BEA Afterhours: What Morgan Gives Jamie Byng; David Foster Wallace, Footnoted
by Steven Zeitchik, PW Newsline -- Publishers Weekly, 6/2/2003
The party scene in general was, well, Los Angelenian -- that is, dinner-centric and scattered. You couldn't really party-hop; if you boarded the bus to the Fox lot for the annual HarperCollins bash you might still be hopping back, so most attendees wound up going somewhere and staying there.Our party patrol stayed in Thursday (we can't be aggressive, um, reporters, every night) but broke out on Friday. First stop was the New Yorker event at a seafood-y place called the Chaya Grill, a gathering that had a wide enough smattering of publishing people (though no Remnick), but with a tweedy kind of crowd that made the party seem better suited to Midtown than Beverly Hills.
Later that evening, the Knopf dinner (that of Ellroy-Ullman-Olson fame) had the best feel of any event we attended. At once glamorous and intimate, it featured Toni Morrison, plenty of media and Nicholas Latimer first asserting, and then proving, that Ellroy would respond to a barking noise. We sat next to Cristina Garcia, whose Monkey Hunting has been getting great reviews and who was charming and gracious when we accidentally asked if she, um, had ever been to Cuba.
After midnight it was Morgan's melee at the Chateau M, where our status as driver meant our state of inebriation wasn't high, which meant our perceptive abilities were. It was, despite hour and host, a surprisingly toned-down party, though in said state of sharp perception one thought that hit us -- this should keep you occupied for hours -- was whether Morgan shares his hairstylist with Jamie Byng. Okay, maybe not totally uninebriated.
On Saturday, BEA threw what guests report was an entertaining fundraiser with Ellen and Hyperion raised a shot-glass for Steve Martin, but mostly it was dinner-time again -- Miramax had Martin Amis; Houghton, Jhumpa Lahiri; Norton, David Foster Wallace and Sherwin Nuland. It was the last one we went to, with, again, plenty of media people, especially West Coast fixtures. We ended up sitting across from DFW, the one person we were really crossing our fingers for. If we were the type to write in the style of the author we were covering, we'd say Wallace was a)studied and b) reticent and c)nothing like the free-associative and loquacious riffer from his books (see footnote 154 for distinction on two words as it applies vis-a-vis his short stories and essays) though it should be noted that he does, as we had hoped, have and was willing to share thoughts about the professional tennis tour and relative weakness of American men thereon, even though he does not watch television these days -- ipso facto negating his essay in A.S.F.T.I.N.D.A. about TV and the appeal to writers thereof -- which may be one but certainly is not the only reason why he writes so prolifically, itself a fact that is, prima facie, proved by referenced Norton title, which covers the topic of infinity and according to editor Jesse Cohen is fittingly not short like other books in the series but is nearly 400 pages, almost the size of this wandering and now self-referential paragraph.
The evening ended with the traditional PGW bash. The company outdid itself this year -- what weak AMS results? -- with Ozomatli, the Latin/hip-hop band that was horn-heavy but not guitar-lite. In other words, pure fusion, which, after a weekend of optimism, pessimism and postmodernism, seemed just about right.
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