One thing that the Apple geeks aren’t mentioning about the Intel chip use is something that I see as pretty important. If you were thinking of bolting from PC to Mac because of the DRM invasiveness, Apple is no longer a sanctuary. This is a bad move in more ways than one.

The headline for this USA Today BEA wrapup from Carol Memmott is “Glitterati outshine literati at BookExpo.” That’s funny. Because I saw plenty of small press booths crowded big-time on Friday and Saturday. I saw an NPR reporter talking with Dennis Loy Johnson. I saw oodles of folks converge upon the Independent Consortium party. The list goes on.

Granted, the main booths at Random House and Time Warner were crowded shitstorms. But then I didn’t come to BEA to touch John Irving’s hem. I came to find out about upcoming releases, meet people I had corresponded with, and get a better sense of how the publishing industry operated.

So far, in the reports that have been proffered, there seems to be two common reactions to BEA floating around:

1. Big popular names occluded the little guys.
2. This was a despicable showcase about the “business” of books, rather than books themselves.

In response to Point (1), I should point out that nobody is holding a gun to your head to see Billy Crystal. Nobody is forcing you to waste your time standing for about an hour in line to get two minutes with Spike Lee. BEA is really an experience that an individual makes of it. Reading Carol Memmott’s article, you would think that literary people were nowhere to be found. But the fact of the matter that it was Memmott, a reporter who purports to “cover books” for a major newspaper, who decided that Billy Crystal’s schtick, Candace Bushnell, and Tab Hunter were more important (and I’m giving Memmott a generous margin here) than getting a goofball report (as I did) about Anne Rice’s latest novel or (more nobly) finding out about the interesting novels in translation that Farrar Strauss & Giroux were profiling.

There was no shortage of interesting books at BEA to write about. And there were limitless people to talk to.

Memmott’s article then is not really about books at all, but about a journalist “reporting” who was at the autograph table — information readily available at the BEA main site — and an opportunity to hobnob with Tab Hunter about his sexuality. What then distinguishes this nonsense from a People Magazine profile?

As to Point (2), I don’t necessarily believe that thinking about the publishing of books detracts from the appreciation of books as works of art, provided that one keeps the lines of thought separate. In fact, I’d say that it’s pretty damn essential for us to be thinking about the business of publishing a little bit, if only so we can understand why certain books get published and others don’t. It is the business, as unsavory as it may be, that determines who are the midlisters, who are the A-listers, and who are left ignobly in the remainders piles.

Why then should we ignore it? If book lovers cut this area of thought from their ruminations, then in my view they are no different than the book publishers who often fail to recognize the book community. Maybe it’s the idealist in me, but I personally believe that if this chasm is bridged in some way, that if both sides make an effort to understand each other’s needs, the book climate can only be improved. Literary lovers get the books they want published and publishers discover the conduits in which to make their literary fiction sell.

Part of the problem is that publishers view the publishing business with a “winner take all’ approach. They dwell upon the Billy Crystals and the Candace Bushnells of our world who need to add rumpus rooms to their palatial Park Avenue estates. Memmott is culpable here, because her article is echoing this hard line. The duty here is for all sides to think and act more flexible about literature and to consider that sometimes a small press title or a book distributed through the streets might just turn a profit in its own right. And the duty for all journalists is to remain unseduced by celebrity bloat and realize that 30,000 people descend every year because it’s about the books, stupid.

The tireless Dan Wickett is blogging over at Scott’s and taking full advantage of his stint to offer his comprehensive coverage.

I’ve arrived back in San Francisco. But with all the information I have to process, I’m not done with BEA by a long shot. To get a head start, I started listening to one of the minidiscs on the flight and transcribed the following notes until my laptop battery ran out. (DFW fans, take note. Major details on Consider the Lobster to follow.)

Please note that because my crap is still packed, I’ll be referring to the publishing houses as “they” and “them.” I did in fact speak with specific people, but I want to ensure that I spell their names right. So without further ado:

Again, I can’t convey how cool the people at Soft Skull Press are. Poor Richard Nash was sounding hoarse when Bud and I talked with him at length during the Independent Consortium party. By the time he got to PGW, the poor man was sans voice. But I did want to point to two nonfiction titles on the catalog that were introduced to me: Michael Standaert’s Skipping Towards Armageddon, a takeoff on Joan Didion’s famous book, is an expose that dishes the dirt on the Left Behind series. Equally noteworthy is a collection entitled America’s Mayor, which is critical of Rudolph Guiliani and examines his legacy before 9/11 (a mayorship that seems all too overlooked these days).

I hooked up with the folks at Tor to see if they had any emerging science fiction authors that they were promoting. What’s interesting is that, aside from the next Wheel of Time volume coming nout on October 11 and The Road to Dune (which will collect several previously unpublished Frank Herbert essays), Tor has shifted to an interesting YA emphasis with a new imprint called Starscape. The field is relatively new for them. And it’s a particularly interesting direction for Tor and for science fiction in general, given that Monkeybrain is also specializing in pure speculative adventure anthologies (inspired by the Chabon-edited anthologies for McSweeney’s). If I had to offer a prediction, I think we’re going to be seeing a good deal of books that pay homage to Heinlein-style juvenile fiction and a return to Golden Age-style speculative fiction in the next year or two. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not. On one hand, part of me sees this as a backlash to the prodigious work of China Mieville and John C. Wright. But if both subgenre markets are allowed to flourish, then this is still a good sign that speculative fiction is alive and well.

At St. Martin’s, there’s a hot allegorical title coming in October. And David Maine (who may very well be a smarter Gregory Maguire) has a new retelling of Cain and Abel called The Preservationist. St. Martin’s is also publishing a TPB original novel called Away from You, wirtten by Melanie Finn. The novel tells the tale of a South African woman living in the States who has to go back to her home country and unravel a family mystery.

Not sure how much I got into it with my APE report, but Drawn and Quarterly has a lot of Joe Sacco-style comics journalism titles coming up. War’s End is a followup by Sacco to The Fixer. It’s a collection of two short stories set in Bosnia. [UPDATE: Jessa writes in to let me know that the Sacco pieces have been previously collected and are not, in fact, followups.]

There’s also Baghdad Journal from Steve Mumford. Mumford took three trips to Iraq and drew what he saw there. It’s due out in October. Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang chronicles a French cartoonist who went to North Korea to work for an animation company. He spent three to four months there. The D&Q folks assured me that it had a dark comic tone.

For more traditional titles from D&Q, Seth’s new volume, Wimbledon Dream, is “a complete departure from anything he’s done.” But then that’s the case with nearly anything Seth does. Even so, this volume is in the form of a scrapbook, but, unlike other scrapbooks, it tells a linear narrative. Michael Rabagliati has a follow up to Paul Has a Summer Job called Paul Goes Out, an autobiographical story about getting a first apartment in 1983.

Little Brown has several interesting titles. Rick Moody’s The Diviners is a comic novel set in the movie business about vanity, ambition and the frantic pace of lives. While we’re not all that crazy about Moody, this novel has been declared “ambitious” and has Moody using a broader canvas for his characters. There’s alos a first novel centered around a mother/daughter growing up in Tahiti. (I’ll have the exact name after I unpack.)

Finally, we come to David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster — also set to be published by Little Brown. Here’s what I found out:

• The book comes out in January 2006.
• It includes “about twelve” essays. (The title essay is, of course, the one that appeared in Gourmet.
• The infamous “Host” essay will appear.
• There will be an essay that DFW published under a psuedonym where he attended the Adult Video News Awards, confronted his own shame, and contemplated the desexualizaition of sex.
• One essay’s on Updike, the other’s on Dostoevesky.
• “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” the essay about the 14 year old girl tennis player that DFW knew better than any adult, will be there.
• Apparently, there’s also an essay on language and culture in which DFW uses the publication of the American Usage Guide to talk about what gets put into dictionaries, who lets cerrtain words in, dictionary making, and deconstruction. DFW confronts the decay of language, and how it is enhanced by the publications of these dictionaries. The title page of this essay is in 4 point type and contains hundreds and hundreds of solaces he’s collected over the years.

Also from Little Brown, Walter Mosley has new Easy Rawllins novel coming out. Los Angeles 1967. Easy Rawlins meets hippies. The previous novels were Mosley’s father’s Los Angeles, but this one begins in Mosley’s own Los Angeles (meaning the one that he personally experienced). Apparently, when Mosley was a teenager in 1967, he used to drive to the Sunset Strip and want to be a hippie.

I am now about to collapse. More later.

Also, Mary Reagan (who I was glad to meet) has some great photos up. As does Nathalie.

The mistake I made was to forget about the galleys. I became so wrapped up in talking with many people that I had forgotten the “book” in Book Expo America. While I had a flight to catch in mere hours (I’m at JFK now), there was clearly no other option. Fill as many bags as I could, FedEx them back home, and get the hell out.

The funny thing about this is that if the books had been replaced with, say, a bank vault, this would have the element of despicable crime written all over it. But at BEA, it seems, this behavior is sanctioned, if not outright encouraged. One publicist who had “a big stack of galleys” waiting for me had the sense of humor to unload a colossal 1,400 page book (which I’ll end up reading of course, now that I can’t say no to a longass book).

This probably wouldn’t have happened had Sarah Weinman not been there. Sarah, besides maintaining a great blog, being a supernice person and being wise beyond her years, accompanied me as I talked with many more publicists and was good enough to put up with my fey enthusiasm and brio, which so overwhelmed me that, during some points, it took me more than a minute to introduce the publicist to Sarah (a sin for which I am now stewing in my own personal guilt).

It was Sarah who coined the term “drive-by galleying.” But it was also an effort to meet some of the remaining folks on the floor and get the lowdown on the titles. Curiously, some of them were hesitant about the audio thing. Which begs the question: why be a publicist if you’re afraid of a microphone that’s placed deliberately outside of eye contact so as to not frighten people off?

On Sunday, the floors were gradually dwindling. But people still milled about. There were last minute deals and, at the Farrar Strauss & Giroux table, all the marketing people were huddled around a table eating a bag of Doritos.

But Sarah went above and beyond the call of duty. She offered to FedEx the bags of books back to me. It was Sarah who reminded me that I had a plane to catch. It was Sarah who whittled the bibliophile in me down to brute pragmatism. And for this I remain not only grateful, but indebted. Rest assured the gesture shall be paid in kind. That’s the kind of person she is, and if you haven’t read her blog or met her in person, you’re missing out.