The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is this coming weekend, which means I've been busy working out, running 10 miles a day and generally getting my shit right in anticipation of seeing all of my fans in one place. Don't want to disappoint anyone who actually thinks I'm, you know, Michael Westen. I've also been reading a shit load of books because part of my job this weekend will be to moderate two panels -- more on this shortly -- and in order to do that job well, it's important to actually know who you're talking to and what you're talking about. (A few years ago, I was on a panel at the West Hollywood Book Fair where the moderator clearly hadn't read a word of anyone's books, nor had she bothered to look at our bios, so she spent the entire time essentially talking about...well...no one could really tell. She might have been insane, now that I think about it. She was the daughter of someone famous. I remember that part. And so does everyone in the audience, probably, since she'd preface all of her statements -- made primarily to herself, it should be noted -- by saying, "My father, the famous author of that book your mother read in 1976, once told me, while we were on the shores of the Adriatic, that he thought..." Odd thing, I can't remember who the famous person actually is...it was either Robert Ludlum or Sidney Sheldon or Harold Robbins or Alex Haley or James Michener or Herman Wouk or someone like that. Who wrote Shogun? It might have been him, too.)
The bigger issue, however, is that LATFOB has moved from UCLA, it's home for the last 50 years, to USC. This is upsetting for several reasons:
1. I taught at UCLA for almost a decade, so I know where all the bathrooms are there. When there's 150,000 people in one place, it's good to know where you have a safe house.
2. UCLA has really good tri-tip sandwiches.
3. Even though I was so fucking stupid that I barely ended up at CSUN, we're a UCLA family specifically, and UC in general. My brother Lee and my sister Karen went there, my wife Wendy went there, I own a lot of UCLA articles of clothing and, until my mom threw it away when I went to soccer camp one summer, the proud owner of a signed piece of paper from Rocket Rod Foster. I taught at UCLA for a long time, teach at UCR now and, like during the Olympics when I root first for the Americans and then the British and the Canadians, I root for the UC schools in all sports in a tiered level. My only concession is that UCLA football sucks so much that in order to enjoy college football for the last decade, I've found myself rooting for USC...unless they are playing UCLA. In fact, the last time I even stepped foot on the campus of USC was in 1994, when I won the Rolling Stone Rock-n-Roll Challenge there, thus procurring a year's supply of ice cream and a denim jacket.
I figure, however, that I'll make do. The mere fact that I won't have to slog up and down Bruin Walk is a pretty big fucking mitzvah. Plus, my sources at the LA Times have informed me that the author green room at USC is gonna be off the chain, yo. And that's really one of the very best parts of going to LATFOB anyway: writers like free food and they like gossip and that's what the green room at LATFOB has in spades. Where else can you get a panini and find out that one author is fucking another author? Or a slice of cake and several people all standing around calling bullshit on people turning down millions of dollars to self-publish? (That will be a topic this year, for sure.) Or some coffee and me doing my Michael Silverblatt imitation...not knowing Silverblatt is standing behind me? Of course, the real reason to go are the panels. Of course. So here are a few of my picks for Saturday...first, my appearances:
10am: Signing at Mystery Ink booth 370
3:30 PM on Saturday
* Fiction: Writing the Absurd
* PANEL CODE: 1084
o Moderator: Mr. Jim Ruland
o Mr. Andrew Foster Altschul
o Mr. Joshua Cohen
o Mr. Tod Goldberg
Altschul, Cohen and Goldberg sounds like a very respectable law firm.
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