Quick Update

I haven’t been feeling very motivated lately to provide complete coverage of my life, but briefly: last Friday I partied at a house up on 23rd street with the Literary Association. Saturday I partied at a house over by Echo Park with some MPWers. Both parties were a lot of fun, and I met a slew of new people.

Tuesday’s Academy Series featured the guy who wrote Scent of a Woman. He was really interesting, particularly when he talked about the range of things that had inspired that story — the original Italian movie, his brother getting expelled from Exeter, an officer he’d known in the service. This officer always wore the fanciest, most expensive shoes anyone had ever seen. They later learned that he did this to try to compensate for his feet — he’d lost all his toes to frostbite.

My Writing for Film class last night was pretty cool. We watched The Player, and the instructor, Kershner, also read long excerpts from Bradbury’s new book of essays singing the praises of horror and science fiction, so I really enjoyed that. One of the girls told Kershner she’d seen him on TV last weekend talking about Star Wars (he directed The Empire Strikes Back). He said, “Did I sound stupid? I always sound stupid in those things. They always ask the same dumb questions, every time. None of these journalists today care about anything important. None of them have passion, anger.” So I burst out, “Well I was really angry when they released the Star Wars Special Edition and they made it so that Greedo and Han Solo shoot at the same time. Man, that just pissed me off.” Kershner stared at me for like a minute, trying to decide if I was joking (or maybe just trying to figure out what the hell I was talking about). Finally he said, “Yeah okay, anger, that’s what I’m talking about.”

I finally got my first L.A. haircut, and finally found the post office and got postage to mail off a fiction submission. This afternoon I’m going to meet with a grad student I heard about who’s a writer in the English department and has taught a summer class on science fiction here at USC.