'Surf Culture' at Festival of Books is more than hanging 10

By -- Don Patterson

THE question is less about what the five panelists of "Surf Culture: Shooting the Tube" are going to talk about Sunday and more about what they'll have time to talk about. Like a lot of offerings at this weekend's sprawling Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, this panel is more of a sampler platter of food for thought than a full-course meal.

In its raw form, surfing can be defined in three simple parts: a wave, a board, a person. But the fictional and nonfictional writings of this session's experts -- Antoine Wilson, Steve Hawk, Steven Kotler, Kem Nunn and David Rensin -- reflect life's struggles, rebellion, the inner workings of the human spirit -- and how do you wedge all that into an hour?

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A chunk of minutes could be knocked off just looking at the connection between waves and physics as explored by Hawk, 52, the former editor of Surfer magazine and author of the coffee table book "Waves." He's candid in saying that this topic tends to produce reactions ranging from wide-eyed fascination to glazed-over detachment. With that in mind, the panel's direction may best be dictated by first determining who's in the room.

"We'll be at risk of boring an audience of surfers if we talk about all the obvious issues that non-surfers want to know about," Hawk says. "And we'll risk boring an audience of non-surfers if we talk like Spicoli."

Surfer or no surfer, the human-interest element in the works of these authors is undeniable.

Kotler's book, "West of Jesus," tells how he surfed back to health from a suicidal state brought on by Lyme disease, which he chillingly describes as "flu meets rheumatoid arthritis meets paranoid schizophrenia." Rensin's book, "All for a Few Perfect Waves," is the story of the late Miki Dora, an iconoclastic old-schooler who lived to surf and, as Rensin says in an interview found on YouTube, represented "the rebel heart" of a surfing life but wasn't above running credit card scams to fund it.

Nunn launched his own genre, surf noir, with page-turners like "Tijuana Straits" and "The Dogs of Winter," and they succeeded because "surfing is the milieu, not the story," says Hawk.

And Wilson, a longtime SoCal surfer, is nearly off the map as author of "The Interloper," a novel not about surfing but about a man who has a meltdown while scheming to avenge the murder of his brother-in-law.

If all this is thought-provoking, it also seems disconnected from the public face of surfing, which Wilson says has become a metonym for freedom and a vehicle for profit.

"It's used to sell free checking," he says. "My friends and I just drive around and say, 'I can't believe there's another surfing billboard.' "

So this session is a chance to go deeper.

Kotler may describe the therapeutic chemical reaction that occurs in the brain when someone is at a wave's apex, or maybe he'll touch on the influence surfing has had on the aerospace industry.

Hawk might urge surfers to reflect on what he says is a subconscious effort to keep the outside world out of their "rarefied, hyper-cool universe." And Wilson is fully prepared to tell you why the term "surfing the net" is wrong.

"Surfing is a much bigger topic than anybody realizes," Kotler says. "Most people just think it's this weird little sport, but it affects art and film and everything you can possibly imagine. I remember an article in 'Surfer Magazine' asking if surfing might be the next world religion because they got so many letters from readers who had a quote-unquote spiritual experience while surfing. The magazine said something like, 'We just don't think that happens over at 'Tennis' or 'Gun World.' That's the fundamental difference here.' "

FESTIVAL OF BOOKS

WHERE: UCLA campus

WHEN: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday; "Surf Culture": noon Sunday, Young Hall CS 24

PRICE: Free

INFO:www.latimes.com/