As the L.A. Times Festival of Books turns 25 with a virtual fest, the author recalls how its tight-knit community helped obliterate his L.A. cliches.
Christine Lennon, Su Wu and others contribute essays to a collection on the master essayist
Yet, crucially and essentially, the festival is an outdoors celebration in the usually stainless mid-April sunshine, where for once Baldwin Park and South Central and Brentwood and Van Nuys seem to come together. Just before the first Festival of Books, in 1996, I’d been living in and around LAX, taking the airport to be a model of the global city of the future.
A few months later, at the festival, I saw everyone released from their vehicles and mingling all around me, freeing me at last from the latest L.A. cliché. The city may indeed be spread out in a way that precludes the braided density of Toronto or New York, but at the festival, everyone’s on foot, sharing the same village green, gathering around the children’s stage or snapping up books aboutL.A.
bassist Phil Lesh delivering deeply literate answers about his memoir to a room packed with 800 Deadheads.This might not be a coincidence. In my 20s, I used to haunt Dead concerts again and again, not for the music but for a sense of community. Suddenly one was off the freeway and out of the office and in some alternative universe in which people were smiling and things were given away for free and we all had the happily woozy sensation of loving something together.
For everyone within 100 miles or more, the Festival of Books is a joy precisely because it has so quickly become such a rich and solid tradition. And as some of us return, year after year, it becomes a very human and specific community too. The festival has given me a new friend in Marc, who brings his high school English classes there. Nora, whom I met while I was signing a book of hers, invites me to her Saturday evening party every festival, a lead-up to her Cuban pig roast on Memorial Day.
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