At Play in the Festival of Books

Some of life’s lesser but still intriguing mysteries were tackled at the Festival of Books on Sunday at UCLA.

For example, how can you have more fun at the office? What happened to Lewis and Clark’s dog? Why does poetry these days hardly make any sense?

And, where exactly are those stairs that Laurel and Hardy dropped the piano down?

The festival, which was sponsored by the Los Angeles Times, drew thousands of visitors, as well as blockbuster authors that attracted packed campus lecture halls.

Some of the most enticing questions were answered at the event’s dozens of booths and panel sessions, which featured writers promoting or discussing books on everything from Los Angeles in the “gay imagination” to “redneck haikus.”

For starters, how does one have a jollier time at the office?

Standing at a booth for a small publishing house, writer Claire Berger gave whoopee cushions to anyone who bought her new paperback, “52 Ways to Have More Fun at Work.”

“Here’s one idea that’s in the book,” the Encino writer said. “Everyone Xeroxes a different part of their body and then later you have an office party and everyone guesses which part belongs to which body.”

Another question had a boy scratching his head at an otherwise droll session on the legacy of Lewis and Clark: What happened to their dog, Seaman?

Panelist Brian Hall, whose recent historical novel on Meriwether Lewis has earned rave reviews, told the young reader there is some evidence the dog made the entire journey with the two explorers.

He also said there is one story that the dog died heartbroken on the grave of Lewis, who committed suicide three years after the Corps of Discovery returned home.

At a session on working-class poets, during which three local poets earnestly recalled Iowa villages and hard-working machinist fathers, one audience member pushed B.H. Fairchild to tackle a question that would appall any Ivy League lit professor: Why does poetry these days hardly make any sense?

“The poetry of incoherence is very fashionable right now,” the poet responded. “But another working-class ethos is you don’t talk foolishly. One has to make sense, or you’re wasting people’s time.”

In a morning session on the politics of sports, the moderator asked his panel whether Angelenos should be embarrassed that their region doesn’t have a professional football team.

George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review and author of “Paper Lion,” a book about his experiences when the Detroit Lions let him “try out” for the team, answered with a question of his own: “What do you do? Where do you go [on Sundays]? Now I understand why so many people are coming to the book fair.”

Panelists didn’t have to ask the crowd whose side it took at a session on “the boom and the bust: America after Enron.” The crowd frequently hissed whenever former Chairman Kenneth L. Lay’s name was mentioned.

The moderator responded by asking crowd members why they don’t attend annual meetings of big corporations and ask CEOs why “they make $1 million every two days.”

For fans of popular culture, Huntington Beach author and marketer Chris Epting proudly peddled his new book, “James Dean Died Here: The Locations of America’s Pop Cultural Landmarks.”

One of those landmarks is the hillside stairs in Los Angeles where Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, playing the parts of deliverymen, did their best to destroy a piano in the 1930s movie short “The Music Box.”

The piano is long gone, but the stairs still stand, Epting said. They’re on Vendome Street near Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake.

Epting said he wrote the book while traveling on business the last three years. He did it mostly to satisfy his own curiosity, and then figured that there were others like him who want to know, for example, the address of the warehouse where the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre occurred in Chicago in 1929.

“All these books are labors of love,” Epting said.

“You hope they catch a wave, but writing this was more of a hobby. You do it because of a love of the topic.”