The Coen brothers were not inspired by the 1969 film starring John Wayne to make a new version of "True Grit." Instead, it was Charles Portis' original 1968 novel that they connected with, Ethan Coen told the L.A. Times' Geoff Boucher.

"We both saw the movie as kids when it first came out, but we don't really remember it very well, honestly," Coen said. "I read the book to my kid, out loud, a few years ago and then we started talking about taking our experience of the book and what we liked about the book and making a movie out of that. It's an unusual western story, a novel that's very funny and touching and compelling in many, many different ways."

The Coen brothers film, which stars Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld, is up for 10 Oscars at the Academy Awards on Sunday. Among its nominations is one for best adapted screenplay, written by Joel and Ethan Coen.

In our pages, Times book critic David L. Ulin revisited the original material, Portis' 1968 novel. He wrote:

Like Twain, Portis is a master of voice, of deadpan narration played for comic effect. And like Twain also, he respects his young narrator as a human being with a fully developed moral sensibility, even when the adults in the novel don't....

Portis never flinches from that sense of balance, of consequence; his novel is blunt, brutal at times, and imbued with a profound understanding of compromise and loss. Yet through it all, Mattie perseveres. Or, as she puts it in the middle of the novel: "If you want anything done right, you will have to see to it yourself every time."

The Coen brothers' "True Grit" has brought new attention to Portis' four-decade-old book. The novel "True Grit" has been on the L.A. Times paperback bestseller list for nine weeks.

But the author himself, now 77, lives in Arkansas and prefers not to be in the spotlight. Will he make an Oscar appearance? We'll see Sunday.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Samuel French is the place to go for plays. Sure, it's a bricks-and-mortar bookstore with two locations in Southern California -- Jacket Copy visited this one, on Sunset Boulevard at Stanley Avenue -- and it also is, as staffer Gwen Feldman rattles off with practice, "the world's oldest, largest publisher of plays."

The Samuel French company has been publishing plays since 1830. There was an actual Samuel French, an American who started his business in this country, then moved to England. The first L.A. Samuel French store was founded in 1929 in downtown; it moved to the current Hollywood location in 1947.

 
In addition to plays, Samuel French carries many books in hardcover and paperback. Biographies of entertainment figures are among those found near the front of the store. Farther toward the back, there are many in-demand books about moviemaking -- how to write, how to perform, and of course, how to direct.

It's chilly in L.A. -- temperatures are expected to drop into the mid-30s Saturday night. The storm front rolling into Southern California on Friday, which left sprinkles at my house this morning, may intensify, delivering rain and hail and snow.

Snow?

Snow as low as elevation 500 feet, our sibling blog L.A. Now reports. The Hollywood sign is at 1,600 feet. Which means that it's possible that the night before the Oscars, there might be snow on the Hollywood sign.

You absolutely couldn't have predicted this -- or maybe you could have, with "The Old Farmer's Almanac 2011." Established in 1792 by Robert N. Thomas, the almanac has astronomical charts, a farmer's calendar and weather predictions.

Do they work? Can they rival the daily satellite weather reports we can find on television and the Internet? Last year, the almanac was pretty accurate, predicting below-normal winter temperatures across most of the nation -- and 11 of its 16 regions came through. The book includes this self-evaluation:

Overall, our monthly regional forecasts were 81 percent accurate in predicting the direction of change in precipitation from the previous winter.... Overall, we were within 1.9 degrees F, on average, in our temperature forecasts, using a city selected from each region.

That's not bad. But did it predict snow for Los Angeles in February 2011? Not exactly. "Winter temperatures will be near normal, on average, with above-normal rainfall," the almanac predicts for the Pacific Southwest region, which extends from San Francisco to San Diego. "The coldest periods will be in mid-January and early February."

It's so close -- off by just a few weeks. Which shouldn't matter, except to the people using the almanac as a planting guide who followed it to the letter and counted on the coldest part of the winter being behind us. If they planted their tender seedlings last weekend, they might be in trouble if it gets frosty over the next two nights.

But lackadaisical farmers can take heart -- they've timed things just right.

There is more in "The Old Farmer's Almanac" than just weather. It has a detailed calendar that includes such archaic days as Lammas Day (the beginning of the harvest, having to do with the Latin word for bread) and Cats Night (summer nights said to be when witches prowl as cats). It has charts of the sunrise and sunset times for each day of the year, and, with a nod to the current era, has customizable-by-Zip-Code versions online, available for purchase.

And there are other ancillary bits and pieces related to farming; the more than 200-year-old almanac describes its contents as "containing, besides the large number of astronomical calculations and the farmer's calendar for every month in the year, a variety of new, useful & entertaining matter."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: L.A.'s palm trees and the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains in January 2011. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

A lineup of literary stars that includes two Nobel Prize winners will participate in World Book Night, a celebration for adults after World Book Day in the U.K. Together, the two events -- which actually take place on two different days -- are expected to give away a million free books.

An audience of 10,000 is expected to show up at Trafalgar Square in London on March 5 for World Book Night. The authors who will read include Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison (the Nobel Prize winners), John le Carre, Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Philip Pullman, Derek Walcott, Sarah Waters, Yann Martel, Seamus Heaney, Mark Haddon and Lee Child.

But a celebration and reading are only part of the whole massive enterprise. About 20,000 volunteers signed up to give away 48 books each, selected from a list of 25. Those books have been shipped to distribution centers, and soon they'll be in the hands of those who are giving them away.

That's on top of World Book Day, which is focused on students in school. In the U.K., World Book Day will take place March 3 this year (elsewhere internationally, it's on April 23). Launched in 1998, World Book Day gives children tokens redeemable for a specially printed free book at booksellers across the country. Six hundred thousand books are ready to go.

In all, organizers say a million books will be given away for free on March 3 and March 5.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Havana in 2006. Credit: Baltazar Mesa /AFP/Getty Images

A red-ribbon bookmark that appeared in the iBooks app provided clues to the iPad 2, according to a report from Apple Insider and MacRumors.com.

Technology hounds wondering about the resolution of Apple's not-yet-announced iPad found what they thought to be clues in January, buried in a version of iBooks. Many hoped the screen of the iPad 2 would have a higher resolution, as the iPhone 4's resolution was higher than the iPhone 3.

At its highest, the resolution of the iPad 2 might be the high display of the iPhone 4, often called the "retina" display because it is said to be the crispest image a human eye can determine. A slightly lower version, which MacRumors.com calls "pixel-double," was also considered a possibility, because of the ease it would provide developers who create programs for the iPhone and iPad.

MacRumors.com found a red-ribbon bookmark icon in iBooks, and it appeared to be created for the pixel-double resolution, it reported in January:

Version 1.1 of Apple's iBooks application seems to have accidentally included some artwork for this hypothetical pixel-doubled iPad. As shown [here], the App's bookmark icon included versions for the iPad, the iPhone and the iPhone Retina Display (iPhonex2). It, however, also included one additional version labeled "iPadx2". Sure enough, this is exactly double the resolution version of the iPad icon and is distinct from the other versions. The most likely explanation for this added graphic is plans for a double-resolution iPad.

Additional reports followed that another graphic in the program was similarly sized and named. However, the higher-resolution graphics were removed from subsequent updates of the iBooks app.

The iPad 2 is expected to be announced on March 2 in San Francisco.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The iBooks app on the original iPad. Credit: Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times

The Book Beast, the books section of the Daily Beast, is a finalist for a Digital Ellie. The Ellies are the awards of the American Society of Magazine Editors. The Book Beast has been named a finalist in the Online Department category.

The Digital Ellies include news and features: many cultural websites, projects and pieces are finalists, but the Book Beast is the only one focused solely on books.

The Book Beast's home, the Daily Beast, was named a finalist in the major category general excellence, news & opinion. It faces off against the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, Slate and Wired.com.

In its category, the Book Beast will face off against the culture-focused Vulture from New York Magazine, Fast Co.'s Co. Design, Foreign Policy's AfPak (documenting the ongoing conflicts in Southeast Asia) and National Geographic's reader-submitted photo blog YourShot. 

Congratulations to the Book Beast for the recognition, and for keeping books so well-represented in the mix of what makes the Internet interesting.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: The Daily Beast's Book Beast

 
I feel betrayed by Laura Schlessinger’s new book, “How to Survive a Shark Attack (on Land): Overcoming Betrayal and Dealing With Revenge.”

The conservative -– and controversial -- radio talk show host is known for doling out advice to callers wrestling with a variety of moral and ethical dilemmas. For her legions of listeners, Dr. Laura’s pointed, no-nonsense advice offers a voyeuristic treat. (Love her or hate her, there’s nothing quite like listening to Dr. Laura let some “shack-up honey” have it with both barrels.)

Dr. Laura similarly uses callers’ vignettes to great effect –- as teaching tools -- in her bestsellers such as “The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands” and “Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives.” But that element is sadly, sorely lacking from “Shark Attack.”

Her book is a trim 200 pages, buoyed by pages of famous quotes. The first three-quarters is largely consumed with Dr. Laura’s cogitations on the nature of betrayal and its motivations. But I picked up this book so I could tuck up my feet, dig into some popcorn and enjoy a guilt-free glimpse into the betrayal playing out in other people’s lives.

Listening from that safe and secure perch allows me to cluck “Oh, no, he DIDN’T!” and fantasize about what I’d do in that same situation. In truth, I like to think of Dr. Laura’s books and radio program as a practice run for the real thing. And, let’s face it, absolutely everyone will grapple with betrayal at least once in their lives. Unfortunately, there’s painfully little of those teaching moments in this little book.

Even the examples from Dr. Laura’s life are hard to grab onto,

[Continue reading after jump]

James Franco has a busy Sunday planned: He's co-hosting the Oscars with Anne Hathaway and is nominated for best actor for his performance in "127 Hours." When it's all over Franco, who is also a writer, producer, director, soap opera actor and English grad student (what did I miss?), might just be thinking about poetry.

The Poetry Foundation has posted a Q&A with Franco about his poetic interests and how they've crossed over into film. He found Anthony Hecht, Frank Bidart and Spencer Reece to be cinematic, which led to his idea of making the biopic of poet Hart Crane.

He compares how the movie "Howl" -- which he starred in, as Allen Ginsberg -- is different from the upcoming biopic about poet Hart Crane, "The Broken Tower," which Franco starred in, wrote and directed.

You actually get the text of the poems in The Broken Tower, at least four, maybe five of them, in different forms. It’s almost like the anti-Howl, meaning the movie Howl. I love that movie, but Jeffrey (Friedman) and Rob (Epstein) had a different approach than I used. They put the poem at the center. The movie is really about the poem, but they did everything they could to illuminate the poem, to make it more clear, at least on one level, mostly kind of a biographical level, or an autobiographical level. Each section helped the viewer approach the poem, so you get the first reading, you get Ginsberg talking about the poem, what inspired the poem, what certain sections meant to him, you get his contemporaries, some of his contemporaries’ responses to the poem in the courtroom, you get a visual interpretation with the animation....

Crane wanted his poetry to be difficult. He wanted it to be read in a different way than people normally read. So when I started developing the movie, I thought, yes, it will be a biopic of sorts, but I wanted to have the texture of his poetry. He wrote this essay “General Aims and Theories” about his work because he knew it was difficult, and he talked about how the meaning of the poems could be found in a way that the metaphors played off each other, like the tenor of the metaphors were all resting on this upper level, relating to each other. And that was the meaning of the poems, rather than the meaning you might get on the surface level.

So I thought, okay, if there is some equivalent in cinematic language that I could achieve, that would be interesting because you’ll get some incidences from his life delivered through something that feels more like his poetry.

"The Broken Tower" is scheduled to come out later this year.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: James Franco at the 83rd Academy Awards nominations luncheon. Credit: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

  Writer Henry Miller was born in 1891, which sounds remarkably far away from the present day. But he lived a long -- and much-married  -- life, one that included wedding a much younger woman from Japan. Hoki Tokuda lived with Miller in Pacific Palisades; they were married from the late '60s to the late '70s, divorcing not long before Miller's death in 1980. Now Tokuda runs a piano bar in Tokyo, named for her ex-husband's most famous novel: Tropic of Cancer.

But that doesn't mean she's sentimental about the man. She talked to John M. Glionna in Japan for this L.A. Times article.

"Henry started asking every week to meet me," she says. "I realized he just wanted a Japanese woman to add to his collection, and I would always ask myself, 'Why me?' Soon after we met, he started telling people he was going to marry me."

He sent countless letters — many left unopened — not just to Tokuda but to her parents. Some arrived by mail; others were delivered by courier to her piano at the Imperial Gardens.

Tokuda wasn't impressed: "I was annoyed — I wanted to meet young, dashing men. But I never got the chance. Henry stuck to me."

Tokuda and Miller's marriage has not been the stuff of legend -- in fact, biographer Karl Orend calls it "a very, very sad relationship." Maybe that's because the famously raunchy writer, whose "Tropic of Cancer" was considered obscene until a 1964 Supreme Court ruling, never consummated his final marriage. 

Laurie Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, Hanif Kureishi, Cynthia Ozick, Deborah Eisenberg, Irvine Welsh, Francine Prose and Wallace Shawn are among the writers and performers who will participate in the PEN World Voices festival, it was announced Wednesday. Wole Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in literature, will give the keynote address.

Scheduled to take place in multiple locations in New York City from April 25 to May 1, the PEN World Voices Festival is now in its seventh year. Salman Rushdie served as chairman, and it is the first year for new festival director Laszlo Jakab Orso.

More than 100 authors from 40 countries will participate, in events that include standard literary readings and conversations, including one focusing on the work and predicament of Chinese writer Lui Xiaobo, who remains in prison despite winning the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.

There are also a few entirely different events, like the game of telephone slated to take place on the former-elevated-train-tracks-turned-pedestrian-parkway the High Line. Here's the festival's description:

“Karma Chain:” On the High Line in partnership with the Rubin Museum, a Tibetan lama will start a game of telephone and pass along sutras down a list of more than 200 Festival attendees. Salman Rushdie will receive the new teaching and Tweet it to all PEN’s followers.

As cool as all that sounds, I will have to skip it. Again, the PEN World Voices schedule conflicts with the L.A. Times Festival of Books, happening April 30 to May 1 right here in L.A.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Laurie Anderson performing in Santa Barbara, October 2010. Credit: Lawrence K. Lo / Los Angeles Times

Franz Kafka's innermost thoughts. John Cheever's under-remembered Massachusetts roots. Samuel Beckett on James Joyce and Flannery O'Connor's wicked words. All can be found in the occasional writers series on the blog This Recording.

The books posts at This Recording read like a faster, looser, bloggier edition of the Paris Review interviews with writers (which sometimes serve as source material). The series homes in on a single writer at a time, often with a snapshot of them as a writer -- or as a writer who is also a person, with flaws and struggles. It's strangely inspiring.

Monday's post about O'Connor, the author whose collected short stories, published posthumously, won an online poll of the best of 60 years of National Book Award winners, started out not knowing all that much about literature.

I didn't really start to read until I went to Graduate School and then I began to read and write at the same time. When I went to Iowa I had never heard of Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, much less read them. Then I began to read everything ay once, so much so that I didn't have time I suppose to be influenced by any one writer. I read all the Catholic novelists, Mauriac, Bernanos, Bloy, Greene, Waugh; I read all the nuts like Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Richardson and Va. Woolf (unfair to the dear lady, of course); I read the best Southern writers like Faulkner and the Tates, K.A. Porter, Eudora Welty and Peter Taylor; read the Russians, not Tolstoy so much as Doestoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol. I became a great admirer of Conrad and have read almost all his fiction. 

I have totally skipped such people as Dreiser, Anderson (except for a few stories) and Thomas Wolfe. I have learned something from Hawthorne, Flaubert, Balzac and something from Kafka, though I have never been able to finish one of his novels. I've read almost all of Henry James -- from a sense of High Duty and because when I read James I feel something is happening to me, in slow motion but happening nevertheless. I admire Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets. But always the largest thing that looms up is The Humerous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. I am sure he wrote them all while drunk too.

In one corner: Frank Bailey, a former aide to Sarah Palin, said to be writing a critical biography of her. In the opposing corner: Joe McGinniss, author of "The Selling of the President 1968" and recent Alaskan neighbor of Sarah Palin, writing his own book. In the middle: a pre-publication manuscript and a cease-and-desist letter.

In our Washington bureau, James Oliphant writes:

The contents of the Bailey manuscript were first reported by the Anchorage Daily News, which said that McGinniss had provided the paper with a copy. The Daily News said that in the manuscript, which was reportedly compiled from e-mail messages sent by Palin, the former Alaska governor complained that she hated her job shortly before she resigned in 2009.

McGinniss' agent, Dave Larabell, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that McGinniss wasn't the only person in the publishing world to see the manuscript.

On Tuesday, Bailey co-author Ken Morris posted an online version of a cease-and-desist letter to McGinniss, from Morris, Bailey and third co-author Jeanne Devon. 

McGinniss moved to Alaska -- next door to Sarah Palin -- to work on his biography. Husband Todd built a 14-foot fence between the properties, and Sarah Palin was not amused. "Wonder what kind of material he'll gather while overlooking Piper's bedroom, my little garden, and the family's swimming hole?" she wrote on her Facebook page.

McGinniss, who has written books about politics and true crime, will publish "The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin" with Broadway Books in September.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Sarah Palin at a rally in Anaheim in October. Credit: Associated Press

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