Yesterday we went back to USC for the LA Times' Festival of Books, where there were far too many children underfoot. for some reason, the festival of books is skewed towards being a small-children-fun-fair and the extreme heat and scampering children (i don't even hate children, but this was Actually too many) made walking around the festival virtually unbearable. the big people who do the actual reading find solace in the panels going on all over campus.
at twelve o'clock we attended the nonfiction panel Tell the Truth but Tell It Slant. the panelists were brilliant (Avrom Bendavid-Val, Geoff Dyer, Pico Iyer, Frank Westerman) and i'd like to read one thing by each of them. i was very excited to hear geoff dyer, whose essays i've enjoyed reading for some time, speak. geoff's mouth moves like a ventriloquist dummy's and he starts off every statement with a dropped-jaw drawn-out, weeeeeellll, and finishes every statement with a big swig of bottled water. we were seated next to an awful, clueless woman who made a racket throughout the entire discussion, zipping and unzipping her purse, shuffling her papers endlessly, rustling her bag of lifesavers and stuffing lollies in her gob. the dyer book i'm reading is an LA public library copy; i had it signed and plan on returning it to circulation.
at one thirty we had chipotle.
at three o'clock we went to the Focus Features screening of Beginners. the movie was excellent, making you sick and confused by toying with your emotions, making you joyous and then miserable but never letting you savor any feeling for more than an instant before changing again. like life. our friend Rey had a few lines in the movie and he looked very beautiful. the entire movie is filmed on the east side of LA, and i enjoyed seeing all my familiar favorite places in it: this scenic hill, that sunset junction, this shabby bookstore, that gay bar, this house party that's just like one i've been to.
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