In with the New, In with the Old: New California Writing 2013, Part I

Categories: OC Bookly
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Of all the many ways to read the eclectic, surprising, affirming and resonating pieces in New California Writing 2013, I fell into the perhaps easiest and undisciplined, picking and choosing from those I hadn't already read elsewhere over the past year, then starting over from the back of the collection. Fiction, nonfiction and poems from some of the best journals as chosen by the publisher, Heyday, and its editor, Gayle Wattawa, I am stopping this morning before I'm even done reading to take the measure of what's there so far. Boy, you think you know what's up, and then this volume in the series arrives to reliably tell you the difference between knew and new.  
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Deadpan or Dead: Jim Gavin's Middle Men is the Real So Cal Existential Dread Deal

Categories: OC Bookly

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Good morning. Are you sure you've found the real deal when you see it? I mean the Real Deal, in caps, or in quotes, or whatever punctuation is required to separate if from the rest? Friends, home-grown So Cal short story writer Jim Gavin is the R.D., though most everybody already knew that except, it seems, Mr. Bib, from The New Yorker to my friend novelist Victoria Patterson--who turned me on to his work--and ZYZZYVA editor Oscar Villalon--who raved about Gavin on NPR. So here I am, the Bibliofella-come-lately, with my repentant, over-eager if justifiably excited upper case of enthusiasm for his short story collection about our sad, psychic and geographic region of despair and difficult resignation to a paradise.

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They Let Me Keep a Book of Keats: Poet Gregory Orr's River Inside the River

Categories: OC Bookly

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There's no real justification on this ostensibly Orange County literary-themed blog for me writing about the American poet Gregory Orr this morning except that the world is, thankfully, much larger than us, our region, our stories. And that I am feeling grateful, a bit humble after a week of some terrific communion with author-friends in the Southland, fellow teacher-writers whose shared mission, as is mine in these weekly reviews, rants or recollections, is literacy and democratic participation. And you can't say enough about Gregory Orr anyway, about whom some readers might welcome reminding, and others--already fans--could probably always use a little more Orr.

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Locals Only: Alisa Slaughter's Bad Habitats and the Reluctant Evolution of Shared Consciousness

Categories: OC Bookly

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Another Sunday morning, another chance to celebrate the winner of a local writing competition and invite readers to a local publication celebration, on May Day, at UC Irvine.

Gold Line Press seems to be a project of another area school, USC, and the judge of its 2012 Competition in Fiction was Dana "Elsewhere, California" Johnson, of whom Mr. Bib is a big fan. A bit of serendipitous circumstantial pleasure it is then that she chose Alisa Slaughter, frequent contributor to Santa Monica Review, as this year's winner,
and that I hold in my hands Bad Habitats, a small, handsome chapbook of Ovidian short stories about local animals interacting with the Southern California human environment, in wry, sad, funny intellect and sociological topsy-turvy organized to remind us of our human species' own devastating, complicating, weird rearrangement of the natural world.


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Jenna Jameson is Ready to Pour Some Sugar with Her "Semi-Autographical" Novel Debut

Categories: OC Bookly, XXX
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PacificProDigital.com
Maybe Jenna Jameson moving out of her Huntington Harbour home and leaving her twins with Tito Ortiz has nothing to do with her recent woes, which were capped a couple Saturdays ago by an alleged assault on her transgender assistant.

Perhaps, just perhaps, Club Jenna abandoned the distractions of motherhood to promote a new, "semi-autographical" novel she co-wrote about an ex-porn star who moves to New York to reinvent herself.
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Pilar Marrero, Legendary La Opinión Columnist, to Visit Fullerton Library April 25 for "Gustavo's Awesome Lecture Series!"

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If gabacho newspaper readers in Southern California have Los Angeles Times columnist Patt "The Hat" Morrison as their institutional knowledge of the region, then the Latino version is Pilar Marrero of La Opinión. But nothing against Patt: Marrero's is in many ways are more vital voice. She has not only been a longtime columnist for the oldest Spanish-language daily on the West Coast, she's also served as their political editor and a general ambassador for goodwill. Only problem with her, thoug? She's rarely in Orange County, because pendejos here never bothered to invite her.

That's slowly changing. Last year, Cal State Fullerton's Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies (where I teach), invited her for a panel. And next Thursday, I'm inviting Marrero to sit down with me as part of my monthly "Gustavo's Awesome Lecture Series!" at the Fullerton Public Library, as sponsored by Cal State Fullerton, the Library, this infernal rag, and KCRW-FM 89.9

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You are Here: Orange County in the House at the LA Times Festival of Books

Categories: OC Bookly
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I especially like the title of a 12:30 panel at next weekend's two-day  annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books for its helpful reminder and either existential celebration or complaint. "You are Here:  Perspectives on Life in Southern California," featuring Times columnists suggests that old-time movie newsreel declaration, and so much more, or less. Because the Festival of Books is sort of what you make of it. With hundreds of vendors, dozens of panels, speakers galore, you'll find plenty that argues the best about our region and observe, politely, a jumble of foolishness, hucksterism, and benign co-optation of book culture. As it ever was, perhaps, yet being there means being part of the conversation about books, culture and politics.  You gotta be there. "Otherwise you got nothing to talk about in the locker room," as Maude said to Harold in one of everybody's favorite films.  
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The Intimidator Still Lives in our Hearts: Re-Introducing Gary Amdahl, the Inland Empire's Chekhov

Categories: OC Bookly
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The far and wide of readerly reach is often rewarded with time to linger, camp out, even put down roots in that place where resides, writes, exists a favorite writer, a discovery, a prize, a locale in which things happen which further complicate, define, explain and challenge. Devotion to artists, writers in good times and bad is earned, surely, but finding an affinity with and an empathy for is the joy of being a fan, a disciple even. I am that way about the English novelist Penelope Lively, about the American novelist Meg Wolitzer, about the fabulist composer of alternative social studies in dreams Stanley Crawford, about my mentor Jim Krusoe.  And they are just a few of the living ones. Among those gone, well, don't get me started: Vonnegut, Heller, Grace Paley, James Baldwin. Lucky for us (and for him) the Inland Empire's Gary Amdahl is alive and kicking, if gently and consistently and elegantly, at the expectations of readers and yet, always somehow meeting them and beyond, a reader's reader and a writer's writer and this reviewer's champion. 

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Nobody Wakes Up Literary: Writers & Activists & Teachers Saturday's Lit O

Categories: OC Bookly
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As promised, Mr. Bib is back this Sunday morning with Part II of a charming if rambling post about Literary Orange, next Saturday, April 6 at the Irvine Marriott. There's something for everybody here - and there - but since I am not everybody, I'll gasbag today mostly about my own panel and the terrific writers participating. Last week you will recall, I suggested unsubtle if totally welcome thematic similarities in the work of Harper Lee and "author-teacher-activist" (as she describes herself on her site) Gayle Brandeis. I love that big, clumsy, wonderful adjectival phrase by the way and have used it myself...on me, of all people!  Brandeis's most recent novel is Delta Girls, though I read on her website about a sequel to her Bellwether Prize-winning The Book of Dead Birds. Speaking of dead, my pal and another author-teacher-activist Diane Lefer, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books for California Transit, has written a mystery novel. While I generally eschew this genre (mostly because I'm too busy reading other books), I had a jolly good time reading Nobody Wakes Up Pretty, a smart and sexy book, every page an attack on all that is decent, from the wry title on.
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To Kill a Mockingbird and Save Mr. Lincoln: Gayle Brandeis and the Political Young Adult

Categories: OC Bookly
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Our little lit family's sojourns find us back from a week in Baja California Norte, Mexico by way of, yes, Chicago, Illinois and Maycomb, Alabama. Audio books are the absolute best travel companions (can pause, never need to go pee), and listening together to the first four cassettes (yes, old-school cassette tapes from the thrift store) on the nearly 500-mile drive down and Part II on the way back home put me in a vividly dreamy place of excitement, not to mention caused the hours to pass quickly, perhaps too quickly (!) as we concluded To Kill a Mockingbird somewhere in the Santo Tomas Valley just south of Ensenada. How enduringly great is Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel? Reread or listen again, and be convinced, no, reassured in the promise--fulfilled--of the novel as a complicated and complex art form, of the urgency of the narrative voice, of humor and wit as explicatory tool of revisionist history and, finally, of the vivid description of place and humane characterization of people as singular arbiters of moral conflict.
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