If I had to choose one novel above all others to represent the glories of American literature it would be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s not perfect. Many critics, myself included, believe that Twain stumbles slightly when he reintroduces Tom Sawyer in the last quarter of the book. But, like the flaws purposely woven into Navaho rugs so as not to displease the spirits, the fact that this masterpiece has one or two dangling threads only serves to humanize Twain’s incandescent genius.

This week, however, week, NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Montgomery, Alabama, decided it was going to improve on Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by removing some of the icky words notably found in the text.

First among those words is, of course, the “N” word. Nigger. This appears 219 times in Huck Finn. NewSouth has decided to replace the offending word with “slave.”

The publisher has also replaced “injun”—as in Injun Joe”— with “Indian.”

As my friend Tod Goldberg put it on Facebook: “In other news, the latest edition of The Things They Carried will no longer contain mention of the Vietnam war.”

NewSouth’s editing gambit is exactly that mind-bendingly stupid.

Another pal, David Ulin, had this to say in the LA Times:

To give their project credibility, NewSouth teamed with Alan Gribben, chair of the English department at Alabama’s Auburn University, to do the clean-up job. According to Publishers Weekly, Gribben was motivated by his own deep discomfort over the novel’s language and by the reactions of younger readers. “After a number of talks,” he told PW, “I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person, they said we would love to teach … ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ but we feel we can’t do it anymore. In the new classroom, it’s really not acceptable.”

I agree: The N-word is not acceptable -- although I’m not sure “slave” is much of an improvement, with its unthinking conflation of servitude and race. Like professor Gribben, I’ve discussed “Huckleberry Finn” in the classroom, and it is always difficult and awkward to work around that word. This, however, is precisely why it needs to remain part of our experience of “Huckleberry Finn.”

Literature, after all, is not there to reassure us; it’s supposed to reveal us, in all our contradictory complexity. The fact that it makes us uncomfortable is part of the point — like all great art, it demands that we confront our half-truths and self-deceptions, the justifications and evasions by which we measure out our daily lives.

Huck is a perfect case in point, a rebel who can’t reconcile his love for the escaped slave Jim with his cultural indoctrination, who goes back and forth about whether his companion is fully a human being.

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” he announces when he finally decides the matter. The choice of words is telling, since in choosing not to return Jim to slavery, Huck articulates the central moral argument of the book. This is the point Twain is making, that there is a difference between custom and conscience, between social convention and the ethics of the individual. At the heart of this is the issue of language, the words we use and how we use them, and what they tell us about the reality we construct.

The passage below from Huck Finn—that Ulin quotes in part— is one of the most important in American letters. To remove the “N word because of its obvious offensiveness is to willfully deny the central point that Twain was making about our nation’s horrifically injurious past in which a boy could, no kidding, believe that he would be condemned to hell for considering a black man a person.

Whitewashing that historically truthful moment in Twain’s book is what causes the real damage-–not the appropriate and contextual use of the wounding word in question.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter- and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather, right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. HUCK FINN

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking- thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him agin in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”- and tore it up.

Yes, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn draws blood.

It’s supposed to.

PS: Both the NY Times and the LA Times have editorials on the matter in their Thursday editions.

AND IN OTHER NEWS….DR. ATUL GWANDE ON SOLITARY CONFINEMENT AS TORTURE

Gawande’s 2009 New Yorker article on the topic, “Hellhole” is important and unforgettable. He recaps and expands on the issue on Democracy Now.

OHIO PRISONERS GO ON HUNGER STRIKE AFTER 17-YEARS IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

And while we’re on the subject:

… Four prisoners at the supermax Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown have gone on a hunger strike to protest their solitary confinement. Their only demand: that they be moved to the state’s Death Row.

The prisoners—Bomani Shakur, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb and Namir Abdul Mateen—were sentenced to death for their involvement in the 1993 prison uprising in Lucasville, Ohio, in which a guard and several inmates were killed. They have now been in 23-hour-a-day solitary for more than 17 years. Based on the nature of their crime, they are being denied the privileges given others on Death Row in Ohio, and condemned to permanent isolation.

The Youngstown Vindicator has the more complete story.

It was late September when we last checked with LA journalist/author/essayist Rodger Jacobs who, together with his girlfriend, freelance editor Lela Michael, has been battling homelessness.

He wrote very candidly and painfully about his experience in two long essays in the Las Vegas Sun during the early fall.  At the end of this week the sun will publish installment #3.

In the meantime, Rodger told me that he has received a pile of emails, Facebook messages, and the like, from other writer friends who are facing similar fiscal disasters and who praise him for his courage in “coming out” about his homelessness. They are afraid to tell anyone about their own situations, they say. Many mention the dauntingly vicious online commentary that his homeless essays engendered.

Frustrated at being cast as the point man for a new class of “starving artists,” Rodger has written on his blog, Carnytown, about what he’d been hearing from others.

Here are some snippets:

Since my New Homeless series began running in the Las Vegas Sun in September I have received literally dozens of e-mails, letters, and private messages on social networks (Facebook, Twitter) from colleagues in the creative sector – many of them complete strangers – who are all drifting in the same leaky boat, writing to thank me for my “courage” in telling my story as a writer whose income and sheer survival has been challenged by these hard economic times. These letters are coming from your friends and neighbors who wish to remain anonymous, for the most part.

“I’m encouraged by your bravery in being ‘out’ as a homeless person,” an east coast political columnist wrote me in October. “I am not out — I get enough hate mail for writing op-eds in the local paper. I haven’t been willing to deal with the kind of responses you received after your first piece in the LV Sun. I’ve made bad decisions along the way, but does that mean I should get put out on an ice floe?”

Citing the media attention that I have received from TV4 Sweden, Belgian Public Television, and La Presse in Montreal, she goes on to say: “It’s interesting that European and Canadian media aren’t afraid of your story, but U.S. media are avoiding it like the plague. I know from listening to NPR that Wall Street is good, therefore the economy is recovering. Very little of real life is reflected anywhere in the U.S. media. It’s disheartening, to say the least.”

The story that this talented writer is afraid to go public with is one that I am reading more and more often in my e-mail inbox:

“I’m having my own homeless experience here in —,” she explains. “It’s a long story that includes me spending 2009 as a caregiver to my husband who was dying of cancer. I’ve been out of full time work for almost three years. I recently moved to a trailer on a friend’s property, but I don’t get cell phone reception there, and it’s taking a while to get an internet hookup. It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

Meanwhile Rodger is still balancing on his own financial tightrope. He writes,

As of this evening we have less than $20 to our name, most of those funds on Pay Pal; tomorrow morning Lela has to take the bus to the welfare office on Rancho to sign paperwork to complete her application for SNAP benefits (this proactive move instigated by her superiors at the Threesquare food bank where she volunteers once a week in an effort to “pay it forward” to the Vegas Valley residents who have assisted us this far); after that trip to the welfare office there will be no funds left for her monthly bus pass so we have no idea how she will get to Threesquare on Friday or how I will pick up my prescription from my doctor’s office on Tuesday.

“If we don’t have $208 for rent on Wednesday,” I snapped at Lela this evening in a mild explosion of repressed stress, “it won’t matter about the goddamn bus pass because we will be locked out of our room and sleeping on the sidewalk.”

We are flat broke. We are the proverbial “starving artists” that the Otis Report hoped to debunk. We’re out there and there are thousands and thousands more like us in the night.

More soon.

And more posts on other topics later this morning.

Photo by Sam Morris, Las Vegas Sun

Every year about this time Loyola Marymount University puts on a week’s worth of celebration of arts anc culture, but with a social justice twist, they call the Bellarmine Forum.

This year the event’s theme is Women’s Art and Activism and it features an astonishingly rich variety of presentations and performances. (Honestly, the 5-day event is really one of LA’s secret jewels.)

Here is an explanatory clip from the intro to the week’s festivities written by this year’s forum director, LMU professor and celebrated poet, Gail Wronsky:

Women artists have been imagining a world in which men and women have equal rights, equal social and political status, and equal freedom of movement and expression since the beginning of human culture. They have done this with grace, humor, and brilliance- sometimes in difficult situations, in anonymity, to little effect, and sometimes with a great deal of notice and success. Their combined efforts have changed the world, and continue to do so.

The 2010 Bellarmine Forum, the first to focus on women, is a weeklong celebration of women artists/activists, a celebration of artistic visions that have inspired change.

If you check the schedule, you’ll find that the array of offerings is impressive. Among them:

On Monday night the fabulously insurrectionist Guerrilla Girls will perform.

On Tuesday afternoon, women artists and poets from Cuidad Juarez will be represented by Evangelina Arce, poet and mother of one of the girls killed in the ongoing series of atrocities taking place in what has become known as Murder City.

Tuesday night, the international best-selling poet Alicia Partnoy, who was “disappeared” during the military dictatorship in Argentina in the 70s, will perform with her mother and her poet daughter, giving us three generations of women’s experience.

At the end of the day, Thursday, you can have afternoon tea with Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Beth Henley, plus other stellar women of the theater, Ellen Geer, artistic director of the amazing Theatricum Botanicum, Oscar nominated actor Amy Madigan, and prodigious playwright, Velina Houston.

Thursday night, I get to play a tiny part in the artistic festivities by introducing one of my personal heroes, who happens to be the week’s keynote speaker, the award-winning and indelible poet and champion of social justice, Carolyn Forche.

Anyway, check the schedule. It’s jammed from stem to stern with an unusually interesting line-up of talented women.

So, com’on down.

NOTE: painting above—pre-scribbling—by Ellina Kevorkian

NOTE: It’s impossible to select only seven John Lennon songs and feel good about it. After dithering over the videos posted below, I’m still dissatisfied. I’d have liked to put up Revolution, I Am the Walrus, Give Peace a Chance…and on and on (including Lennon’s wonderful cover of Ben E. King’s Stand by Me).

So what songs would y’all have put up?

We still miss you.

Just to confirm everyone’s suspicions that writers are an odder group than the rest of the populace (which is true, but what of it?) the newest mini-obsession among certain literary and semi-literary types (I include myself in one of those categories) is watching the bookmaking odds on who is the most likely to win the Nobel Prize in literature, which is to be announced on Thursday.

(Don’t laugh, there are odds on the Man Booker prize, too, which will be awarded the following Tuesday, Oct. 12. But since we already have a 5-book short list for the Booker, that’s not as dramatic.)

I first became aware of the bookmaking issue when, on Monday, I read Carolyn Kellogg’s LA Times column on the matter. (And an excellent column it is.)

At that point, the news–-aside from the revelation that there were odds for the literary Nobel—was that punctuation outlaw and master of muscular and gloriously poetic (if violent) prose, Cormac McCarthy might actually have a shot at the prize, after his odds suddenly vaulted from 66-1 to 8-1, thereby putting him in second place behind Kenyon born, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, ahead of the expected list of east coast darlings, Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow, and Don Delillo, all of whom most of the US literary establishment would likely deem more probable for, and more deserving of the award. (After all, McCarthy lives in—gasp—New Mexico, and writes of un-zeitgeisty western types who sometimes shoot others and take notice of the phases of the moon.)

The notion that any American might truly have a fighting chance was especially newsy after the little incident two years ago when the top member of the lit prize committee famously talked smack about US writers as a whole, whom he called too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing. (Thank you for sharing.)

(The Nobel lit committee has an irritating past of this kind of pissy behavior. For instance, one committee member was said to have, for years, blocked Graham Greene from ever getting the award [Greene was repeatedly considered], simply because he very vocally loathed Greene’s left-leaning politics.)

Anyway, as of this afternoon, the odds have shifted yet again. Now McCarthy is at 5/2, whereas Thiong’o is at 7/2. (!!!)

(It’s amazing the activities that a writer can come up with to avoid….you know….writing. It’s an art form of its own, I tell you.)

Anyway, if you too would like to obsess over something that has exactly zero relationship to your actual life, the place to go is Ladbrokes.com, this page in particular. And hit refresh. Frequently.

UPDATE: Wed, 9:30 a.m.

The betting odds still have McCarthy as the front runner at 5/2, with Thiong’o right behind at 7/2. However, the closing horse….er….novelist at 6/1 is Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, author of, among other works, Kafka on the Shore.

Still and all: Go Cormac!

PS: Do we have any assurance whatsoever that the odds-making bears even the slightest resemblance to what the Nobel committee is thinking? Well, um, no. But tomorrow all will be known.

UPDATE 2: Wed. 2:30 p.m. – McCarthy’s now at 11/4.

The event known as GLOW Santa Monica will take place Saturday night, from dusk ’till dawn (7 pm – 3 am). It’s free and features 20 original light installations, art displays and exhibits created by an array of local and international artists for one night and one night only—on Santa Monica Beach, the Santa Monica Pier and Palisades Park.

(The LA Times has more.)

Art….meets beach….meets light. (What’s not to like?)

As to why I’m promoting this? No reason. It just looks like a wonderful thing to do with one’s time on a heat-wave-ish late September Saturday night.

Maybe I’ll see you there.

Okay, yeah, we all knew that all the drama about how maybe Eli Broad wasn’t going to put the museum to house his art collection downtown after all, because maybe Santa Monica (or Beverly Hills) was going to be nicer to him….was simply a negotiating ploy in getting what he wanted from The Grand Avenue Authority et al….but we’re happy anyway.

Santa Monica’s fine (and, hey, it’s closer to my house) but no one believed for a second that Broad would have wished to let go of the majestic cache that the 2nd & Grand Avenue spot just south of Disney Hall would give him.

It also helps that the nearly $8 million in lease money he must pay to the Community Redevelopment Agency will be used to build affordable housing downtown—a fact that is much more in keeping with Broad’s image of himself as a socially-conscious philanthopist.

So, now that the soap opera of dealing is over, it is very, very good news that our once moribund downtown area will have another beautiful and architecturally intriguing space that anyone and everyone can enjoy. (Broad has chosen as his architects the New York firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.)

“This is our gift to the city that has been so good to us.” Broad said in the official release. “We want to make great works of contemporary art accessible to the broadest public, and we can think of no better location than in the center of the contemporary art capital of the world.”

Well, yeah. Exactly.

Monday night, Los Angeles Magazine held a gathering they called a Women’s Leadership Reception. it was co-hosted by Editor-in-Chief Mary Melton and Publisher Amy Saralegui along with City Controller Wendy Greuel.

The women present were an eclectic mix. They were from government (like Greuel, city planning director Gail Goldberg, and longtime California Democratic powerhouse, Roz Wyman) from journalism—(Director of the Annenberg School of Journalism, Geneva Overholser, columnist/radio host, Patt Morrison, KPPC’s Shirley Jahad, KCET exec Val Zavala) —from literature and the arts…from the nonprofit sector and, well, from a lot of varied fields– County Counsel Andrea Ordin, L.A. Conservancy chief Linda Dishman, author Gina Nahai. However, unlike most such gatherings, although all of us knew a few people, no one but perhaps the LA Mag editors who did the inviting, seemed to know a lot.

It took about fifteen minutes of collective shyness before everyone ventured out to talk to those whom they’d not met.

A lot of intriguing and decidedly non-small-talkish conversations seemed to emerge from the mingling (even though accessories were occasionally mentioned).

For instance, I heard from Emmy winning composer Laura Karpman that she was in the middle of writing an “multi-media opera called The One Ten—about…well… the 110 Freeway. It seems that the 110 turns 70 in December of this year. So to commemorate the anniversary, the LA Opera offered Karpman a quirky commission to create an opera about it. (Laura and librettists M.G. Lord and Shannon Halwes blog about their creative process here.)

Wendy Greuel veered easily between topics that included her newest audit (more on that another time) and and the fact she and Wyman were two of the three women ever to get pregnant and have a child while serving in LA public office. (The third was Gloria Molina, said Greuel.)

“I’m glad she took on the DWP,” I heard two different women whisper when they spied Greuel.

Stephanie Stone, the Vice Chair of LA County’s Veterans Advisory Commission, told me disturbingly that according to the most recent estimate, 25 percent—likely more—of the women soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, have been sexually abused during their time in the service. One out of four.

(I’ll be following up on that story.)

I heard from Elena Stern of Para Los Ninos about the desperate need for psychological counseling among the children living on Skid Row whom her agency serves.

I talked with Literary agent Bonnie Nadell, who was the longtime agent of the late David Foster Wallace, about whether she thought that D.T. Max, who wrote the long, unutterably sad, but relievingly informative story about DFW in the New Yorker, was the right person to do the upcoming biography of Wallace. (She did. She thought he’d be good. And, since she’d known both men for over 20 years, I figured she was in likely the best position to judge the matter.)

Mary Melton also mentioned, when she gave her welcoming speech, that Roz Wyman was the youngest LA City Council person ever. (She was first elected in 1953 at the age of 22.) Mary also said that Roz was instrumental in bringing the Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957, figuring that LA needed its own sports team.

And so it was that, as the longest night of the year unfolded—along with myriad conversations—everyone seemed to settle into the pleasant realization that it was nice (even if merely for a change) for just girls to get together with just girls…in LA. (And a kick-ass group of grrrllls it was.)

Thanks to LA Magazine for making it possible.

After 8 seasons, Monday night was the last night of the series, “24.”

Most times, no matter its popularity, a TV series is just a TV series. But in the case of this TV show, when the series’ main character, Jack Bauer, was referenced more than once on the floor of Congress, and Bauer’s actions were trotted out as an exhibit A in the middle of a panel discussion about torture and terrorism law, by none other than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and then in 2007, the Dean of West Point, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, along with some FBI interrogators and representatives of Human Rights First, traveled to LA to ask the show’s creative team to tone down the torture scenes because of the impact they were having both on troops in the field and America’s reputation abroad. ….I think we can safely say that we’re in some other kind of realm that transcends the “it’s only a TV show” trope.

The series showrunner and exec-producer, Howard Gordon, was on Fresh Air on Monday and had his own answer to the controversy:

“To say that we’ve been some … mouthpiece for some political point of view — it’s not only specious — but I promise you, it is insane. Any fly on the wall and anyone who’s been there would tell you the same. So unfortunately, look — the show is a show for one thing. It’s a thriller in the vein of Bourne Identity or Rambo or Dirty Harry. And the hero finds the bad guy and shakes out of him where the bomb is. And again, the real-time scenario lent itself really well to that. Frankly, for the first five years, I don’t think you could find a single article or op-ed piece that used the word ‘torture’ or described that this was somehow morally repugnant or corrosive or anything. I think what happened was, when Abu Ghraib happened and Guantanamo happened — the show certainly benefited from some kind of post-9/11 wish fulfillment; you had a guy who cut to the chase, who did whatever was necessary, and again there was some wish fulfillment involved — I do think the show experienced some of the blowback. We did understand that the climate had changed, because of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, it had changed. … [A]nd it put us into a conundrum. Honestly, at the end of Season 6 — where Jack had been acting a certain way — we had a choice: Either we renounce the series and admit we’re a bunch of torture-mongering, morally corrosive torture pornographers or we find a way of confronting this issue and this changed world that we’re in. And, in a strange way, it gave us fodder for the seventh season.”

Yes, well…

As a die-hard “24″ fan I have long been ambivalent about some of the show’s script choices, but have hung in faithfully because the delights of the series seemed always to outweigh its unsettling downsides.

(That is with the exception of 2007’s notorious Season 6, which went completely and creepily off the rails, both in terms of its over embrace of brutality, and frankly, in terms of the quality of the writing in general. But then, as Gordon said, it recovered in Season 7 where it articulated some of the moral issues around torture, plus had some very nifty plot twists, so all was forgiven.

Or sort of forgiven. It was somewhat vexing that both Fox and Friends and Glenn Beck—whose moral compasses, such as they ever were, seem to have long ago rusted—became so ooozily enamored of the show in Season 7, that they failed to perceive its ambiguities and still managed to use it as ajustification for torture not a caution against it.)

And, nearly any pronouncement from former “24″ producer, and co-creator, Joel Surnow, was enough to make some of us wonder if we were, oh, I don’t know, risking the health of our immortal souls by watching the show at all. But Surnow is thankfully long gone.

Now the last few hours of Season 8 have taken us into what is, in many ways, the darkest place of all.

In hour 20, we had to watch as Jack coldly executed the latest CTU insider traitor, Dana Walsh. (“24″ has pioneered a whole new class of evil broads—13 female villains in total. They have ranged from the queen of them all, Nina Myers, through the very, very bad first lady, Sherry Palmer, to this season’s Dana Walsh, who managed to project a sort of sloe-eyed, sexy spawn of Satan look that became its own kind of special effect.)

In hour 21, there was the matter of Jack disemboweling the Russian sniper/assassin who killed FBI agent and Bauer paramour, Renee Walker—AKA Jack’s Last Chance for Happiness. Now most of us might honestly have wanted to disembowel the guy too, but most of us also, I trust, would have stopped short of it (even if there was the vague justification of getting the guy’s recently swallowed cell phone sim card).

Hour 22 featured Jack clad in an Imperial storm troopers-like outfit as he prepared to kidnap the divinely Nixonian ex-President Charles Logan who, after seeing the scarily helmeted Bauer approach in the distance, screams in high hysteria to his secret service agent “That’s Jack Bauer, he’s coming to get me!” (A great “24″ moment, as were nearly all of actor Gregory Itzin’s scenes this season.)

Finally, there was the very last two hours—which I am reluctant to give away here if you haven’t yet watched the finale. I can tell you that the poet Rumi was quoted well in a crucial moment of foreshadowing—and that, in the end, everything came down to Jack and Chloe O’Brien—Mary Lynn Rajskub’s sour-faced and fabulously courageous character creation.—which was exactly as it should be.

I can also tell you that, for me anyway, the finale was a worthy two hours with which to cap the best of the eight seasons—complicated, multi-shaded, possessed of the courage of its convictions, and fraught with the knowledge that cleaving to what is just and right and true is the only worthwhile path, no matter the cost (and that there will be a cost), but when the cleaving grows too single-minded and brittle, it has its own soul corroding moral dangers.

So what, in the end did it all mean? Was it only a TV show as its producers say? Was it a pop cultural reflection of our desire for good and evil to be clearly demarcated with bright, shining lines in a manner that real life rarely provides? Or did it start to actually affect in troubling ways the culture it purported to merely reflect in fantastical broad strokes (with no meal times or bathroom breaks)?

Or was it all of the above—and, on occasions, like Monday night, satisfyingly more.

I’ll go with the latter.

What do you think?

DAVE EGGERS’ PRIZES AND QUIRKS ON LAT BOOK PRIZE NIGHT

As most of you know, the LA Times Book Awards were this past Friday night, and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books took place on Saturday and Sunday at UCLA. 125,000 people were expected at the LATFOB and judging from the crowds I saw both days, it is likely that the book fest hit its mark or more.

But first the awards: the full list of the winners may be found here. (For those of you looking for a good reading list, the lists of winners and finalists are a great place to start. I’ve already downloaded on to my iPod the audible version of the First Fiction winner, Phillipp Meyer’s American Rust)

I was a judge for the category of Current Interest—along with my wonderful and wise colleagues Henry Weinstein and Bill Boyarsky, The three of us read a preposterous number of books, many of which were very deserving. (A few, not so much.)

We finally narrowed it down to the five below, all of which featured excellent writing and reporting and dealt topics of consequence.

“Columbine” by Dave Cullen
“Zeitoun” by Dave Eggers
“Strength in What Remains” by Tracy Kidder
“Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sharon WuDunn
“The Healing of America: The Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Healthcare” by T.R. Reid

The winner was Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun-–my personal favorite and a book I can recommend unhesitatingly to any of you. It’s a great story, meticulously reported, and possessed of the grace and velocity of a good novel.

Eggers also got a newly created Innovator’s Award–which “recognizes the people and institutions that are doing cutting edge work to bring books, publishing and storytelling into the future, whether in terms of new business models, new technologies or new applications of narrative art.”

(For the details go here.)

However, while assuredly very deserving of the latter honor, Eggers turned out not be be your average techno nerd/writer. In the course of accepting the two awards, Eggers blurted that the only way he got any reading done was to completely unplug the Internet at his house. “I only go online twice a day,” he said. Even then, in order to get a WiFi signal, he takes his laptop and drives to the parking lot of a local carpet store, and steals their WiFi.

When he and I spoke later on in the evening, we talked about the unplugging issue and I mentioned in passing that, unplugging aside, I thought that the iPhone app for his magazine “McSweeney’s was particularly good.

Eggers winced. “I’ve never seen it,” (said Mr. Innovation).

Me: “What?! You’re kidding.”

Eggers: (apologetically) I saw the drawing. I mean, I thought the drawing was good.

Me: No really, that’s bad.

Eggers: Probably.

[Here's a demo of the app.]

Yet as a writer, a publisher, and as an innovative promoter of the written word-–from basic literacy to literature— Eggers is very, very good. As LA Times Book Review editor David Ulin said to me after he interviewed Dave Eggers on Saturday at the Book Festival—he’s the real deal.