Philly Book Fest returns, leaner but lively, with a special look at hard-boiled David Goodis

A leaner version of the Philadelphia Book Festival returns Monday to the Free Library of Philadelphia for a six-day program featuring readings and discussions by seven authors, including the poet laureate of the United States, Philip Levine, and the first-ever poet laureate of Philadelphia, Sonia Sanchez; a rich array of children's events and performances; and a tour through the dark fictional landscape created by one of Philadelphia's forgotten literary figures, hard-boiled author David Goodis.

The festival this year is certainly svelte compared to the 2011 event, which featured nearly 90 authors. "Funding isn't what it was," says Andy Kahan, director of the library's author events, with some rue. "It's just a challenging funding environment."

Still, the festival remains strong in poetry and in its diversity of children's programming, Kahan says. The festival's final day on Saturday will be devoted to children's events, including two perennial favorites, the Storybook Character Parade and the Teddy Bear Picnic, and two musical performances, by local band Many Thoughts of Music, featuring Library staffer Alfred "Moe Joe" Moore on bass, and locally based hitmakers the Cat's Pajamas. The day will be capped by a three-hour program led by mega-selling tween and young adult author Sara Shepard, whose smash-hit, 10-volume Pretty Little Liars book series has spawned a hit TV show on ABC Family.

The great attraction is Goodis, who died in 1967 at 59. He will be discussed, read, debated, but most of all, celebrated Thursday at a discussion led by poet and critic Robert Polito, editor of the five-novel Library of America collection David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s.

Joining Polito will be fellow poet and critic Geoffrey O'Brien and local book collector and Goodis aficionado Lou Boxer, founder of NoirCon, a biannual celebration of Goodis and noir, and producer of a documentary film about Goodis.

"Goodis is emerging as a favorite son of Philadelphia," says Polito, whose books include Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. Usually grouped with Thompson, Goodis wrote hard-boiled best-sellers that spawned several hit films, most notably the 1947 Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall thriller Dark Passage. (François Truffaut's 1960 masterpiece Shoot the Piano Player is adapted from Goodis' Down There.)

Polito says Goodis is less a crime writer than a premier chronicler of modern, urban despair. "It's there from the first line of his first novel," says Polito, who quotes from the opening of Goodis' 1939 debut, Retreat From Oblivion: "After a while it gets so bad that you want to stop the whole business."

Says Polito: "Goodis is incredibly good at layering in a pervasive sense of melancholy and doom that sometimes finds expression in criminal action. but the criminal element seems incidental."

Goodis, Polito says, wrote about "the inverse of the American Dream. He takes the guy voted the most likely to succeed in high school, somebody who should become a great classical pianist who ends up playing jazz at dive bars by the docks in Philly."

Boxer, an anesthesiologist at Chester County Hospital in West Chester, says Goodis, unlike his characters, grew up in a solid middle-class family in the city's Logan section.

But something drew him to the less fortunate.

Boxer says Goodis' characters inhabited the now-gentrified areas around Society Hill, Northern Liberties, and the tenderloin section. "Goodis is a historian and social anthropologist of the down and dirty side of life," Boxer says. "I relate his books to a Brueghel painting: You peel back the stones that make up life in the city and you see the horrible stuff underneath."

Boxer, who will present a biographical sketch of Goodis, says this is an ideal time for a recovery of Goodis' works.

"Given the way our economy is and the state of the world," he says, "you can really see yourself having that Goodis attitude, that there is no hope on the horizon, that there is nothing but a dismal life followed by death."

The discussion Thursday will be preceded at 5:30 by a screening of a 1957 film adaptation of Goodis' The Burglar starring Jayne Mansfield and Martha Vickers.

Before the festival turns its attention to Goodis, there will be three nights of poetry, led Monday night by Nikky Finney, whose latest collection, Head Off and Split, won the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry. The title, Finney says in an interview, was inspired by an encounter she has every week at her local market with the fishmonger. "The fishmonger asked me a question he always asks: 'Head off and split?'," she says, "meaning do I want him to gut the fish and clean it up nice." Or would she prefer to take it as it is — dead eyes, scales and all.

It occurred to her that truth, real truth, about how the world hangs together and how people relate to one another in social, political, sexual settings, tends to be messy, like the fish. And that we have a tendency to turn away from that mess, to demand that reality be prettied up for us.

The media, Finney says, "has been numbing us down to the world around us," which she says in turn numbs us to each other's pain and makes us lose our sense of moral responsibility.

She says poetry institutes a conversation with readers, challenging them to "open the self to feel something empathetic, something sympathetic, something political, something that the rest of the world tells us that you really don't have the time to do."

Levine, 84, who is celebrated for his poems about working-class life in Detroit, reads on Tuesday, while Sanchez will take the stage on Wednesday.

This year's festival features a joint program with the Philadelphia Science Festival, which brings to the library three prominent science writers, Dava Sobel, Jonathan Haidt, and D. Graham Burnett.

Sobel, one of the best populizers of science in the business, will speak Saturday about her latest book, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos. "Why Copernicus? Copernicus turned the whole universe inside out," she says. His heliocentric model of the universe undermined millenniums of religious, political, and scientific certitude, she said.

Sobel's book is a dramatic account of how a young Protestant mathematician named Georg Joachim Rheticus persuaded the aging Polish astronomer to publish his findings, despite fear he'd be censured by the church.

Haidt, who received his doctorate in psychology at Penn, also takes the stage Saturday for a discussion about his much-buzzed-about new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. He says psychology can offer a fresh perspective on a question that continues to bedevil philosophers and political scientists no less than pundits and politicians — why can't conservatives and liberals communicate without rancor these days?

Haidt challenges the conventional view that people base their political orientation on reason. Affiliation with any group, he says in an e-mail interview, is a deeply emotional process that taps into our deepest moral intuitions. He argues that while there are universal moral beliefs, different groups define those same values in slightly different ways.

"The taste buds are universal, but cuisines differ across cultures," he says. "Similarly, the are like taste buds of the moral mind, and cultures construct a variety of moral 'cuisines' on top of them. The cuisines can change in just a few decades, e.g., attitudes about homosexuals, or smoking."

The trick, he says, is for people to begin appreciating these variations.

Burnett, who teaches the history of science at Princeton University, rounds out Saturday's lineup of science writers with a chat about his new book, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century, which traces how the whale has figured in scientific, literary, and social discussions over the last century. "No animal," Burnett says, "tells a richer story of changing ideas about nature over the last century."

Contact Tirdad Derakhshani at 215-854-2736 or tirdad@phillynews.com.