Los Angeles Consorting

I believe I am finally recovered from my trip to Los Angeles, which was full of family, friends, and a lot of new babies issued by friends and family. But what I really wanted to do was plug some people's work by way of some shameless name dropping: I spent a fair amount of time with three excellent and deservingly respected writers: one Blair Tindall, doubling on oboe, whose controversial Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music is a fantastic cross between provocative and fact-dense, prurient and realistic; Ellen Slezak, whose collection Last Year's Jesus is lovely, funny, sad, bizzarre and humane and whose novel All These Girls is among the more touching "coming of age" stories I've encountered this side of any Ya-Ya sisterhood; and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, about whose stunning, precise, lilting novel Madeline is Sleeping I begin to lack for superlatives. So on the whole, my company did not lack for accomplishment or talent; I guess you might say the trip was worthwhile.