Just back from the Hay-on-Wye literature festival. Well, it was great. We camped out at the Hollybush Inn which, we discover, has changed somewhat since last year. At first we struggled to understand the bunch of insanely smiley helpers that guided newcomers along the dirt roads, helped out in the shop, or slopped out the, frankly gross, toilet block. Only later did we find out that the whole place has been taken over by a cult. Apparently the cult grades its members. One woman has attained grade 8, which infers invisibility. This woman wanders naked down to the river under the impression that no one can see her. Any wolf-whistles she hears are, she believes, purely coincidental. We met some good people whilst camping. There can’t be many places where you can sit around earwigging and every conversation you can hear is a literary one.
The wheather was fantastic, hot sunny. The location, as always, beautiful. The place was crawling with literary types. The ’stars’ mingles with the crowd in cafes, bookshops, at the events, and wandering the few streets of Hay. Before seeing Malcolm Gladwell talk, I’d already bumped into him three times. It amazes me that he turns out not to have heard of CS Peirce. It’s not surprising that he hadn’t prior to publishing “Blink”, but you’d have thought that someone would have mentioned him since.
The highlight for me was Chritopher Hitchens. He’s good VFM. He’s funny, he knows everyone, and seems to have memorised every word he has ever read or written. He tells a story, presumably true, of being asked by the vatican to be the devil’s advocate in the beatification process for mother theresa. He launched into religion early on, continuing a trend that I’ve noticed recently. In the last year or so many more media gurus have begun to weigh in against religion. Hitchens says you’ve got to do this all the way down. Fundamentalists are a bunch of people that really believe the crap written in the holy books. It is odd that this bunch, more than those that merely purport to believe, are villified. But Hitchens wants to take them all down, even the “sinister” Dalai Llama.
