I lied. A lot happened.

I am intimidated by all the things I've been meaning to say, but haven't. So:

This is a picture of the backs of people who, obviously, sat in front of me. Matt Groening and Lynda Barry spoke at the UIC Forum for the opening of the Chicago Humanities Festival last Thursday. They were light and easy to swallow and I laughed very hard at their banter and their comics and I enjoyed myself and that felt very nice.

These are the backs of more people. Saturday I did a back-to-back culture vulture session, brought to me, again, by the kind people of the Chicago Humanities Festival. First was Ian Frazier who, as you can see, spoke at a church. In fact, it was the Chicago Temple on Clark and Washington, which is a fantastic place and houses the United Methodist Church on the bottom and top floors. The minister who introduced Frazier gave a nice little history of the building, including a joke about how the floors in between the church are filled with lawyers' offices and Clarence Darrow worked there back in the day. "We claim him," he said, "but he never claimed us." (This was maybe funnier in person.)

Regardless, Frazier was very funny. Did I mention the Humanities Festival's theme this year is "Laughter?" This might help explain why everything was so entertaining and nothing was boring or dull. He read passages from some essays and was kind of exactly what I expected of someone who has been contributing to the New Yorker for thirty years. Unfortunately, he did not read from Travels In Siberia, though someone asked him about it in the brief Q&A that followed and he mentioned that the two part series is being turned into a book (I suspect this was its original intention). I am excited for that.

The next stop was a panel discussion on alternative comics. I walked over with a very nice couple from California who come into town every year for this festival, which I found kind of unbelievable, mostly because the weather around here tends to go to shit in early-mid October and the idea of leaving a warm coastal city to come to Chicago past its seasonal expiration date, particularly for a lecture series, is ridiculous. Then again, when I am retired I will probably do seemingly unreasonable things and will hopefully enjoy every second of it.

Matt Groening and Lynda Barry were back, this time with Jules Feiffer and Chris Ware. This was kind of mind blowing. First of all, it was moderated by Michael Miner, who writes for the Chicago Reader and who seems to be a few years short of ancient. His main purpose, in moderating, appeared to be convincing the four cartoonists next to him that the death of alternative newspapers meant the death of comics. They didn't agree as easily as he, I suspect, had hoped, and this created some entertainingly polite miscommunication.

Jules Feiffer was hard of hearing but full of good stories of the Good Old Days, Groening was teased for his super-succesful, possibly-sell-out status in the alt-comics community, Barry was nuts, in the best way, and Chris Ware was so self-deprecating you wanted to hug him. He also finished off the panel with a touching presentation of all the others' work and how it inspired him, etc etc. I really like Chris Ware. He's horrible on stage, but so charmingly awkward and his comics are good.

I meant to go to a Jonathan Lethem lecture on Sunday, but decided instead to sleep in and then sit on my porch and read the newspaper. I don't really like Lethem and it was sixty degrees outside. I think I made the right choice.

I have spent a lot of the past week cooking. I came out of my angst right in time for the start of a weekly CSA, which is turning into a competition to use one batch of vegetables before I have to go pick up the next batch. But more on that later.