November 27 - novelist Victoria Patterson

Tonight at 8 PM on Bibliocracy, KPFK 90.7 FM:  VICTORIA PATTERSON.  In her first two books, a short story collection and a novel, my guest tonight observed, dramatized, sent up the glittering rotten lives of the grown-ups and children of nouveau riche of Orange County, California, wielding an elegant ice pick at duplicity and self-reverence, the too-easy meaningful meaninglessness of the indulged and clueless, yet simultaneously offered empathy and honest description.  Victoria Patterson is the author of the debut short story collection Drift and a novel, This Vacant Paradise, two favorite books about our Southern California place and politics.  Now, in her third book, she offers a fictional version of a lost moment in history, constructs a revisionist tale, and ---best of all --- explores perspective and the authority of storytelling – all around the circumstance of women’s participation in the 1928 Olympics, not to mention the struggle against intransigent misogyny and discrimination against women athletes, period.  The Peerless Four is not only a sports novel, though the excitement, pain, and physical beauty of competition is of course thrillingly told.  The novel is also about who tells the story, and whose story is told, and how and why the teller might indeed be as important as the other characters.  Thanks for listening on the radio, or online.  The show is available as a download, free for 90 days, from the KPFK audio archives.  Thanks always to Stan Misraje, engineer.  

Wednesday, November 13 - novelist Nicholson Baker

Wednesday night at 8 PM on Bibliocracy Radio, KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California:  NICHOLSON BAKER.  The fictional poet-anthologist introduced in an earlier and much-acclaimed novel is back in Nicholson Baker’s continuing fictional documentary self-narration of his life titled, self-consciously and hilariously, Traveling Sprinkler.  The also wonderfully named anti-hero Paul Chowder, almost age 55,  hosts his own make-believe public radio show in his car, and behaves, stubbornly yet as easily as your favorite eccentric next-door neighbor as local purveyor of a certain kind of charming.  He integrates big ideals and ambitions into the hapless and tragic-comic.  Selfish but humane, big-hearted yet impulsive, Paul’s response to big problems or issues – the war, US drones, love – is asymmetrical and kind of nutty, but most of all it allows him to become and inhabit and exist with the urgency and futility of, not poetry this time, but song, rhythm, music, beats.  Nicholson Baker is the acclaimed author of nine novels and nonfiction as well, The Anthologist being the earlier, wildly popular first part of the Paul Chowder story.  It probably does not matter which you read first, but for sentence-level hilarity, wit, deadpan existential arias and joy, joy, joy at idiom, detail and the everyday profound power of words, Nicholson Baker is one of our best.  What a great writer.  What a cool radio show.  You can listen to it on the radio live, or online and, yes, as a free download on your computer, shoe phone, or traveling sprinkler anytime you like, as long as it’s in the next 90 days.  Thanks for supporting commercial-free anti-corporate genuine community media. Oh, and if you'd like more of my take on Baker, here's the link to a recent OC Bookly piece:  http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2013/10/nicholson_baker.php

Wednesday, November 6 - Joanna Scutts on Fascist Sympathies

Tonight at 8 PM Bibliocracy Radio, KFPK 90.7 FM:  JOANNA SCUTTS on Fascist Sympathies.  I’m a longtime reader, fan, and supporter of The Nation magazine --- no surprise! --- and am grateful and delighted at the experience of finding an article, review or opinion piece which not only affirms but teaches me something, provokes, insists its argument into my life, whether demanding more reading and research, or correcting my own misperception or --- I’ll be honest --- confirming what I’d understood.  All of that happened for this happy reader after blazing through a long, packed, fun piece by my guest tonight, Joanna Scutts. Her review, not so much of a single book, but of a genre, inspired and delighted me with its careful yet urgent framing of the so-called American self-help movement and its literature, in a historical context and, yes, a political one.  It’s important to be able to critique the enduring attraction of what seems so obviously a flimsy if ideologically grounded --- in the worst way --- part of how many citizens seem to construct a worldview.  The article, which its author will read from, is “Fascist Sympathies: On Dorothea Brande," from the August 13 Nation magazine.  Who was Dorothea Brande, and how is it that so much of the all-American tradition of narcissistic and pro-capitalist, dog-eat-dog self-improvement literature, Dale to Deepak, emanates from her arguably right-wing bestseller of 75 years ago, Wake Up and Live!?  The writer is Joanna Scutts, freelance reviewer of book reviews, writer of author profiles, and cultural criticism for The Washington Post, The Nation, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, and more.  She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and teaches writing at NYU’s Gallatin School. This is one of the most fun conversations I've had lately. Thanks for listening, on the radio or online live, or as a free download from the station's archives whenever you like.  

Wednesday, October 30 - Brenda Stevenson on Latasha Harlins

Tonight on Bibliocracy:  BRENDA STEVENSON.  My guest tonight has composed an all-too-real nonfiction story which transcends only historical analysis, and instead both taps into our collective memories and perceptions, and challenges them.  She is Dr. Brenda Stevenson, a professor of history at UCLA and the book, in case you have not yet heard, or read it, is The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins from the estimable Oxford University Press.  Mike Davis’s imprimatur means a lot, especially perhaps to smart KPFK listeners, and his praise for this book – meticulously fair but disturbing --- just about sums it up.  The story of young Latasha Harlins’ murder and its reverberations in the Southland is plenty for any historian, but Brenda Stevenson’s writing, ambitious yet accessible, offers the tragedy in a big, deep, complex --- and its perverse way --- satisfying sociological take-apart which offers both reasons and responsibility to its readers.  Brenda Stevenson is the author of Life in Black and White:  Family and Community in the Slave South, selected as an Outstanding Book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America and you’ve heard it a lot on the radio lately as a go-to expert commentator on the new film “Twelve Years a Slave.” I count myself lucky to welcome her to Bibliocracy tonight.  Thanks for listening, on the radio or online, and anytime you like as a free download from the KPFK audio archives. And thanks to those who donated during the recent fund drive.   

Wednesday, Oct 2 - No Kidding!

Tonight at 8 PM on Bibliocracy Radio, KPFK 90.7 FM:  SUZY SORO and BETSY SALKIND, two contributors to NO KIDDING:  WOMEN WRITERS ON BYPASSING PARENTHOOD.  In studio, reading and talking about this project, and cracking wise, funny and political, these two writers and performers join me to explore the alternately sincere, sardonic, careful, reckless --- did I say funny? --- and humane perspectives of childless or, if you will, child-free women. A delightful collection of manifestos, meditations, celebrations of independence from the often oppressive social expectations of motherhood, or sometimes just rants, the 37 essays in No Kidding are defenses, confessions and provocations from, among others, Jennifer Coolidge, Margaret Cho and editor Henriette Mantel. The volumes from the the urgently activist and committed Seal Press, which has bolstered women writers for decades. Bestsy Salkind is a writer for television, stand-up comic and author of a desperately mean and hilarious take on Sunday School Bible stories. Comedian, actor and writer Suzy Soro wrote the memoir, Celebrity sTalker: Stories from a Woman Who Thinks Celebrities are Dying to Talk to Her. Only They Aren't. Thanks for listening.  Heads up for the fund drive, when the station asks you, no kidding, to pay for the only real alternative community media in Southern California.  Listen on the radio or online, and anytime you like as a free download from the KPFK archives.

Wednesday, September 25 - Why Public Higher Ed

Wednesday night at 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California:  ROBERT SAMUELS.  It's a special public education education night with an expert, who's also in the trenches.  Well, no, there aren't any actual trenches but the warfare metaphor - however tired - certainly makes itself useful when you consider - as has my guest, Robert Samuels - the assault on public higher education.  In Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free, he explains where the money goes, who profits, the ways in which higher ed has been purposefully underfunded, and how to fix the problems, and help students and promote labor justice, too. In his short, well-argued explanation and critique, the head of my own labor union, University Council - American Federation of Teachers, offers a radical proposal that's only as radical as a re-imagining, to start, of the potential for our higher ed system, one of the best things about our democracy.  If you think this is pie in the sky, check out the promise of his subtitle: How to Decrease Cost and Increase Quality at American Universities, and then go right to the chapter titled "Where the Money Goes at Research Universities, and Why Students Don't Complain." Or, yes, read his proposal in Chapter 9, "Making All Public Higher Education Free."  Bob Samuels is president of UC-AFT, representing over 3,000 Lecturers and Librarians at the University of California. He's taught at both UCLA and UCSB, and is the author of the blog Changing Universities, as well as a contributor to the Huffington Post. His other books include New Media, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory after Postmodernity and Writing Prejudices:  The Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy of Discrimination from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison.  Thanks for listening, on the radio or online, or as a free download from the station archives.

Wednesday, September 18 - Banned Books Week

Tonight on Bibliocracy, 8 PM on KPFK:  BARBARA M. JONES, on BANNED BOOKS WEEK 2013: Celebrating the Freedom to Read.  Sponsored by the American Library Association, this annual event is a favorite of mine, and anybody with an attitude about freedom.  Read my own enthusiastic endorsement at the OC Weekly’s “OC Bookly”

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2013/09/banned_book_weeks_2013.php

and go to the ALA’s terrific Office for Intellectual Freedom http://www.ala.org/bbooks/bannedbooksweek for more information, an event organizing toolkit, other resources, lists of frequently challenged books.  Jones is the Office’s director, and she joins me tonight to talk about the motivation, the mission and this year’s reasons for celebrations or commemorations.  She and her staff --- and hundreds of thousands of American teachers, parents, kids and cultural workers --- will celebrate or commemorate or agitate (or all three!) starting next week, Sunday, September 22 through 28.  You can too.  Sponsor an event, or just show up someplace and read a naughty book out loud.  There’s an international dimension as well, my favorite US export to the rest of the world.  So, yes, the whole world is listening, and reading.  Thanks to you for listening, live on the radio or online, and whenever you like as a download from the station’s audio archives.