Random notes

Some random notes from last month’s LA Times Festival of Books, before I forget the two days of peaceful rambling up and down the hills of UCLA. How relatively little fiction, for a start. How much space given to self-help books and self-publishing organisations (if that’s not contradictory).

Ricky Jay was endearing at only perhaps a third of his capacity, pushing his new book on bizarre acts and playbills of long-ago vaudeville and variety. His talk was captivating mostly just to be in the presence of a man whose demeanour is that of a genteel mobster, who could project a playing card directly into your brain stem for some small violation of magic etiquette and then continue civilised discourse as if nothing had happened. I did get an answer to a question that’d been bothering me for a while: why does he sometimes waste his time with parts in films that are obviously beneath him? As this fantastic New Yorker article makes pretty clear, it’s because Jay has a genteel yet massively expensive habit.

A not terribly compelling SF panel with Harry Turtledove (a geek who grew older but not exactly up), Paul Sammon and Michael Reaves, hamstrung primarily because the panel had been given a pretextual topic that none of them cared about much. The whole affair was livened up considerably by the presence at the end of the table of Richard Matheson, who played Dormouse in this Tea Party, slumbering beneath a flat cap rather than by the tea pot, and beginning most of his answers by asking to be reminded what the question was. I suspect it was a little early in the day for all of them.

Nicholas Meyer completely rescued a parochial panel on Hollywood business with dry appeals to the audience and deadpan punchlines. I can see why he likes to pepper his genre scripts with quotes from the classics (famously giving Moby Dick to Khan in Star Trek II); it’s ’cause he does that himself. After Linda Obst and Peter Bart had rambled endlessly, he’d cut their feet from beneath them with a line of pith. Bring a writer to a panel with producers, and the writer’ll win, I think. And not one but two profoundly tedious grandstanding sermons masquerading as questions from the floor from (out of work, it seemed) actors with way too much baggage. Time and a place, guys, time and a place.

And then a funny, gentle, almost hatefully convivial panel of women writers (Paula Woods, Elizabeth Berg, Chitra Divakaruni, Janet Fitch, Lisa See) talking about their readers and their experiences as readers. It set me to wondering about general differences between male and female writers and if there actually are any. Is there anything to the notion that women writers are more likely to seek to share, to enlighten, to illuminate — aspects of reading that bring people together, you might say — whereas male writers are more likely to seek to achieve a degree of mastery over their readers, to be puppeteers of plot and affect? Might female writers care more for the connection with the reader then the male writer, who is more concerned with story as artefact?

I caught a reading by Laurie Notaro in a windswept outdoor venue that was nevertheless packed. She was funny, but the sense was always of trying a bit too hard. I think she’d kill to write like David Sedaris.

And then winding up with Eric Idle at the cavernous Royce Hall. He began with a couple of lame oppressed-husband jokes that might have come from the ’50s, but warmed up nicely later on. My impression these days about the Pythons is that it’s amazing they stuck together as long as they did. Despite some commonality of class and education, they’re such vastly different personalities. Gilliam is a visual artist, Jones is a scholarly historian, Palin is an actor and wanderluster, Cleese is an amateur psychologist, but Idle is really just a throwback cheeky-chappie performer. I don’t think his bullshit detector is quite as functional as most of the others’, so he just pours out the shtick and hopes some of it hits.