Celebrating Bloomsday and James Joyce

On Saturday, Angelenos can celebrate one of the greatest novels of the 20th century -– by gathering together and raising a glass of Guinness.

June 16 is Bloomsday, so called for Leopold Bloom, the main character in James Joyce's "Ulysses." The notoriously challenging novel blasted through formal conventions and become an iconic work of modernist fiction; its 600-plus pages take place in Dublin over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904.

Although it has now become the focus of public celebrations, “Ulysses” was, at first, the stuff of hushed words and darting glances. Serialized by an American literary journal in the late teens, part of Joyce's novel -- involving masturbation -- was ruled obscene in 1921. Expatriate Sylvia Beach, owner of the famed Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company, published the complete "Ulysses" abroad in 1922, yet it was officially banned in America. In 1933, Random House’s attempt to import copies of the controversial novel were at the center of a major court case; “Ulysses” won, helping to prise open laws regarding “obscene” content.

Of course, just because American readers had access to “Ulysses” didn’t mean it was accessible. The novel is the stuff of semester-long seminars and Ph.D. theses – making it an odd candidate for marathon public readings, city tours and evening dancing.

“The really big breakthrough was in 1982, celebrating the centenary of Joyce's birth with a large Joyce symposium in Dublin,” Dr. Vincent Cheng, co-editor of 2009’s “Joyce in Context,” writes from this year’s conference in Ireland. “Bloomsday 2004 in Dublin was the first time that it felt like a fully public celebration, with lots of locals and tourists joining the Joycean academics in celebrating the day.” People lucky enough to be in Dublin this year can download the JoyceWays iPhone app, three years in the making, a literary tour through the city circa 1904.

Joyce enthusiasm has spread across America, where Symphony Space in New York has presented “Bloomsday on Broadway” for 31 years; this year’s performance will be streamed live online. Also online will be a classic reading by Alec Baldwin, Wallace Shawn and others at Pacifica Radio; at seven hours, it’s still only a portion of the 600-plus-page text.

At the Hammer, which hosts LA’s premiere performance-and-participation Bloomsday event, actors will be reading the book’s “Aeolus” section, or, more plainly, the part of the novel set in the offices of the Freeman’s Journal newspaper. It also includes a visit to a pub.

The Hammer will be offering happy hour Guinness from 6 to 7:30 p.m., accompanied by Irish music. Joyce enthusiasts can arrive up to two hours earlier to participate in an open “Ulysses” reading. When the performance is done, there will be more music, and more Guinness.

Is all this drinking and dancing an appropriate way to celebrate a brilliant work of literature? “I think Bloomsday events absolutely do a service to Joyce's work,” Cheng says. “Not only are they a lot of fun for Joyce aficionados, but they get people who have never read Joyce (and who might otherwise never dare try such challenging reading) interested in looking at these wonderful (but very difficult) books, especially ‘Ulysses.’"

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Celebrating Irish heritage and Bloomsday, named for James Joyce's "Ulysses," at the Hammer in 2011. Credit: Hammer Museum

Festival of Books: California as a novel backdrop

“California Dreamin’” was a dream panel, because as moderator and L.A. Times book reviewer David Ulin pointed out, Hari Kunzru, Dana Spiotta and Steve Erickson are three of the best novelists working today.

The L.A. Times Festival of Books panelists also have recent novels that take place in California:  Erickson’s "These Dreams of You," Kunzru’s "Gods Without Men" and Spiotta’s "Stone Arabia." So each writer is ideally situated to reflect on real and mythic representations of the Golden State.

Kunzru’s novel is mostly set in the Mojave Desert, a place he described as a hinterland where people “test bombs, cook meth, and bury bodies,” but also as Ulin added, “a power spot” that draws dreams and UFOs.

PHOTOS: Festival of Books

What Kunzru found in his research for the book was that as a UFO culture arose in the Mojave, it represented a meeting of the aerospace industry and military testing with spiritualist and theosophical traditions. Yet now, “the angels had become spacemen.”

This Sunday: Innovation at Bell Labs, James Brown and Jack's juvenilia

More than half a century ago, long before Apple was a glint in anyone’s eye, the reigning champion of innovation in American business was Bell Labs, an arm of the original AT&T. Its staff of youthful scientists and engineers were assigned, notes our business columnist Michael Hiltzik in this Sunday's Arts & Books section, “to go where their intellects took them, not especially concerned about serving the corporate bottom line, picking up cartloads of Nobel Prizes along the way.” Much of this image, Hiltzik writes in his review of Jon Gertner's “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation,” was more of a public relations invention than a reality. “The Idea Factory” explores this and more, Hiltzik says (though not without some issues).

James Brown had issues too, but, oh my, could he sing. He was, as staff writer Steve Zeitchik notes in his review of “The One: The Life and Music of James Brown,” “demanding, egotistical and prone to pulling a gun on those who disagreed with him.” All that aside, Brown’s biographer, R.J. Smith, offers a complete look at the singer’s life and concludes that he was a key social figure whose life intersected with significant racial trends.

Filed under the loose category of “lost” novels, Jack Kerouac’s early work “The Sea Is My Brother” is finally being published in its entirety, by Da Capo Press. It is, reports Times Book Critic David L. Ulin, not “entirely unreadable.” And while that may be faint praise, it does offer an interesting departure point for Ulin’s thoughtful larger question: “How did such a mannered young writer, self-indulgent and often woefully pretentious, become the purveyor of his own uniquely American idiom, jazz-infected, improvisational, a spontaneous bop prosody?” Ulin explores that issue and reflects on the scope of Kerouac’s early work, his “juvenilia,” on Sunday.  

More after the jump

Happy 200th birthday, Charles Dickens!

Charles Dickens was born 200 years ago today in the town of Portsmouth, England. According to Claire Tomalin's 2011 biography "Charles Dickens: A Life," his childhood home was happy and comfortable, but his father tended to live beyond his means, and the family was uprooted more than once. On the worst of these occasions, 12-year-old Charles was sent to work in a boot-black factory. He didn't like it. But it became material -- there was a boy there named Fagin, a name that will ring familiar to readers of "Oliver Twist."

Dickens was remarkable in that he created characters and stories that have become permanent fixtures in our cultural landscape. How many times has "A Christmas Carol" been adapted for stage, film, or sitcom holiday episodes? Too many for me to count. But that lasting cultural presence is paired with something else that sets Dickens the writer apart: He was stunningly prolific.

During the three years he worked full time as editor of the magazine Bentley's Miscellany, for example, he wrote and published two books -- no less than "The Adventures of Oliver Twist" and "The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby." By the time of his death in 1870 at age 58, he'd written 14 hefty novels ("The Mystery of Edwin Drood" was published posthumously) and many other works.

To celebrate Charles Dickens' 200th birthday, then, here is a list of his published works.

Charles Dickens' novels:

The Pickwick Papers    
The Adventures of Oliver Twist        
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby    
The Old Curiosity Shop        
Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty'
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit      
Dombey and Son     
David Copperfield    
Bleak House    
Hard Times: For These Times    
Little Dorrit
A Tale of Two Cities    
Great Expectations    
Our Mutual Friend    
The Mystery of Edwin Drood

It continues after the jump.

John Corey Whaley, 28, discusses his Printz Award and what's next

John Corey Whaley is living every debut author's dream. On Monday, his novel "Where Things Come Back" won the American Library Assn.'s prestigious Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature written for young adults. The story of a teenage boy whose brother goes missing while everyone else obsesses over a woodpecker is "witty," "sardonic" and "groundbreaking," according to the ALA.

We caught up with the 28-year-old author for a phone interview in the town where he grew up and in which his novel takes place: Springhill, La.

You really can’t get any better than what you've just achieved -- winning a top literary prize with your very first book.

You’re telling me. I’m sort of still in a state of shock. It’s completely life changing and unbelievable and it’s crazy. It’s so great.

You were an English teacher for five years before you left the profession to become an author, correct?

In the middle of my fourth year teaching is when I got my book contract -- in 2010. I knew the book would come out in May 2011. My dream had always been that I would teach until I published a book, so my goal was to give myself one year to be an author, and I guess that changed today.

What gave birth to your story?

I grew up in a little town with about 6,000 or 7,000 people. I always knew from 11 or 12 years old that I wanted to be a writer, and I always wanted to write about growing up in a place like that that’s small and you don’t fit into. When I was a senior in college at Louisiana Tech, I was driving home and heard a story on NPR about this extinct woodpecker that someone saw in this small Arkansas town. The townspeople were all talking about how it gave their town this sense of hope because tourists from all over the world were coming to find this bird.

I’d been trying to find a good place to place a teenager -- a kid trying to grow up in that kind of craziness. A story about life growing up as a teenager in a small town you don't fit into developed into a story about are we looking for the right things and do second chances exist, because while everyone in this town is preoccupied by this extinct bird coming back to life, the narrator’s younger brother goes missing. So then the story is sort of a parallel. He and his family are looking for their lives. Everyone else is preoccupied with this nonsense.

You’re living in the town where the story takes place?

In the town it’s based on. It’s really strange. In the book, Cullen Witter is very cynical about where he grows up, like I was as a teenager, but all the support everyone from my town has thrown my way since the book came out -- it’s really made me change my outlook and not be so bitter about it. It’s been a really cool thing to learn about yourself and get older. Sometimes it’s not about the place. It’s about the person. An amazing cool thing that’s come out of this is that so many people are proud to say, "He’s from this place." To have people stop me in the store and say, "Hey. I read that book." It’s like, "What?" It’s really crazy. I am on cloud nine.

Are you at work on another novel right now?

I am. I just recently finished my second novel, and I don’t think it will be out before 2012’s over because there’s no pub date. But I have two more novels coming out with Atheneum.

Are you relieved you finished it before winning the award?

Everyone has been like, "Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you finished that book because you’re not going to have any time to write a book." I was like, "Oh my gosh. I didn’t even think about that." I finished it last Thursday on my birthday. I had planned it that way because I’m kind of cheesy sometimes. I had no idea this was going to happen.

Does your second book have a title?

It's tentatively titled "The Defenestration of Abbott." It’s a story set in south Louisiana about -- I can’t tell you too much about it, but it’s sort of a murder mystery. It’s still a young adult novel, but it’s more concerned with the mysterious death of someone and the aftermath of all of that.

What has today been like for you?

Today has been a lot of congratulatory emails and tweets. My book was a trending topic this morning on Twitter. That’s mind blowing to me. That many people were saying the title of the book.... My publicist has contacted me about several opportunities that have popped up locally where I live before I start traveling. Right now, I’m just going to spend the rest of the day catching up on emails and phone calls. I’ve not talked to anybody via phone except for my mom and dad. I have all these friends waiting for my phone call. I nearly have no voice left.

-- Susan Carpenter

Photos: "Where Things Come Back" cover art, top; author John Corey Whaley, below. Credits: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

Sunday: Pico Iyer's long sentences and Stephen Hawking's birthday

Call it the value of complexity in a frantic time. That’s the thought that came to mind when I first read Pico Iyer’s engaging essay on why he’s made the conscious decision to write longer sentences. What Iyer, whose latest book, “The Man Within My Head,” was published this month, is saying to us (and for us) is that the world of instant communication is far too distracting and that there is gratification -- and a relief from the mundane -- in reading something complex and engaging. It is an interesting proposition by one of our favorite writers. His essay begins on the front page of Sunday’s Arts & Books section. (For more on this topic, I would recommend David Ulin's book "The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time," which was developed from Ulin's article in the Aug. 9, 2009, issue of The Times.)

Sunday is also Stephen Hawking's 70^th birthday and, to mark the occasion, Sara Lippincott is reviewing Kitty Ferguson’s latest book on the eminent physicist: “Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind.” As Lippincott notes, 70 is a real milestone for the superstar of the cosmos who has lived almost 50 years with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease). Also, Carolyn Kellogg reviews “Power Concedes Nothing: One Woman’s Quest for Social Justice in America, from the Kill Zones to the Courtroom,” the memoir of Connie Rice, the civil rights advocate and agitator who has made it her business to balance the scales of justice in Los Angeles.

On the fiction card, book critic David L. Ulin assesses playwright and television writer Alan Bennett’s latest work, a collection of  stories called “Smut.” And Susan Carpenter looks at “A Million Suns,” the second installment in the “Across the Universe” young adult fantasy trilogy by Beth Revis. Universe? Hawking? A birthday present?

And, of course, we have our weekly look at the bestsellers.

Thanks for reading.

-- Jon Thurber, book editor

Photo: Stephen Hawking at the 2010 World Science Festival opening night gala in New York. Credit: Jemal Countess/Getty Images

 

A book trailer worth watching: Ben Marcus' 'Flame Alphabet' [video]

To kick off the publication of Ben Marcus' "The Flame Alphabet" this month, Knopf has posted a video for it that's worth watching.

To be honest, I'm not sure whether it's good. But since it's a book trailer that's trying to do something more interesting that simply be an advertisement, I consider it three minutes well spent.

Created by artist Erin Cosgrove, the animation uses text from the book in voiceover and illustrates, in action, some of what happens in the book. Partway through it uses a news broadcast to explain the novel's premise, which is one of my least favorite narrative devices. In this case, however, it's forgivable because the setup is pretty odd: In "The Flame Alphabet," children's language has become toxic to adults.

Even with the explanation, the trailer is a bit puzzling. It left me confused enough to go elsewhere to learn more about Marcus' book.

Maybe that's the task of a book trailer -- to fill the viewer with curiosity about the book. Although I'm not sure whether confusion and curiosity are quite the same thing.

Marcus will be in Los Angeles in February, at the Hammer on Feb. 1 and Skylight Books on Feb. 2. Maybe things will become clear then.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Russell Banks talks archetypes and underdogs

In Sunday's Arts & Books, book critic David L. Ulin talks to Russell Banks about his new novel, "Lost Memory of Skin." Banks is the author of "The Sweet Hereafter," "Affliction," "Continental Drift," "Cloudsplitter" and "Rule of the Bone." Here is more of the conversation.

Jacket Copy: "Lost Memory of Skin" is a realistic novel, but it also plays with archetypes. None of the characters are named but rather go by more general designations: the Kid, the Professor. In some sense, even they don't know who they really are.

Russell Banks: I was trying to use the conventions of realism to tell the story but also to lift it off the page and make it a bit more universal and archetypal. Once I got going with the Kid and the Professor, I just felt this was going to work, that I could do this all the way through. It's the same reason I didn't call the city Miami, even though it clearly is Miami -- if I call it Miami, then I'm stuck in a level of social realism that I don't want to get held down by. Even though I love the conventions of realism and the tradition of it, I don't want to be limited by that. But on the other hand, I don't want to write something hyper-real or surreal or meta-real, or anything of that sort, which takes off from the page and never gets grounded in reality again. So I wanted it to hover somewhere in between the two, and tell a story that would have the flavor of a fable and the feel of a fable, and yet be rooted in our everyday, mundane reality. That was one reason why I never gave him a name. Once I had gotten 50, 100 pages in, and he still was called the Kid, I was quite comfortable with it, and that meant everybody else was going to be treated more or less the same way. It's funny the way names do that. Pretty soon, the person becomes the name. And by the time you get very far into it, it would be shocking any other way. So he is the Kid.

JC:It also allows you to play with the fabric of reality a little bit. There's that scene late in the novel when the Professor is driving in the eye of the hurricane for hours and hours.

RB: And the babes on blades early on who float up into the sky. Stuff like that you couldn't do if you didn't have this kind of slightly bent reality. You can't get away with it unless you establish ground rules that permit it. It's a way of being aesthetically coherent throughout, of trying to find the zone of realism where those things are possible but it's still grounded in reality. What we call realistic fiction, it's not a rigid formula. There's this tremendous expanse between Zola and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Where do you want to land on that? What band, of all the bands that exist between Zola and Garcia Marquez, do you want to work? Then you find that zone and you try to make the whole thing consistent. My zone was somewhere in the middle, where I thought: This is where I want the novel to exist.

JC: There are echoes between "Lost Memory of Skin" and novels such as "Continental Drift" or "Rule of the Bone." Most unexpected, perhaps, is the reappearance of Dolores Driscoll, whom we last saw in "The Sweet Hereafter."

RB: There are some characters you just don't want to let go of. You keep wondering, what the hell ever happened to them? Dolores is one. I always liked her and I always wondered what had happened to her. But it wasn't really a return to "The Sweet Hereafter" or to "Continental Drift" or "Rule of the Bone." It was just ... in a way, I think of it as an extension, a continuation of those books and those stories and those characters. And I suppose some of the archetypes too, which do exist in those books. Here we have the adolescent male who's on a quest for meaning in what otherwise seems like a meaningless life and he has an older guide, who's not quite trustworthy ...

JC: Yes, and because of this we never quite know what's truth and what's illusion, even when the characters speak for themselves.

RB: Exactly. So how do you find meaning, how do you find the truth? That's one of the Kid's quests. He had to think in ways he's never thought before. And the fate of the Professor presents him with an epistemological problem: How do I know what I'm supposed to know about reality? At the beginning of the book, the meaning of his life doesn't extend beyond today. By the end, you hope, anyhow, that he can think ahead nine years.

Man Booker Prize announces 2011 shortlist

 

The six-book shortlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize was announced Tuesday; Patrick deWitt, a former Los Angeles bartender, made the cut with his bawdy cowboy noir, "The Sisters Brothers." The Man Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary prizes, comes with an award of about $80,000.

DeWitt, in the running for the award for the first time, outlasted Alan Hollinghurst, who won the Booker in 2004 and was shortlisted in 1994. Two of the authors remaining on the shortlist do have histories with the prize: Julian Barnes has twice been shortlisted and Carol Birch has previously been shortlisted. The shortlist also includes two first-time novelists, Stephen Kelman and A.D. Miller.

The six books shortlisted for the Man Booker prize are:

Julian Barnes "The Sense of an Ending" (coming January)

Carol Birch "Jamrach’s Menagerie" (out now)

Patrick deWitt "The Sisters Brothers" (out now)

Esi Edugyan "Half Blood Blues" (no U.S. publication date available)

Stephen Kelman "Pigeon English" (out now)

A.D. Miller "Snowdrops" (out now)

The Man Booker Prize will be presented at a ceremony Oct. 18 in London.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Book review: 'The Adjustment' by Scott Phillips

Noir is a literature of limited choices: for the people who write it and the people about whom they write. Like most popular genres, it relies on formula, but at its best, it subverts that formula even as it pays homage.

We all understand the set-up: a desolate world, devoid of possibility, in which characters operate out of sin or self-interest, and even the good are compromised. This is why noir first flourished in the Depression, and also why it seems to speak so well to our current circumstances -- because in difficult times, things get elemental quickly, as our illusions (that we are good, that we are civilized, that we look out for each other) are revealed to be the most desperate sorts of lies. 

Scott Phillips' fourth novel, "The Adjustment," dispenses with such illusions from the beginning, taking place in a landscape of such moral bleakness that there is nowhere to go but down. The narrator is Wayne Ogden, a World War II vet back home in Wichita, Kansas, where he works as a fixer for Everett Collins, the debauched owner of a local aircraft firm.

The plot, such as it is, has to do with Wayne's efforts to keep his boss in power, by whatever means necessary -- whether that means setting up abortions for the office girls he knocks up, or blackmailing the company's board members who want him out. But really, this is Wayne's story, and what makes it memorable is his hulking presence, drifting through the world as hungry and blank-eyed as a shark, waiting for the opportunity to make his kill.

Wayne was a quartermaster during the war, and he has no qualms about running anything, from girls to drugs to porn. He has a house and a wife and a baby on the way, but even when he's taking care of them, he does so with a casual brutality, as when he visits a furniture store to renegotiate a trade-in deal.

"I was a little disappointed," he admits, "that old Bellows caved in so quickly when his soon-in-law phoned him. What I'd really wanted was to smash one of their expensive tables to pieces and beat Mr. Stan Franklin to a bleeding pulp with one of its legs, after which I might allow the remainder of the sales force to flee before I soaked the place in kerosene and watched it burn to the ground."

There's something compelling about that sort of rage, about its compression, its control. It's the same rage anyone might feel in an extreme circumstance, yet here it’s just a fact of life. Not much happens in "The Adjustment," which spins off characters and themes Phillips wrote about in "The Walkaway" and "The Ice Harvest" -- or not much that Wayne can't handle, anyway. But what draws us to the book is Phillips' taut and vicious vision, so clean we cannot help but inhabit it, even when we find ourselves repelled.

This, too, is the essence of noir, which works by putting us in touch with our own inner darkness, our desolation and despair. Phillips makes that clear when, late in the novel, Wayne stops at a diner where the man next to him at the counter insists that nothing matters, despite the fact we think it does. Briefly, Wayne listens, thinking about not much at all. Then, he tells us, "I nodded and finished my egg sandwich, swigged down my coffee, and went home."

-- David L. Ulin