Los Angeles Literature Events 9/21/2015 – 9/27/15
Erica Jong on “Fear of Dying”
Four decades ago, Erica Jong revolutionized the way we look at love, marriage and sex. Her world-wide bestseller,” Fear of Flying” opened the doors for writers from Jennifer Weiner to Lena Dunham. Now she does it again by giving us powerful, new perspective on the next phase of women’s lives. Full of the sly humor, deep wisdom and poignancy we know from her poetry, fiction and essays, she delivers the novel women everywhere have been waiting for… “Fear of Dying.”
Where: Vroman’s Bookstore
Date: Monday, the 21st
Time: 7 pm
Address: 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, California 91101
Website: https://www.vromansbookstore.com/erica-jong-sept-2015
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Love Across the Color Line: Remembering Alan Kaplan
NOTE: A touching essay about the intersection of race and love, by one solid native Angeleno journalist and essayist Erin Abury Kaplan.
By
Fourteen years ago I wrote an article for Salon.com published for Valentine’s Day about how I met my husband, Alan Kaplan. I ended the article on a cautionary note: our hugely improbable, racially romantic story did not mean that we’d solved the problems of the color line. Far from it. Strip away the circumstances that I was a reporter and he was the reluctant subject of an interview for a story I was writing at the time, and we were merely a black woman and a Jewish man from different parts of L.A. who shared the same politics and bottomless outrage about the historic effects of that color line. He taught about it–for 33 years at Hamilton High School’s humanities magnet–I wrote about it. That was the most obvious thing we shared in common, but there were other things too, ordinary couple things like a complicated love of the Dodgers, eating out (neither of one us cooked), movies, sifting through stories in the latest issue of the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly. A few years into the marriage we discovered that we both loved dogs, and rescuing dogs; we adopted one post-Hurricane Katrina and eventually accumulated a whole houseful.
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Los Angeles Literary Events 9/14/15 – 9/20/15
Evan Thomas on “Being Nixon”
Noted author Evan Thomas discusses and signs “Being Nixon: A Man Divided” in which he peels away the layers of a complex, confounding figure and examines the gaping character flaws that would drive him from office and forever taint his presidency and legacy.
Where: Vroman’s Bookstore
Date: Monday, the 14th
Time: 7 pm
Address: 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, California 91101
Website: https://vromansbookstore.com/evan-thomas-sept-2015
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Writer Claudia Rankine On White Blindness, The Black Body, and the Freedom to Live
NOTE: The following is an interview conducted by one of Los Angeles’ great journalists and native Angelenos Lynell George.
On the American “stage” — within mainstream media and in public discourse — the discussion of race and racism is often defined by spectacle: an event that we can collectively point to that plays out on our screens, large and small. It might be the grievous roll call of black lives cut short by raw acts of violence; or it might take shape in next week’s headlines — a bungled arrest or denial of dignity — that eerily mirrors incidents of three generations ago.
While those high-profile, super-charged moments are indeed odious and shameful, they are indicative of a deeper malady affecting the American psyche, writer Claudia Rankine argues in her most recent book, “Citizen: An American Lyric.”
Los Angeles Literary Events 9/7/15 – 9/13/15
Speakeasy/Open Mic Night
It’s the first Monday of the month, and we’ve got our open mic night happening! Come early to get a good spot in line!
Where: The Last Bookstore
Date: Monday, the 7th
Time: 7:45 pm – 10:45 pm; Sign ups 7:45
Address: 453 S. Spring St., Los Angeles, California 90815
Website: https://www.http://lastbookstorela.com/events/speakeasy-open-mic-night-2/
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A Los Angeles poet’s revolution of everyday life
by E. Tammy Kim, From http://www.america.aljazeera.com
As gentrification sweeps the city, Sesshu Foster has quietly become the poet laureate of a vanishing neighborhood
LOS ANGELES — In this high-turnover city, the Eastside, more than the moneyed west, has
seemed to hold on to its past. There are eccentric bungalows and blanched murals, and shopping corridors with the foot traffic and feel of a village market. Neighborhoods such as Lincoln Heights, El Sereno and City Terrace have thus far escaped the peculiar affliction of the upscale coffee shop. Their residents and business owners are still predominantly Latino and Asian, and largely working class — though perhaps not for long. According to trend-spotters, East LA is the molten core of gentrification, full of hipsterpreneurs with backing from friends in venture capital.
To see the real Eastside, ask the writer and teacher Sesshu Foster to take you on a little tour. He’ll pick you up downtown in his Toyota SUV, air conditioner whooshing, a Ry Cooder track pulsing. You’ll cross the LA River — thin puddles in a long concrete ditch — and keep going down Cesar Chavez, originally named Brooklyn Avenue by Jewish émigrés. Every few blocks, you’ll glimpse a faded mural and Foster will explain the story behind each one. If there’s graffiti, he’ll denounce the taggers’ “total disregard for their grandparents’ social art” in his unhurried Angeleno drawl.
Foster, 58, the author of four award-winning books of poetry and prose, is an encyclopedist by nature, the Diderot of the neighborhood. His writing is political, experimental and consistently local, even unfashionably so. A family man and full-time public school teacher, he’s never focused on self-promotion, yet he is praised within literary circles and counts U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita and poets Claudia Rankine and Amy Uyematsu among his friends and peers. Herrera says Foster might be better known if not for the day-to-day “pressure [on] working-class writers, writers of color… writing for the community.”
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Los Angeles Literary Events 8/31/15 – 9/6/15
Long Beach Poets Listening Room Open Mic
Weekly open mic. Let your voice be heard. Your stories matter
. Step up to the mic. Imagine a different kind of open mic, in a listening room so you can hear the music and have your music heard.Why just imagine it? We close the front door and sign-up sheet at 7:05. After 7:05 please enter through the door down the hall and around the corner. If there is room on the list, we will reopen it during the 10 minute break beginning sometime around 8:15. We are limiting the list to 20 signups and only guaranteeing the first 17 that they will get to perform. The last three will get up if there is time. Info for performers: This is a music and poetry open mic. We have a state-of-the-art sound system with a stage monitor. We have an electronic keyboard. If you want to use a backing track, the sound system has a cable with a mini jack plug that works with almost any phone, tablet, computer or CD player. We welcome light percussion (e.g., cajon, djembe, snare with brushes) but, out of respect for our neighbors, we do not allow full drum kits. No bagpipes. Material will need to be appropriate for the audience. We don’t really expect children, but have something ready just in case.
Where: Gina M. Woodruff Gallery
Date: Monday, the 31st
Time: 7:00 pm – 9:30 pm; Sign ups 6:40
Address: 5555 E Stearns St. Suite 203, Long Beach, California 90815
Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ImagineAnOpenMic/
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Words On The Streets: City Poet Steven Reigns
INTERVIEW BY KARINA WILSON
From litreactor.com
Poets were once central to public life. The Ancient Greeks and Romans regarded poetry as the best way to record epoch-making events, laud emperors or deities, and map the quests completed by heroes. Wherever a city fell or a conqueror rose, a poet observed from the sidelines and would, later, carve their account into cool clean lines of dactylic hexameter. Civilization, politics, and moral principles compressed into feet and couplets; history registered as art.
Somewhere along the line since, however, poetry’s civic status faded – perhaps in the palaces of Renaissance princes, who liked to control the flow of words through bestowing, and removing, private patronage? Poetry became a luxury, a privilege reserved for residents of ivory towers, far removed from everyday discourse, reserved for the most personal expression. But, thanks to initiatives like Poetry In Motion on transport systems it didn’t disappear from public spaces entirely.
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Los Angeles Literary Events 8/23/15-8/30/15
Han Vance discusses and signs Golden State Misadventures
Golden State Misadventures chronicles an amusing and ultimately life-altering quest of a soon-to-be-divorced father from Atlanta as he travels turn of the millennium California, immersing himself in the urban grittiness of the Bay Area, glitzy yet morally ambiguous quirkiness of Hollywood and slow burn reclusiveness of the Emerald Triangle. Han Vance is an Atlanta-based American culture reporter: writer (author/journalist/poet/blogger).
Where: Book Soup
Date: Monday, the 24th
Time: 7:00 pm
Address: 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90069
Website: http://www.booksoup.com/event/han-vance-discusses-and-signs-golden-state-misadventures
Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 8/23/15-8/30/15”
Steph Cha talks about the L.A. immigrant noir of ‘Dead Soon Enough’
IVY POCHODA
Steph Cha might be the world’s only author of Korean American feminist 
noir. That might sound overly niche, but it isn’t. Her
Juniper Song detective series featuring, you guessed it, a female Korean PI, plays by most of the conventions of the noir genre and does so with much finesse.
Juniper might idolize Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s great hard-boiled detective, but she more closely resembles another Los Angeles PI — Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins. Like Mosley, Cha weaves her mysteries around Los Angeles’ immigrant and outsider communities, creating a richer and more ethnically diverse (and more accurate) portrait of the city than the average detective novel.
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