Storytelling

It's hard to resist dancing penguins, but "Happy Feet Two" may make you want to try. Though it features tens of thousands of Antarctic types toe-tapping their way across the screen, it doesn't have a clear idea of what else it wants them to do. George Miller returns to direct and co-write the sequel to "Happy Feet," but the clean, focused story line of a penguin born to dance that won the first film the best animated feature Oscar in 2006 has...

At the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, fans of Krzysztof Kieslowski found their hearts lifted. And then broken. The Polish master was on the Riviera with the magnificent "Red," the final panel in his "Three Colors" triptych and a film widely expected to receive the Palme d'Or, even by Quentin Tarantino, whose "Pulp Fiction" took the honors instead. But for devotees it wasn't the disappointment of laurels denied that was hard to bear; it was Kieslowski's announcement that he was retiring from filmmaking.

Growing up in New Orleans, writer Michael Lewis learned three lessons that stuck with him for life: Success and happiness are very different things. Never become a lawyer. You don't need to come from a bookish environment to know how to spin a helluva story. Maybe the storytelling part, Lewis speculates, stems from another thing New Orleans taught him. With its Creole-Cajun culture and hedonistic ethos, the Crescent City schooled him to view his native country like a skeptical foreigner trying to make sense of outlandish things that appear normal to the rest of America.

Don't just walk by quickly, looking straight ahead. If you notice a person living on the street, don't pretend you don't. That's what Victor Rodriguez chose to say to a group gathered downtown one evening last week to hear from people who once were homeless and who know how it feels not to be seen. Rodriguez, 52, now lives in the Dewey Hotel Apartments, operated by the Skid Row Housing Trust, which develops and manages affordable housing in an effort to provide homes for the homeless.

Already imprisoned for nearly eight years, the inmate who once was Russia's richest man must still see at least 1,800 more sunrises from behind his barracks window, his view of the real world beyond the camp fence with barbed wire on top. But armed with a pen and pencil, Mikhail Khodorkovsky is following in a grand, if grim, Russian literary tradition: writing about his life in a gulag-style camp he has described as "an anti-world" where "lying is...

In television, the reality is reality works. Even so, the ever profitable genre is often regarded as the uncouth and self-involved relative who should never be invited to mingle with respectable company. But that's exactly what a handful of prestige basic cable networks are finally poised to do. After years of mostly defying the siren call of reality, networks like USA, TNT and AMC plan to launch a slate of reality programming in the coming months. Don Draper and Brenda Leigh Johnson, meet your new neighbors: Comic book geeks, treasure hunters and the U.S. Coast Guard, among others.

The Marriage Plot A Novel Jeffrey Eugenides Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 406 pp., $28 For a while there, it looked like the novel was a goner. This was after the French theorist invasion, when the ideas of Lacan and Derrida caught fire with American academics, turning the study of English inside out. Language was slippery, its meaning elusive, narrative old-fashioned, they said; the straightforward march of an imagined story across a page was a sham. In the early 1980s, Charles Dickens was out; Donald Barthelme was in. This is the world in which Madeleine wakes up, hungover, on her graduation day in Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel, "The Marriage Plot.

Four decades ago, a rangy civil servant in charge of overseeing the forested ridges and brick-hut villages of Pakistan's Swat Valley sought a pastime to get through slow days. He dabbled in poetry, composing haiku in longhand. His wife read the poems and called them "rubbish. " "Why don't you write about something you know?" Jamil Ahmad recalled his wife, Helga, telling him. She said his focus should be the tribes of Pakistan's northwest frontier, where Ahmad had worked for 15 years.

For Ken Graydon, repairing cars was a living. But writing poetry and song lyrics and tall tales to be told and sung around a campfire was his passion. For anyone who thinks of poets as smallish, shy, intellectual fellows who look inward, Graydon was a shocker. He stood 6 feet 4 and, in his prime, weighed 220 pounds. His idea of a fine time was mixing with friends from the disparate worlds of poetry and classic cars, and swapping songs and stories long into the night. His voice was a strong baritone, and he was generous with praise for other versifiers.

EVENTS Bawdy Storytelling Everyone loves hearing a good yarn — but what about when that story includes a transsexual sex worker, a BDSM porn clown or an interaction with "gay deprogramming" at a behavioral modification boarding school? These are some of the examples that will air at Bawdy Storytelling, a series headed by Dixie De La Tour. She returns to Los Angeles this month with her show devoted especially to the Libertines, those who are "morally and/or (especially)