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Spent the weekend at the LA Times’ “Festival of Books” w/Tom again only to be NOT disappointed by the offering for a second year in a row. Due to travel schedules, neither of us had time to pick up the free tickets for any of the panels which meant getting shut out of “The Sunday Funnies” with Berkeley Breathed; however, magically we managed to pretty easily pick up 2 tickets to see Gore Vidal in conversation with Arianna Huffington! Do I need to tell you how amazing it was? They reminded us, the rapt audience, that it’s time for the Opposition Party to start presenting some real answers, ideas to change the tides. But as a woman in line for the restroom afterwards said to me, Who wants to step into the wake of the Disaster President, knowing it will take several generations to undo the damage he hath wraught and that the blame for a slow turnabout will fall heavily on their shoulders? That s/he will be our second Hoover?

I’m sure I’ve forgotten more that I had originally intended to share (particularly in reference to Gore & Arianna) but you get the idea. It was a good weekend, even though I didn’t get to go to Coachella. Again.

"They’ll sit there all day, till their shift changes. The action’s all at night, less of it now that there’s the fence."

"And yet many people die because of it….. But I crossed without trying,… The fence just crumbled away…"

"It does that out there on the beach sometimes. The ocean  is rough and the saltwater eats away at things….. If you had been trying to cross, it wouldn’t have happened for you like that. You would have been caught," he said. "Or the fence would not have broken."

Magdalena just looked at him. "Is that so?"

"It’s the way life is."

"The way life is?"

"I believe it has something to do with the irony of human action."

"I didn’t know you were a philosopher."

"I’m a worm farmer."

This weekend, Tom, his brother Chris & I had the distinct pleasure of spending two full days discussing books, listening to authors discuss their books, buying books, and considering writing books at the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.  Read the rest of this entry »

…for a Greek every event, no matter how stale, is always unique. He is always doing the same thing for the first time: he is curious, avidly curious, and experimental. He experiments for the sake of experimenting, not to establish a better or more efficient way of doing things. He likes to do things with his hands, with his whole body, with his soul, I might as well say. Thus Homer lives on.

…It’s good to be just plain happy; it’s a little better to know that you’re happy; but to understand that you’re happy and to know why and how, in what way, because of what concatenation of events or circumstances, and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss, and if you have any sense you ought to kill yourself on the spot and be done with it. And that’s how I was - except that I didn’t have the power or the courage to kill myself then and there. It was good, too, that I didn’t do myself in because there were even greater moments to come, something beyond bliss even, something which if anyone had tried to describe to me I would probably not have believed.