A blog about books and literary culture in San Francisco with nary a post about eggs. Go figure.
Witold Rybczynski on the poor architecture of San Francisco.
Architecturally speaking, San Francisco has been like a beautiful, rich woman who has never developed an interest in cooking and serves TV dinners to her family, then occasionally—somewhat frantically—hires caterers whenever she has company for dinner.
Last Saturday I was in Seattle for a wedding. I’d forgotten a tie and Erin (my girlfriend, and part of the bridal party) dropped me downtown on her way to get her hair done. After pacing around the men’s department trying to locate a shirt that resembled mine, I settling on an approximation of what I thought might look good and gained the enthusiastic approval of the salesman.
My body temperature had oscillated all morning, the result of a flourishing cold. I was relieved to walk out of Nordstrom and take in the brisk fall air. I turned west toward Puget Sound to make my way back to our hotel. Waiting at the crosswalk, I noticed a commotion across the street. Before I could suss out what was going on, a percussive bang cut through the air. Everything fell still. The reverberation echoed up the downtown towers.
Just as quickly, the pause ended. The people across the street either dove to the ground or scattered from the corner like a flock of frightened birds. A man in a dull yellow shirt collapsed aside a concrete planter.
I can recall many times when a loud percussive sound triggered a nagging question: a gunshot or just a dumpster flap closing? I think our protective instincts opt, or at least resolve, towards the latter—even if they suspect the former. It’s as if you have to see the gun to believe you’ve heard a shot. It was clear the man on the ground was hurt. In that instant, I was torn between impulses to help or to flee.
By the time I pulled out my mobile phone and dialed 911, the emergency line was already busy. With the pulsing signal in my ear, I noticed a man standing in the middle of the square holding a gun above his head. I watched from the corner as a car stopped on the far side of the intersection. Within minutes the corner was clogged with the flaring lights of ambulances and police cars.
I spent the next few hours trying to sort out what happened. I sat at a cafe over a hot cup of tea and studied more senseless violence with Beasts of No Nation. Exhausted—from my cold, from the walk, and from my emotions, which fluctuated with my temperature—I stopped in the convenience store across from our hotel. Without any provocation, the woman behind the register told me to be careful. “A man’s shot downtown.†I told her I saw it. She said he’d died.
The rest of this confounding story is here, and then here. I could talk about the revolting liberality of Washington’s concealed gun laws, but that’s a different blog.
That evening’s wedding was beautiful.
British bookmakers have Philip Roth a 10/1 longshot to win the Nobel Literature Prize, trailing fellow American Joyce Carol Oates (6/1) and frontrunner, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, a 5/2 favorite. It’s the third year Ladbrokes has taken wagers on the prestigious and controversial prize.
Prize likely to be announced Thursday. Hold tight.
My friend Claire Smith maintains an excellent blog. She recently revisited our time together at the Reliant Center in Houston last September.
The second time I visited New Orleans, in 2000, my taxi from the airport passed a corpse in the grassy median of Highway 10. Tennis shoes poking out from beneath a white sheet, the victim lay between a wrecked car and the open back door of an ambulance, the whole scene colored by a pink sherbert sunrise. The image colored the rest of my trip as a reminder of the Crescent City’s long fascination with celebrating the dead. It has stayed with me over the past year as I’ve seen the scattered residents, and memories, of the city try to cope in Katrina’s wake.
At Salon, Tony D’Souza praises the latest issue of the New Orleans Review, penned entirely by New Orleans writers, for inhabiting “its moment of most-relevance so surely that its collective voice rises high above the din.”
We lost one of our most beloved and mythical cities, a psychological escape of libertinism and subversion — whether we’ve been there or not — from our prudish, puritanical country…Whether intended or not, the first half of the New Orleans Review has the feeling of walking around in a Holocaust museum: all of those head shots, all of those piles of shoes. This is the lost New Orleans we knew and took for granted.
In a sidenote, the issue features a dis on Andrei Codrescu, whose Web-based literary magazine published my first short story, “Campanile. As D’Souza aptly notes, “If the writers are already sniping at each other, then the writers are returning to normalcy.”
And so, we hope, is whatever New Orleans has become, and is becoming.
Order the New Orleans Review