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I have a sick fascination with fan fiction. Part of this is genetic, I'm sure, since my brother is one of the foremost opponents of fan fiction, largely based on issues of copyright and, I think, something having to do with reading a fan fiction story about Dick Van Dyke and his son Barry, both stars of a show my brother produced for many years, having a hurt/comfort scene together. I'd explain what a hurt/comfort scene is, but, well, I don't really know.

Autumn of the Patriarchs: Great American critic Edmund WilsonEach Sunday, I commit a crime in the name of personal literacy: I steal the New York Times Sunday Book Review from Starbucks. I’m not even discreet about it. I order my drink and whatever mound of trans-fat appeals to me from the pastry section and then I wander over to the newspaper stand and yank apart the New York Times until I find the Book Review. I then read the first couple of reviews in full view of the asexual – yet provocatively pierced – barista while I wait for the he/she to make my drink. No one says a word to me – not the employees of Starbucks, who’ve seen me do this every Sunday for the last six years nor my fellow patrons, many of whom I see so frequently in service of this crime that we now nod to each other like co-workers – because, clearly, no one cares about the book reviews. Now, if I filched the Sunday sports page, I can only imagine an Ox-Bow Incident ending.

If the workers and patrons of a typical suburban Starbucks don’t sound like a scientifically sound focus group, they do at least comprise a metaphorical one as it relates to the dwindling space and attention given to book reviews nationwide. Their tacit approval of my crime is emblematic of just how little readers in general care about what was once a staple of the Sunday paper and, for authors, the best way for them to get news of their latest work before the most likely buying audience.

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One of the more curious aspects of American culture is the way oppressed groups co-opt the words once used to denigrate them, turning them into accepted language within their own culture. Desensitization is a powerful coping tool, though what never ceases to amaze is how those same groups recoil in rage when the pejoratives they’ve come to accept as common parlance are hurled back at them as invective or simple-minded ignorance. A few months ago, my wife’s grandfather – a born-again Christian – asked me if I was able to “Jew down” a car salesman in order to get the particularly good deal I’d received.

I was both saddened and offended, though not all that surprised, since I think I’ve probably said the same term in a self-mocking fashion numerous times over the years, which I thought provided me some ownership over the pain; some desensitization. Words carry weight, even if they don’t break bones, and for that I suppose I should be grateful, since I’m capable of writing words but am not much of a street fighter. It’s when words and actions marry that it’s hard to make a distinction between intent and result. 

Which leads me to the curious case of Tom Wayne and William Leathem, owners of Prospero’s Books in Kansas City, who hosted a book burning – or, in their words an “act of art” – to rid themselves of 20,000 used books they couldn’t sell and which, they say, no one would even take from them for free. 

Tom Wayne amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero's Books. His collection ranges from best sellers like Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October" and Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," to obscure titles like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910. But wanting to thin out his collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops, which said they were full. So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books protest what he sees as society's diminishing support for the printed word. "This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books. The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne didn't have a permit to burn them. Wayne said next time he will get a permit. He said he envisions monthly bonfires until his supply - estimated at 20,000 books - is exhausted.

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One of the more curious aspects of American culture is the way oppressed groups co-opt the words once used to denigrate them, turning them into accepted language within their own culture. Desensitization is a powerful coping tool, though what never ceases to amaze is how those same groups recoil in rage when the pejoratives they’ve come to accept as common parlance are hurled back at them as invective or simple-minded ignorance.

A popular misconception about Los Angeles is that it's a town full of illiterate, fame-obsessed aspiring screenwriters whose most intense relationship with literature is Starbucks' employee relations manual. Well, perhaps that's not the most popular misconception -- there's the one about how pictures of your shaved genitalia appearing in US Magazine is actually a wise career move -- but time and again Southern California is noted for being the Capitol of Vapid; a place where Norbit's opening weekend is considered the high watermark of cultural talk. And while this may be true for the ten percenters who clog Wilshire Blvd. and the mail room denizens who spend their off hours speaking in Variety's Esperanto while in line at Baja Fresh, the hidden truth is that Los Angeles is a book town.

The empirical evidence is provided every April when the Los Angeles Times hosts their annual Festival of Books and Book Prizes ceremonies, a three-day celebration of the written word on the campus of UCLA. An average year features 150,000 readers, 500 authors, a hundred moderated panels, countless book signings, those weird people who believe Ayn Rand is a religious icon, those weird people who believe Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' caterwauling alien/human hybrid child is the messiah, my gut filled with churros and at least three of the following spectacles:

1. Mitch Albom In Conversation With Dr. Phil or Deepak Chopra or The Five People You Meet In Heaven Who, Upon Seeing Mr. Albom, Run Screaming Into The Depths Of Hell Lest Albom Starts Talking About All Those Great Afternoons Spent With Morrie Again, For The Love Of Christ.

2. Julie Andrews signing children's books while adult women pull each other's hair out (literally) whilst jockeying for their space in line, their toddlers screaming bloody Mary Poppins in the background, while Ms. Andrews just sort of sits with a vague look of resigned horror on her face, counting her royalties one snarled clump of bloody follicle at a time.

3. Christopher Hitchens calls an unruly, possibly insane, audience member a fascist crack pot.

If this sounds horrific, it's not. It's the best weekend of the year if you're an author (apart from the 500 or so who take part in officially sanctioned events, at least another 200 come in simply to sign in booths or to hang out, the cumulative effect being like the walls of Barnes & Noble have suddenly come alive), both from a sales and ego perspective, where both are edified by complete strangers, which is unusual at a typical signing at the Borders in Wilmington, DE. For a reader, it's a unique opportunity to come face to face with writers of every genre in an open setting (as in: you opting to take a crap doesn't stop them from continuing their conversation about how, you know, they'd like it better if you wrote more books like your first one and not these new "literary" ones, and how it would be great if you could write a novel like James Patterson, who they consider second only to Dean Koontz as the ultimate chronicler of the human condition).

What I find most interesting, however, is how the Festival begins to form into a character with striking opinions and definitive trends.This year, the demise of traditional book reviews (and Book Reviews), the emergence (for better or worse) of literary blogs and the contested territory between traditional print media and the online world were the hot topics both in the panels and in the author green room. From the first bell of the Book Prizes, where the editor of the Times lamented how it's mere seconds between the posting of confidential internal memos before they're up on watchdog blogs, to the final conversation I had walking to my car when a woman wearing a purple muumuu asked me if I'd review her novel based on her blog about the corruption of the Iraq war, the assault (real or perceived) on literary and simple culture was on full display.

That the LA Times' own Sunday Book Review (where, in full disclosure, I occasionally review) was recently shrunk in size and combined with the Opinion section into a single tabloid was the clearest conversation piece of them all: The Times and times a-are changing and while 150,000 people may love books, they don't take out ads, seem to prefer the Internet for their culture (if not news) and the time to grapple with it is over. Now, it's time to deal. The Times, at least, is trying, adding specialized online content. It's not clear what other recently downsized papers, like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, will do, but what became clear listening to prominent critics like Mark Rozzo and Slate's Meghan O'Rourke discussing the topic is that there are still people out there who want to write intelligently about books, but it's not always clear if that's what the people want.

The three panels I took part in -- one on the mystery fiction of Southern California's Mean Streets, one on the fiction of the Inland Empire (if you've ever purchased crystal meth, been a long haul trucker, or wondered what it might be like to play an active role in your own involuntary actions, like, you know, respiration, then you've at least metaphorically visited the fetid middle ground just east of metropolitan Los Angeles), and one on the rise of lit blogs (where Andrew Keen acted as the voice of defiance -- a role soon to be repeated here on Jewcy, I understand) -- were also hallmarked by the kind of passionate dialog that gives hope to a simple fiction writer like myself, which is to say I was only asked fifteen times how to get an agent ("Have a morbid curiosity about the Kennedys, write a book about the mysticism of anal sex or convince Judith Regan that you slept with a guy who killed his wife.") and was only presented with two velobound manuscripts.

That I was sharing the stage with the likes of T. Jefferson Parker, Susan Straight and Mr. Keen might have been the reason behind this semi-draught, but I'd like to think that it's endemic of a cultural shift away from asking stupid fucking questions and the realization that no one wants to read your self-published novel of thinly veiled Lord of the Rings fan fiction. Or maybe it's that people are starting to value that authors aren't receptacles for their wish fulfillment and have begun to view the Festival as the viable opportunity it is to hear the nation's very best voices espousing their expertise -- be it in fiction (in addition to Mitch Albom, this year featured the likes of Sherman Alexie, Daniel Woodrell, T.C. Boyle, Vikram Chandra and even S.E. Hinton, who I was surprised to learn was alive and surprised to learn was a woman) or nonfiction (including Neil Gabler, Douglas Brinkley, Lawrence Wright and Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel).

Apart from the esoteric delights I've discussed, the personal joys for me come in the odd interactions, like the conversation I had with Sean Penn:

Me: Hey, how you doing?

Sean: Good, good.

Me: Cool.

Me: Hello Mr. Nader.

Ralph: (blank stare, followed by a slight nod of the head, which I took to mean, Yeah, I fucked that one up.)

A popular misconception about Los Angeles is that it's a town full of illiterate, fame obsessed aspiring screenwriters whose most intense relationship with literature is Starbucks' employee relations manual.

Any day now...[My girlfriend Sarah forwarded me a link to a Chronicle of Higher Ed article on faking literacy. Not sure how this bodes for the state of our relationship, but I knew Jewcy contributor Tod Goldberg would dilate admirably this subject.
– Michael Weiss]

When you write books for a living (and teach others how to write books for the health benefits, discount tickets to college football games and the built-in opportunity to hand sell dozens of copies of your back list each quarter), there is often a presumption that you are also wildly well read, as if each new novel that arrives at the front table of Borders is first vetted by you for possible use in interesting dinner conversation, extemporaneous workshop quoting and damning insults hurled at other literate folks. The problem here is two-fold, at least as it relates to me:

1. It is often difficult to actually read all of the “important” books, both new and old, because it turns out that “important” also can mean “so boring you find yourself with an anti-diuretic erection from fooling your body into thinking you’re actually in a deep, deep sleep.”

2. Time, as in: There’s just not enough time on Earth for me to read the new Salman Rushdie book, whenever it’s released, and, really, anything by Jay McInerney, either.

Lennard J. Davis, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education (and with a general disdain for the French, which is something I think we should see more of in all discourse in academic journals), is by varying degrees apoplectic over people like me and, it seems, sort of envious of the ability to simply not read books you don’t want to read.

The University of Paris literature professor Pierre Bayard's best seller How to Talk About Books That You Haven't Read is flying off the shelves in France. Not only does Bayard tell readers how to fake literary orgasm, but he admits to giving lectures on books he hasn't bothered to read. I'm sure Bayard's book will be met with outrage from many academics on this side of the Atlantic who lack the French national penchant for public display and intellectual pretension. Obviously, there is something seriously reprehensible about Bayard's know-nothing chutzpah (or whatever the French word for that is). Our goal as teachers is to teach what we know, not what we don't. But, outrage aside, perhaps it's time to admit that not reading has its virtues as well as its vices.”

My solution to this creeping problem has always been to simply lie and say I’ve read everything. It makes people think my intellect is so vast and Hitchensian that I’m likely to bark them down at any turn and with probable cause. As such, I’ve become rather adept at speaking in great length, at archaeological depth and with the clinical eye of a forensics expert on books I haven’t read, never intend to read, and, in the rarest of cases, am being paid to read in a workshop setting, simply by employing what I call the Silverblatt Method, so named for the host of NPR’s Bookworm program Michael Silverblatt. You simply make a series of broad pronouncements (“The words are like scrimshaw…”), hark back to obscure work you have read (“I’m reminded of Shirobamba by Yasushi Inoue…”), and pronounce the profound effect the book has had on you as a person (“McInerney’s The Good Life showed me how I might have fallen in love with someone exceptionally vapid after the terrible events of 9/11, too…”) and then wait for the somnolent nodding of the audience. The result is that I feel smart, well read, and have much more free time to play Madden online with a bunch of fourteen year-olds.

In an academic setting, of course, this method can only really work if the novel in question is not the one written by the brooding student of amorphous sexuality over there in the corner rocking the vintage Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt. In that case, what's needed is a well-timed tantrum over the class’ lack of pointed criticism and a proclamation that you’re gonna just sit this critique out to see how the class handles this “innovative, flawed, and ultimately very promising work” and that you’ll deliver your thoughts via private email to the student. As for the novel you’ve assigned the class to read which you inexplicably forgot to read yourself, your best intentions having lost out to the allure of living a real life –  repeat everything except the promise to email.

Is there guilt? Oh, certainly. No one ever likes to feel like a fraud, even when it’s true. But it’s a guilt that just doesn’t apply to the world outside of academia and cocktail parties where book advances are discussed like they have the power to halt the Illuminati.

Davis, however, finds the intellectual bukkake more paralyzing then it might otherwise seem to those not in the business of words:

It's the guilt and fear of not being well read, of having missed out on reading a work that everyone else has read that makes us shy about admitting our nonreading. Remember back when everyone was reading the same book at the same time — in my case it was The Alexandria Quartet, The Hobbit, The Greening of America, Amerika, or anything by Herman Hesse — and you weren't? You felt so out of it, and then it was just too late.”

Perhaps my feelings about this are muted by the fact that I’ve never read The Hobbit (I saw the cartoon), The Greening of America or Amerika (best Ice Cube album ever), and only read one stanza of The Alexandria Quartet, but I’ve long thought that being well-read doesn’t always mean that you have the same cultural DNA as every other professor or writer in terms of the books you’ve committed to your shelves or mental rolodex of fictive examples. It also means knowing that there is a life to be read outside of the printed page, where experience and understanding of human nature often far exceeds the vagaries of imagination.

When you write books for a living (and teach others how to write books for the health benefits, discount tickets to college football games and the built-in opportunity to hand sell dozens of copies of your back list each quarter), there is often a presumption that you are also wildly well read, as if each new novel that arrives at the front table of Borders is first vetted by you for possible use in interesting dinner conversation, extemporaneous workshop quoting and damning insults hurled at other literat