LAT's FoB folly

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is an outstanding springtime ritual. Every April, authors, booksellers, readers (and, sometimes, a Meandering Mouse) come together on the splendid campus of UCLA to celebrate the joy of the written word. We listen to writers discuss their books and craft, buy out-of-the-way books from rare and independent booksellers that we would never have found otherwise, eat iced lemonade at the top of Janss Steps…

Not in 2011, we don’t.

It seems an earwig has crawled into the ear of the LAT which is telling it wrong things.

The Festival of Books will not take place at UCLA this year. Instead, it’s going to be at…wait for it, I’m trying to write this without headbutting the keyboard…USC. (At least there’s no earwig telling me wrong things, because I’ve resisted the temptation to forget the caps shift and type “usc”.)

According to the “official” explanation, “The move allows for increased attendance due to USC's central location, proximity to public transportation, abundant parking and newly enhanced campus facilities.”

Wasn’t Westwood “central” enough? How many buses stop at UCLA? (Nineteen, from seven different bus lines.) Weren’t these facilities good enough???





Can USC offer the experience of climbing towards the sky via Janss Steps?





How about these benches, perfect for sitting a spell and browsing through your purchases?



Or going into the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden and looking up, way up, at Gaston LaChaise’s “Standing Woman”?



And Deborah Butterfield's "Pensive" horse has far more character than that Trojan horse:



When you step off the campus of UCLA, you enter the charming town of Westwood. What happens when you step off the USC campus? You’re in the south part of downtown L.A…where the houses have bars on the windows .

I had been thinking about going back to the FoB this year. (The last time I went was in 2008.) But now…it’s not looking like a good idea. (As if Two Dogs would even let me go to downtown L.A. by myself.)

I’m bummed. I feel that something special has been taken away from me, and there’s no place to shout at about it…except this blog. Of course, why can’t I visit the UCLA campus without the lure of the FoB? (It still has an excellent student bookstore.) Beats spending one bitty penny at u…um, USC.

Good luck with this year’s FoB, LAT. Remember, if this USC experiment doesn’t work out, you still have a home in Westwood.

All photos taken at the 2008 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA by Jennie Brown Hakim, except the one of the bottom of Janss Steps, which is courtesy of Wikipedia.

You Can't Choose Your Own Science

Joel Stein is a Los Angeles Times columnist whose links I usually avoid while reading the paper online (yes, that is where I do 99% of my newspaper reading). His columns contain an especially annoying blend of snark and fluff (snarff? flurk?). I prefer to read columns about issues that matter to the world and me.

Today, Stein wrote a column that does matter. Science is not a friendly subject, writes Stein, especially for conservatives:

People on the far right don't believe in evolution, global warming or doing stem cell research. Most of their opposition is rooted in the fact that these ideas challenge the Bible, which is the oldest book they know. I'm guessing Greek conservatives are OK with killing your dad and making love to your mom.

It's terribly easy to snicker at right-wingers who fear the fossil. On the other hand, scientific illiteracy rears its silly head in lefty-land, too:

Liberals have an irrational fear of inoculation and genetically engineered food, no matter how conclusive the science is on these topics. They believe that the body needs to be detoxified with foot pads, colonics, mud wraps and maple-syrup-and-cayenne-pepper fasts. They take echinacea and Emergen-C, heal themselves with crystals and magnets, and believe that energy flows through different "centers" of their bodies. They practice, I swear, a form of healing massage called reiki in which the masseuse usually doesn't even touch you. I believe my wife and I have a reiki marriage.

How easy it is to watch other people, and how hard it is to watch ourselves.

We lefties must see bullshit clearly. If we don't, and then open our mouths and our laptops to pass it on to others, we become so much low-hanging fruit for the conservatives to munch on.

Truth is not your sociopolitical ally. Truth is just truth. Our first allegiance should be to truth, even when, as in what family compostion is best for children or how to be a loving spouse, the truth is that there is no one, indisputable truth. Free your mind -- but keep your filter.