Tag Archives: Louise Steinman

Jeff Bridges, Anne Lamott and Others Join ALOUD this Winter

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Do you find yourself quoting The Big Lebowski in casual conversation or humming Mahler in the shower? ALOUD’s winter season promises not to disappoint with an exciting and eclectic line-up of filmmakers, actors, authors, musicians, scientists, religious and political leaders, and more, taking part in the Library Foundation’s yearlong 20th anniversary celebration. Here’s a round-up of what’s to come, and you can visit www.lfla.org/aloud for more info and tickets.

Kick-off the New Year with these special film events:

Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman. Image by Alan Kozlowski.

Thursday, January 10, ALOUD welcomes screen legend Jeff Bridges and world-renowned Zen teacher Bernie Glassman to the Aratani/Japan America Theatre for an enlightening and entertaining conversation between student and teacher on their new book, The Dude and the Zen Master, co-presented by the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center.

Thursday, January 24, film critic and KCRW host Elvis Mitchell talks to writer, poet and playwright Nick Flynn on the surreal process of adapting his memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, into a film called Being Flynn, starring Robert De Niro as his father.

Tuesday, January 29, actor, director and activist Diego Luna visits on the occasion of his new feature about Cesar Chavez to discuss the power of storytelling as an agent for social change.

Span the globe with these groundbreaking international stories:

Artwork from Gallery Monin.

Tuesday, January 15, days after the third anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, veteran journalist Amy Wilentz reports on the uncanny resilience of the country that emerged like a powerful spirit from the dust of the 2010 disaster.

Monday, February 11, internationally-renowned radiation expert Dr. Robert Peter Gale and writer Eric Lax correct myths and establish facts about life on our radioactive planet in our post-Chernobyl, post-Fukushima world.

Women who wow us:

Monday, December 10, best-selling author and activist Anne Lamott converses with Father Gregory Boyle about the three prayers that she believes can illuminate the way forward: Help, Thanks, Wow.

Thursday, February, 21, journalist and The End of Men author Hanna Rosin, Ms. Magazine Executive Editor Kathy Spillar, imMEDIAte Justice co-founder Tani Ikeda, and Feminist Women’s Health Center co-founder Carol Downer join primatologist and Darwinian feminist Dr. Amy Parish for a multi-generational look at feminism and women’s rights today in light of the 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique.

Homegrown in California:

Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Wheaton residence, Brentwood, CA, 1958. Photo by Maynard Parker.

Thursday, December 13, the newly created LA Grand Ensemble makes its public premiere, blending theatrical and artistic elements for a contemporary and new classical music experience including a reduction of Mahler’s Symphony No.4.

Thursday, January 17, photography curator Jenny Watts of The Huntington, Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, and author and historian D.J. Waldie gather to discuss influential photographer Maynard L. Parker, who aimed his lens at the mid-century masterworks of L.A. architects in Cold War California.

Saturday, February 9, ALOUD partners with the Los Angeles Philharmonic to present its annual afternoon chamber music concert.

Tuesday, February 26, former mayor of San Francisco and current California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom joins acclaimed local journalist Patt Morrison onstage for Citizenville: Connecting People and Government in the Digital Age.

And last but not least, a new iteration of the “Writing and the Art of Not Knowing” musings:

Wednesday, February 6, writers George Saunders and Bernard Cooper discuss how they grapple with the difficult, but essential challenges of their creative work with moderator Sarah Shun-lien Bynum.

We hope you’ll join us this season! Free reservations are strongly recommended for ALOUD at Central Library programs, and tickets can be purchased for the LA Grand Ensemble and An Evening with Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman via www.lfla.org/aloud.

 

Thoughts On Salman Rushdie’s JOSEPH ANTON

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This Sunday the Los Angeles Public Library will honor Salman Rushdie with the 2012 Literary Award for his commitment to literature, and on Monday he will sit down with ALOUD’s Louise Steinman for a conversation about his recently published memoir Joseph Anton. His memoir reflects on his time in hiding when a fatwa had been issued against him for his novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie tells his own story from the 3rd person to reflect on the surreal magnitude of this time—his life turning into the plot of a spy novel. As readers will most certainly be captivated by his extraordinary memoir (buzz is brewing this week on The Daily Show and in The New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times, to name a few), Louise Steinman, below, grapples with his new book as she prepares for the upcoming ALOUD event.

On Living in Hiding

He couldn’t know how long he would be in hiding. He had to find a way to preserve his sanity. He had to find a way to maintain and even re-discover his “authentic self.”  Events that unfolded a continent away affected his everyday life, in a much more drastic way than it does our own. A tsunami in Japan? Debt crisis in Greece? We feel the after-effects when a cargo container washes up on shore, or the stock market jitters. But Rushdie felt the spasms in Tehran in his own home, in his own family, in his own mind.

On Literature in Hiding

Open any section of the book and you are plunged into matters of conscience, tales that will make you think and wonder. In 1986, before the fatwa, Rushdie attended the International PEN Congress in New York City.  He was “dragged into the heavyweight prize fight between Saul Bellow and Gunter Grass.”  He listened to Eastern European writers like Danilo Kiš and Czeslaw Milosz, Gyorgy Konrad and Ryszard Kapuscinski who were “setting their visions against the visionless Soviet regime.” He listened to Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, “articulating views not often heard on American platforms.” Listening to Vonnegut critique American power, and Bellows and Updike critiquing “the American soul,” Rushdie writes, “In 1986 it still felt natural for writers to claim to be, as Shelley said, ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world,’ to see literature as a lofty, transnational, transcultural force that could, in Bellow’s great formulation, ‘open the universe a little more.’”

Can we still believe in the force of literature to do just that? In this frightened world of ours, can we make such exalted claims for mere writers?  I agree with Rushdie that it is more difficult to do so, “but no less necessary.”

–Louise Steinman

Bookmark This! Meet Our New Reading Community

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I am excited to launch Bookmark This!, the Library Foundation of Los Angeles’ recommended reading program. Each month, we will present you with a list of books, stories, or poems recommended by Foundation and Los Angeles Public Library staff, members, and ALOUD participants for your reading pleasure.

In this inaugural issue, we have five recommendations – the first of which comes from our very own Louise Steinman (curator of the award-winning ALOUD series, co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC, and author of The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War).

Nemesis by Philip Roth

“It’s set in the Weequahic section of Newark, NJ during the war year of 1944 when the polio epidemic is stalking the town. It’s a stunning evocation of a fear-filled time and a lovingly wrought portrait of a tight-knit Jewish community in mid-century America. No one then knew the vectors for the spread of polio, so the finger of blame moved nervously and frequently—from particular individuals to entire ethnic groups.  Bucky Cantor, Roth’s protagonist, is a humble man and a gifted athlete whose heroism comes at great cost. I was drawn to this story because I love Philip Roth’s work but also because the polio epidemic cast a shadow over the life of my own family here in Los Angeles– my sister contracted the virus in the early 50’s.” –Louise Steinman

Our second recommendation comes from Suzanne Lummis, a poet whose work has appeared in The Hudson Review, The New Ohio Review, in the Knopf “Everyman Series” of anthologies Poetry of the American West and Poems of Murder and Mayhem, and is forthcoming in The Rattling Wall. Last year her organization, The Los Angeles Poetry Festival, presented a 25-event citywide series, “Night and the City: L.A. Noir in Poetry Fiction and Film.”

The Untouchable by John Banville

“The Untouchable unspools the inner life of a double agent loosely inspired by the brilliant art historian Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge alumni publicly disgraced decades later, when it was discovered they’d spied for the Soviet Union. Related in the first person, the novel investigates the price to be paid for duplicity and betrayal, and in some devastating larger sense, for the inability to commit emotionally to any person or ideologically to any belief.  The Untouchable is not a fast read – in fact, quite the reverse – but at a certain point, Banville’s masterful writing and the power of his slow, deepening disclosure, took hold of me.” –Suzanne Lummis

The next recommendation comes from Cheryl Collins, an avid reader and interim director of Branch Library Services, who has worked for the Los Angeles Public Library for 32 years.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

“I first heard of this book when the New York Times named it one of the best works of American fiction during some period of time. It looked harmless. It was short and I thought, ‘just another tale of a dysfunctional family in some American backwater.’  What I got was something so unexpected and so incredibly beautiful. This is a novel, and so a work of prose, but it comes so close to poetry that invites a careful reading because it seems that each and every word was chosen so carefully and so precisely and so perfectly.  It is a really beautiful and emotional work of art.” –Cheryl Collins

The following recommendation comes from Stan Molden, Public Safety Officer at the Central Library.  He has worked for the City of Los Angeles for over 20 years.  In addition to ensuring the safety of library staff and patrons, he is a professional photographer and has a deep passion for music, most especially classic rock and roll.  Fittingly, his recommendation is a biography of a very famous musician.

The Life and Times of Little Richard by Charles White

“The story of the ‘architect of Rock n Roll’ – as Richard Wayne Penniman called himself – captures Little Richard’s charismatic persona, humor and deep frustrations.  Clearly reflected in his exuberant stage performances, Little Richard’s unabashed love of music and belief in himself established him as one of the great artists of the 1950s.  He was such an energetic and flamboyant character and dominant figure in rock and roll.  This book gives an incisive look into this great musician’s life. A-WOP-BOP-A-LOO-MOP, A-LOP-BAM-BOOM!” –Stan Molden

Our last recommendation comes from two of our most ardent and long-standing members, George and Randy Beckwith.

 The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

“This is an important book about North Korea written by a man who is one of few Westerners to visit the country.  It details people’s lives there; there are some really grisly scenes.  Various people in the State Department are reading it.  It is not an easy book to read, but it is a story about the triumph of the human spirit.” –George and Randy Beckwith

 

 

These books – and more than 6 million others – are available through the Central Library, 72 branches and www.lapl.org.  The library collection includes books in print, audio and digital formats.

Have you read these books?  Post your comments and let us know what you think. I hope you enjoyed the first edition of Bookmark This!  Happy reading, and stay tuned for next month’s issue.

–Posted by Erin Sapinoso