Jerry Stahl, godfather of the gut-socking overshare

If the world ends up on its collective deathbed, every last one of us expiring from the unglamorously named swine flu, we can count on Jerry Stahl, right, to issue withering quips that will at least make us laugh. On the misnamed “Postmodern World” panel, the godfather of the gut-socking overshare taught his younger co-panelists, Todd Hasak-Lowy, Fiona Maazel, left, and Lee Kostantinou, center, a few things about the deadpan one-liner. Not that they weren’t capable players themselves.

A little gallows humor was needed for this dark but easy-flowing discussion. As moderator and “Big Lonesome” author Jim Ruland explained in the first few minutes, the panel wasn’t going to concern itself with endlessly circular arguments about the meaning of "postmodern" (as with "pornography," no one’s really come up with a working definition) but, rather, with the apocalypse in fiction.

This pronouncement made Stahl’s blue eyes glow like burning embers. “I always welcome the apocalypse,” he said, “and feel vaguely disgruntled that it never shows up. For me, it’s all weird foreplay till the end.” Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation blog and “Harry, Revised” guffawed from the front row.

If life is all weird foreplay till the end, the preferred titillation is chemical living – the arsenal of double lattes, high-grade marijuana and Oxycontin that deadens our senses, perhaps a kind of personal apocalypse, Ruland posited.

When the subject of drugs was first broached, Stahl drolly remarked, “I don’t know why everyone’s looking at me.”

Vampires, Victorians and chasing the shadows of the past

Is there a vampire walking the halls of Microsoft, thirsty for blood? Not that we know of (although Mac types may disagree), but the corporation does boast one serious vampire fan at the top.

Writer Leslie Klinger, after telling antiquarian book collectors that he was searching for the original manuscript for Bram Stoker’s "Dracula," was approached by a minion of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The famous entrepreneur, the minion explained, would allow Klinger to view his prized possession but only under supervision.

Several weeks later, Klinger was sitting at a desk, watched with polite hawkishness by another Allen trustee, with the original typed pages of what he excitedly called “the greatest horror novel of all time.” Klinger, who recently published "The New Annotated Dracula," described the manuscript as "550 pages typed by Stoker with extensive hand-corrections."

Stoker had even employed a primitive version of cut-and-paste; when Klinger lifted a page to the light, he could see text underneath where Stoker had affixed his latest corrections.

At the LA Times Festival of Books Sunday afternoon panel "Victorian Shadows," it was all about reveling in the juicy discoveries of the research process, the bedrock for authors Klinger, Michael Sims and Selden Edwards, each happily obsessed with the era of corsets, top hats and steam-engine trains. Led by L.A. Times deputy books editor Nick Owchar, the panelists got to the bottom of their love of the time: It’s escapism from our troubles — and a way to put them into perspective. (The Victorians had their plagues and prejudices too.)

But in the present day, nothing can give a writer pains like the publishing gantlet, which rejected Edwards' "The Little Book" for some 30 years... read more after the jump.

Arianna Huffington and others on the future of media

"Sorry we started late," James Rainey announced. "There were a lot of people who wanted to get in here once they saw Arianna’s helicopter circling."

Rainey, an L.A. Times media columnist, moderated Sunday’s panel, “Media: Where Do We Go From Here?” which featured writer Marc Cooper, editors Sharon Waxman (The Wrap) and Andrew Donohue (Voice Of San Diego) and the doyenne of new media herself, Arianna Huffington, editor of the Huffington Post.

Earlier this month, Huffington announced the new nonprofit Huffington Post Investigative Fund, which will support pieces that "range from long-form investigations to short breaking news stories and will be presented in a variety of media, including text, audio and video. And, in the open source spirit of the Web, all of the content the Fund produces will be free for anyone to publish."

Apparently, she doesn't see this as being in direct competition with more traditional news outlets; she said that newspapers and websites could coexist peacefully by "integrating the inevitability of technology."

But old media outlets -- including organizations like the L.A. Times, the N.Y. Times and the Washington Post -- were painted early on as craggy strongholds of institutionalism that deign only to let certain voices be heard. New media organizations, we were told, provide new and very necessary public forums where the gatekeepers of the press could be surpassed by citizen journalists with handy tape recorders and low-overhead websites like the Wrap and the Annenberg School's digital news website.

Sharon Waxman, who had a post up on the Wrap about the panel just a few hours after it concluded, was previously employed by not one but two "towers of arrogance." At the panel, she said, "only when you work at the New York Times do you understand how the New York Times is part and parcel of the establishment, rather than an engine for pure accountability or for transparency among other pillars of the establishment. It is the establishment."

Marc Cooper, who reviewed the "demise"of his old LA Weekly stamping grounds in January, compared the present cultural atmosphere to that of 1490, not long after the Gutenberg printing press had been invented. Cooper noted that the printing press, built nominally to distribute copies of the Bible, led directly to such non-Christian events as the creation of secular humanism and the French Revolution. Progress begets progress, it seems. “I will take mass amateurization, or the mass democratization of publishing any day,” he said.

It was Andrew Donohue, editor of the 4-year-old local news website Voice Of San Diego, who offered the most salient point of the afternoon. It's after the jump.

S.E. Hinton, a.k.a. Your Majesty

“I don’t know what I should call you,” Jane Smiley said as the crowd at Moore Hall gave a warm welcome to S.E. Hinton.

“You can call me Susie, or Your Majesty,” S.E. Hinton said.  We all laughed, but in a way, it’s kind of true. There are few authors who grab a whole genre by the soul and shake it up, but at 16 years old, when S.E. Hinton wrote "The Outsiders," that’s just what she did for young adult fiction (also known as YA). 

Smiley began by reading from Hinton’s lesser-known and newest work, "Some of Tim’s Stories," and then the two spent most of their conversation talking about that book and her adult novel "Hawks Harbor." 

The one thing she guaranteed about the book, is that Hawks Harbor is not the typical S.E. Hinton novel.

 “I wrote that book for fun,” she said of her adult novel.  “And it was the loosest I felt about writing since writing 'The Outsiders.' ”

When asked what books she read as a child, she said that she wasn’t a good reader back then but that she liked animal books such as "The Black Stallion" or those by Will James.  She thought she might grow up to be a cowboy. She read David Copperfield while stuck in a cabin on a lake and discovered Jane Austen while in college. Now, she rereads Austen every year, and a few years ago she took an Austen course. 

“It was one of the best things I’ve done in my life,” she said of that class.  “Believe me. I’ve been hugged by Matt Dillon.”

Festival of Books: Newsmakers on newspapers

Saturday's panel on "The Future Of News" featured Slate Group Editor in Chief Jacob Weisberg, USC Annenberg School of Journalism director Geneva Overholser and Los Angeles Times Editor Russ Stanton. Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR’s Los Angeles correspondent, fresh from cuts that swept through NPR West’s offices was the moderator.

Overholser started things off by making a case for the future of her business: the academy. “This is a crisis of the economic model of journalism,” she said, noting that the functional model of journalism and the skills required to practice it remain relatively unchanged. “Journalism schools should be like law schools, in which you learn skills that can affect a number of different fields."

Weisberg, who started with Slate under the late-‘90s editorial flag of Michael Kinsley, was energetic and confident as only a man who got into the Web early can be. He noted that the art of the blogger, of writing without editors and copy editors, was a “high-wire act” but that it worked to produce less error. “You know you’re not going to get away with anything on the Web. Someone is going to catch that mistake.”

Weisberg compared print journalists to Medieval monks after the first Bible was printed; that we as a society are in the unique position of getting news and information disseminated without the help of the “priestly class.”

Addressing the audience, Weisberg explained that the media communityhas "confused the economic problem (which is our problem) with the democratic problem (which is your problem)."   Still, Weisberg acknowledged, Web-only sites such as Slate and others “in no way substitute for the primary news organs.”

Cue Russ Stanton, from the Los Angeles Times. What he said ... after the jump.

Classic California crime

(We originally wrote that David Ward interviewed 100 inmates of Alcatraz; we’ve changed the post to note that some interviewees were inmates and others were not. Additionally, the post originally noted that one inmate tried to escape from Alcatraz again after a successful attempt; that has been changed to show that his other escape efforts were from other institutions.)

Sunday's panel on criminal literature showed that perhaps there's been too much written on what makes a criminal turn to a life of crime and not enough written about what makes a writer turn to a life of crime reporting.

"My dad was a crook," explained Richard Rayner, whose nonfiction book "A Bright and Guilty Place" (coming in June) follows two men as they navigate the Los Angeles crime scene in the 1920s and '30s. He has a very personal reason for asking, "How does someone go down that road?"

"The interest for me was in trying to figure out what made Leslie White go one way and Dave Clark go the other way," he said of his main characters, one of whom finds himself in a downward spiral of vice and corruption. (No spoilers here!)

"These were human beings that weren't any better or worse than the rest of us," added Larry Harnisch, whose Los Angeles Times blog The Daily Mirror looks at historical crime cases in California. He's chronicled cases of the Black Dahlia and the Changeling.

But David Ward had reason to disagree. His latest book, "Alcatraz: The Gangster Years," follows the criminals deemed "the worst of the worst." For the book he located and interviewed 46 guards and staff members and 54 former inmates, most of whom never returned to prison.

"The Alcatraz inmates aren’t like the rest of us," he said. They are the leaders, the highly intelligent, the very articulate, the type-A criminals. He told a story of one former criminal he interviewed, the only one to ever escape from "the rock," who swam all the way to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, where he was sighted by tourists and assumed to be a jumper.

“It’s great, hearing his story and what it was like going along with the current, floating past Ghirardelli Square.” He was taken to the local hospital and treated for hypothermia. Then he was returned to Alcatraz. (After he was caught, he was transferred to other prisons, from which he also tried to escape).

“But," Ward said, "he proved it could be done."

— Stephanie Harnett

Photo: Christina House / For The Times

Wells Tower on darkness, joy and the Internet

"Fiction: Closing Time" at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books brought together three writers who traffic in the darker elements of life: Patrick DeWitt ("Ablutions"), Wells Tower ("Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned") and Jerry Stahl ("Pain Killers"). Jacket Copy blogger and moderator Carolyn Kellogg (far left) first asked how far was too far.

DeWitt took this to mean vulgarity and claimed it was easy to be too vulgar, preferring to avoid ugliness for the sake of ugliness. Stahl saw his lack of a New York Times review as possible indication of an excess of vulgarity. Tower said he thought that “general hideousness serves as a sentimentality credit.” The nasty allows the sweet. DeWitt supported this “sweet and sour” balance because he’s not interested in offending people for the sake of offending.

Stahl told the crowd that if they want darkness, they should read the paper. Tower pointed out that a human being is a complicated, painful thing to be; it is the task of the fiction writer to salvage moments of transcendence and amazement. Stahl, on the other hand, said he thought the task of the fiction writer was not to bore: writers must earn the right to be read. He was always inspired by people who say the unsayable, mentioning the late J.G. Ballard. DeWitt said he was inspired by books his father had given him, especially those by Charles Portis, leading to a cross-panel discussion of "True Grit."

Not quite wrapping up the Festival of Books

Thousands of attendees at the Festival of Books stopped by the "What Are You Reading" graffiti wall and left their mark, from the Bible on one side to the Koran on the other. The enthusiasm expressed — all those titles filling the enormous banner, the struggle to find a blank space for a beloved book — was inspiring. Publishing industry insiders may say the business is in trouble, but people still love to read. After the jump, more pictures, and a sampling of titles.

Here at Jacket Copy, we went to panels — lots of panels, more than one person could possibly see without a time machine. Although my name often appears here, it was with the focused efforts — and willingness to overcome technological challenges — that a big group of new bloggers covered novelists, celebrities, memoirists, prizewinners, science fiction, real science, California history, sports, new technologies and more. Big thanks to Cecil Castellucci, Chris Daley, George Ducker, John Fox, Lori Kozlowski, Stephanie Harnett, Michelle Maltais, Nick Owchar, Kelsey Ramos, Heather Robertson, Josh Sandoval, Lisa VanLund, Margaret Wappler, Leslie Wiggins and Lauren Williams for their work. And none of their posts would have gotten online without the superhuman efforts of Mary Forgione, who produced all of them with unflagging energy and enthusiasm from a secret bunker on UCLA's campus. Thanks, Mary.

Though the festival is over, we still have some reports left to share with you, on S.E. Hinton, Arianna Huffington's panel on the future of media and more. Stick around. And if you didn't get a chance yet, tell us — what are you reading?

— Carolyn Kellogg

To live and write in L.A.

Ten minutes after the designated start time Sunday, the panel members of “Fiction: L.A. Writes the World” still hadn’t shown up, and I started wondering if I could write a post if a panel never occurred, a la “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” where the author writes a whole piece about never getting an interview with Ol' Blue Eyes.

Thankfully, they arrived. Ben Ehrenreich moderated a discussion between Chris Abani (“Graceland,” “The Virgin of Flames”), Steve Erickson (“Zeroville,” “Our Ecstatic Days”) and Rachel Kushner (“Telex From Cuba”) (pictured, left to right). Unlike other panels that spend half an hour promoting the authors’ latest works, they dove right into the topic, with Abani and Erickson lending the talk a decidedly academic tone.

Ehrenreich parsed the panel title into two parts: What it means to write in Los Angeles, and what it means that the world has been written by Los Angeles.

All three authors compared Los Angeles and New York. “L.A. doesn’t impose the same kind of civic identity as New York,” Erickson said. In his view, writers who live in New York are New York writers, but writers who live in Los Angeles are not Los Angeles writers. He also refused to identify himself as an L.A. writer.

Erickson said that many of his books start in L.A., then move on. New York fiction asks, “Why would you want to leave here?” while Erickson said that his Los Angeles fiction asks, “Why would you want to stay here?”

Too many books and too hard to market them?

In contrast to another Festival of Books panel, "Publishing 3.0," "Publishing: The Big Picture" on Saturday focused less on how new developments (in social media, in algorithmic software) can be adapted to publishing and more on how publishing can adapt to current economic and industry uncertainty. The panel, moderated by Kit Rachlis of Los Angeles Magazine, featured George Gibson (independent publisher), David Kipen (NEA director of literature) and Bonnie Nadell (“great American literary agent”) (above, with Rachlis, right).

The panelists initially discussed whether the publishing crisis is like the newspaper crisis, which stems from a fundamental change in reading habits, or like the magazine crisis, which is due to sensitivity to cyclical recession. Some combination of the two seemed to be the consensus.

Some core problems were identified: too many books being published each year, increasingly complicated distribution models, industry domination by international conglomerates and fewer traditional media opportunities to market new books.

Nadell compared the volume of new books to going to a restaurant with a giant menu and being too overwhelmed to choose anything but the blandest item. This idea can be connected to a later discussion of distribution in big-box stores.

To earn shelf space at WalMart, a book already needs to be a bestseller. Rachlis described how other chains, such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, require a pay-to-play model, in which publishers must pay for the best placement in stores, leaving small publishers at a disadvantage. Other traditional venues for publicity – National Public Radio, newspaper book reviews – have been switching to an increasingly non-fiction menu, leaving fiction at a disadvantage.