Hot weekend refreshingly literary

I am fairly certain that I am not the only young man at UCLA who wishes he could write like Nabokov and was built like a truck.

If for no other reason than that, walking around campus in the heavy, smoggy heat this weekend to make the rounds at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was a worthwhile endeavor. The tiring heat made for that unusual combination of bookish snobbery and acute physical activity.

OK, so maybe this is a slight exaggeration; but I did have to take air-conditioned breaks in the Powell Library throughout Saturday afternoon, cool timeouts which helped me finish reading a Philip Roth novel when I should have been studying for my last week of midterms as an undergraduate.

It was just after 11 a.m. on Saturday when I started my tour of the festival as I made a beeline to the first and really only panel discussion that I wanted to check out. It was Gay Talese in conversation with Tim Rutten in Schoenberg Hall. (I heartily recommend anything by Talese, especially his old magazine pieces on Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra. Rutten’s op-ed column is one of the few must-reads in the Los Angeles Times.)

The trek in the heat was daunting, even though it wasn’t yet noon. The long streak of sweat rolling down my back from the heat wave and my shortness of breath en route to Schoenberg illuminated my physical decrepitude. (The beauty of physical fitness is that it is based solely on conditioning. I will never be able to write in platinum-perfect prose, but I will always have the slim chance to have the sculpted physique of a Greek god.)

By the time I made it to Schoenberg for Talese and Rutten, the standby tickets had been gobbled up.

But the truth is that I didn’t really care all that much, because the excitement of the festival, at least for me, has nothing to do with the panels.

Most panel discussions with writers are painfully boring. Almost all of the questions from the audience are either simpleminded or just thinly veiled attempts to suck up to the writer. Panel questions from the proctors or other writers tend to be obvious to the die-hard fans in attendance, also.

(The only time I truly enjoyed a Q & A with a writer was when I saw Norman Mailer plugging his newest, and what turned out to be his last, book last April in Washington. It was only a few months before he passed away and, at 84, he was as feisty as ever. His response to one question from a female audience member: “It is a shame such a pretty young lady would ask such a stupid question.”)

So while it is impressive that the Festival of Books brings so many writers together to make a small community out of a craft done primarily in moments of solitary contemplation, I always thought the best part of the festival was the existence of the event in itself.

That’s why on Saturday I just enjoyed walking around aimlessly ““ yes, in the heat ““ watching all the under-40 parents bring their children to the campus and hearing the small talk between over-70 UCLA alumni who still found a way to wear corduroy jackets and khakis in the sun.

It is very chic to isolate a few insidious people who occupy far too much space and time on American television ““ Paris Hilton comes to mind ““ and go off on a diatribe about the stupidity of the American people or the swill scooped out by merchants of our pop culture.

But it is so refreshing and encouraging to see so many locals of all ages grace the campus for a celebration of the written word.

Call me pretentious or elitist, but it is nice to know that there are still some people who have a vested interested in writers and the things that make them write.

For those of you who think the festival is all for show ““ so a bunch of people can walk around and pretend to be intrigued by the idea of reading and eat frozen lemonade and overpriced barbecue chicken sandwiches ““ you are wrong.

Nor is it just a bad excuse to write a column laced with obnoxious literary references (six, as it stands now).

The Festival of Books gives us reason to believe, contrary to popular opinion, that some Americans still want their kids to read and write about things that matter. And it is nice to think that the UCLA community plays an important role in all of that.

E-mail De Jong at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected].