Amy Goodman's book tour draws noontime crowd

It's hard to fill a bookstore at noon on a weekday, but that's exactly what happened at Skylight Books in Los Feliz today when Amy Goodman appeared to talk about her new book, "Breaking the Sound Barrier." By 11:45 a.m., all the seats were filled, decent standing room was taken and people were queuing up behind high bookshelves -- even if they couldn't see, they could listen.

Listening is what they're used to doing with Goodman, a longtime left-wing radio host. In Los Angeles, her show Democracy Now!, now in its 13th year, airs on KPFK-FM (90.7).

Out on the street, a leafletter concerned with changes at the radio station loudly attempted to intercede with Goodman's fans. Some stayed to listen, others hurried into the bookstore. But it seemed fitting; a strong political voice like Goodman's isn't doing its job if it isn't attached to some controversy.

Goodman's book tour will take her to Pasadena tonight and continue through early December. While she's making lots of stops and traveling far, she won't be crossing book tour paths with that other strong-opinioned woman, Sarah Palin. Although that would be some crowd.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The Skylight Books audience. Credit: Carolyn Kellogg

Al Gore tonight in Beverly Hills: tickets still available

Al Gore is hitting stages again with a brand-new book. "Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis" picks up the environmental themes of "An Inconvenient Truth" and presents a call to action. He's in the Los Angeles area tonight at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills.

Independent bookstore Book Soup, which is helping to present the event, has tweeted that there will be tickets available at the door. The $40 ticket comes with a copy of "Our Choice." Start your (hybrid) engines: The show is scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m.; doors open at 6 p.m.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Al Gore at George Washington University, Nov. 5. Credit: Olivier Douliery / Abaca Press/MCT

Jonathan Safran Foer Q&A: You gonna eat that?

Jonathan Safran Foer asks, what did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals? A take on that truth can be found in his occasionally inspiring, occasionally gruesome book "Eating Animals." It's the first major work of nonfiction by this award-winning novelist; he spent three years exploring the realities of animal husbandry in America. In her review, Susan Salter Reynolds writes that Foer has "a kind of fearless modernity: one part 'whatever,' one part descendant of Holocaust survivor (we've only got this one life, if that, to get things right) and one part soaringly beautiful, annoyingly entitled liberalism.... Think your way through it, Foer warns. Define the terms. Choose your priorities. You have that luxury."

Foer will be in Los Angeles this weekend, appearing at the Santa Monica Library on Saturday at 7 p.m., at a sold-out appearance at the Skirball Center Sunday afternoon and Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena on Sunday at 6:30 p.m. He spoke to Jacket Copy by phone.

Jacket Copy: In "Eating Animals," you really bring to life how horrifying factory farms are. I wonder, as a writer, what it was like to write that horror story.

Jonathan Safran Foer: I don't really think of it as a horror story, for a couple of reasons. One, it might very well have a happy ending. Two, there's plenty of moments of not only levity in it, but also joy, whether it comes in the form of my own memories of happy meals – not Happy Meals, from McDonald's, but meals that are happy – or days that I spent on really good farms. Obviously the book is about an industry that is almost entirely horrific, but the story is bigger than just that industry.

JC: You open with a story of generations – what food meant to your grandmother, your family growing up, and now you with a new son. Is choosing to be a vegetarian  a break from tradition, or can tradition accommodate change?

JSF: There are different kinds of traditions. My grandmother was not a vegetarian, and my parents are not vegetarians. On another hand, there's the tradition of wanting your actions to reflect your values. Or wanting to make good choices even when they're difficult or against certain instincts or cravings. Traditions happen on all sorts of levels, and sometimes we have to lose one tradition in order to maintain another.

JC: When you started the book, did you realize how important turkeys and Frank Reese's Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch  would be to telling the arc of the story?

JSF: No, I didn't know very much about Frank Reese. I mean, I'd read a bit about him, mostly because he wins all these taste tests – that's how he became a famous farmer, because he makes food that apparently is the best that anybody is making now. I was really moved -- I was moved by him, his story, his farm, the way he thinks about raising animals, the way he thinks about feeding people. If there's a hero of the book, in a certain way, he's it.

JC: You're going  on Martha Stewart right before Thanksgiving – are you going to talk turkey?

JSF: Presumably – I don't know. I don't boss her around, she bosses me around.

JC: Have you been on Martha Stewart before?

JSF: I was once, with my first book. I've gotten to know her a little bit just because she's very concerned about these issues. She's not a vegetarian herself, but she's a very very strong advocate of family farming, small farming.

JC: In the story you tell, factory farms are growing more and more powerful, to the detriment of more humane small farms. What lesson do you think we should take from that?

JSF: There are a lot of forces that are encouraging the growth of factory farms; they're enormously profitable precisely because they externalize all the real costs. We pay for it through subsidies, we pay for it through environmental degradation, that we are the ones who have to clean up. It's in their business model to destroy the environment. All these forces encouraging the growth of factory farms. It's very hard for small farmers, because it just costs more to raise animals the right way. Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat – to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it. And that's not something that's easy to tell everybody.

JC: How much do you see the book as an exploration, and how much as a call to action? 

LA inkSlam poetry festival includes heavy-spitters

Those who want to see lively live poetry should not miss the inkSlam Los Angeles Poetry Festival, which kicks off Wednesday and runs through Saturday The lineup features more than 50 poets, including seven national poetry slam champions and nine regional champions. Shihan, above, is one of four poets who have appeared on "Def Poetry Jam" on HBO.

Shihan is one of the four founders of "Da' Poetry Lounge," L.A.'s largest weekly poetry open-mic night. It takes place every Tuesday at the Greenway Court Theater, which is where the inkSlam festival is being held. The theater is at 544 N. Fairfax Ave., adjacent to the Fairfax High School campus.

The Greenway Arts Alliance operates arts education programs for Fairfax High students as well as the theater, and is a sponsor of the inkSlam festival. It's keeping the theater open during the day for workshops, focusing on the art and the business of being a poet. At night, there are performers' showcases -- and the high-octane poetry slam competition. Tickets run from $5 to $20.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Pasadena Museum of California Art launches its first reading series

The happily local Pasadena Museum of California Art is launching a fitting reading series, Written in California. The free series kicks off Thursday at 7 p.m., with discounted ($5) access to the galleries for the hour prior.

Thursday night will feature Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, who was nominated for the National Book Award for her debut novel, "Madeline Is Sleeping." She now lives in Southern California and teaches at UCSD, so she could read her recent short fiction or from her second book, 2008's "The Ms. Hempel Chronicles." Susan Salter-Reynolds wrote our review:

Such a beautiful book is "Ms. Hempel Chronicles," the kind that gives its reader profound insights into ordinary, everyday life. The more such insights we have, the better able we are to really live, and not just go through the motions.

Beatrice Hempel is a young middle-school teacher, "still young enough to decipher the lyrics" of the songs her students listen to, but "old enough to feel that a certain degree of outrage was required of her." Beatrice, Ms. Hempel, is often uncertain of herself. She thinks she is a terrible teacher, but her students love her. The school bureaucracy makes teaching with any heart all but impossible.

Current exhibitions at the museum include "Wayne Thiebaud: 70 Years of Painting," "Behold the Day: The Color Block Prints of Frances Gearhart" and "Population: Portraits by Ray Turner."

Written in California is scheduled to return roughly bimonthly. The next announced reading will be in January 2010, featuring Marisa Silver, an LA Times book prize finalist for her novel "The God of War."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Pasadena Museum of California Art. Credit: Annie Wells / Los Angeles Times

Author Jean Thompson at the Hammer Museum tonight

Jean Thompson will be in Los Angeles for a swift 36 hours to read from her new collection, "Do Not Deny Me," in the New American Writing series at the Hammer Museum tonight at 7. Thompson, born in Chicago and brought up in Kentucky and Tennessee, earned an MFA at Bowling Green in Ohio and went on to teach creative writing in many places, including San Francisco and Oregon.  She was a National Book Award finalist for her 1999 collection "Who Do You Love," and now makes her home in Urbana, Illinois.

Jacket Copy: Many of these stories focus on a character, often a character in a difficult situation. What's your starting point?

Jean Thompson: If you write, you get into the habit of seeing the world around you in terms of stories. Just as a painter might, or a photographer might, look at the world around them in visual terms, framing things in accordance with what they want to do. I think that’s sort of the way writing works, too, at least for me. Here's something I've happened across, or that sets up a kind of question. If you're in the habit of writing stories, you push it a little bit. What if – what if we took that initial situation or question and put it in motion.

JC: As a former writing professor, are there any creative writing rules that you are fond of breaking?   

JT: No, I’m pretty dogmatic and humorless about my rules. I always tell them not to change point of view, and I suppose once in a while I have a story that changes point of view, but I try to do it in a way that is cohesive and focused.

JC: The title story, "Do Not Deny Me," is pretty spooky. How'd you achieve that feeling?

JT: I wanted to write a ghost story, in a way that made sense to me. There were conventions of a ghost story that I couldn't bring myself to use, because they seemed very shopworn. Yet I wanted a kind of creepiness, and I wanted there to be places in the story when you to say to yourself, well, I could see how that might happen. Because there are otherworldly things that may or may not be happening. I suppose I was trying to write a ghost story a bit like Henry James, a psychological ghost story.

Michael Chabon Q&A: Fatherhood and writing at midnight

Michael Chabon comes to Los Angeles tonight with his new nonfiction collection "Manhood for Amateurs: the Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son." Chabon may be known for his fiction such as "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," but he's turned his attention to concerns of daily life. 

He and his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, are the busy parents of four children. He spoke to Jacket Copy's Carolyn Kellogg via phone from a Pittsburgh hotel before his first reading. "You cook the foods you'd love to eat," he said. "You write the books you'd love to read."

All tickets for tonight's appearance at the L.A. Public Library's ALOUD discussion with David L. Ulin have been reserved, but standby hopefuls at ALOUD events often find a seat.

Jacket Copy: In the first essay in "Manhood for Amateurs," you say that if you've ever had a bad review, that sticks with you for a long time. Do you still read your reviews?

Michael Chabon: Definitely. Not all of them -- I don't necessarily go out of my way to read the reviews, but I also don't try to avoid it.

JC: In our review of your book, Steve Almond wrote that you're incapable of writing a boring sentence.

MC: How about that? That was very nice of him.

JC: But I wonder if maybe you're incapable of publishing a boring sentence? I'd like to ask you about your writing process. Because I'm guessing that these pieces did not spring fully formed onto the page.

MC: Oh, no, they definitely did. I actually just wrote them on napkins. While I was cooking dinner and watching a baseball game. 

JC: (laughs)

MC: I work really hard on my sentences, and on my paragraphs, too.

JC: It's kind of stunning to anyone who's ever tried to write that you and Ayelet have four kids and you both actually finish books. What's your routine? How do you make space to craft your work?

MC: Thank God school was invented. I don't know what we would do if it hadn't been. We send them away every day. They leave the house -- we drive them to school, and then we've got all this time. Ayelet works primarily, almost entirely during that period, and she's very efficient. When she's really working on a novel or whatever she gets her word count in every day, and that works well for her. I have a harder time -- my natural rhythm is to work at night, stay up late and to sleep late. I can get more writing done between midnight and 1 o'clock in the morning than at any other hour of the day. 

Unfortunately, that schedule does not work at all well in a family with small children. If I sleep late, then I miss out on what I think is the nicest, most pleasurable time of the day, of an ordinary, everyday routine. In the morning -- my kids are generally in a pretty good mood when they wake up, you know, we make breakfast. I hate missing out on that, so I get up. So that means I can't really stay up as late as I might like. Or else I don't get enough sleep. I struggle with the schedule. And I've been struggling with it for years. Lately, sleep has been losing out. I've been staying up late, and getting up early. It doesn't work as well for me as it does for Ayelet, and I envy her that she's more of a morning/day person than I am.

Often, I have to go away [to write]. I'll go to a place like the MacDowell Colony, or borrow somebody's cabin, or go to a hotel even. Stay up until all hours, and sleep late, and just crank. I can get a lot done. Even in three or four days, I can do about as much as I could do in a month at home. 

JC: Many of these pieces were written for Details -- were they written over a long period of time?

MC: My column just ended at Details -- my last one I think is on the newsstand right now. That was four years' worth of columns. They're not all in the book by any means. I only selected the ones that I could fit into an overall thematic kind of scheme, or at least the best ones of those.

JC: When you were putting together this idea of collecting stories about manhood in its various generational forms, was there an author you were looking up to, or was this filling a hole in our culture?

MC: Well, there's a lot of good personal writing out there right now, both stuff that's being written to be performed in a spoken-word setting and stuff that is written for the page. I don't think I had any illusions that I was necessarily breaking new ground, and that isn't really what motivated me to do it. It's more the impulse to turn your eye on the life around you. The experience of having children, of being a father, impelled me, not just in my writing but just on a daily basis in my thoughts and in my everyday reflections to look backward at my own life, my own childhood, my relationship with my father, with my brother, and to sort of look around me, not only what was going on in the world of my children and their family but other families, other kids around. Somehow it felt worthy of writing about -- it felt like I had a few things to say.

JC: You describe your father and your first father-in-law acting differently than you do. Do you see a period of continuing change with the role of fatherhood from their generation to yours, and then to your sons'?

MC: I imagine there will be, although I don't have the faintest idea how. Everything keeps changing, that's the one thing we can count on. The world has changed so much in not only in what a father is expected to do, but is allowed to do. It's not just that a father might face greater demands to be with his children, to be more involved with their daily care, but also that he's granted the privilege of doing that, it's something I wouldn't have wanted to miss out on. Even though it's often really boring and tedious, too. I don't know what it's going to mean for my sons to have grown up with the father that I've tried to be. I don't know if that's going to make things easier or harder or what. I feel very very close to both my sons, and I encourage them, as much as I can, to feel like it's OK for them to be whatever kind of man they want to be. If they see me walking around carrying a purse, taking my wallet and keys out of it, I don't know if that makes any kind of impression on them at all. 

Vroman's and Book Soup, sitting in a tree

Two major independent bookstores in Los Angeles are about to become partners: Pasadena-based Vroman's has signed an agreement to purchase Book Soup in West Hollywood.

Glenn Goldman, Book Soup's longtime owner, began looking for a buyer when he fell severely ill, and the fate of the store has been up in the air since his death early this year. "Glenn and I had talked about it," Vroman's President and chief operating officer Allison Hill told The Times Friday night, "and we've been in conversations with the seller since January."

Although both Book Soup and Vroman's are landmarks of L.A.'s cultural life, they're not an obvious match. 115 year old Vroman's is the Auntie Mame of Los Angeles bookstores: a bit frowsy on the surface but sassy underneath. Located east of Old Town in Pasadena, it's got room to spread out and offers a deep, rich stock of literary fiction, travel books, cookbooks, kids books and toys, local history, stationery and -- yes, already -- holiday cards. It's done so well with this model that it opened a branch in Hastings Ranch in 2001 to serve the deeper east San Gabriel Valley.

Then there's Book Soup. Located on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, it was founded by Goldman in 1975 and shaped by his electric, artistic sensibility. It's equally fascinated with the edgy, the glamorous and the smart, packing sometimes disparate books into its tight space and towering shelves. This is where Patti Smith signs and shops. If a bookstore can be a pair of skinny jeans, Book Soup is one, and they're black.

And that's just how it's going to stay. "I don't believe that just anyone could have come in and taken over Book Soup," Hill says, and she should know: she was its manager for six years. "There is an authenticity to what Book Soup is that we intend on honoring. We would be crazy to do this otherwise." Closure of the deal is still pending.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: Left, Tom Brokaw signs "The Greatest Generation" at Vroman's in 2000. Credit: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times. Right, Book Soup's marquee after longtime owner Glenn Goldman died in 2009. Credit: Carolyn Kellogg

Margaret Atwood on green rabbits, writing sex and Twitter

Margaret Atwood comes to UCLA's Royce Hall tonight with a performance from her new novel, "The Year of the Flood." In the book, as two former eco-cult  members struggle to survive an environmental disaster, they remember leader Adam One and the lessons he taught to his flock, God's Gardeners. On the tour, each performance -- which includes actors, singers and Atwood as the narrator -- has taken a different shape. Atwood talked to Jacket Copy's Carolyn Kellogg by phone this week about the shows, the book, the difficulty in writing sex and what it's like to be a new blogger.

Jacket Copy: I understand you've been blogging, uploading pictures, using Twitter. What do you think about it?

Margaret Atwood: Part of it is really fun. And part of it is a lot of work -- as you know.

JC: What's the fun part?

MA: The fun part is probably the Twittering. Because it's short.

JC: Is it really you Twittering?

MA: Yes, it’s really me. Absolutely, it’s really me. But there were two false mes when I went on … my Twitter pals did something, and they disappeared.

JC: Has the Internet created a different level of engagement with readers than previous book tours?

MA: It puts you in the position of a journalist, in a way. You become the journalist of yourself. Which is really weird. But you also become the journalist of your own tour. For the blog, I've been taking pictures of the events we've been doing…. Sometimes they come out, and sometimes they don't.

JC: This must be your 30th book tour. Does this added component bring a new excitement to the experience?

MA: It brings a whole different number of levels to it. It's certainly different from anything I've done before. So it's certainly different from anything I've ever done before, because it is a multi kind of thing. First of all, we've got the website, which I built myself with the Scott Thornly company -- it was they who said, "Well you need to have a blog and a Twitter" so I said basically, "What are those?" I have a coach, I have this media coach called McLean Greaves and he's the one who Twitter/iPhone/webstreamed a party in my kitchen. It's very sort of horror movie-looking. It would be possible to do something that looked a little less like ghosts in my kitchen -- but it was an experiment, and I therefore now know how to do that on my iPhone. All of these are new things, and it's a very steep learning curve for me because I didn't know how to do any of this before August. I started the first blog entry from New York just before I got on the Queen Mary. I had to learn Wordpress -- that's been an experience too, because nobody has been teaching me. I've had to sort of figure it out. But the good thing about my Twitter pals, I can ask a question and somebody will tell me the answer.

JC: I'm not sure that all authors would try any of this. James Ellroy, for example, doesn't even use e-mail.

MA: I can understand that point of view. It can take you over. There's no question. You can spend hours doing this stuff, following up on tags people send you, and interesting stuff -- it can suck you in like a vortex. I'm not sure that it would be a thing you would want to do while you were actually writing a book.

JC: Which you're not doing right now – you're doing a series of performances. It's with a different set of performers each time?

MA: Think of it as a relay race. Or -- remember Mr. Potato Head? Think of it as Mr. Potato Head, in which each venue, each city that takes this on gets the basic potato: the script and a few rudimentary instructions as to how they might do it, with some optional choices. For instance, those who want not to use the swear words can take them out. They need to find a singing group. They get the CD [of the hymns in "The Year of the Flood"] and sheet music, so the singing group can learn the music. But they can do it any way they want, and they have done it any way they want. We've had all different interpretations of the three characters  because we use three readers to do them -- sometimes those have been professional actors, sometimes they've been people who work in bookstores. So we've had a wide range. The only thing they all have in common is that I'm the narrator in each one of them. It's been a wide-ranging experience that has involved a lot of people, and that is the most astounding thing about it. People have leapt into this, they've taken it on, they've put their own spin on it and they've had a great time doing it.

JC: As an author, what's it like to see your work interpreted and reinterpreted and reinterpreted?

MA: You know, it's reinterpreted every time someone reads the book. Because each reader is in effect playing the book, the way you would play a piece of music. And each of those readings or playings is different. The only difference is, usually I'm not standing in the room when they're doing that. I don't get to see it.

When you're doing it in public like this, you actually get to see the different interpretations, and that's been pretty fascinating, because it also makes you realize how differently people read books.

Bike riding in Los Angeles with David Byrne

There aren't a lot of role models for how to grow up gracefully in rock. Bob Dylan, Patti Smith -- they've aged like blues musicians, deepening their connection to the music the further they move from youthful notoriety. Steve Jones -- of all people -- reinvented himself as a DJ and was, until Indie 103 shut down in January, the last real avatar of punk spirit in its purest form.

And then, there's David Byrne, another new wave icon, who continues to reinvent himself in fascinating ways. His latest project is a book, "Bicycle Diaries" (Viking, 304 pages, $25.95), which records his thoughts, ideas and reflections on the art and politics of bike riding in cities around the world. Byrne has been a dedicated cyclist since the 1980s, riding in New York (where he lives) and bringing along a folding bike when he goes on tour. "This point of view," he writes, "-- faster than a walk, slower than a train, often slightly higher than a person -- became my panoramic window on much of the world over the last thirty years."

Friday night, Byrne cycled into Los Angeles for a symposium called "Cities, Bicycles and the Future of Getting Around" at the Aratani/Japan America Theatre in Little Tokyo. Sponsored by the Central Library's Aloud series, the event also featured Bicycle Kitchen founder Jimmy Lizama; Michelle Mowery, senior bicycle coordinator of L.A.'s Department of Transportation; and Donald Shoup, professor of urban planning at UCLA. Everyone spoke for 10 or 15 minutes, and then the conversation was turned over to the audience for questions from the floor.

Byrne seemed nervous to be speaking without the structure of a band or a set of songs. Even so, he was engaged, funny, showing slides of termite cities and futuristic projections of what urban environments might come to look like in a reimagined world. He admitted that he wanted to hate the Grove, but that it "kind of works" as an urban environment, as an approximation of public space. He's right about that, although it's public space (actually, more of a public-private hybrid) in a way we don't commonly consider it: a blurring of the authentic and the artificial, of the city and the mall.

What all the speakers kept coming back to was a certain notion of engaged citizenship, that on bikes, or on foot, we had to interact with the city directly, rather than from the air-conditioned distance of our cars. It's a compelling notion, and it was borne out by the dynamic of the evening itself. Here, after all, at an event that offered free valet bicycle parking, was the intersection of three disparate communities -- books, music and bicycles -- in a city commonly regarded not to have any real sense of community at all. If it could happen here, it could happen anywhere.

Or as Byrne put it as he closed his remarks: "Bikes ... well, yeah."

-- David L. Ulin

File photo: David Byrne. Credit: Jim Dyson / Getty Images