Last weekend, getting into my venue of choice for Saturday night
was a lot harder than I was expecting.
It involved waiting in a line that wrapped around the building
for over an hour. And the guy at the door was turning people away,
telling them that the room was already at capacity, and only
members were getting in.
The only thing was, I wasn’t trying to get into a swanky,
pretentious club on the Sunset Strip. I was hoping to go to a Joan
Didion book reading at the UCLA Hammer Museum.
New to the book-reading scene, I had no idea it was a popular
event for Angelenos, who I had mistakenly stereotyped as wanting to
party in celebrity-studded clubs on the weekend. I had frequently
dismissed book readings as a social activity for middle-aged
mothers and elderly women.
But when I arrived at the Hammer an hour before the event was
set to start, I discovered that there was already a huge line, with
people of both genders camped out.
When expressing my surprise at this discovery to a friend this
week, she told me how she had stumbled upon a line of people camped
outside Borders in order to be one of the first 100 people to get
Paul McCartney’s new children’s book and score a pass
to his reading at the store.
As UCLA students, my friends and I would have looked much more
at home on the sidewalk of Westwood Boulevard than among the Hammer
crowd. We were feeling underdressed and considerably younger than
most of the people there.
However, it was when Didion finished the reading and opened the
floor up to questions that I began to feel at home. The scene had
all the markings of an English class, beginning with the fact that
females were the majority gender, though thankfully not
overwhelmingly so.
It’s like when a professor invites the class to ask
questions or comment on the text. The freedom of being able to talk
to Didion was a little scary.
The first few minutes when she welcomed the audience to speak
were met with an awkward silence as people looked around, hoping to
avoiding eye contact with her.
At last, the first person spoke. Like in class, this is usually
the pretentious individual who makes some esoteric comment, hoping
to convince everyone that the person is an intellectual.
In the case of Saturday night, this person announced where he
went to school and followed it with his observations on
Didion’s lack of metaphor in the work. Like in class, this
person usually doesn’t ask a question, so much as delve into
a lengthy discussion of a personal analysis.
Then there’s always the guy who hasn’t done the
reading, but thinks he can BS his way into sounding smart. This
usually backfires, but since he hasn’t read, he usually
doesn’t realize it.
On Saturday, a guy seated up front asked Didion how she came up
with the title. Had he gotten to about page 15 of the book, he
would have already known.
And it wouldn’t be an English class without a person who
likes to show off by referring to books from other classes ““
in this case, sociology books on grief.
But as a senior, I’m glad to know I can still have the
English class experience after UCLA. And I just may have found my
new favorite weekend activity.
E-mail Rodgers at jrodgers@media.ucla.edu if your
Thursday-night plans involve book readings, too.