Bookweek: Don't miss Mark Doty

Eleven days ago, Mark Doty received the National Book Award for "Fire to Fire," his seventh book of poetry (he also writes nonfiction, and has written about books for the L.A. Times). On Thursday, Dec. 4, he and poets Dana Goodyear and Timothy Steele will read their work and discuss poetry at the L.A. Public Library's ALOUD series at 7 p.m. Robert N. Casper from the Poetry Society of America, the event's co-sponsor, will moderate. Tickets are free; advance registration is recommended. 

Other goodies this week:

Monday, Dec. 1, at 7 p.m.
Five L.A. food writers, all contributors to "Eat: Los Angeles," share their tips on where to chow in L.A. At Vroman's Bookstore, Pasadena.

Tuesday, Dec. 2 at 6 p.m.
Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch makes an L.A. appearance for "The Paris Review Interviews Volume III." He'll be joined by former Paris Review staffers Mona Simpson, author of "Anywhere but Here," and  Stephen Gaghan, screenwriter of "Traffic" and writer-director of "Syriana." Special guests are also promised. At the Hammer Museum, Westwood.

And you can get a double dose of Denis Leary, who will read from and/or explain "Why We Suck: A Feel-Good Guide to Staying Fat, Lazy and Stupid" at Book Soup on Monday at 7 p.m. and at the Barnes & Noble at the Grove on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.

L.A. author Rachel Resnick will do Leary one better and make three appearances this week in support of her new memoir, "Love Junkie." You can find her at the Santa Monica Barnes & Noble on Monday at 7 p.m.; the next night, also at 7 p.m., at Book Soup; and at Village Books in Pacific Palisades on Thursday at 7:30 p.m.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: Mark Doty, left, by Matthew Stroshane, Dana Goodyear by Lauren Dukoff and Timothy Steele

The benefits of sunshine and mai tais

Oregon bookseller Powell's is green green green. Since 2006, it's used biodiesel in its delivery trucks; last year, it began buying clean wind power from the local power authority. And last month, it began installing 540 photovoltaic solar panels at its northwest Portland warehouse. Once complete, the solar array will provide 25% of the warehouse's power needs. And that's with 155 rainy days a year.

Sometimes it takes another person's blog to point out something you knew all along. In this case, thanks to PeteLit for reacquainting me with the L.A. Public Library's online menu collection. The interface is clunky, but if you follow directions, you can see the colorful covers and inside selection of menus going back more than 100 years. Many, but not all, are from Los Angeles restaurants. PeteLit is right, it's a great resource for authors working on historical fiction. And perusing the menus begins to reveal stories of what we value and how we talk about food; but be warned, this can lead to hunger pangs.

Hunger — or rather, satisfaction thereof — and sun combine in panel-style solar cookers, highly portable reflective-lined cardboard ovens that fold up into the size of a large book. Used in refugee camps and in areas with lots of sun but dwindling firewood supplies, solar cookers are lauded as being affordable, effective and convenient. LAist talks to a representative from the Jewish World Watch solar cooker project, one of many NGOs promoting the use of solar cookers around the world.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Quon Brothers cocktail menu, undated, from the Los Angeles Public Library's menu collection.

Books and cats: a love affair in photos

There are legions of people who love books, and who love cats, and have a habit of photographing them together. You may like books and not like cats; I know it's possible. But this post, my friends, is not for you. This post is for people who think that Pippen, above, is awfully cute when confronting the "Omnivore's Dilemma." As is Jamila, below.

The Bible seems to be putting Jamila to sleep. Of course, this can happen with any book, even "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity." Looks like the cat, Ahchan, has gotten the "stress-free" part down.

Even the wham! bam! pow! of Marvel comics can't keep this store cat awake.

But tiny little Cayley is ready to tackle a very big book.

Happy bookish cats from the world over, plus photo credits, after the jump.

English literature at Harvard may get less English

A proposed curriculum change for English majors at Harvard would get rid of two required survey courses of British literature. The English department guide describes 10a and 10b, both lecture classes, as constituting "a full-year introduction to British literature from Beowulf to the twentieth century." The Harvard Crimson reports:

The demise of the lecture courses is the most pronounced feature of a proposed overhaul of the undergraduate English program, the first in more than two decades....

The department still needs to iron out the details before a final vote can take place on the proposal. It appears almost certain, however, that the current form of the "Major British Writers" series will go.

The classes don't seem to be very popular. In that article, one student complained that 10a and 10b did little more than "repeat a lot of what we learned in high school." Another said that "it's hard to have a relationship with the text" because so many books are assigned. The New Yorker's Book Bench found a 2006 note: "Many students give up when assigned a 500-page George Eliot novel in one week" -- editorializing, wickedly, "Oh, come on, you call yourselves Harvard students?"

Frustration with 10a and 10b aside, the real issue with the courses appears to be that they overprescribe a course of study. From the Crimson:

The plan would trim the number of basic requirements for concentrators from six to four, which members of the department said would allow students more leeway to design their own curriculum.

The published reports make clear that requirements will continue -- a course in Shakespeare, literature of different time periods -- but that this change will enable students to study, say, American literature in more depth. This does not sit well with everyone. One Harvard senior -- Christopher Lacaria -- is outraged by the proposed changes. In an opinion column at the Crimson, he writes:

While these innovations may bode well for the undergrads interested in plumbing the depths of postcolonial narrative, they only further point to the ongoing crisis in liberal education.

I do love me some postcolonial narrative, and I might point out that "postcolonial narrative" -- depending on your cutoff -- now constitutes almost 500 hundred years of literature and culture. Lacaria is a history major, so perhaps it's not surprising that he looks backward: 

The Greek and Roman classics, and the modern canon of "great books" of literature and philosophy, once occupied much of the intellectual experiences of Harvard students -- presumably because the study of such works imparted knowledge of the virtues, and made men's minds "liberal" in the original sense, not slavish....

But as concentrations continue to scale back their programs in response to the later declaration deadline and departments continue to obliterate common requirements, any semblance of a coherent academic purpose has disappeared.

It's the old Great Books debate, repeated by a twentysomething Harvard student. "These resentniks have destroyed the canon," Harold Bloom told the New York Times in 1994. "The rabblement, the barbarians have taken over the academy." Lacaria would have been 6 or 7, so it's no wonder that he's sounding the same chords. Those who don't read postcolonial literature are doomed to repeat it. 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by zenobia_joy via Flickr

A book ban, Neil Gaiman's cranberry jelly and more book news

The book "Bless Me, Ultima" may be one of First Lady Laura Bush's favorites, but that hasn't kept it from offending one central California school administrator. Newman Crows Landing Unified School District Superintendent Rick Fauss decided that the coming-of-age novel "is not suitable for teenagers", the San Jose Mercury News reports, and has "banned it for the rest of the school year."

English teachers accuse Fauss of circumventing the district's policies on book challenges and ignoring the findings of a committee of teachers and a committee of administrators from the Stanislaus County Office of Education and Modesto City Schools. Both groups recommended keeping the book, with limitations such as not allowing it as a summer reading book or sending warnings home to parents....

Fauss said the book was not appropriate for any teenager.

"I think there's room for exposing students to other experiences, but do we have to sacrifice the values of our families and our community to do that?" asked Fauss, a former high school English teacher.

He hasn't read the entire book but said he's "read enough."

At the Telegraph's book blog Paper Tiger, Peter Robins points out that struggling Woolworth's, the original five and dime, played a crucial role in the world of publishing. Without it, Penguin probably wouldn't have lasted. An archived Sunday Herald review of the book "Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Alan Lane":

Legend has it that the turning point came three weeks before publication when he called at Woolworths head office. Its chief buyer was not impressed by the Penguins, finding the unillustrated, typographical covers in orange and white livery uninviting. His wife, however, was enthused, perhaps as much by Lane's charm as by his books. The buyer capitulated, Woolworths ordered Penguins in their tens of thousands, and the rest is publishing history. The first 10 Penguins were published on the Tuesday before the August Bank Holiday of 1935. In little more than a year Allan Lane had revolutionised publishing and inaugurated a brand that would become as familiar as Guinness and Rolls Royce. 

At the time, Penguin paperbacks sold for sixpence, which was the maximum price of a Woolworth's item. And quite a bargain.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Thanks to La Bloga for pointing out the story.

In completely unrelated book news, author Neil Gaiman has posted his recipe for homemade cranberry jelly. "And seeing I have to sit in the kitchen for another twenty minutes, and only stop to stir or skim sometimes," he wrote on his blog Wednesday, "I thought you might possibly need to know about cranberry jelly." I like to picture Gaiman sitting in the kitchen with his laptop, thinking that with nothing to do but stir, he might as well blog.

Be an indie lit Secret Santa

The independent literary blog HTMLGIANT has set up a Secret Santa literary gift exchange. It's a small operation that hopes to spread the cheer of small presses and independent literary magazines.

You send them an e-mail with your name, address and the subject line SECRET SANTA between now and Dec. 5. Then they send you the name and address of someone else who's signed up (and send yours to someone else). You purchase a literary gift and send it off, then send an e-mail to the HTMLGIANT folks telling them about your gift.

Why do that? Because on Christmas, they'll post a big list revealing who got what from whom.

You may be concerned that if you give "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," your gift recipient will already have gotten three other copies. Well, regifting would be in the spirit of the project. But they suggest that you try for something your recipient might not have, like a new book from an independent press, a subscription to a literary magazine or journal, or a work in translation.

Don't worry too much about having different taste than your recipient -- if you give a collection of poetry and your recipient likes manga (or vice versa), maybe this will be the reason they give poetry a try. The people who sign up for this like books and stories and are probably happy to read whatever arrives on their doorstep.

I know this is true because I've signed up. And I'm game.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by Caleb Jacobs via Flickr

Collected Q&A's with Seamus Heaney

Among the more unexpected appearances by Seamus Heaney in the last year has been a blurb on the cover of "The Way I Am" by Eminem ("'There is this guy Eminem... He has sent a voltage around a generation.')

More expected is a collection of interviews, organized by Dennis O'Driscoll, titled "Stepping Stones," that will be published in December by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. There is much to enjoy here, much that causes one to regard him with the awe normally given to a poet of his reputation and much that shows him as just another human being trying to deal with deadlines and get his work done.

First the awe part. Asked about the composition of one of his bog-poems in "North," Heaney makes it sound as if no meditation were required at all to write it. Here's his brief response to the question, Was it difficult to write?:

"The Grauballe Man" was done quickly. I had these notes scribbled on stray bits of paper that had been in my pockets in Aarhus, and one day I suddenly rallied them into a poem.

Then, asked when the writing gets done, he sounds like any other writer with a day job and family to support:

Well, it used to be that -- whatever I did -- I wrote at night. That was in my twenties, thirties, forties, partly because I was teaching and busy all day and living a full life with the thrilling Heaney household. The house, you see, quietened later at night. Now that the house is quiet all day, I tend to work in the mornings if poems are coming. But I don't have a time of day for poems and a time of day for essays. In fact, my experience is that prose usually equals duty -- last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

"Prose usually equals duty" -- such is the life of journalists. The later interviews in this collection also show Heaney, now approaching 70, confronting the inevitable issues of aging and death. Just as other writers are engaging with mortality in their writing, which Heller McAlpin pointed out recently in our section, so too does Heaney. He says he doesn't feel fear anymore when he thinks of death, only grief at "having to leave 'what thou lovest well' and whom thou lovest well." 

-- Nick Owchar

Photo credit: Farrar, Straus & Giroux (2001)

Tuesdays with Snicket

Mr. Lemony Snicket, chronicler of unfortunate events and penner of "The Lump of Coal" and "The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christamas Story," will be doling out holiday advice at Amazon's Omnivoracious on Tuesdays in December. But not just any old advice -- advice in response to your questions.

Readers can submit their questions now, in advance, in the comments of the blog post. Questions like:

Why does it always have to be coal? Why shouldn't a concerned parent give their ill-behaved youngsters something more accessible for modern times, say, a stick of firewood or a dried lump of mud?

What holiday traditions do you hope die with your generation? Which ones would you like to see passed on?

So far, there are only nine questions in total. Sure, that's more than two for each week that he'll be writing, but doesn't a character of Mr. Snicket's estimable talents deserves a plethora of holiday questions? If he doesn't get many more, that would be quite an unfortunate event.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of "The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming" by onefish2 via Flickr

Chris Ware's Cinefamily cover

Acclaimed comic artist Chris Ware's artwork has made a surprising L.A. appearance -- on the cover of the current Cinefamily schedule. Cinefamily is an organization of film aficionados that program screenings at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax. They've shown all kinds of esoterica, including music movies (like "The Apple"), camp classics (like "Queen of Outer Space") and classy art films.

That's what Ware has illustrated: a classy art film. 1953's "Tokyo Story" screens Friday night with "Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family" to close a monthlong series of films by director Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu directed his first picture in 1927; his last was released 35 year later. He was a favorite of critics, many of whom consider "Tokyo Story" to be among his best films; a 2002 British Film Institute poll ranked "Tokyo Story" the No. 5 film of all time.

Ware's three panels give a sense of stillness and melancholy. Which I'm guessing is something like the movie.

The connection between Cinefamily and comics is Sammy Harkham, a comic artist who bought the movie business with his brother in 2006. (He also owns Family, a small and cool independent bookstore up the street). Harkham has done covers of the Cinefamily schedule himself, and has recruited others from the comics world to make a really fine-looking, practically collectible program each month. But if you can't get your hands on one, the calendar is online too.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Illustration by Chris Ware

Penguin authors share holiday give/get lists

Penguin got 37 of its authors to share the books that they plan to give -- and hope to receive -- this holiday season. Geraldine Brooks, Stuart O'Nan, Henry Winkler, Elizabeth Gilbert, Leonard Maltin and Karen Joy Fowler are among those who've revealed the books they like to read. Who would expect actor/director Winkler, a successful children's book author, to be fond of crime novels?

One book that appears multiple times is "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz. Khaled Hosseini ("The Kite Runner") finds it "Hilarious, engaging, and profoundly moving and sad. A feast of language." But if you happen to be friends with Hosseini, Laura Dave ("The Divorce Party") and Michael Pollan ("In Defense of Food"), be warned -- you might find yourself unwrapping "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" three times. They're all planning to give it as a gift.

The list is the most fun when an author provides an explanation for what they're giving. It sounds almost like they're sitting there after you've opened their package, explaining why you should love this book. Nick Hornby, for example, is pretty convincing:

I'm evangelical about Mark Harris's "Pictures at a Revolution," a loving, brilliantly-researched account of the five movies nominated for the 1967 Best Picture Oscar, from conception to ceremony. It's not only one of the best books about film I've ever read, but one of the best books about any artistic process.

Elizabeth Gilbert, who chronicled her spiritual journey and international travels in "Eat Pray Love," says she'd like to get stories of "great adventurers like Captain Cook and Ernest Shackleton" because "with travel as expensive as it is these days, I'm looking forward to spending much of 2009 at home, reading about other people's magnificent journeys!" If an author whose book spent more than 50 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list can't afford to travel, the economy is really in trouble.

-- Carolyn Kellogg