festival of books - day 2

Yesterday was my second outing to the Festival of Books. It felt right to be going to my version of church bright and early on a Sunday morning. On Saturday, I saw a panel of Southern California historians followed by a panel of Southern California theorists, so we kicked off the day with a panel of Southern California fiction writers:

Reinventing California

Steve Erickson, Our Ecstatic Days (who must think I'm stalking him coast to coast)
Michelle Huneven, Jamesland
Michael Jaime-Becerra, Every Night Is Ladies' Night
Peter Lefcourt, The Manhattan Beach Project

My two favorite quotes from this panel both came from Steve Erickson. At one point, he said something advantageous about writing in Los Angeles rather than New York is that Los Angeles encourages you to constantly rethink it, whereas New York rethinks you. He also said that the trope of the apocalypse is so pervasive in L.A. literature that "it appalls us to think they might end the world somewhere else." This panel was followed by:

Jared Diamond

The UCLA professor gave a lecture to hundreds of people on the basic premises of his follow-up to Guns, Germs, and Steel: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail. It was a totally depressing overview of what will happen to us if we don't radically alter our environmental policies now. In short, we're fucked.

We wrapped up the day with a highly entertaining panel of short story writers.

The Art of the Short Story

Steve Almond, The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories
Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Merrill Joan Gerber, This Is a Voice from Your Past
Tod Goldberg, Living Dead Girl
Bret Anthony Johnston, Corpus Christi

While I work on my dissertation, I'm going to try to keep in mind something Steve Almond said about the work of writing: "Any time at the keyboard is time in heaven."