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.

The Mammoth book of Best New Erotica volume six is one to read in bed.  Technically, this is the 13th edition of the book, as earlier compilations were individually titled.  Edited by Maxim Jakubowski, the tome brings you into contact with up and coming writers who are filled with fresh ideas.  This eclectic collection of stories offers something for everyone, from stories for the timid and shy to the amorous and sexually liberated.  Both sides of the spectrum are represented creatively enough: those who are new to the game will have their imaginations easily teased, whereas those self-proclaimed libertines amongst us will find many a moment of fine reminiscing.

Lê Thi Diem Thúy, author of the highly praised novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, is coming to the campus of the University of California at Riverside next week to attend Writer’s Week.  The event, sponsored each year by UCR, “now unfolds in full force with 40 presenters, authors, agents, and publishers to celebrate our 30th anniversary of stories, poems, images, and words of and for Inlandia and the West Coast at large,” writes event director, Juan Felipe Herrera.  The Inlandia to which he refers is a clever term suggested by Herrera to represent the Inland Empire encompassing Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. 

Imagine you’re rummaging through an old cardboard box salvaged from the storage shelf in your parent’s garage, and you stumble upon a forgotten cache of essays, song lyrics, love letters, and diary entries from your clumsy adolescent past.  What would you do with the painfully naïve, angst-ridden ramblings of your pubescent self?  Would you burn them, tear them up, or bury them in an unmarked grave?

Here's a story I tell every Christmas and even sometimes in mid-year!  I put on my Santa Claus hat with the flashing lights in the white fur trim, and the fact that I have a white beard helps, of course.  I use my tiny jingle bell to tell the story by jingling it wherever you see "jingle, jingle."  If I can do it, you can too.  All you need is a Santa Claus hat and a tiny jingle bell on a paper clip.  Here goes: