Eric E. Olson’s novel The Procession of Mollusks begins with a quote from Ween’s The Mollusk. For those not initiated into the mindmeld fuzz-pop euphoria of the legendary underground band, being on the wavelength with a great Ween album is like either being part of the best inside joke you’ve ever heard or realizing that the inside joke isn’t even a joke at all

I know it is summer by the usual indicators: the kids are out of school and the glorious free Santa Monica summer concerts are underway (thanks Amoeba Records!).  But this summer, two items landed on my desk with an intriguing thud, and both are putting me in mind of summers past

You can learn about a person by what that person does and what that person says. But you can also learn a lot about a journalist by the company he keeps. One of the great rewards in writing arts journalism, it seems, is to praise those who you admire with complimentary analysis. When the journalist has some kind of direct relationship with the subject, then it is obligatory to use the term, “full disclosure.”

Visting the country’s biggest book fair, the L.A. Times Festival of Books at UCLA, is like one’s attitude about reading books: You’ll never get to everything. Nevertheless, circumnavigating the booths, readings, panels and 140,000 or so bibliophiles who crowd the Westwood campus is both a challenge and an opportunity like no other in the US.

If one needs a welcoming indication of Spring, other than pretty nature photos on one’s calendar or the insane, chattering mockingbirds behind my home in the Sherman Oaks hills, there is always the L.A. Times Festival of Books, which completed its 12^th incarnation April 27-28.

The WWW was still a glow in computer geeks’ eyes, and Teen, YM and Seventeen were the mags of choice for American girls in the late 1980s.Long after the rise of feminism and the sexual revolution, even several years after Madonna had exposed her belly and bangles for girls to emulate, mags for young women still focused on diets, prom dresses, and recipes, not the reality of everyday teen life in America.

In Farley Granger's newly published memoir ''Include Me Out,'' the former screen idol makes a revelation that is unusual among Hollywood tell-all books: He was bisexual. Granger describes a Honolulu night that epitomized his life. A 21-year-old virgin and wartime Navy recruit, he was determined to change his status. He did so with a young and lovely prostitute. He was about to leave the premises when he encountered a handsome Navy officer. Granger was soon in bed again.

Ellen Sandler could fairly be billed as the Dalai Lama of television writing.  It is not clear if she wears orange robes when writing.  (There is a swathe of orange on the book’s cover.)  What is known and cannot be denied is that she defines, paradigmatically, the medium as one that is simple but not easy.  She explores the consciousness of those who create sitcoms and episodic dramas in The TV Writer’s Workbook with a lucid, wise sensibility and wry detachment that avoids pomposity and, yet, paradoxically, establishes her guru status.  Not that her credentials are for nothing, including her Emmy nomination while being Co-Executive Producer on the hit show Everybody Loves Raymond and her work on more than 25 prime-time shows, plus the pilots she’s created for network and cable television.

In the vast reaches of the Internet, there is a sex-vixen-pinup space creature named Izabael who travels from comic convention to comic convention, seducing middle-aged comic lovers and prepubescents alike.  Wearing little more than a smile, she shakes hands, signs autographs, and takes pictures with people who most of us would guard our lunches from with every ounce of our being.  She is the descendent of a Goetic daemon named Seere—an aspect of the subconscious, combining traits of both the Mercurial and Venusian.

As I write this review, I am house-sitting for a friend in a suburb-to-remain-unnamed.  Despite the house’s possession of sturdy walls, a sound roof, and a seven-figure price tag, I am left feeling unsheltered.  The protection I seek is not from nature’s elements, but from the demons of ennui, apathy, and bourgeois complacency.  This morning, in an effort to write, I moved from the bedroom to the study, from the study to the living room, and then from the living room to the kitchen.  But as I did, my agitation only intensified.  I could not concentrate; I paced the floor, my heart pounded with the brutal urgency of a jackhammer at 7:00am.  With no choice but to flee, I headed for the nearest freeway.