How was the first Desert Book Festival? Anything but dry.
Saturday’s one-day festival in Twentynine Palms had a book fair, author signings and panel discussions on such topics as crime fiction in the Mojave Desert, Western writer Louis L’Amour and the challenges facing independent bookstores.
That latter panel had one of my favorite moments.
During the Q&A, a man wondered if the small booksellers could give him a fair, nonjudgmental response to his internal conflicts about buying books online from Amazon instead of from them.
Bookseller Jean-Paul Garnier of Space Cowboy Books replied tersely: “I can give you a two-sentence answer. If you shop locally, your money stays in the community. If you shop on the Big A, your money leaves the community and goes to the richest man in the world.”
The man did not follow up.
A session about UFOs in the desert was, not surprisingly, the best attended.
An audience of 70 heard about musician Gram Parsons’ lost science fiction film “Saturation 70,” the subject of an upcoming book by Chris Campion, and from a couple who talked about their personal encounters, plural, with spacecraft.
Leslie Shaw said she had seen fast-traveling “white balls” in the desert sky in 2005 and again in 2022, “moving the way they move, not a banked turn.” Her husband, Stephen Shaw, said he’d “been experiencing stuff since the age of 3,” including visits by entities that “have followed me to six different addresses.”
Moderator Paul Cullum said of the Shaws’ tome “Who They Are: And What They’re Up To”: “I can’t do justice to the theme of your book because it is very complex.”
But he summarized it by saying that the couple believes aliens are living underground in caverns, that the aliens are sanctioned by the federal government and that they met with presidents Truman and Eisenhower.
“They only met with Eisenhower,” Leslie corrected him. “They didn’t meet with Truman.”
The aliens’ loss, I’m sure.
I only went into this much detail because in my line of work, you can never go wrong writing about UFOs.
The festival drew some notable desert writers, among them Tod Goldberg, Deanne Stillman, Ivy Pochoda, Kim Stringfellow and Claire Vaye Watkins.
The first panel was cheekily titled “Where the Hell is Twentynine Palms?” I’ll try to come back to that angle in an upcoming desert dispatch.
In the meantime, that the Desert Book Festival existed at all is somewhat remarkable.
“It’s like a very dusty L.A. Times Festival of Books,” joked Ruth Nolan, the poet and prose writer. She added: “I’ve lived here my whole life and I never thought I would see something like this here.”
Co-organizer Patrick Zuchowicki said the 278 who attended and the 36 authors seemed pleased, that social media buzz was positive and that downtown had noticeably more foot traffic.
Zuchowicki and his wife, Francoise Lazard, know how to stage events. Hourly book signings took place in the courtyard behind their store, Corner 62, with the seven panels and a book fair across the street at the city’s new Community Center.
(The center’s basketball court was not the coziest place for author panels, but the bleacher seating for the audience was kind of fun.)
The couple is so gung-ho for the Desert Book Festival, they were already planning a second, two-day festival for Nov. 8-9, 2024 before this first festival happened.
“I’m happy, I’m happy,” Zuchowicki told me toward the end of the day Saturday. “I think it’s a good basis for the next one.”
Audiobooks (or ‘books’)
“Does an audiobook count as ‘reading’?” was the provocative headline on Cati Porter’s Inlandia Literary Journeys column in our Sunday editions. Her answer was yes. Mine would be too. We are both, as it turns out, belated converts to audiobooks.
As I’ve meant for some time to write a column on the subject, I’ll consider this the prompt to do so. Email me at dallen@scng.com with your thoughts, yay or nay, on whether audiobooks count as reading and why or why not. Let the microchips fall where they may.
Airplane book
Ontario International Airport is an unlikely venue for a book signing. Yet what’s called The ONT Author Series launches — or takes flight? — on Thursday, Nov. 2 as former USC and NFL linebacker Devon Kennard signs his investment book “It All Add$ Up” from 10 a.m. to noon at Terminal 4’s Gate 407.
If you’re willing to use the ONT+ program for a digital visitor pass and pay for parking, you can attend too. Still, this is probably more geared to travelers who need reading material.
It’s too bad Cormac McCarthy died or he could sign his novel “The Passenger.”
Chin music
Curtis Chin spoke to Cal Poly Pomona students about his new book, “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant: A Memoir.” It’s about growing up Asian and gay in Detroit in the 1970s and ’80s around his family’s multi-generational restaurant, Chung’s Chinese, which lasted from 1940 to 2000.
“My family’s been in Detroit since the 1880s, longer than Ford Motor Co. and Motown Records,” Chin told students (and one visiting columnist) in the University Library on Oct. 26. “My great-great-grandfather moved from Canton, China to Canton, Ohio before realizing there were no Chinese people there.”
Afterward I asked Chin what he’d learned in a Chinese restaurant.
“People always say ‘don’t talk to strangers.’ My parents thought the opposite,” Chin told me. “My parents would talk to customers. If someone had a particularly interesting job, my dad would call the six of us over to talk to him: ‘What’s your job, what do you do, and’” — Chin emphasized the next part with a laugh — “‘how much does it pay?’”
brIEfly
When Orlando Davidson spoke about his detective novel “Baseline Road” at the Claremont Library on Oct. 14, he drew nearly 50 people — one of whom proved light-fingered. Sometime during Davidson’s interactions at his signing table, his cell phone vanished. The phone was sheepishly returned by an absent-minded attendee, who was — of all things — a retired cop. This was the twist ending I didn’t see coming.
David Allen writes Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, straightforwardly. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.
