The prevailing mood was utter giddiness when the brand new 11,293 square foot LA County library opened on Saturday morning in Topanga Canyon with Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and actress (and longtime Topangan) Wendie Malick the duel masters of ceremonies for the speechifying part of the festivities that also featured Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, Al Martinez, and others. Then, just before the ribbon cutting, Henry Smith, a Native American canyon resident of more than 50-years duration, (and a man with a character-sculpted visage well-suited to Mt. Rushmore) gave the building its requisite blessing.

In the past, Topanga residents—in general a community of maniacal readers— had depended on a weekly bookmobile for their library urges. Either that or they found a city library, since the closest county library was in Malibu, too far away for homework forays, especially after school during rush hour.

Nevertheless, after several years of draconian cutbacks in the city’s library system (with disaster averted only when the voters passed Measure L last March), it seemed impossible that the county would actually manage to add a library, what with librarians’ hours getting whacked every time one turned around.

In truth, this new addition to the LA County system had been in the works for over a decade, and broke ground in 2008—right about the time the nation’s economy was collapsing. But once having cleared the land and dug the foundation, it seemed like a good idea to somehow struggle forward.

Still, the place was to have opened in the summer of 2009, but got bogged down with seemingly a zillion set backs. There were the expected money problems, plus the discovery of Native American artifacts on the site, and some issues with the design and….well, nothing seems to be simple in the world of public works.

Plus there’s the fact that Topangans tend to be a meddling group so they wanted to weigh in on everything. (I live in Topanga, so I can say this with affection.)

Despite the hurdles, Yaroslavsky’s office championed the project, and managed to shove it back on track during the instances it fell off. It helped that two of Zev’s field deputies, Susan Nissman and Cynthia Scott, both happen to live in the canyon and were ferociously determined to see the damned thing get built.

As the $19.6 million building neared completion—with its silver LEED certified green construction strategies and its whimsical public art pieces made by canyon artists—locals who had been grousing noisily for months about the library construction crews blocking part of the road, screwing up their work commute, now suddenly were wonderstruck that this sprawling new thing had finally managed to bloom at the canyon’s center, and that it was actually going to belong to everyone.

On Saturday morning, after the speeches had been given, the ribbon was finally cut, and the packed-to-the-rafters crowd and their kids gushed at a near run into the library building itself for the first time, all at once several hundred people became simultaneously goofy with delight, myself included.

In our digital-centric age to see so much obvious happiness over a structure devoted mostly to books, literature and reading—well, it was a very nice thing to behold.

“It’s as if the community finally has a physical heart,” one neighbor said to me, “And it’s a library, of all things! How cool is that?!”"

Very cool indeed.

Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

A pile of journalist and editor types plus a gaggle of politicos gathered late Sunday afternoon to hear LA Times’ columnist/editor-at-large Jim Newton talk about his new biography, Eisenhower: The White House Years. The lit party was thrown by longtime Newton friends, former LA Times reporter (now UC Irvine law and literary journalism prof) Henry Weinstein and his wife, author and former Times staffer, Laurie Becklund.

There was a big LA Times crowd—present and former—including Steve Lopez, Barry Sieigel and wife Marti Devore, Lorenza Munoz, Times legal counsel, Karlene Goller, and more (plus a few non-LA Times journos like….well…me).

The politicos who chatted and sipped wine in the name of literature included Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky,, along with former LA Mayor Richard Riordan and right-now LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Antonio came late and had another event scheduled afterward so couldn’t stay too long, said his young and smart-seeming aide. But the rest of the political types were there early, and showed no signs of restlessness by the time I left.

Newton is a very good writer in general and is deeply enamored with the process of—as Weinstein put it when he introduced him—”peeling the onion” whenever he focuses his attention on a problem, question or, as in this case, the life of a U.S. president.

I’m on a fiction kick and thus I can’t tell you how much I wasn’t interested in reading a book about a former president right now, but after Newton read from his book that was released at the beginning of this month, I suddenly became convinced that Eisenhower was precisely the guy whose life I wanted to examine, forthwith.

There are many connections that make his life relevant to the moment. For example, he was truly a consensus president, a goal which Obama repeatedly aspires to achieve, but rarely reaches, even briefly. As commander-in-chief, Ike faced a list of impressively huge temptations to take Americans into battle. But, unlike our last four presidents, he avoided all of them. (Newton noted that one single American service person was killed in Ike’s two terms as president.) And there’re lots more.

Bottom line…if you’re a biography fan, take a look at Jim Newton’s new Eisenhower book. See if it calls to you.

Surprisingly, I find it calls to me.

PS: Not surprisingly, the subject of Sheriff Baca and the jails scandal surfaced in several conversations during the afternoon. More on that tomorrow—plus news of another very different LA literary event.

PPS: APOLOGIES TO SEVERAL DEAR FRIENDS FOR THE TYPOS IN THE EARLIER VERSION OF THIS STORY.

TOO IMPORTANT TO FAIL

The terrible fact is that a staggering 48-percent of all African American males will drop out of high school. Tavis Smiley explores what amounts to a national tragedy and looks at what to do about it.

The PBS show debuts Tuesday night in LA, but check listings for your cable provider to find out what time and which PBS station will have it.

LA TIMES SAYS STATE SHOULD BE FORCED TO DEFEND PROP 8 AGAINST CHALLENGES

The Times editorial board makes an interesting and worthwhile argument. I still don’t happen to agree with them, but their points in Monday’s editorial are good ones and essential to consider as you make up your own mind.

HOW 9/11 COMPLETELY CHANGED SURVEILLANCE IN THE U.S.

This story is from Sunday’s Wired Magazine by Ryan Singel, and is a definite must read. Here’s a clip:

Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein handed a sheaf of papers in January 2006 to lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing smoking-gun evidence that the National Security Agency, with the cooperation of AT&T, was illegally sucking up American citizens’ internet usage and funneling it into a database.

The documents became the heart of civil liberties lawsuits against the government and AT&T. But Congress, including then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), voted in July 2008 to override the rights of American citizens to petition for a redress of grievances.

Congress passed a law that absolved AT&T of any legal liability for cooperating with the warrantless spying. The bill, signed quickly into law by President George W. Bush, also largely legalized the government’s secret domestic-wiretapping program.

Obama pledged to revisit and roll back those increased powers if he became president. But, he did not.

Mark Klein faded into history without a single congressional committee asking him to testify. And with that, the government won the battle to turn the net into a permanent spying apparatus immune to oversight from the nation’s courts.

Klein’s story encapsulates the state of civil liberties 10 years after the shattering attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. After a decade, the country is left with a legacy of secret and unilateral executive-branch actions, a surveillance infrastructure whose scope and inner workings remain secret with little oversight, a compliant judiciary system that obsequiously bows to claims of secrecy by the executive branch, and a populace that has no idea how its government uses its power or who is watching out for abuses.

Read the rest.

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF A SECOND CHANCE – A FORMER GANG MEMBER GETS TO STAY IN THE U.S.

Hector Tobar’s LA Times story is one you shouldn’t miss. Here’s a clip from the story’s opening:

Before this week, the last time I’d seen Obed Silva was in an immigration court in downtown L.A. On that day, he rolled his wheelchair to the witness box and explained to a judge why he shouldn’t be deported.

That was in 2009. Born in Mexico but raised in Orange County, Silva is a 32-year-old former gang member paralyzed from a gunshot injury who reinvented himself as a scholar. It was the errors of his youth — as a teenager he shot and wounded a man at an O.C. party — that led to the deportation proceeding.

Professors at his alma mater, Cal State L.A., testified in immigration court on his behalf. After I told his story in this column, even a conservative talk-show host said he deserved to stay in the U.S. And in December, the government agreed to stop the deportation proceedings against him.

After nearly four years of court dates and adjournments, Silva’s final appearance before a judge lasted only a few minutes, he recalled. “Next thing I knew, the judge said, ‘You’re free to go.’”

This week Silva and I met again, at his mother’s home in Buena Park. I’d come to see what he was doing with his second chance.

He’s teaching writing at Cypress College and tackling his own painful story in a book. Much of his manuscript is about another man born in Mexico, a heavy drinker who was deported many years ago, and who isn’t missed on this side of the border:

Obed’s father, the late Juan Silva.

Juan Silva was, as Obed writes, “an alcoholic, a drug-addict and a wife beater.” Juan Silva, aged 48 at his death, was one of those fraught men who live hard and leave a lifetime of wreckage in their wake.

“I came to this country to run away from him,” Obed’s mother, Marcela Mendoza, told me. Juan Silva was, by Mendoza’s account, obsessed with the family that had escaped him. Soon after they left, he followed them northward……

THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF PRISONS: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A RESEARCHER COMPARES U.S. PRISONS WITH LOCK-UPS ELSEWHERE IN THE WORLD? ANSWER: THE NEWS IS NOT GOOD

“The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.”

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In the spring and summer of 2010, law professor and researcher Lucian Dervan, traveled to prisons in the United States, The Netherlands, and Israel to “compare the way each country detains its most violent and culpable residents.” The results of this research, he wrote afterward, “indicate something quite striking about what makes prisons around the world successful.” His results also indicated an alarming view of the way the United States treats its prisoners and what results from that dehumanizing treatment.

Here is a long clip from Dervan’s conclusions. (You can download the entire paper here.)

What makes one prison a violent and uncontrollable badland, while another is a calm, relatively safe, and productive facility for both staff and inmates? From my travels to three continents in search of an answer to this question, one aspect of each prison seems to contribute significantly to its success or failure. Where prisoners believed they were treated like human beings and were provided with reasonable living conditions and opportunities to utilize their time in meaningful ways, the prison environment was relatively healthy and rates of violence were low. In comparison, [in U.S. prisons] where prisoners were subjected to abhorrent living conditions and no efforts were made to treat them with a modicum of respect or provide them with even a scintilla of meaningful stimulation during the day, the prison environment was poisoned and violence ran rampant.

One final story from my travels will summarize the distinction between treating inmates like human beings and treating prisoners as mere objects for confinement.

[W]hen I traveled to Israel three prisoners were asked if they would volunteer to meet with me and, for their services, they were personally thanked by a prison official. During my visit to the state maximum-security prison, however, the treatment of the prisoners was quite different. At one point, a prisoner was sitting inside his cell reading a book. A
guard, who was showing me this particular wing of the facility, decided to demonstrate how he could control the lights inside this prisoner’s cell from outside. Without acknowledging the prisoner was even present, the guard then began switching the light on and off several times. When he was finished with his demonstration, still not having even acknowledged the presence of the prisoner inside the cell, he simply continued to walk down the corridor. It is striking to observe that the guards at this state facility treated prisoners with considerably less respect than the officers tasked with supervising convicted terrorists in Israel.

In conclusion, it is important to clarify why we care what type of environment exists inside a prison. It is certainly not clear that how prisoners are treated has any positive impact on recidivism rates. In fact, of the four prison systems examined in this Article, the one with the highest rate of recidivism is The Netherlands.Nevertheless, the environment inside prisons is vitally important. First, prisons in which inmates feel a sense of community appear to be less violent than those that serve as little more than warehouses for the one out of every hundred Americans currently behind bars. Second, prisons with high rates of violence are expensive facilities to administer because they require large staffs and incur incidental costs associated with medical treatment, overtime, and sick days. As such, prison systems can perform their functions in a more economically efficient manner by creating environments where prisoners are provided with incentives to cooperate and reject violence. Finally, treating prisoners as human beings and creating positive prison environments is simply the morally correct manner in which to administer a penitentiary.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky stated, “The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.” Even without the significant added benefits of reducing violence and lessening the administrative costs of running our prison systems, treating prisoners with dignity is the moral duty of any government. That abiding by this duty creates a safer environment for both staff and inmates and provides for the possibility of creating better prisons with less money should merely be considered a significant and
wonderful ancillary benefit.

FATHER MYCHAL JUDGE – “WE COME TO BURY HIS HEART BUT NOT HIS LOVE, NEVER HIS LOVE”

Like most news outlets, NPR had a string of good 9/11 stories. This, about the death of NY City Fire Department chaplain, Father Mychal Judge, is a particularly sweet one.

Father Mychal Judge was a Franciscan friar and a chaplain to the New York City Fire Department. He was also a true New York character. Born in Brooklyn, Mychal Judge seemed to know everyone in the city, from the homeless to the mayor.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Father Mychal arrived at the World Trade Center shortly after the first plane hit. And as firefighters and other rescue personnel ran into the North Tower, he went with them.

Bill Cosgrove, a police lieutenant, was also there. When the South Tower collapsed, it sent debris flying into the neighboring building. When the dust cleared, Mychal Judge was dead. Soon after, Cosgrove found him. Then, Cosgrove and a group of firefighters emerged from the rubble, carrying Father Mychal’s body….

Listen to the rest here.

AND JUST IN CASE YOU MISSED IT….FOX SPORTS AND THE STUNNINGLY RACIST USE OF USC STUDENT

As you may or may not know by now, Fox Sports ran a video about the inclusion of two more college teams—Utah and Colorado— in the PAC 10, which will now be the PAC 12. In order to publicize the change on Fox’s college sports show, the show’s “reporter” Bob Oschack interviewed students at USC about their reaction to the new of the change, and asked them to “give a good old fashioned American welcome” the two new schools. Oschack, however, did not interview just any USC students. He picked only Asian students and only Asian students with strong accents. The result was racial caricature that was utterly flabbergasting in its creepiness.

The story was first reported by the Colorado Daily Camera and in short order calls and emails began to stream into the network, Fox Sports at first issued a tepid apology that was little more than an “Ooops. Our bad.” Then, a few hours later, as the fury over the vile video grew, there were evidently some hurried meetings in FoxLand because the apology from the Fox Sports head got a little bit stronger—but not much.

We sincerely apologize to President [C. L. Max] Nikias and the entire USC community for the production and posting of the video. The context was clearly inappropriate and the video was removed as soon as we became aware of it. We will review our editorial process to determine where the breakdown occurred, and we will take steps to ensure something like this never happens again.

The fury continued, thus on Wed, Fox cancelled its college sports show, The College Experiment which had produced the horrid segment, yanked videos from the network site and Hulu, and apologized all over again. (Of course Fox couldn’t stop a million video flowers from blooming on YouTube and the like. For example, here at KCET in it is posted along with a commentary by blogger/teacher Ophelia Chong, which—by the way— is very much worth reading.

Although the news on the incident died down over the weekend, all is far from forgiven. After all, said one Asian commentator, Fox is the network that called Obama’s birthday party “a “hip-hop BBQ” that “didn’t create jobs”—and other fun racist moments. In other words, they created the environment in which it was only a matter of time that the racist crap on the news segments would bleed into areas like sports coverage.

If you want to go to a cool party this weekend and congratulate yourself on doing a good deed at the same time, consider the ChangeLA Fundraiser, sponsored by Liberty Hill, an LA-based nonprofit that has a history of supporting small but significant LA projects that larger funders tend to overlook.

A featured speaker on Saturday is Manuel Criollo, a young LA guy who is an organizer with a group called the Strategy Center, who will talk about his work trying to end what Harvard calls the “school to prison pipeline.”

One of the projects Manual worked on last year was a campaign to end the LAPD’s policy of handing out high-priced tickets to LAUSD students who were late to school. It seems that the Los Angeles Police Department had handed out 34,000 tickets in the last five years to tardy students. Those tickets cost $250, and often the kid and/or his parents didn’t have the extra $$ to pay up, especially if there was more than one ticket involved. Thus often the tickets went to warrant. And if the kid wanted to contest the ticket, the parent had to take off work to go to court and…. You get the picture. In any case, it was defeating cycle that did no one any good. (Did I mention that the tickets went, almost exclusively to Black and Latino students?)

Last April, student leaders working with Manual and the Strategy Center helped convince the LAPD to stop handing out those pricey tickets. As my friend Barbara Osborn of Liberty Hill (and host of KPFK’s DeadlineLA) put explained, “It was a big victory. That’s the sort of work we’re trying to raise more money for—to train more grassroots leaders around L.A.”

The party is on Saturday, September 10, from 3:30 to 5:30 PM at Station Hollywood at the W Hotel.

The tickets are $35 for students and employees of other nonprofits, $75 for everybody else (unless you’re affluent enough to pop for $125, which gets you a reserved seat on a tour that Liberty Hill does in October).

“IT’S ONCE AGAIN IT’S THE ALLEGED RAPE VICTIM WHO IS ON TRIAL, SAYS LAT’S SANDY BANKS

As the cable channels blared out the details of Dominique Strauss-Kahn being released from home confinement largely because his alleged victim turns out to have a less than squeaky clean life, the LA Times’ Sandy Banks found she has something to say about what the reversal means. Here’s a clip:

And Dominique Strauss-Kahn — a potential French presidential candidate — was a wealthy bully with a history of sexual faux pas, accused of attacking her while she cleaned his suite in a luxury hotel. In May, he was charged with attempted rape and sexual assault, and held on $6-million bond.

Then suddenly, on Friday, Strauss-Khan was set free. His accuser, it appears, is a liar and cheat.

She lied on her taxes and asylum application — claiming a child she didn’t have and a gang rape in Guinea that never happened. Her bank records and a taped phone conversation with her jailed fiance suggest she consorts with criminals linked to drug-dealing operations.

Does that prove that she wasn’t attacked and forced into sex by Strauss-Khan? No. But it does mean that his high-priced lawyers would tear her apart on the witness stand…..

2 VIEWS OF 3 STRIKES AND ITS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Tracey Kaplan of the San Jose Mercury News and Andy Furillo of the Sacramento Bee each have stories that have bearing on the future of the Free Strikes law. (Both Kaplan and Furillo are a part of the Three-strikes Fellowship that I covered here.)

Kaplan writes about 3-striker Kelly Turner whose future could have an impact—for good or ill— on the 3-strikes initiative that is expected to be on the ballot in fall 2012.

Here’s how it opens:

The luckiest woman in California may not be the Alameda secretary who recently won $93 million in the lottery, or the Marin woman who survived a Maui shark attack.

By some accounts, she’s Kelly Turner, a 42-year-old former thief once doomed by the state’s “three strikes” law to spend 25 years to life in state prison for writing a bad check for $146.16. Retired Santa Clara County Judge LaDoris Cordell, now San Jose’s independent police auditor, got the courts to release her after Turner spent 13 years locked up. She’s believed to be the only female “third-striker” to get out early.

“She’s turned her life around,” Cordell said.

But if Turner so much as steals a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, it’s not just her new life in a Central Valley town that could unravel. Also at risk could be an effort by a group of Stanford law professors to put an initiative on the ballot to temper the “three strikes” law, the strictest such sentencing law in the nation.

That’s because Turner’s behavior — and the conduct of all third-strikers, including the few who have been freed early and the thousands still inside — will take center stage if the measure qualifies and goes to voters next year, political experts say.

“The only thing voters will see when they get behind the curtain are their faces,” said Democratic political consultant Bob Mulholland, referring to the third-strikers. “Voters will vote with their gut or heart, not their thought process…..”

Furillo of the Sac Bee shows how the use and enforcement of Three-strikes has changed since its passage in 1994.

Furillo’s story explores the evolution of prosecutors’ attitudes toward the law and, in particular, highlights the manner in which LA District Attorney Steve Cooley led the way among prosecutors to a more proportionate application of Three Strikes.

Here are some clips;

Fifteen years after passage of the state’s landmark “three strikes” sentencing law, prosecutors in Sacramento and throughout California have become far more selective in applying the full force of the statute, reducing the number of lifetime prison terms being sought for third strikers to a relative trickle.

While it used to obtain the maximum sentences anywhere from 50 to nearly 100 times a year, the Sacramento District Attorney’s Office now asks for life terms for third strikers fewer than 20 times a year, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The office obtained 16 such sentences in 2010 compared with a high of 94 in 1996.

The trend bears out from Del Norte to Imperial counties. District attorneys across the state used to collectively pack off criminals on maximum three-strikes terms by the hundreds – more than 1,700 in 1996 alone. In the past three years, the numbers have dropped to well short of 200 annually. California prisons housed 8,727 three-strike lifers as of Dec. 31.

[SNIP]

Prosecutors have always had discretion under the law to reduce potential life terms to lesser sentences, but many didn’t exercise it. Los Angeles County prosecutors, in particular, refrained from “striking strikes,” or dismissing prior serious or violent convictions for the purpose of lowering prison terms.

The approach changed when Steve Cooley was elected L.A. County district attorney in 2000. Elected largely on a platform of refining the law’s application, Cooley took the lead in putting a new policy in place. He reserved the heavier sentences for defendants with serious or violent third strikes, but built in exceptions to target offenders with horrific pasts even if their latest charge wasn’t so serious.

Cooley said over-application of the law by some California prosecutors – hitting people for third strikes for minor felonies such as drug possession and pizza theft – prompted a public backlash. A 2004 statewide ballot measure that would have dumped three strikes altogether came within three percentage points of winning.***

“If you have a good law, and you abuse it, you will predictably lose it,” Cooley said at a recent symposium on the three-strikes law in Los Angeles. “If somebody has a rock (of cocaine) in his sock, you give him 25 to life? Give me a break.”

***NOTE: Furillo has this one fact wrong. The 2004 ballot measure, Prop. 66, would not have done away with Three-Strikes altogether, but would have modified the law. People like Cooley, who is not at all averse to some modifications, felt Prop. 66 went too far.

HAMLET IN PRISON

Even non-Shakespeare fans know that a large part of the play of Hamlet features the play’s leading guy musing about whether or not he should kill Claudius. Okay, then, what if the play was performed by actors who actually had killed a person or persons?

The radio show This American life attempts to answer the question.

Reporter Jack Hitt spent 6 mos reporting on the casting, rehearsal and performance of Hamlet by maximum security prison inmates for TAL.

Jack Hitt begins his story about a group of prisoners at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center who are rehearsing and staging a production of Hamlet. The man who plays Hamlet gets in character by recalling times he’s wanted to hurt people, like the crime that sent him to prison, in which he shot two people and left them for dead. Big Hutch, who plays Horatio, explains how it would work if you set Hamlet in a prison, and why it would actually improve a flaw in the plot.

I love this show. Listen when you possibly can.

ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S DEATH LA TIMES DAVID ULIN ASKED HIMSELF WHY “PAPA” MATTERED

As LA Times book critic Ulin goes about answering the question, he writes a terrific essay. A must read for anyone with a love of literature and writing. It helped me sort out my own hot/cold feelings for Papa and his writing.

This weekend the glorious LA Times Festival of Books will be held at its new location on the USC campus, after 15 years at UCLA.

The line up of authors and other intriguing panelists is, as usual, excellent. (You can find the Saturday and Sunday schedules here.)

Both days are filled with more great events than you can possibly fit in.

So to help you with this pesky dilemma, I’ve devised 7 TIPS FOR GETTING THE MOST OUT OF THE LATFOB

In no particular order they are:

TIP #1: GO TO SEE MY PANEL (Yes, this is a self-serving pitch, but it’s also a really good panel). Specifically, I am moderating a panel on Sunday, at 2 pm at Taper Hall 101. It’s called History: Democracy and Its Discontents, and the LATFOB folks gave me a GREAT threesome to interview: Barry Siegel, Scott Martelle, and Thaddeus Russell—all of whom have written books that tell of crucial yet unreported times in American history that have deep resonances for the health of our democracy now.

For instance, I’ll be asking my brilliant pal Barry (Siegel) about his book, Claim of Privilege: A Mysterious Plane Crash, a Landmark Supreme Court Case, and the Rise of State Secrets, which reads with the depth and pacing of a novel as it relates how the American government began its obsession with state secrets—starting with the Supreme Court case that jump started the now, it seems, ever-expanding habit of hiding away any paperwork that might prove inconvenient to those in power.

And then there is Scott Martelle and his book, The Fear Within: Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial, which just came out this month and tells the story of the 1949 trial of 11 of the mouthpieces of the then minuscule American Communist Party.

The third panel member is Thaddeus Russell, who I’ll ask about his outrageously original A Renegade History of the United States, a book that tells of many of the unlikely people who affected the course of American cultural and political development, but whose tales of influence rarely seem to turn up in most history books.

It’ll be a dynamic exchange, I promise. So y’all come on down.

Okay, now that the personal pitch is out of the way, here are the other six tips:

TIP # 2: GO TO SEE ANY AND ALL PANELS THAT INVOLVE TOD GOLDBERG. Tod is moderating two on Sunday, and he’s on a third one on Saturday. I don’t think anybody except for LAT book reviewer David Ulin is on that many panels. There’s a reason for this. Tod is fantastically entertaining. By “entertaining” I mean, eye-leakingly funny. Plus he’s really, really smart and…really, really….you know…. literary.

TIP #3: GO TO SEE FATHER GREG BOYLE on Sunday at 11 am at Bovard Auditorium being interviewed by LA Times columnist Steve Lopez. Father Greg is really as good as it gets as speaker. Last year at the FOB, Warren Olney interviewed him and, during one of Greg’s stories, Warren started to tear up, with a quiver in the voice, and all. Most of those in the audience were teary too. But Warren Olney’s a pro’s pro, so you’ve got to really have something unusually moving to say to get Warren to cry.

TIP# 4: GO TO SEE EGGARS AND SMITH—TOGETHER AT LAST. On Saturday, David Ulin will interview musician Patti Smith and writer/novelist/publisher Dave Eggars. at 12:30 at Bovard. No, I have no idea why in the world those two are being interviewed together, but it’s a weirdly inspired idea. I’m betting the combo will alchemize something that you will miss at your own peril. (Yes, I know alchemize isn’t a verb.)

TIP #5: IF YOU’RE A DAVID FOSTER WALLACE FAN (or even if you’re not), GO TO SEE Ulin again at 4 pm on Saturday, this time moderating a panel on DFW and The Pale King with Bonnie Nadell, Wallace’s longtime agent, DT Max, the guy who is writing a book about Wallace (and who wrote that heartbreaking New Yorker piece), and Michael Pietsch, DFW’s editor and the guy who had to knit together the piles of incomplete and fragmented manuscript pages that Wallace left after his suicide, into a….book. (This will be sold out, so get a ticket now, or show up on Wednesday and just camp out for three days. I really don’t think this is too extreme a plan.)

TIP #6: GO TO ANY PANEL FEATURING SOMEONE NAMED AMY. It’s a good basic rule. The Amy strategy will, for example, get you to a couple of panels with the fabulous Advice Goddess and author, Amy Alkon, or with witty Texas grrrll novelist, Amy Wallen, or with the soulful and gifted nonfiction writer, Amy Wilentz, or with the incandescently talented poet, Amy Gerstler.

Alternately, I recommend going to any panel with the word MYSTERY in its title. So Cal has produced some fine mystery writers from Raymond Chandler forward, a vein of literary genre gold that continues to get richer, and the array at this year’s LATFOB is a satisfyingly bright and shiny one—Don Winslow, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, T. Jefferson Parker, and more.

TIP # 7. WALK INTO ANY PANEL RANDOMLY. Seriously. I’ve done this many times over the years and never been disappointed. There are so many wonderful conversations that will take place in front of microphones over that two day period, it’s hard to go wrong.

On Saturday Janet Fitch talks to T.C. Boyle; Robin Abcarian interviews Andrew Breitbart; Garrett Graff of the Washingtonian, Eric Alterman of the Daily Beast and the Nation, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, the Nation’s editor/publisher all talk about Obama; Jennifer Egan and other fictionistas talk about breaking boundaries in fiction—and I have only slightly dented the surface,

On Sunday, the LA Times’ Carolyn Kellogg moderates Publishing: the New Shape of the Book. featuring Tom Lutz, the editor/publisher of the about-to-launch Los Angeles Review of Books, along with Ethan Nosowsky, editor-at-large, Graywolf Press, …..and…. Oh, you get the picture.

Just plan to go, whatever you do.

We can talk about non-literary news tomorrow.

THE LA TIMES BELL REPORTING TEAM & TO LAT PHOTOGRAPHER BARBARA DAVIDSON FOR THEIR WELL-DESERVED PULITZERS

I believed and hoped that the Bell series would win. But one never knows. The committee can be quirky.

Barbara Davidson’s win for her strong and heartbreaking photos was a welcome surprise.

It was also nice to see that Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad” won for fiction, although it wasn’t a huge surprise since she already won the National Book Award, and one could feel the wind has been blowing her way, what with the Franzenfreude still running so hot and heavy that he didn’t even get shortlisted. But hers is a wonderful book. A satisfying winner.

However, speaking personally, I think the choice of Joseph Rago from the Wall Street Journal for editorial writing was a bit weird. But okay.

Here’s the full list.

AND A CONGRATULATORY BOUQUET TO THE LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS, WHICH HAS JUST LAUNCHED A TEASER VERSION

The LA Review of Books is the first major book review to launch in the 21st century, and it’s an exciting prospect that you can read more about here. (I’m delighted to say that I’ve got something in the works for LARB myself.)

Ben Ehrenreich has written about The Death of the Book, for this soft launch moment.

Expect lots more great things soon!

PLUS A CHEER TO RODGER JACOBS FOR SNAGGING THE RUNNER-UP POSITION IN PEN’S SHORT FICTION CONTEST

You’ll remember writer Rodger for his essays about struggling with homelessness.

His short story opens thusly:

“It’s the damnedest case of Bluebeard Syndrome I’ve ever seen.”

Detective Spellacy lit a cigarette and stared at the police psychologist for a beat through an acrid haze of blue smoke. “Doesn’t Bluebeard Syndrome have to do with matricide?”

“…when you are growing up, there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is the great equalizer.”
- Keith Richards

Why vote YES on Measure L?-–even though it means the dreaded ballot box budgeting, as the LA Times editorial board pointedout in their endorsement against the ballot measure. And even though it doesn’t specify what will be cut in its stead?

Because of what Keith said. The last line, in particular.

Our K-12 school budgets have been slashed. Adult education has been lacerated. Unemployment in LA County is still in double digits. Twenty percent of Californians said that there were times in the past year when they didn’t have enough money to buy their family enough food to eat.

But here’s the one thing this city cannot afford NOT to give its residents, even in these wallet-challenged times, and that is access to knowledge—on the page, online, on CD or DVD—all of which one can get at the public library.

Since the Los Angeles City Council couldn’t manage to preserve an adequate library budget, we must step in and do so.

Instead of protecting our libraries as sacrosanct, the council cut more than a quarter of the LA public library system’s budget forcing all of the city’s branches to close two days a week, shrinking the book acquisitions budget to $1.70 per capita, versus a national average of $4.20, and forcing a layoff of 28 percent of the LAPL staff.

Utterly shameful.

But most of you know all this already. So simply vote for it. If Measure L wins, it will be a very, very good thing for all of us.

(Hey, the writers are for it, and the writers are right.)

We can talk about other issues tomorrow. But for today, vote for Measure L.

NOTE: If you’re trying to figure out what to do about the Community College Board seats, this excellent LA Times article will be of help. There are no endorsements, and I’ve not been following the race closely enough to make any endorsements myself except to say that in my district, I will not be voting for the incumbent. With the huge amount of wasted $$ recently uncovered by the Times in relation to the community college building projects, and the money spent on the election by longtime board members Mona Field and Miguel Santiago and their slate—much of that money coming from contractors—for me, anyway, it’s time for new blood. I’ll be voting for Oswaldo Lopez or Derrick Mims, likely Mims.

Since, I’ve gotten a slew of emails about this race, I thought you’d like to know.

The finalists for this year’s LA Times book awards were announced Tuesday morning and it’s a great list filled with things that you honestly ought to run out and read immediately. (Or soon, anyway.)

For instance, I love the range covered by the five books short-listed for the fiction prize: This year’s megabook, Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen is (deservedly) on the list. It’s a brilliant work, despite all the, you know, Franzenfreude it seemed to trigger. Franzen’s ability to turn a character this way and that, each time letting the light catch a different psychological angle, is genuinely remarkable.

Another delight on the list is the glorious A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, a terrifically entrancing and original novel that uses the story cycle form to create a larger psychic canvas than a purely sequential narrative likely could have accomplished. (It’s easily one of my favorite books from last year.)

Happily, in addition to the above highly recognized novels, the list also includes things like Rick Bass’s Nashville Chrome. Bass—like his friends Thomas McGuane and Jim Harrison—is a kick ass prose stylist yet, because he lives in Montana (the horror) he (like McGuane and Harrison) is often viewed as a “regional writer” by east coast reviewers who are made nervous by people who spend too much time out of doors in states other than Connecticut. This time, however, Bass set his book in Nashville and wrote a partially true tale about the country music business. This change of venue, plus the music biz angle, seemed to get him removed—if only temporarily—from the Regional Lit ghetto. (Not that the LAT judges would have dreamed of putting him there. We have better sense out here on the left coast.)

I was on the judging panel for Current Interest Nonfiction, along with Henry Weinstein and Ron Brownstein, and we love our five finalists.

We found The Big Short and All the Devils Are Here to be far and away the best all ’round books written about the financial meltdown in the past two years. (And between us we looked at all of ‘em, and read most of ‘em, trust me.) There were other extremely worthy books on the topic, but these hit so many marks they easily stood out as important works that were also marvelously well-realized from a literary standpoint. (A word of warning: I don’t recommend reading deeply on this subject if you have any kind of blood pressure or anger issues.)

In another realm entirely, Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, is a beautifully rendered memento mori, as Publisher’s Weekly puts it, “of a relationship fueled by a passion for art and writing.” We all agreed it had to be on our short list. (Two of us were also taken with Keith Richards’ memoir, Life, which features, among other things, helpful tips about winning a knife fight. And who among us cannot use such handy advice? For a variety of reasons it didn’t land in our top five. Yet we wouldn’t have missed it and you shouldn’t either if you are any kind of music lover.)

After reading a pile of the Obama and 2008 elections-related books that gushed into the book stores last year, several of which were quite good and definite contenders, we came back over and over to the surprising and canny insight, combined with great access and reporting, that characterized Jonathan Alter’s The Promise. Speaking personally, I did not really expect to love this book. I thought it would probably be too political, too partisan, too…something. But it was instead a sober-eyed and unflinchingly detailed look at Obama’s first year in office that landed firmly on our individual top 5 lists and stayed there.

I don’t think any of us intended to put a book on either the Iraq or the Afghanistan war on our list. It seemed that there had been too many of them already these past years. But then we read Sebastian Junger’s brilliant and harrowing and deeply wise book, War. In terms of its content, it is about the 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, but really it is just about war—in general. And it is utterly unforgettable.

Oh, I could go on. I’ve read all but one of the finalists in the mystery category and can recommend all. The science and history lists look great. (For example, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is terrific. We read it to see if it should be in our category, but realized it should be in history or science.) And I’m just about to wade into the poetry list.

Go and look for yourself. And read on! Reading great books (or downloading ‘em via audible.com com.) makes life richer and better, IMHO.

The winners will be announced April 29th.

TWO WRONG-HEADED DECISIONS THAT ASK FOR OUR ATTENTION

THE POLICE UNION Vs. THE LA PUBLIC LIBRARIES

I wish this was not grindingly predictable that the LAPD’s union, the LAPPL, would come out against Measure L, the item on the March 8 ballot that would set aside funding for the Los Angeles Public Library system.

In a statement put out Wednesday, union president Paul Weber made the usual dire predictions. Measure L will force cuts in police, fire and public safety, blah, blah, blah.

The LA Weekly detailed the deep and shameful cuts to the LA Public Library system last year in their excellent cover story by Patrick Range McDonald, City of Airheads, which showed that Los Angeles stood alone among big cities in failing to protect its libraries.

Many public library systems — the five biggies are Boston, New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles — have faced an ugly two years of recession-spawned budget cuts and trimmed hours. Yet political leaders who control the purse strings for the biggest cities fought and saved their libraries from severe harm.

The city that has not done that is Los Angeles.

Measure L was, in part, a response. Granted, it didn’t help the union’s attitude toward the ballot measure, that it was proposed by Councilman Bernard Parks who, one could plausibly argue, has never scene an opportunity to stick it to the Los Angeles Police Department he didn’t like.

As the LA Weekly points out in a Wednesday night blogpost, Measure L doesn’t raise new $$ but rather sets aside a certain portion of property tax dollars as sacrosanct for the city’s libraries. This kind of ballot box budgeting can be a dicey strategy in that it ties the hands of lawmakers to move all funds around as needed. But given the council’s unwillingness to protect LA’s library system, supporters feel it is necessary, in this instance, for the citizenry to step in.

As Councilman Park’s chief of staff (and son) Bernard Parks Jr. noted,” Public safety already accounts for 70 percent of the city’s general fund.” That 70 percent should be enough. Public safety is important. But it is also important to feed the minds of our children by protecting their libraries.

So to the LAPPL, please sit down. We got this one.

CRIMINALIZING CAMPUS PROTEST

I’ve been meaning to comment on the troubling decision of Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas to bring criminal misdemeanor charges against 11 Muslim Student Union UC Irvine students who heckled and otherwise disrupted the on campus speech of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren.

Salon Magazine has presented the issue well. Here’s a clip from their story.

The Orange County district attorney has brought highly unusual misdemeanor charges against 11 Muslim students for disrupting a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. at the University of California at Irvine last year, raising questions about the First Amendment and the criminalization of protest on campus.

The case has generated competing free speech claims, with both sides arguing they have the Constitution on their side. Supporters of the so-called Irvine 11, including progressive Jewish groups, have argued that the prosecution is politically motivated because of the explosive nature of the Israel-Palestine issue and because the students are Muslim.

Ambassador Michael Oren came to speak last February at U.C. Irvine, which has been the site of tensions over Israel-Palestine for several years. Members of the Muslim Student Union took turns interrupting the speech every few minutes, calling Oren, who is an Israeli Defense Forces veteran, “an accomplice to genocide” and a “mass murderer.” Each student briefly stood up, shouting a sentence or two, then walked to the aisle and was arrested by police and escorted out. After four interruptions, Oren took a 20-minute break, according to news reports at the time. He was then interrupted another six times before a group of protesters left the lecture hall. Oren then finished his speech.

In response to the incident, the U.C. Irvine administration revoked the charter of the Muslim Student Union for a year and disciplined the students involved. [Ed. note: Which should have been good enough.]

Now, after a year-long investigation that included issuing search warrants and convening a grand jury to interview witnesses, Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas has brought charges against 11 students for “conspiring and disrupting a lawful assembly.”

Let me repeat that: Rackauckas, in all seriousness, convened a grand jury and issued search warrants about a campus protest. Your tax dollars at work. How is this a bad precedent? Let me count the ways.

The Jewish Journal reports that a hundred UCI faculty members have called on the OC DA to drop the charges.