Wednesday, July 10 "Film Night" with Peter Rainer

Wednesday night on Bibliocracy Radio, KPFK 90.7 FM:  Film critic PETER RAINER. Being challenged, taught, entertained by a generous and smart critic is a valuable thing, not to mention being affirmed by way of a smart political analysis that sort of reflects your own!  Veteran and award-winning film critic Peter Rainer’s writing on the movies has in 30 years earned him a big following, through his work at the old Herald Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, and for this loyal fan especially at the weekly “Film Week” show on KPCC, where so many rely on his funny, sharp, artful analysis of film and all its collateral meaning.  Rainer writes today for the Christian Science Monitor and, lucky for us, many of his essays and reviews are collected in a new volume from Santa Monica Press titled Rainer on Film:  Thirty Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era.  The story of the movies as discussed, interpreted by Peter Rainer is indeed the story of the past weird and wonderful three decades, and it is a well-told story by a film writer who writes elegantly, authoritatively and humorously across disciplines, with style and insight.  But you already knew that if you hear him on the radio or read his newspaper reviews.  Thanks for listening on the radio, or online, or anytime you darn well please on electronic contraptions which you can plug in to the station archives.

Wednesday, July 3 - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Wednesday night at 8 on Bibliocracy Radio, KPFK 90.7 FM:  CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE.  My guest this week is celebrated worldwide for her literary ambassadorship on behalf of curiosity, candor, keen observation and urgent storytelling with both ambitious reach and accuracy.  Her confident, complex and richly detailed prose arrives with gravitas and humor, politics and the interconnectedness of perspectives which seem to demand one another.  I have not been so convinced by a writer of the verity of her portrayals about how we are living, seeing, thinking since reading Doris Lessing.  Yes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is my guest tonight, and what a lucky host I am.  Author of the previous novels Half of A Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus, Adichie has earned both prizes and critical acclaim, as well as an international following.  She is the recepient of a MacArthur Fellowship and author of a short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck.   In her newest, Americanah, the construction of a two principle characters across time and place accommodates elegantly her keen and provocative analysis of life on three continents.  One of the best books of the year.  Thanks for listening on the radio, or online, or as a free download from the station archives.  “Friend” me on Facebook, why dontcha?

Wednesday, June 26 - Poet Andrew Allport

Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM:  ANDREW ALLPORT.  My guest this week is a young poet whose debut collection won the 2011 New Issues Poetry Prize, a very big deal from Western Michigan University Press and judge poet David Wojahn.  Andrew Allport’s the body / of space / in the shape of the human is a smart, sharp accounting of absence and loss, but always reckoning on possibility and a sometimes ironic but urgent call to attentiveness and creation:  “What today is killed on the page still survives in the world where no one reads.”  In a poem set at a local Buddhist meditation retreat, Allport makes a Zen funny while also calling out the artist and the reader, and perhaps a society chockfull of the virtual, and its endless absence.  Beginning as an elegy for a lost father and ending in the rich environs of the natural and man-made natural world of the Romantics, Allport introduces history and philosophy and humor to show us fullness and absence together.  Andrew Allport holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.  His reviews, poems, and essays appear or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of an earlier chapbook, The Ice Ship & Other Vessels and he teaches at USC.  Thanks for listening, for purchasing books by guests of this show, and for supporting your, our community-sponsored alternative radio.  

Wednesday, June 19 - Tom Lutz, LA Review of Books

Tonight on Bibliocracy, on KPFK 90.7 FM at 8 PM:  TOM LUTZ.  My guest is local literary hero Tom Lutz, a friend of readers and writers.  His Los Angeles Review of Books has in two years since its online debut not just filled the gap created with the loss of so many regular newspaper book review venues, but established a community of cultural workers well beyond being only an alternative. LARoB is a collective invention of mind and spirit that defines literary life in our region and beyond. As Founding Editor-in-Chief, Lutz brought on board the LA Review of Books website dozens of talented Southern California writers, offering essential reviews, essays and interviews.  Organized as a non-profit reader-supported online journal, where critics, journalists, artists, filmmakers and scholars convene and celebrate the life of the mind, LA Review of Books is committed, as its mission statement declares “to the intellectual rigor, the incisiveness and the power of the written word.”  Dig it.  Tom Lutz is a teacher – at UC Riverside-  a critic, and reviewer. He is also the author of Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value and Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears.  Join me in conversation with the Founding Editor in Chief of everybody’s favorite literary arts website, the Los Angeles Review of Books, soon to be a quarterly hard copy magazine in addition to an essential online resource for bibliophiles, activists, thinkers and creative Angelenos everywhere.  Not yet discovered LARoB?  Here’s the link, friends: http://lareviewofbooks.org/.  Donate, subscribe, share.

Wednesday, June 12 Jim Gavin, "Middle Men"

Tonight on Bibliocracy Radio, on KPFK90.7 FM:  JIM GAVIN, on Middle Men. Do you recognize the real deal when you see it?  I mean the Real Deal, in caps, or in quotes, or whatever punctuation is required to separate it from The Rest?  Friends, home-grown So Cal short story writer Jim Gavin is the R.D., though most everybody already knew that except me, 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, a Johnny Come Lately, with my over-eager and justifiably excited upper case of enthusiasm.  From Long Beach to Echo Park, Riverside to Compton, Gavin charts the stunted emotional growth of his “middle men,” boys and adult males who struggle with the near-geographical emotional boundaries drawn by work, school, family.  In the too-perfectly, ominously, hilariously titled “Bewildered Decisions in Times of Mercantile Terror,” an overachiever with one foot in failure dreams of spiritual wholeness in her ancestral home even as she negotiates the demise of her corporate career and tries to take care of a kind of her alter-ego, one in a series of Gavin’s lost boys named Bobby – the incarnation here of a series of hapless, feckless, just plain “less” young, old and middle-aged men.  Nora works unhappily in sales for a software company while the childhood family friend, a boy-man, pretends to invent a miracle product. Gavin’s writing confronts our region with the power of DJ Waldie, Joan Didion - Nathaneal West without the hyperbole, but with wicked humor and tenderness, too. This guy is a new favorite, and Middle Men is a must-read bound for a place in our region’s literary canon.  Thanks for listening, on the radio or online, as a download any time you like from the station archives.

Wednesday, May 8 - Alisa Slaughter

Wednesday night at 8 on KPFK 90.7 FM:  ALISA SLAUGHTER.  My guest this week has somehow dramatically amplified what should be most obvious and unremarkable about our lives in the Southland – our clumsy sharing and easy noncooperation with animal lives --- and served it up to us in perversely, delightfully proto myth: “varieties of animal story, anthropomorphized morality and crypto-poltical tales,” Alisa Slaughter has herself called this.  Cougar goes to a ball game, Raven is foreclosed, Coyote is a downtown street vendor.  It’s hard --- by which I mean, easy and fun and rewarding! --- to try and tell where they end and we begin in Slaughter’s accommodating fictional worldview.  She is author of the new collection Bad Habitats, winner of USC’s Gold Line Press chapbook collection.  Teacher and essayist, and now author of a debut short story collection, Alisa Slaughter has produced an ongoing, evolving if you will, revisionist history of our relations – pun intended - to the creatures and places around us.  Bad Habitats is only six stories but with a much larger vision indeed, of a Southern California you will recognize if you look carefully, as she has, where human animal and wild animal residents interact, share and fight for resources, where easy transformation and cooptation and sometimes reluctant empathy are all part of survival across the Southland.  Thanks for listening on the radio, online, or as a download free from the KPFK station archives.  Friend me on Facebook.  

Wednesday, May 1 - Gary Amdahl

Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California:  GARY AMDAHL.  What a pleasure it is to host in studio at last a writer whose work has meant so much to me over many years both in terms of his professional artistic struggle with a weird industry and his success as a devoted craftsman of a kind of prose that explores ideas and character, place and politics with such attention to language as to cause readers to stop and reread, sometimes perhaps out loud, before advancing further to plot and premise.  Gary Amdahl is the author of a first collection called Visigoth, which won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize.  His second book was two novellas, published together as I am Death.  And now arrives The Intimidator Still Lives in Our Hearts, a second short and long story collection that is perhaps his most representative, ambitious and richly complex yet entertaining.  This collection is a good introduction to a writer about whom you should know and care, and a reward for his many long-time fans.  Throughout the stories there is simultaneously the voice of a dramaturge, sometimes out front, sometimes less autobiographical, but always familiar --- and a consciousness, of the artist in whose trust we are affirmed and challenged.  Amdahl’s collection brings together recent stories originally seen in A Public Space, Agni, Massachusetts Review, Liquake and, yes, Santa Monica Review.  Gary Amdahl is one of the smartest, most talented, most rewarding writers you can read.  Thanks for listening, on the radio or online, and as a free download from the station’s archives.