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.  

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.  

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.

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.