BookFest

I may have died and gone to book heaven last weekend.

I attended my first Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA. The experience worked at a lot of different levels for me--as an editor, author, teacher, and reader.

On the Carey McWilliams front, I was definitely in the heartland. Many of his fans were there, and the biography came up twice: once in my question to Jim Newton, the LA Times editor and Earl Warren biographer, and again when Philip Fradkin picked me out of the crowd and mentioned the book. Both moments were televised on C-SPAN that day, I later learned.

It was also a good visit on the Ramparts front. I met and interviewed Robert Scheer and one of his early co-authors, Maurice Zeitlin. That deserves its own treatment, so more on that later.

If that weren't enough, I also had a chance to visit with Judith Freeman (author of The Long Embrace, her book about Raymond and Cissy Chandler) and Anthony Arthur, Upton Sinclair's biographer. Judith gave the 2006 Bonnie Cashin lecture, so we also had that in common.

I'm skipping some very energizing contacts I had with other attendees, but you get the idea. The place was lousy with people who like to read and write about California. I think I found my tribe.

White/Milk

The CSA conference came off this weekend and produced various pleasures--some predictable, others less so. I met some email and telephone correspondents face-to-face for the first time (Rick Wartzman, Frances Dinkelspiel, John Scott, David Bacon, etc.) and had a good chance to visit with others I don't see often enough (Susan McWilliams, Peter Schrag, Louis Freedberg, Rose Aguilar, Yumi Wilson, Sasha Abramsky, Mary Moreno-Richardson, and many others). Splendid that way.

One of the less predictable benefits was meeting John Geluardi of SF Weekly. He came to the conference to hear about the environmental impacts of ports, but he also mentioned a piece that he wrote on Dan White, whose story will resurface with the release of Milk, the Sean Penn film about the gay San Francisco county supervisor Harvey Milk. (Josh Brolin will play Dan White.)

John suggests that White's personality and motives for murdering Milk and San Francisco mayor George Moscone have been more or less systematically misunderstood. Check out John's article--very worthwhile.

The Real McCain

One of Carey McWilliams's biggest achievements at The Nation was turning a journal of opinion into a forum for investigative journalism. Ramparts, of course, pushed that even further. Not only did the San Francisco muckraker break big stories, but its staff also had the publicity savvy to make the mainstream media pick them up.

That seems to be happening with a new PoliPointPress book called The Real McCain, which is charging to the top of Amazon.com's bestseller list. Cliff Schecter's profile of the GOP presidential candidate has given the mainstream media permission to talk about McCain's nasty temper, which insiders have known about for some time.

I highly recommend the FoxNews interview in which McCain claims, after a false start or two, that the reports are "false or exaggerated." He then bridges quickly to his talking points about what really makes him angry: bloated budgets, corruption, etc. Not very convincing. Other news sites and blogs haven't been as accommodating as Fox.

As PoliPointPress's editorial director, I'm not exactly a neutral observer. But there should be a place in our political discourse for frank assessments of a major candidate's temperament.

BTW, the book is an original trade paperback; on Amazon.com, it costs $10--about the same price as a beer in New York or a bank-owned house in Stockton.

Cal Studeez Stunna!!!!

It's happening. Mark your calendars. The 18th annual conference of the California Studies Association is coming to Berkeley, April 11-13. Check out Changing Climates: Class, Culture, and Politics in an Era of Global Warming.

Boatloads of talent. Matt Gonzalez will give the keynote Friday night at Berkeley City College. The next two days will feature many of my faves: Philip Fradkin, Rick Wartzman, Rose Aguilar, Dick Walker, Peter Schrag, Peter Laufer, Sasha Abramsky, David Bacon, Jon Rowe, etc. Susan McWilliams and Yumi Wilson will chair panels, and Mary Moreno Richardson is coming from San Diego to tell us how she made the Minutemen enemy's list.

The panels will be on the environmental impacts of ports, coping with climate change, working in the green economy, green media, California lit, immigration and the border, and more. Former Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg will give the lunch address on Saturday.

This is going to be good, people. Free and open to the public (donations requested), 2050 Center St. in Berkeley.

Stegnorama Redux

OK, one last post on the Stegnorama in Point Reyes. It received even more attention than I thought. The New York Times ran a piece on it last week. This is the photo of Page and Lynn Stegner that ran with the piece.

In slightly less exalted news, the West Marin Citizen will run my review of the Fradkin bio. Also, I noticed a large ad for that bio in the current issue of Harper's, complete with blurbs. One, it turns out, was from some perceptive reviewer at the Los Angeles Times.

Small World

Another great day at the Stegner conference. Met many interesting people and discovered that Margaretta Mitchell took the cover photograph for the Stegner bio I reviewed. (See that photo a few posts down.)

As we discussed the photo shoot, I realized she had captured Stegner's winning nonchalance, a quality I emphasized in my review. As with McWilliams, that nonchalance masked a very developed work ethic. When this subject came up at lunch, Lynn Stegner noted that the motto at the Stanford creative writing program was that hard writing makes for easy reading.

Stegnorama

I caught the opening panel of the Stegner conference last night in Point Reyes. Super duper. First was a lasagna dinner at Toby's Feed Barn, where I ran into Jeff Lustig. Then we strolled over to the West Marin School gymnasium for the first panel.

When we got there, Robert Hass spoke, Michael Witt read a fine poem, and Mark Dowie presided over a panel of Stegner students and friends. In addition to fleshing out Philip Fradkin's storyline in Wallace Stegner and the American West, those recollections introduced me to the contrasting styles, interests, and life trajectories of the panelists. The only name I knew well before I arrived was William Kittredge, and I'd never seen or heard him speak before. Robert Stone was supposed to attend but had to cancel. Too bad, but the panel was superb anyway.

By utter coincidence, I met Margaretta Mitchell, whose husband Fred was once publisher of Ramparts. I also visited with Melody Graulich of Utah State University and the Western Literature Association, who will speak today.

By no coincidence at all, the Marin alternative weekly has a cover story on how West Marin became a literary mecca--the story is tied to the Stegner conference--and the Chronicle ran a big story this week, too. These guys know how to work it. And I checked the Bookscan numbers yesterday--Philip's book is off to a strong start.

The Cannons on Bush

Lou and Carl Cannon have a new book, Reagan's Disciple, that compares Reagan and George W. Bush at the latter's expense. Jacob Heilbrunn's review ran this week in the New York Times.

Lou covered Governor Reagan for the San Jose Mercury and was senior White House correspondent for The Washington Post during Reagan's presidency. His son Carl is White House correspondent for the National Journal.

As it turns out, Lou is also a Carey McWilliams fan. Their friendship stretched back to the 1960s, when Lou was writing a book (his first) on Reagan and Jesse Unruh. Lou told me he had mentioned McWilliams in every book he has written since then. Not sure yet if that applies to this new one.

When I was researching American Prophet, Lou was very supportive. I interviewed him at his home near Santa Barbara, he reviewed the manuscript for the University of Michigan Press, and he ran my article on McWilliams in California Journal.

I've read two of Lou's previous books: Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power and Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD. Both first-rate.

Ralph and Carey

Ralph Nader is running for president again. Didn't you hear? It was in all the papers.

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote an open letter asking him not to. In the first sentence of his response to her, Nader evoked the legacy of Carey McWilliams, the magazine's editor when Nader wrote his landmark piece on automobile safety.

Katrina's request is a practical one. Nader's response is more about principle. Who better, then, to evoke in your first sentence than Carey McWilliams? But since Carey stepped down at The Nation more than three decades ago, Nader's response has a giants-in-the-earth quality.

By coincidence, the keynote speaker for the next California Studies Association conference, which I'm helping to organize, will be Matt Gonzalez, Nader's running mate. I asked Matt before the nomination was announced. That conference will run April 11-13 at Berkeley City College; Matt will speak Friday night, April 11. Details to come.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Nader picked a PoliPointPress book (Building the Green Economy) as one of his top picks for the 2007 holiday season.

Granted, It Ain't California ...

...but I can still link it to Carey McWilliams.

Last summer, Matt Bokovoy of the University of Oklahoma Press asked me to write a report on McWilliams's Prejudice (1944) with the idea that the press might reissue it. In return, I received a credit for some of their books.

I chose four:

George Armstrong Custer, My Life on the Plains
Elizabeth Custer, Boots and Saddles
Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own
J.S. Holliday, The World Rushed In

I started reading My Life on the Plains and am still making my way through it. Yesterday I came home to find my issue of The New York Review of Books. It included a piece on Custer by Larry McMurtry. Slightly uncanny. McMurtry recommended Evan Connell's Son of the Morning Star, one of my favorites. Also a coincidence since McMurtry and Connell appeared in my review of Philip Fradkin's Stegner bio. (Not sure if Connell made it through the final trim.) Also, McMurtry will make a cameo appearance in the Ramparts book.

This clustering reignited a desire from the mid-1980s to visit Little Bighorn. And maybe that will happen. But in the meantime, I'm tripping on the simple fact that Libbie Custer and my parents were walking the planet at the same time. Actually, my mother might have been crawling the planet when Libbie Custer died in New York City.