Saturday, October 23, 2010
The View From Where I'll Be
A new friend gave me a perfect book yesterday....listen to this from Eric Maisel's A Writer's San Francisco:
"I 'm American by birth but an urban writer by nature. My true homes are Paris, London,
New York, Tokyo, San Francisco, and the world's resonant cities. I am calmest in a Paris jostle a
Manhattan stampede and edgiest hiking a mountain trail or shopping at WalMart. Everything in
the universe may be equally spiritual but not equally congenial to a blue-state person like myself
with a horror of orthodoxy and of the grandiosity of ordinary people.
I need cafés, video stores that stock independent films, and bars where everyone is an
outsider....I need a place a full standard deviation above the mean....where, when a house
catches on fire, half the people who rush out to watch are Spanish-speaking ladies
and the other half are working - from - home lesbian graphic artists."
And there's a sentence or two in those first paragraphs about needing a place "with more knowing smiles than blank stares and more wry asides than hate-filled sermons"....but we can get to all that later, since I have a feeling this book given to me by my new friend Leslie will have a lot more I will wish to quote from, and let you all share. This book already speaks to my soul, and I am grateful for it. Thank you, Leslie....and for the Virginia - California mixtape as well....when was the last time you guys got a mixtape from a new friend? I feel , gratefully, like I'm back in high school, waiting for my future to begin with a new person I have a crush on, and the new person in this case is a new city: San Francisco, and my new friend Leslie is the high school pal who got us together and knows more than we do...which in this case is accurate, since she has lived in my new city love, and does indeed know more about it than I do! And she gave us a mixtape to play along the way!!! I mean, c'mon! How perfect is that?
She also loaned me my first Jeannette Walls book, and I am deep down into it already, and am at that stage where I resent having to do a matinee because it will get in the way of my reading this book! I can barely wait to get back to it later this afternoon and will probably be able to return it to Leslie on Monday! The 2011 Big Read I am trying to put into place before I leave ( so that my successor will have something to work with and put more firmly into place and succeed) is being built around our book of choice Great Tale and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe and the community theme is about creativity and mental illness: the fine line between the two. So we chose a writer who was plagued by mental health issues all his creative career, and Leslie is the new person at our local Library and she is being a tremendous help in getting these initial parts of the Read together with me. I am grateful for that, but am most grateful for a new friend that speaks so clearly to my sensibilities.
It's of course quite strange the way these things are falling into my path: a book by SF Chronicle writer Adair Lara practically falling into my hands at the local Barnes and Noble, that has resulted in my enrolling in my first SF writers workshop....a new person at our local Library who has lived in SF....(she could have landed at any other business in this town, but it's the Library of all places, where we were fated to meet, underscoring all sorts of themes lacing together the quilt of my imagined future there in that city...), but if there's one thing I've learned in my long life so far, it's to trust what naturally comes my way with ease and surprising resonance.
So, this new book, that has in its title two of my newest favorite words: "writer", and "San Francisco":
thank you, Leslie. It is sitting here on the table, pulsing with life, beckoning me to make a cup of coffee and snuggle down on the sofa with it, crack it's sweet pages and dive into the view it presents: the view from where I'll soon be living.
My heart is racing.
"I 'm American by birth but an urban writer by nature. My true homes are Paris, London,
New York, Tokyo, San Francisco, and the world's resonant cities. I am calmest in a Paris jostle a
Manhattan stampede and edgiest hiking a mountain trail or shopping at WalMart. Everything in
the universe may be equally spiritual but not equally congenial to a blue-state person like myself
with a horror of orthodoxy and of the grandiosity of ordinary people.
I need cafés, video stores that stock independent films, and bars where everyone is an
outsider....I need a place a full standard deviation above the mean....where, when a house
catches on fire, half the people who rush out to watch are Spanish-speaking ladies
and the other half are working - from - home lesbian graphic artists."
And there's a sentence or two in those first paragraphs about needing a place "with more knowing smiles than blank stares and more wry asides than hate-filled sermons"....but we can get to all that later, since I have a feeling this book given to me by my new friend Leslie will have a lot more I will wish to quote from, and let you all share. This book already speaks to my soul, and I am grateful for it. Thank you, Leslie....and for the Virginia - California mixtape as well....when was the last time you guys got a mixtape from a new friend? I feel , gratefully, like I'm back in high school, waiting for my future to begin with a new person I have a crush on, and the new person in this case is a new city: San Francisco, and my new friend Leslie is the high school pal who got us together and knows more than we do...which in this case is accurate, since she has lived in my new city love, and does indeed know more about it than I do! And she gave us a mixtape to play along the way!!! I mean, c'mon! How perfect is that?
She also loaned me my first Jeannette Walls book, and I am deep down into it already, and am at that stage where I resent having to do a matinee because it will get in the way of my reading this book! I can barely wait to get back to it later this afternoon and will probably be able to return it to Leslie on Monday! The 2011 Big Read I am trying to put into place before I leave ( so that my successor will have something to work with and put more firmly into place and succeed) is being built around our book of choice Great Tale and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe and the community theme is about creativity and mental illness: the fine line between the two. So we chose a writer who was plagued by mental health issues all his creative career, and Leslie is the new person at our local Library and she is being a tremendous help in getting these initial parts of the Read together with me. I am grateful for that, but am most grateful for a new friend that speaks so clearly to my sensibilities.
It's of course quite strange the way these things are falling into my path: a book by SF Chronicle writer Adair Lara practically falling into my hands at the local Barnes and Noble, that has resulted in my enrolling in my first SF writers workshop....a new person at our local Library who has lived in SF....(she could have landed at any other business in this town, but it's the Library of all places, where we were fated to meet, underscoring all sorts of themes lacing together the quilt of my imagined future there in that city...), but if there's one thing I've learned in my long life so far, it's to trust what naturally comes my way with ease and surprising resonance.
So, this new book, that has in its title two of my newest favorite words: "writer", and "San Francisco":
thank you, Leslie. It is sitting here on the table, pulsing with life, beckoning me to make a cup of coffee and snuggle down on the sofa with it, crack it's sweet pages and dive into the view it presents: the view from where I'll soon be living.
My heart is racing.
Labels: San Francisco, Writing
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