Skimming the Brooklyn Book Festival

September 24, 2012, 1:48 pm

By JOHN WILLIAMS

With more than 100 panels scheduled in and around Brooklyn's Borough Hall over the course of eight hours on Sunday, the seventh annual Brooklyn Book Festival offered more choices than any one person could take in. But with an eye on logistics and a ruthless willingness to leave events early - the way one might drop a book after 50 pages if it doesn't grab you - it was possible to hear a great deal about sex, politics, violence and other literary subjects.

At a panel of graphic novelists talking about “Taboo in Pictures,” the author Leela Corman began her remarks: “I'm really surprised to be on the sex panel.” Following her, Bob Fingerman started: “I'm utterly unsurprised to be on this panel.† Mr. Fingerman traced his memory of making transgressive art back to age 7 or 8, when his babysitter's child threatened to beat him up if he didn't draw a naked woman for him. The panelists were spirited, in a mostly unprintable way.

More printable, but just, was Naomi Wolf, who appeared on a panel discussing gender in the 21st century. Her new book about female pleasure, “Vagina,” has been criticized by many for relying on pseudoscience, but for those open to suggestions, she shared some of her findings. “The male armpit has a strong effect on heterosexual women,” she said.

Elsewhere, the author Michelle Goldberg and MSNBC host Christopher Hayes debated things like whether right-wing populism is more dangerous than plutocracy. A smattering of boos followed Ms. Goldberg's declaration that she would prefer to be governed by Michael Bloomberg than by Pat Buchanan. (Given the setting, it's safe to assume the crowd agreed with t he Buchanan part.)

Later in the afternoon, Jimmie Walker, the former star of “Good Times” and author of the memoir “Dyn-o-mite!,” expressed frustration at the unanimity of African-American support of President Obama. “Why aren't you going to vote?” a woman shouted from the crowd. Mr. Walker replied that he was going to vote, but probably not for Mr. Obama. The woman in the crowd stood up and walked away from the event in a huff.

At a panel moderated by Gregory Cowles, a preview editor at the New York Times Book Review, Dennis Lehane, Sapphire and Amelia Gray talked about how they deal with violence in their work and why they're attracted to it as material. “It's where the drama is,” Mr. Lehane said. “People reveal themselves when their backs are against the wall.” He said he was most interested in “fiction of mortal event,” a phrase he attributed to Cormac McCarthy. “I'm not interested in who cracked the golden bowl,” Mr. Lehane said. “You're rich, buy another one.”

At a panel titled “So, You Want to Publish a Book?” that was overcrowded with aspiring authors, Reagan Arthur, who has her own imprint at Little, Brown, extolled the work of best-seller Kate Atkinson. Sean McDonald of Farrar, Straus & Giroux explained why he once published Tyler Perry. Tina Pohlman of the digital publisher Open Road Media said her company issued “very few originals,” and had been founded on the principle of taking advantage of existing backlist titles. Which seemed to circularly imply that in order to publish a book one would have to already have published a book.

In addition to the organized talks, dozens of vendor booths were spread around Borough Hall's plaza. Some of them were run by household-name journals and big publishers - The Paris Review, Harper Perennial - but in keeping with the scrappy outer-borough atmosphere many were occupied by the lower-profile: the Aesthetic Realism Foundation; Red H ook's Freebird Books, which was showcasing obscure older titles about New York; and Novel-T, which had set out racks of its literature-themed baseball shirts.

The lovely cloudless day made it easy for the community to commandeer the space for any and all purposes. “Atlantic Yards is a crime,” one middle-age man calmly declared, handing out flyers.

The National Book Foundation's booth included a large easel that read, “What Are You Reading?” People left layers and layers of Post-it notes that fluttered in the breeze, citing books like “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace and “A Hologram for the King” by Dave Eggers. One note read: “Plato's Apology. but not by choice.” As one young woman contributed a note saying “Anna Karenina,” an older woman could be heard playfully mocking the exercise: “Look at her,” she said. “You know you were reading some James Patterson. Some good old James Patterson on the No. 2 train.”