The Elegant Variation

BEA & THE MYSTERY OF ULIN'S DOPPELGANGER

BEA is over and we're digging out around here, so please sit tight - we're about to post our delayed giveaway, as well as news of the release of the first international edition of Harry, Revised.  As for the weekend, for us it was mostly about catching up with old friends and making some new ones.  We do have the requisite pile of galleys through which we will be inching this week, and over the next few days we will share our three favorite BEA Galley Page Ones.  Until then, you can find plenty of coverage at Jacket Copy, Counterbalance, Vulture, Scalzi and BookFox.  And, for subscribers, Michael Cader does his usual thorough roundup for Publishers Marketplace, where he covers the food workers walkout that left us hungry, the party at Prince's house that left most of us snubbed, and the the general response to the show:

Publishing executives who used to gamely tell us how nice to was to see everyone gathered together and be part of the community even if they couldn't measure the return on investment were talking more this time about the "waste of money" the show has come to represent. One ceo, admitting that "you have to be here," nonetheless said to us, "I don't know what the solution is. People are going to have to take a hard look" at the show and its relevance and value.

For us the big story of the weekend, though, was the mysterious appearance of Los Angeles Times Book Review editor David L. Ulin's double, who seemed to be everywhere David was not.  Here is Ulin Redux at the Consortium party at the Hotel Figueroa:

 

And below is the genuine article for comparison purposes:

Creepy, eh?  Theories abounded all weekend - a successful clone, a hired body double to cover the extra parties - no one can be sure.  But the attention to detail - right down to the earring (too hard to see on these photos) - had us consumed with guesswork into the wee hours.

BEA PANEL

I've been added at the last minute to a BEA panel "The Author-preneur: Balancing Authorship and the New Business of Brand-building," in which I expect to present the ambivalent if not dissenting view.  It will be held on Thursday, May 29 at 4:00PM, and my co-panelists will be Betsy Amster, Ron Hogan, Kim Ricketts and moderator Kevin Smokler.  For other BEA events and updated appearance info, go here.

SPECIAL TEV GIVEAWAY: CHARLES BUKOWSKI'S L.A.

This one is a bit unusual, folks.  In honor of the upcoming BEA weekend, the gang at Esotouric is presenting, in cooperation with the landmark City Lights Bookstore, a special tour of Charles Bukowski's L.A.  "Haunts of A Dirty Old Man" will take a lucky TEV reader on this tour which

focuses on Bukowski’s great passions: writing, screwing and Los Angeles. We’ll take in the canonical locations of his life and myth: the Postal Annex Terminal where he gathered the material for “Post Office,” the De Longpre apartment where he briefly experimented with marriage and fatherhood, one of his favorite bars and liquor stores, and many other spots. Along the way, we’ll explore the people and ideas that made up the warp and weft of Buk’s rich inner life. This Esotouric bus adventure is hosted by Richard Schave.

"Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski's LA" spans Bukowski's personal city, from Skid Row to once-genteel Crown Hill, to Bukowski's favorite East Hollywood liquor store, the Pink Elephant. The tour also includes a stop at one of several bars notorious as Bukowski haunts.

In addition, the lucky attendee will also receive a free Bukbird beer coaster featuring Tony Millionaire's cartoon bluebird character, and a very special gift from City Lights Books, a pre-release copy of their Charles Bukowski anthology "Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944 - 1990." "Portions," to be published in September 2008, gathers many essential, uncollected pieces including his first and last short stories, and his first "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" column. Many of the writings have only appeared in 'zines, newspapers, chapbooks, and magazines.  Additionally, "Bukowski - Born Into This" director John Dullaghan will be on the bus.

The tour is a $55 value and, for obvious reasons, you need to be in L.A. on Saturday, May 31 to collect.  But if you're interested, please drop an email with the subject line "TO ALL MY FRIENDS" and include your full name, please.  Previous winners may participate in this one, and we'll take all entries until 8 p.m. PST at which time the Random Number Generator will pick a lucky winner.

UPDATE: Congratulations to Juanita Poareo, who will be going on the Buk tour!

BEA OMNIBUS

We apologize for stepping ever so briefly on the lovely toes of our guest blogger Katherine Taylor.  We promise not to intrude again. But we wanted to direct you to the loads of BEA coverage out there, as well as posting a few of our own fleeting impressions before diving into our revisions.

On Thursday morning, we met Dallas Morning News book editor Michael Merschel who was attending his first BEA.  He asked for our advice and we told him that BEA basically breaks down into four parts (for us).  The meetings - of which there are always more than there should be, going longer than they should.  The panels - which are never as interested as they promise to be.  The floor - which is always completely overwhelming.  And the parties - of which there are always more than we can get to, which go later than they should, and where we drink more than we should.

This year more or less followed the pattern.  (Although the meetings part is our fault - we always overplan but there are so many people we like to catch up with.)  We can report that, for the first time, we religiously followed our own advice about picking up books and came home with exactly eight galleys - everything else will be mailed to us later.  (The new Philip Roth novel Exit Ghost was among the coveted galleys.) 

And if we hear one more word about the Crisis in Book Reviews, we will almost surely kill someone, if not ourselves.

The big BEA book for us this year was David Leavitt's absolutely stunning The Indian Clerk, about which you can expect to hear a great deal more from this quarters some time in July.

It was a great opportunity to reconnect with some old friends, make some new ones and spend a salutary weekend talking books with loads of people way smarter than we are.  Highlights included a lovely, celebratory lunch with our Super Agent Simon Lipskar; meeting so many of you at the LBC shindig at Kettle o' Fish; the strongest martinis in recent memory served up at the Tin House booth; our annual dose of quality time with Steve Wasserman at the New York Review of Books party at the Museum of the City of New York (which we'd never seen); finally meeting Matt Weiland of Granta and Brigid Hughes of A Public Space, both of whom were eloquent and thoughtful at the Debut Fiction panel; hearing book tour anecdotes from Arthur Phillips; recapping the weekend with James Marcus; and so much more but, above all, being in the thick of all things bookish for four solid days.  Incidentally, for all you local readers, BEA comes to Los Angeles next year.

We're fairly certain more posts/memories/recaps will dribble out in the weeks ahead but, for now, here's an overview of some of the plentiful BEA coverage that's out there:

* As always, Publishers Marketplace leads the way with comprehensive BEA coverage, including blogs, stats, and photos. 

* At Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee takes on BEA from the perspective of university press action.

* Blog coverage courtesy of Carolyn, Dan, Levi and (comprehensively if exhaustingly) Ed.  Bud has a nice video of the ethics panel up for your viewing pleasure.

And with that, we leave you in the able hands of Ms. Taylor until we return to these precincts next Monday.

BEA QUICKIE - OUP

Am blogging live from the Oxford University Press booth, where they've pointed out this fantastic link on their blog put up yesterday in honor of the 40th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper.  Ever wondered who all those people on the cover are?  Now you know.  An sterling example of precisely how to best use the internet.

More on panels and meetings this evening.

IMAGES OF BEA:LATBR PAST AND PRESENT

David Ulin and Steve Wasserman, together again, as seen from our cell phone. More to follow.

BEA CODA

Mostly odds and ends to report ... Sunday at BEA is usually an anticlimax as people begin to check out and head for the airport ... I was a bit too tired and hungover to make the Sunday's author breakfast (at 8 a.m. - who schedules these things??) so I didn't get to see Richard Ford and Monica Ali but I did make some final booth visits and got to say goodbyes to friends until next year's show.

Saturday was another night of busy partying, with the big show of the night being the annual PGW blowout at the Black Cat.  Too loud for much talk but a great, lively scene - fun to watch people let their hair down a bit.  The Unbridled Books party was much more along the lines of what one thinks of when one thinks of Book Parties, and it was a great opportunity to chat with their authors, including Frederick Reuss, about whose fascinating novel Mohr I've already written.  It was also nice to see so many bloggers in evidence, there and elsewhere.  It's hard to believe that at BEA two years ago, I still had to explain what a blog was.  (Last year, too, though less often.)  The question wasn't asked once this year.

But my favorite part of the weekend came Saturday evening.  At my first BEA I made what I know will be a lifelong friend in a gentleman named Marc Parent.  Marc works with the French house Buchet-Chastel in Paris, where he acquires foreign language literature for the French market.  It's become an annual tradition that when I visit Paris, he cooks for me, and when he comes to the US, I buy him a nice, American steak.  As it happened, the steakhouse I chose for this year was the same one where Macadam/Cage was holding its staff dinner party.  Marc knows Macadam/Cage publishers David Poindexter and Scott Allen very well, having bought two of their titles from the French market.

We were sitting directly outside of the private room of their party, and we were invited in to join the ending.  Marc and I ended up sitting with an author named Sonny Brewer, a courtly, charming independent bookstore owner from Fairhope, AL.  I didn't put together that this was the same Sonny Brewer who was the subject of a recent profile in the New York Times Styles section.  The conversation ranged all over the place and naturally touched on Sonny's forthcoming novel, A Sound Like Thunder, which nabbed an all-too-rare blurb from Harper Lee.  I promised to stop by the Random House booth the next day and grab a copy.  Which I did.

Since my bags were already packed, Sonny's book made it as carry-on for the flight home, and I read the book through in its entirety en route.  It's a lovely coming-of-age story, one that will surely resonate with any lad who's had an uneasy relationship with his old man.  And the best part of BEA - and why I'll go back next year - is that but for this fortuitous meeting, I would surely never have picked up this book - it simply wouldn't have hit my radar.  But it has, and I'll talk more about it as its August publication date approaches.

Finally, there's loads of great coverage elsewhere, most notably at Galleycat where Ron and Sarah have been working overtime.  Newsday's Aileen Jacobson also gets into the act.  Inside Higher Ed looks at the university press quest for crossover appeal.  And, of course, there's also good stuff at Ed's, Max's, Carolyn's, Kassia's, Wendi's, Matt's and many others ...

BEA STASH

Every year we absolutely swear we're going to be picky as hell and pick up no more than a handful of galleys and have the rest mailed, and every year we end up in a mad dash to buy a new suitcase for the trip home.  Herewith the 2006 edition.

LBC AT BEA

In the Coffee House Press booth ...

BEA IMPRESSIONS

I was sitting in the Knopf booth chatting with one of their publicists and LATBR editor David Ulin (who had just offered a tongue-in-cheek - we hope - warning about the dangers of talking to bloggers) when Michael Cader wandered by and gave me a friendly chiding over my dearth of posts here.  When I made excuses that posts were coming later, he suggested that the raw impressions might be more entertaining than polished consideration - because, really, who has the time to consider anything at BEA? 

He's right, so I'm following his lead and offering some unedited impressions about my DC BEA experience.  It breaks down into three areas for me - meetings, panels and parties.

Meetings: Unlike previous BEAs, where I would wander serenditipitously up and down the aisles bumping into friendly publicists, I made appointments this year.  Lots of appointments.  The upside was structure.  The downside was more time in meetings than in panels.  (Although given what I saw of the panels, this wasn't such a downside.)  So I've spent much of the last two days meeting with publicists of more houses than I could name, and I share some general impressions:

The publicists that I had the good fortune to meet with were, to a person, smart, enthusiastic, dedicated to the work they were handling.  They are young, overworked, underpaid but they really are motivated by the love of the book (a refreshing change from the hired marketing consultant who might be selling widgets or Starbucks as easily as books).  They know the material they're handling, have thought about why they like it and are, in a noisy, noisy marketplace, often a book's last, best advocate.  As I waded through dozens of catalogues and made my requests, I was struck by just how much promising material is out there, looking for its audience.  As dire as the calls seem to get each year, every single house I visited - again, without exception - had something on their list that would interest any serious reader.

So what were the "scores" people want to know - galleys or books I got that I'm most excited about.  Well, I picked up copies of the new WIlliam Boyd, Jonathan Franzen and Richard Ford books.  I was thrilled to nab a copy of Grove/Atlantic's bilingual edition of Waiting for Godot.  And William Logan's collection of criticism, courtesy of Princeton University Press, might have been the score of the weekend.  (Actually, the biggest score I'm not quite at liberty to mention yet, but watch this space soon.)

Some less well known titles that are high on my radar now, given the enthusiasm I found surrounding them include Yvette Christianse's Unconfessed (Other Press) and Frederick Reuss' Mohr (Unbridled Books), which I've begun reading and looks promising, indeed.  Also catching my attention is Delia Falconer's The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers (Soft Skull).

Panels:  As I said, with all the meetings, I've had less time for panels than usual.  The blogging panel is always a must for me but, sadly, was a bust.  There was virtually no moderation - the five panelists each made longish statements (David Brustein's opening statement was maddeningly longwinded and elicited at least one cocked eyebrow of dismay from Ana Marie Cox), and a handful of questions were fielded.  I was surprised at how, frankly, inarticulate the proprietor of Daily Kos was but perhaps that's just generational - your average twenty-something would surely have related to him.  And although he might understand blogging, he seemed out of place at a publishing convention, where his insights on publishing seemed to be limited to "Dog books and Abraham Lincoln are popular."  Still, Michael Cader gave the best definition of a blog we've yet heard - "A website that showcases an individual voice" which is more elegant than our "A website that records the enthusiasms of its host."  Still, Michael's description doesn't account for popular group blogs, like LBC, but it's a handy starting point.

The problem remains, as Michael himself pointed out, people still don't know what to do with these blog panels.  They all seem to lack a clear sense of purpose (and in this case, an absence of effective moderation), and it might be that simply taking on Blogging casts to wide a net to be informative in an hour.  BEA education types, if you're reading this, drop a line to this address, and you'll get some proposals about how to liven things up next year.  Like actually showing a blog on the large screen sitting there dormant ...

At the other blog-related panel, Sarah Weinman struggled valiantly with the nebulous "Syndicating Litblog Reviews," which I still don't entirely get, and I'm a blogger.  But she made the most of it and her lecture was a handy blogging 101 for those in attendance, with several audience bloggers leaping in with pointer of their own.

Oh, another BEA panel pet peeve - use namecards, people.  If you arrive late, as I did to the Future of the Novel panel, you have no idea who the players are.  Fortunately, David Kipen was on hand to be my scorecard, as I watched Lev Grossman, John Freeman, Laura Miller, Oscar Villalon and Jennifer Reese talk about novelists under 40.  This discussion was the liveliest of the three I attended, even if the Writers Under 40 designation feels like an arbitrary mark.  And the panel did seem to take that mandate literally, discussing writers and youth, thus taking a pretty straight-line approach to the question of "The Future of the Novel."  Now, I arrived a bit late but in the time I was there, no one discussed the role of the Internet in the future of the novel.  It was entirely focused on young writers as the future of the novel.

That said, numerous interesting and worthy points made.  The MFA question seemed to split the panel with Freeman and Villalon clearly against and Miller more or less for.  Reese was silent on the issue.  Villalon suggested - as others, including myself have - that there's a sameness in MFA fiction, and he cited the New Yorker as Exhibit A.  Miller disagreed with him, arguing that MFA programs are an opportunity for writers to learn to polish their skills, especially less gifted ones.  The panel tackled the question of genre as a trend of the future, with Miller suggesting that the merging of the literary and genre is a new development but Freeman pointed out (rightly, I think) that that's scarcely a new development.  Milller also asserted that literary fiction tends to be passive and reflective because those writers are passive, reflective people.  Nothing like falling back on a gross generalization, eh people?  Prep was noted as a novel that blurs distinctions, one that can't easily be pigeonholed as either commercial or literary.  Finally, Grossman asked whether it's possible to still have a writer considered "The Voice of Generation."  Miller suggested some thought Dave Eggers might fill that role (which prompted a few groans of distress), and she felt these days the Voice of a Generation tag will get attached to memoirs before novels.  Villalon opined that the Voice of a Generation is like pornography - we'll know it when we see it.  And, he added "God willing it won't be a white writer ... but a writer comfortable with White American ... and Immigrant America." Milller went on the suggest that people essentially only like to read about themselves, or about the deeply exotic.  Good Lord, does she enjoy this stuff at all?  Still, it was a panel that left one wishing they'de been given a bit more time, and Grossman showed himself an able moderator, keeping the proceedings lively.

Parties:  Everyone wants to know about the parties.  Once again, I was surprised and pleased how well attended the LBC party was.  The Big Hunt turned out to be the perfect spot and, as with last year, it was definitely the most relaxed of the evening's parties.  Folks did complain that the bloggers were not easy to find and should have been wearing name tags, so perhaps those will come into use next year.  By the time I left, at least 75 people had shown up, and I understand they kept coming after I left ... I made a brief appearance at the party thrown by A Public Space, which was held in a great space with great music playing but I admit I felt a bit old among the late 20-somethings, so I didn't stay long.  I'm also not used to the whole smoking-in-bars thing anymore, so I was eager to flee the smoke.  I then proceeded to get so thoroughly lost on the streets of Washington that I entirely missed the Hougton Mifflin dinner for Alison Bechdel, which I'd been looking forward to.  But I did make my way over the Phillips Collection for the NYRB shindig where I spent quite a lot of time chatting with my former nemesis Steve Wasserman, who regaled me with wonderful literary stories.  (Highlight of the evening:  Telling Steve and Ben Schwarz, Atlantic literary editor, about my "scores", especially the Godot and the Logan.  Wasserman nodded approvingly and Schwarz laughed, looking between the two of us and saying to Steve "You know what I'm thinking ... "  So do I - more alike than either of us realized.  Then onto the Macadam/Cage launch party for their forthcoming title Mary where I got have a long and interesting talk with Dave Weich, the mastermind behind Powells.com, before finally ending up at the Hyatt drinking whiskey with a bunch of YA authors.  More of the same on tap for tonight, dishy stories to follow and general wrap up tomorrow.