invited back ... Every reader ought to "become the cartographer of his or her own literary map"  ...

10:58 - First question: All but one of the former editors are assembled here today ... first time that they've met as a group ...  Schwartz just called it the "most intellectually challenging weekly review in the country" ... this from the guy whose magazine just killed fiction ... First question to each - Briefly define your vision for the review, and what were the pressures/constraints working against said vision ...

Diehl:  Came to LAT in 1969 at behest of Robert Kirsch ... jokes that LAT was best when Kirsch wrote all the reviews himself ... Diehl started as a part timer to write ancilary reviews that "ran around the bra ads" ... suggests that he had no real constraints ... first separate Book Review section ran in December 1969 and became weekly in 1975 ... He's talking about the advertising department which seems a bit inside for this audience ... Schwartz has shoved him along, thankfully.

Schwartz rephrases the question to suggest that he's not looking for dirt about the paper management ...

Miles: Came to book review in 1985 ... came from publishing side ... went from "launching books to sinking them" ... suggests that stopping and sinking is a necessary part of book review editorship ... Back then, columnists were assigning themselves their own book reviews ... many books covered but in paragraph-length coverage ... Talking about Eder being sent west after too many bad reviews of NY plays with Times interest ... came out here as an all around arts reporters before settling in as a fiction critic ...

Turan:  Was only editor for a year (I didn't know this) ... Describes bringing his persoonality to bear on the section ... He suggests he likes to bring a sense of playfulness to the reviews ... He just attributed John Richardon's Picasso biographies to Robert Hughes (though he did call it "magisterial") ... Headline - He's Brash, He's Bold, He's ... Young Picasso - over a photo of a leather jacketed Pablo ... Says he spent a lot of time dealing with cranky copy editors and personnel issues ...

Bolle:  Was editor for five years ... an "exercise in cooperative book review editing" ... She was given the position unexpectedly when Miles moved to the op-ed pages ... Her tenure sounds like it was fun ... Friday meeting in her office with "knock down drag out" arguments about the titles they were passionate about in any given week ... She does seem to suggest that she looks to find reviewers likely to giving good reviews to the titles they select ...  Schwartz is asking if they ever killed a piece that was merely a lukewarm appraisal ... She's suggesting that "grubby details" of budget have  a bigger role ... a fine line ...

The room has filled out now, probably about 100 people here ...

Wasserman:  Was deputy editor of Sunday sections from 1977 to 1983 ... Left L.A. for NY to work for FSG and Random House ... 12 or 13 years in NY - he found Manhattanites guilty of "breathtaking provincialism" ... Wow, we actually agree with him on that ... He's talking about NY marketing directors suggesting that people don't read in L.A. ... and rising to the defense of our fair city ... Felt he'd been preparing for the his job his whole adult life ... says he had some idiosyncratic ideas .. wanted to break the "full nelson geography had on Los Angeles" ... and to "drive a wooden stake through the canard" of non-literary L.A. ... As I've said before, this line seems a bit overworked by now, don't you? ... Says he sought out passionate reviewers that would cause readers to remember on Monday what they had read the previous day ... Most papers consign book reviews to "virtual ghettos" ... He wanted to take L.A. readers as "the adults I thought they were ... instead of the baby talk that passes for [book] fare" in so many newspapers ... He believes L.A. has become a world capital with the local having gone global ... He wanted to "break out of the straitjacket of thinking that only the local writers need to be showcased" ... based on advice from Joan Didion ... Joan "reached out a bony hand and gripped my forearm with her nails" ... and said "just review the good books" ... She said do not privilege a writer just because they live in 90210 ... He suggests his critics have assailed him on this ... He just suggested that he is, in fact, pretentious - which he considers the prerequisite of ambition ... Barnes and Noble and Borders are "emporiums of culture" ... Danielle Steel is the "Balzac of our time" (that was a joke, folks) ... Quoting Gordimer ... "authors ought to write as if they were already dead" ... editors "should cleave to such an adage."

10:35 - Prohibitions on drinks in the room now make sense ... my coffee is running down the auditorium floor ... a good start.

10:33 - Mr. W has nodded in my direction upon spotting me here - am a bit hard to miss: front row, tablet PC, satelite connection ... Shall I make faces in his direction?

10:30 - Attendance is spotty, about 50 people or so ... lots of empty seats ... panel participants are - from left to right - Digby Diehl, Jack Miles, Kenneth Turand, token female Sonja Bolle, the mighty Mr. W, and panel moderator Jack Schwartz ....

Overheard conversation behind me:  "Who's that NY filmmaker ... his last name is Allen?" ... Was not asked ironically.

Here in the front row again ... connected ... waiting for Our New Best Friend Wasserman ...

Sw

It's a lovely day on campus, sun is shining ... one of the nice things about the Festival is having all these writers in one place and bumping into them ... we just passed our pal Tod Goldberg and his lovely wife Sandy ... we will visit his panel this afternoon.

Mr. Wasserman just arrives ... he's wearing a seersucker*, for those of you who follow such things ... More to follow.

* Thanks to Wendy Goldberg ...

Posted by TEV at 10:24 AM |

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» Sunday at the Book Festival from A Writer's Life
Things were relaxed at the Book Festival today...perhaps because it was chillier and cloudier than in past years. I signed at the Mystery Book Store with Michael Gruber (yes, that Michael Gruber), who autographed a copy of his new childrens [Read More]

Tracked on April 24, 2005 at 10:10 PM

Comments

hi mark. thank god you're bringing it all to us poor folks who can't be there. personally, i have no gripes against wasserman...he did publish a nice review of one of my short story collections. now, stop spilling coffee!

Posted by:daniel olivas | April 24, 2005 at 10:34 AM

Good blog on the panel. Accurate and caught most of the good quotes. I've missed your previous critiques of the present LAT Book Review, but I thought the issues were raised, if not entirely addressed. Thanks, Digby

Posted by:Digby Diehl | April 25, 2005 at 05:12 PM

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