The Reading Life: J.G. Ballard's stormy weather

This is part of the occasional series "The Reading Life" by book critic David L. Ulin.

"Los Angeles weather," Joan Didion wrote in her 1967 essay "Los Angeles Notebook," "is the weather of ... apocalypse," but late last week, as rain descended on the normally arid summer landscape of Southern California, it was not Didion about whom I found myself thinking, but J.G. Ballard.

Ballard, who died in 2009, is perhaps best known for investigating the erotic possibilities of violence in a world anesthetized by consumerism and conformity. Early in his career, though, he wrote a series of novels ("The Drought," "The Drowned World," "The Wind From Nowhere," "The Crystal World") that address environmental themes.

From the perspective of the present, it's tempting to call Ballard prescient — these novels all appeared in the early-to-mid-1960s — yet as Martin Amis notes in an introduction to the new 50th anniversary edition of "The Drowned World," that's something of a fixed game. "[F]ictional divination," Amis writes, "will always be hopelessly haphazard. The unfolding of world historical events is itself haphazard (and therefore unaesthetic), and 'the future' is in a sense defined by its messy inscrutability."

'50 Shades of Grey' series hitting the 20 million mark in sales

Who would have guessed that an erotica series would becoming the biggest book juggernaut since "Harry Potter"?

That's what things are looking like. This week, E.L. James'  "50 Shades of Grey" and its sequels, "Fifty Shades Darker" and "Fifty Shades Freed" are poised to cross the 20 million mark in U.S. sales. As of July 2, publisher Vintage had tallied sales of the series at 19.4 million. Vintage brought the series to shelves in April; originally published by a small press in Australia, the book had already become an underground hit. The Wall Street Journal reports on the book's massive popularity:

By comparison, Stieg Larsson's best-selling "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" trilogy took more than three years to reach the 20-million sales mark in the U.S. Those three books were released in the U.S. in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

In the U.S., sales have been split nearly evenly between physical and digital versions, with 9.8 million paperbacks sold through July 2, compared with 9.6 million e-books during the same period, Vintage says.

"50 Shades of Grey" tells the story of virginal college student Anastasia and Christian Grey, the billionaire entrepreneur who takes an interest in her. They soon develop a sexual relationship that gets kinky -- the bondage-y content is part of what has been keeping sales hot. Vintage says the series has brought in $145 million in revenue.

Nielsen's BookScan numbers show that in the spring, the "50 Shades of Grey" series accounted for 20% of adult fiction sold (that's print books, not e-books). BookScan tracks about 75% of the retail American book market, and it misses a lot of independent bookstores -- where, presumably, people may be reading headier stuff than the sexually explicit series. However, the "50 Shades" series has been at the No. 1, 2, and 3 spots on our paperback bestsellers list, which includes local independents, since its publication in April.

Film rights were sold to Universal and Focus Features, which will have to figure out how to make the explicit text -- which some have called "mommy porn" -- suitable for American viewing audiences.

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez unable to write, brother says

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is suffering from dementia, which has made him unable to write, his brother says. "Dementia runs in our family, and he's now suffering the ravages prematurely due to the cancer that put him almost on the verge of death," Jaime Garcia Marquez, the author's younger brother, told students in Cartagena, Colombia, the Guardian reported Saturday.

"Chemotherapy saved his life, but it also destroyed many neurons, many defences and cells, and accelerated the process," Jaime continued. "But he still has the humour, joy and enthusiasm that he has always had."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is now in his mid-80s, is best known for his novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude," first published in Spanish in 1967, which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. With it, he ushered in the genre known as magic realism, which combined fantastical elements and the real, and became closely associated with literature from Latin America.

"He has problems with his memory," Jaime said. "Sometimes I cry because I feel like I'm losing him." Jaime is head of the Ibero-American New Journalism Foundation, founded by his brother. As a young man, Gabo worked as a journalist in Colombia, Rome, Paris; Barcelona, Spain; Caracas, Venezuela; New York; and Mexico City.

During his life, Marquez has been overtly political in his life -- he fostered a friendship with Cuba's Fidel Castro -- and his writing. The novel "The General in His Labyrinth" caused an uproar when it was published in Colombia; it presented an ailing, delirious Simon Bolivar. Calling the book "anti-patriotic," Roberto Belandia, secretary of the Colombian Academy of History, told The Times, "He uses history to darken the prestige of our institutions and heroes." Marquez disagreed, telling The Times, "I haven't tried to destroy anything but to show the man. All the veneration and all the respect that he gets as a myth are greater if he is seen as a human being." It's sad to think that Marquez himself may be facing a similar fate.

Marquez's other major works include the novels "Love in the Time of Cholera," "The Autumn of the Patriarch," "The General and His Labyrinth" and the novella "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." He has written one memoir, "Living to Tell the Tale," intended to be the first book in a series. His brother says that he does not expect he will be able to complete the story.

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Photo: Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 2006. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

'The Sound and the Fury' as William Faulkner imagined, in color

Although William Faulkner won a Nobel Prize in literature, his writing is still considered particularly dense. One of his most difficult works is "The Sound and the Fury," which is told from multiple points of view. It begins in the voice of Benjy, a mentally disabled man whose perception is jumbled, immediate and distinctly hard to parse.

One of the reasons Benji's narrative is hard to follow is because it jumps around in time with little indication of the change, other than italics. But when Faulkner was working on the book in the 1920s -- "The Sound and the Fury" was published in 1929 -- he imagined a way to make the section clearer to readers. "I wish publishing was advanced enough to use colored ink," Faulkner wrote to his editor, "as I argued with you and Hal in the Speakeasy that day." 

"I'll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up," he added, inadvertently launching a challenge to future publishers. Nine decades later, the Folio Society took it up.

In a special edition, the Folio Society is publishing "The Sound and the Fury" in 14 colors. It's a fine press edition, quarter-bound in leather, with a slipcase and an additional volume of commentary. It also includes a color-coded bookmark that reveals which time period is designated by each color.

The Folio Society worked with two Faulkner scholars, Stephen Ross and Noel Polk, to figure out how to divide the text. Only the Benjy section is rendered in the 14 colors of ink.

"With the Benjy section the different threads are sufficiently clear that I don't feel we are distorting or compromising the novel," Folio's commissioning editor for limited editions Neil Titman told the Guardian. "I found the book tremendously confusing the first time I read it, so I think that overall you have a net gain here, rather than feeling over-guided."

The color edition of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" is being published July 6 in a limited edition of 1,480 and is priced at $345. One thousand preordered copies have been sold.

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Photo: William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" in color. Credit: The Folio Society

Remembering Bukowski with Harry Dean Stanton on Saturday

A parade of Hollywood stars who are fans of writer Charles Bukowski, led by Harry Dean Stanton, will pay tribute to the author at a celebration on Saturday. The free show, at the Grand Performances outdoor stage, begins at 8 p.m.

Bukowski, who died in 1994, was a celebrated writer of L.A.'s gritty side. A longtime post office employee, Bukowski was a hard drinker who lived on the edge. He wrote a column, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," which was published by a handful of underground newspapers in the late 1960s. In 1969, at age 49, he quit his day job to write a book for Black Sparrow Press; that novel was "Post Office."

While not a bestseller, Bukowski was a favorite of the underground (and the French). He wrote six novels, including "Factotum" and "Ham on Rye," and dozens of poetry collections. Disinclined toward capitalization and with a fondness for raw language, he wrote poems like "i wanted to overthrow the government but all i brought down was somebody's wife" and "a 340 dollar horse and a hundred dollar whore."

Bukowski's work reached the mainstream after the 1987 release of the movie "Barfly," which starred Mickey Rourke as the Bukowski-like character Harry Chianski. It was set in dive bars and the seedy parts of Los Angeles.

Downtown L.A. has been cleaned up considerably since Bukowski's time, featuring cultural celebrations like Grand Performances. On Saturday, the reading series Tongue & Groove takes over the stage to present a tribute to Charles Bukowski.

Hollywood stars Harry Dean Stanton and Rebecca De Mornay headline the evening. Other readers include writer Dan Fante, whose father, John Fante, was an inspiration to, and rediscovered by, Charles Bukowski. Poets Jack Grapes, Kenneth Sonny Donato and Chiwan Choi, and writer Wendy Rainey will also read. Two writers who knew Bukowski, Joan Jobe Smith and Gerald Locklin, will also take the stage, so in addition to readings there may well be reminiscences.

Bukowski died at age 73 in 1994. His papers are now at the Huntington Library.

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Left photo: Harry Dean Stanton in 2006. Credit: Robert Lachman / L.A. Times. Right photo: Charles Bukowski from the documentary film "Bukowski: Born Into This," released by Magnolia Pictures. Credit: Michael Montfort

Paul and Storm to George R.R. Martin: Write like the wind [video]

Comedy duo Paul and Storm have a "Game of Thrones" obsession. In a new video of their song "Write Like the Wind (George R.R. Martin)," they implore the author to pen the next book in the series. "George R.R. Martin, please write and write faster," they sing. "We need our allotment of incest and intrigue and six-page descriptions of every last meal."

George R.R. Martin's rich, complex "A Song of Ice" and "Fire" fantasy series began with the novel "A Game of Thrones" in 1996. Since then there have been four sequels: "A Clash of Kings," "A Storm of Swords," "A Feast for Crows," and "A Dance with Dragons." Together, the five massive fantasy novels total more than 4,200 pages.

That's in hardcover. It'll be even more in paperback, once a paperback edition of "A Dance With Dragons" is released.

Writing all that material takes time. Famously, six years passed between book 4, "A Feast for Crows," and book 5, "A Dance With Dragons," which finally came out in 2011. As promised release dates came and went, devoted readers clamored for the next installment. The agitation reached such a pitch that Neil Gaiman was prompted to write a blog post telling people to calm down:

Some writers need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their books very rapidly. Some writers write a page or so every day, rain or shine. Some writers run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they're ready to write again. Sometimes writers haven't quite got the next book in a series ready in their heads, but they have something else all ready instead, so they write the thing that's ready to go, prompting cries of outrage from people who want to know why the author could possibly write Book X while the fans were waiting for Book Y....

Wait. Read the original book again. Read something else. Get on with your life. Hope that the author is writing the book you want to read, and not dying, or something equally as dramatic. And if he paints the house, that's fine.

Gaiman used some off-color language in his post, which -- fair warning -- makes its way into the Paul and Storm video. The comedians are clearly fans -- not just because they tromp around in period outfits weilding swords and turkey legs, but because their lyrics are grounded in Martin's books. They even reference the two further, yet-to-be-written books in the series, "The Winds of Winter" and "A Dream of Spring."

Since "A Dance With Dragons" came out, Martin has garnered even more fans, thanks to the HBO series based on the books. It's slated to return for a third season in 2013.

The Paul and Storm video premiered Friday on the Sword and Laser show on the Geeks & Sundry YouTube video channel -- a show that also included an interview with George R.R. Martin himself.

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First-ever Carnegie Awards in Literature go to Enright, Massie

The first-ever Andrew Carnegie Awards for Excellence in Literature were announced in a ceremony Sunday night at the American Library Assn. conference in Anaheim. Awards were given in two categories, fiction and nonfiction. The biography "Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman" by Robert K. Massie took the nonfiction prize; Anne Enright's novel "The Forgotten Waltz" won in fiction.

Up to now, the American Library Assn.'s prizes have focused on books for children and young adults; the prestigious Newbery and Caldecott medals are among the organization's awards. For the inaugural Carnegie Awards, librarians and library professionals chose the winners, working in consultation with adult readers.

"Catherine the Great" was lauded by the American Library Assn. as "A compulsively readable biography of the fascinating woman who, through a combination of luck, personality, and a fine mind, rose from her birth as a minor German princess to become the Empress of all the Russias." Massie has become something of an imperial biographer; he is the author of "Nicholas and Alexandra" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Peter the Great."

"The vicissitudes of extramarital love and the obstructions to its smooth flow—including spouses, children, and the necessary secrecy surrounding an affair—are charted in sharp yet supple prose," the organization writes of "The Forgotten Waltz" by Anne Enright. In our review Joy Press explains, "Gina is not so much an unreliable narrator as someone obsessed with her own unreliability. Dissecting her love affair with married man Sean Vallely, she constantly doubles back on her own thoughts and memories, gamely trying to pinpoint the moment when her conventional middle-class life — complete with husband and mortgage — dissolved into something darker and more complicated."

The two books were selected from short lists of finalists. They're after the jump.

Alice Walker says no to Israeli edition of 'The Color Purple'

Citing "apartheid" in Israel and the occupied territories, author Alice Walker declined an offer to publish a new Israeli edition of her prize-winning novel "The Color Purple."

In recent years Walker has become an increasingly vocal advocate for Palestinian issues. Her reply to publisher Yediot Books, which had wanted rights to print a Hebrew edition of "The Color Purple," is posted on the website of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

Thank you so much for wishing to publish my novel THE COLOR PURPLE.  It isn’t possible for me to permit this at this time for the following reason:  As you may know, last Fall in South Africa the Russell Tribunal on Palestine met and determined that Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.  The testimony we heard, both from Israelis and Palestinians (I was a jurist) was devastating.  I grew up under American apartheid and this was far worse.  Indeed, many South Africans who attended, including Desmond Tutu, felt the Israeli version of these crimes is worse even than  what they suffered under the white supremacist regimes that dominated South Africa for so long.

It is my hope that the non-violent BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, of which I am part, will have enough of an impact on Israeli civilian society to change the situation.

Licensing books internationally rarely makes news. American authors whose works are published overseas get additional payments from international publishers; it can be a nice way for books that sell well to make an additional profit. A book like "The Color Purple," which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and went on to be the subject of a film, would be a good candidate for international sales.

Walker mentions the film in her letter to the Israeli publisher. The movie, directed by Steven Spielberg, came out in 1985. During consideration of whether it should be released in South Africa, Walker and Spielberg agreed to honor a cultural boycott and not allow it to show in that country while it was under apartheid. After the apartheid system was dismantled in the mid-1990s, the film finally did show there. "[T]o this day, when I am in South Africa, I can hold my head high and nothing obstructs the love that flows between me and the people of that country," Walker writes.

Walker's decision to withhold "The Color Purple" from publication has stirred controversy. An email to Anti-Defamation League supporters went out Wednesday afternoon with the subject line "Alice Walker's Decision Not to Publish 'The Color Purple' in Hebrew Exposes Her Own Bias & Bigotry."  In it, the ADL writes, "It is sad that people who inspire to fight bigotry and prejudice continue to have a biased and bigoted side. For some time Walker has been blinded by her anti-Israel animus."

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz notes that Walker's book was published before in Israel; a Hebrew edition appeared in the country in the 1980s. According to publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Walker's books have been translated into more than two dozen languages.

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Photo: Alice Walker at a 1996 book signing at Eso Won Books in Los Angeles. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Secret codes, the Trystero: A mysterious Thomas Pynchon hunt

Turns out when you show people the tattoo on your wrist and ask if they've seen any stickers nearby with it and a mysterious URL, they might not respond particularly warmly. They might just shake their heads in bafflement, ask halting questions, then look at you as if you're in some sort of a strange cult.

Maybe I am. I have a tattoo of the Trystero symbol from Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" on my wrist. In the book, the symbol -- a muted post horn -- is the sign for an underground mail system known as w.a.s.t.e. And the mysterious symbol might have greater, or lesser, meaning.

Now that symbol adorns 200 stickers planted around the country and can be found in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Boston and Los Angeles. Each sticker has a url, but you have to find a sticker to see where it leads.

The Google map of the sticker locations took me to my local Trader Joe's -- convenient, because I had some grocery shopping to do -- but nary a sticker was to be found. I searched all the sticker places I know, around the parking lot and light poles, places inside where a sticker might be stuck. Finally, I asked my cashier, who showed no spark of recognition at the words "Pynchon," "geocaching" or even "game." As she was edging away, a fellow staffer who could double as a bouncer at any rock club looked over his massive shoulder at me suspiciously. OK, time to go.

A similar scene occurred at a local coffee shop that I frequent; today its staff seemed to think I was some kind of imposter dressed as a journalist (it happens). I explained what I was looking for -- Pynchon, sticker, wrist. The barrista huffed, "I don't know what you're talking about," and went back to his business. And ... no sticker.

Apparently, while a Pynchon fan in England has picked up on the idea by creating and posting his own versions of the Trystero symbol and the secret codes, Pynchon stickers in the U.S. are going missing. Could it be the result of simple sticker cleaning? Are Pynchon fans scooping them up? Or are they being torn down because of some conspiracy?

But eventually I found one, in the photo above. It's still in a good spot above the coffee lids at Demitasse, a high-end coffee shop in downtown L.A. I wasn't the first one to discover it -- that honor goes, appropriately, to Trystero Coffee, a micro-roaster that sells its beans to the shop.

So where does the url trystero.me/12pgg take you? To a passage that begins, "Everybody in 24fps had their own ideas about light, and about all they shared was the obsession." That's from Pynchon's novel "Vineland," set in Northern California, which I discovered using the exhaustive and essential fan-run Pynchon Wiki website.

At the bottom of each webpage is a button marked "w.a.s.t.e" Click it and a box pops up in which you can type a message. Where will w.a.s.t.e. deliver it? It’s a mystery -– which will lead some to concerns about privacy, while opening up the freedom of the anonymous Internet to others. There was no Internet in 1966, when “The Crying of Lot 49” was published; then Pynchon imagined real-life post-office boxes set up to move secret messages.

This Pynchon project -- the Google map, the sticker hunt, the URLs, websites and message system -- was cooked up by Pynchon's publisher, Penguin Press. The Press announced last week that Pynchon's entire catalog of books -- eight novels and a collection of short fiction -- will be released for the first time as e-books. In a likelihood, this project has something to do with that.

There must be more to learn about what the Pynchon project points to. For now, it's a very Pynchon mystery.

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Photo: The Trystero sticker at Demitasse Coffee in downtown Los Angeles. Credit: Carolyn Kellogg / Los Angeles Times

 

Armistead Maupin to leave San Francisco behind

Armistead Maupin, whose seminal Tales of the City series has been set in San Francisco, will leave that city behind for good, he says. "It's been 41 years since I landed here and it gave me my story," Maupin tells the San Francisco Chronicle. "I keep reminding myself that Barbary Lane is portable and everything I learned here became part of me and is something I'll always have."

Maupin's "Tales of the City" was initially serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle, telling the story of  inhabitants of 28 Barbary Lane, particularly the likable, gay Michael Tolliver. The first book, published in 1977, was groundbreakingly open for its time and became a bestseller. He continued writing the series until 1989, then turned his attention elsewhere. In 2010, he returned to Barbary Lane with "Mary Ann in Autumn."

As Maupin wrote the first five books in serial form, the series was very of-the-moment; his novels were among the first to deal with the AIDS crisis. He told Times book critic David L. Ulin what it was like to be able to respond to current events in his fiction:

Armistead Maupin: The day after the Chronicle ran the story about Anita Bryant organizing her anti-gay campaign, I had Michael Tolliver's mother write him a letter saying that she had joined the Save Our Children campaign without knowing that her own son was gay. And as fate would have it, I had already established Michael as the son of Florida orange growers.

David L. Ulin: How did the Chronicle deal with your more controversial material?

Armistead Maupin: When the anti-gay measure passed in Florida, I heard a lot of gay people making noises about how we'd have to go back into the closet. I thought: This is not a referendum on whether you're a worthwhile human being. So I had Michael say, "When I came out of the closet, I nailed the door shut." I heard through the grapevine at the Chronicle that the guys upstairs were going to pull it because it was too offensively firebrand. I got on the phone to Dick Thieriot, the younger of the Thieriots, and I told him that if he pulled it, I would quit. I hung up and thought, "You just murdered the goose that laid the golden egg." I paced around the house for three hours, and then he called back and said, "All right."

Maupin is leaving San Francisco behind for Santa Fe, where he, husband Christopher Turner and their labradoodle plan to settle. Maupin said he and Turner are "both craving a little more space and some nature," and that the move is "giving us new dreams."

Before they get to New Mexico, however, there is a summer of other adventures: first to Provincetown, Mass., then a cross-country book tour back to the West. That will end with the two attending Burning Man, after which they'll head home -- no longer to San Francisco, but to Santa Fe.

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Photo: Armistead Maupin at home in San Francisco. Credit: Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times