matthew’s alibi

My standard line about the LA Times Festival of Books is that it’s my very favorite thing in Los Angeles. Which becomes something of a mantra when I’m actually at the Festival, since I need something to focus on to deal with the actual experience.

The Times calls the annual event the country’s “largest celebration of the written word,” and it’s hard to imagine they’re wrong - the festival boasts 140,000 attendees, more than 450 authors, and over 100 panels all crammed into two short days. Best of all, all of the panels and stages are free.

Which brings back the need for a mantra: 140,000 people packed onto the UCLA campus in 90 degree heat can be a little overwhelming - it’s like Coachella for people who like books better than bands. (Coincidentally, both events have happened on the same weekend for the past few years. It’s a tough call, but the fact that Festival of Books is free, and the fact that I don’t have to trek to a remote desert have meant the festival has been victorious every year so far.)

After a late night on Friday at the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Awards, I arrived at the festival this morning just in time for the Gore Vidal session. Vidal, who, as Jane Smiley said in her introduction, has been reviled in every place a decent person would wish to be reviled.

Smiley gamely led off with a question about Vidal’s novel Creation, which she indicated that he had asked her to read in preparation for the interview. But Vidal, in his typical cantankerous fashion, was having none of it. Instead, with the most cursory of transitions, he spent the first fifteen minutes on a monologue about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Smiley had to buckle in for the ride.

Vidal is a national treasure, and I despair at seeing him in a wheelchair. He has such faith in this country and its ideals, and a real optimism that they will be restored. He’s a different, dying breed; an intellectual, a contrarian, a gentleman.

He told stories about Charles Lindburgh, about Benjamin Franklin, about Ayn Rand. He eventually discussed Creation, much to Smiley’s relief. His quips and insights glided effortlessly between the sixth century and the twenty-first.

Smiley ended the interview by asking Vidal what’s the best revenge, to which he croaked, “survival,” and he really savored the word. When the Q&A was over, the packed house gave him a second standing ovation.

I nearly gave up on the festival after that, with my lack of sleep and hot sun ganging up on me, but I decided to tough it out, and popped into a mystery panel called “Cruel and Unusual.” I admit, I mainly went to see if local hero (and New York Times bestseller) Christopher Rice was as hot in person as he is in his publicity photographs. Is that shallow? Well, in any case, he is. And the discussion was interesting enough to make me want to stick around, even if he hadn’t been.

The panel also featured Stuart Woods, the mystery novelist with a protagonist named Stone Barrington. Now, I’m not snobby about genre fiction, but I don’t think I would have picked up a book with a hero named Stone Barrington before hearing Mr. Woods speak. But, Woods is fantastic. Funny, articulate, unpretentious, tells good stories, works hard. And when I say works hard, I mean to the tune of more than 30 novels in 25 years.

Woods is exactly the sort of writer I’d like to be, in a lot of ways; he treats writing like a job, and believes firmly that the primary goal of fiction is to entertain. (Wonder what Gore Vidal would say about that.) On the topic of overly ponderous fiction, he cites Mark Twain’s review of Henry James: “once you put it down, you can’t pick it up.”

Finally, I crashed the second half of Ray Bradbury’s talk at Royce Hall. It was the second old master in a wheelchair of the day on the Royce Hall stage, and I enjoyed Bradbury nearly as much as I enjoyed Vidal. Although, Bradbury anchored his talk around the need to act out of love, and in this way (and most others) was much less ornery than Vidal. He described his writing as a lark, and demanded that his audience follow his example, and take seriously the things they most want to do in life, and start working toward those things.