Again I spent my sabbatical in San Francisco, being officially hosted by U.C. Berkeley, where George Bergman was good enough to act as my sponsor. My stated purpose was to work on my mathematical web site, and in fact I did write quite a few articles for this site, including a conceptual approach to applications of integration which I consider extremely important. (Nobody else seems that interested though. For one thing, the final article wound up being much too long.)
For me personally, though, the more important part of the sabbatical was taking a number of creative writing courses from U.C. Berkeley Extension. The courses were given at their San Francisco location.
The letters to friends below will provide details.
Date: January, 1998
Dear Gail,
Merry Seasons Past!
Here I am in San Francisco, living on Castro Street, two blocks from the streetcar station. Putting up with a roommate, which doesn't thrill me (it's his flat), but we're fairly successful in ignoring each other. Mostly I'm getting my mail at 2261 Market St #72, San Francisco 94114. My voicemail is (415) 273-4695.
I remember that I once told you that the most satisfying times in my life seemed to have been times when I was living in some dingy little place. Well, it seems like I really outdid myself this time, what with this totally dreadful San Francisco rental market.
To start with, my friend Janet had told me that the spare room in the basement in what I used to jokingly call her urban commune would probably be available as of the middle of July. And that's when I arrived, but her other guest had since decided that he needed to stay in San Francisco until December. So I was put in the other basement room, allegedly an office for Jay, Janet's, um, domestic partner. The floor had just barely enough room for my mattress. No closet, nothing with drawers in it that I could use. And I lived there for a month and a half, all the way out at the end of the 38 Geary line. I spent most of my life on the bus, but it kept seeming like there always was some new reason to delay moving into a cheap hotel.
Occasionally Janet's two sons would be brought in from Sacramento. One of them high-school age, the other a little older. And during the afternoon the two employees would show up to help Janet run Greenery Press, whose operations were also housed in the basement. But at least Jay's son (far past high-school age) wasn't living there this summer, nor were there any other temporarily homeless people except for the two of us in the basement, so it wasn't actually as crowded as it had been last summer (1996), except that that summer I did have a semi-decent room to myself.
Anyway, the rent on the house had gone up and was scheduled to go up still more and so Jay & Janet and Tom & Katy (the permanent residents) had started looking for a place to buy. That seemed like no immediate threat, but then through some incredible stroke of misfortunate (from my point of view) they actually found a duplex they liked, went through closing in a hurry, and gave notice on the urban commune as of October 1.
However through a writer I had taken a course from at UH during summer school (Carolyn Lei-Lanilau), I got in contact with two former UH students who had a one bedroom apartment they were living in on Guerrero St. (across the street from the Valencia Street projects). The one roommate was going to be out of town for September and October, so they were very happy to sublet me the real bedroom. (Well, I soon realized that the roommate who was staying wasn't actually happy at all about my moving in, but it did save him from total financial disaster. This roommate --- my new roommate for two months -- had converted the living room into a bedroom for him, which was much nicer than mine except for the lack of a closet.)
My room had a fold-out sleeper couch, which I didn't even try sleeping on, preferring a futon on the floor which filled up most of the room. Well, that was cheap anyway: $360 a month plus minimal utilities. There was no living room in the apartment, of course. My roommate actually managed to cook in the tiny kitchen but I didn't want to even try to make meals there, except for yogurt and muffins for breakfast. The bathroom had an old sink with separate faucets for hot and cold, so that washing my hands involved jerking very quickly back and forth between the two faucets to avoid scalding myself or freezing my hand off. And there was an old claw bathtub with a shower attached. A lot of people think those claw bathtubs are charming in a quaint way, but I considered myself lucky every time I managed to climb in and out for a shower without breaking my neck.
The litter box for the roommate's cat was also in this tiny bathroom with the sink and tub. (The toilet was in a separate room.) He did clean the litter box reasonably often, but I soon understood that there was a good reason why the bathroom window was always kept open. Better to stand there naked freezing to death than deal with the ammonia fumes.
No heat in the whole apartment, in fact, but I was given an electric heater so at least I could keep my own room warm. Except for about a week or so, September and October weren't all that cold here anyway. I'm glad I got out before November.
My roommate was a writer, which explains why $360 a month for rent was difficult for him. Justin Chin: you might even find a book by him, probably poetry, in Barnes & Noble. He's also a performance artist, slowly building himself a reputation on the local ``spoken word'' scene apparently, and goes out of town to do gigs occasionally. The apartment was actually reasonably nice when he was out of town. We never talked, so I didn't learn that much about him. But once he realized that I wasn't going to object when he played industrial rock in his room at top volume whenever he was home and awake, and had his gay boyfriends over for loud sex, he starting being mildly friendly on the few occasions when we actually encountered each other. (Usually we were each shut up in our own room. There was really no common area in the apartment to hang out in.)
I liked living in the Mission district. A month or so after I left, the Chronicle had a big article in the Pink Section that called it ``The Hippest Neighborhood in the City.'' Maybe so, although I never got involved in the nightlife there. The Latinos definitely didn't appreciate that Chronicle article, and I don't imagine the Blacks in the Projects and the winos and homeless panhandlers on 16th Street thought much of it either.
It was three blocks walk to BART, anyway, convenient for those times when I wanted to go over to Berkeley and pretend to be a mathematician for a few hours. And three blocks in the other direction to Church and Mission where Sparky's is open all night so I had no problem having dinner at midnight when I wanted. As far as I'm concerned, Sparky's might qualify for being the hippest cheap diner in the city. I really like the waitresses there. I just automatically assume that they're all lesbian, although anything is possible. (In this town, anything is definitely possible!)
I was also living three blocks from Market and Laguna, where UC Berkeley Extension holds their San Francisco classes. Very lucky for me, since I had signed up for a ten-week class in novel writing during September and October. At the beginning, I still hadn't got myself a computer, but I bought a typewriter and wrote an outline and two chapters for a novel, without the slightest idea what it was going to be about.
Meanwhile, I had discovered that the computer terminals which now substitute for a card catalog in the public library can also be used for telnet, so I was working on mathematical articles for my web page by standing at terminals in the library. Or else doing it at one of the two cafes near me which had a computer terminal (only one) which one could use by sticking quarters in a slot --- five minutes per quarter --- whenever some homeless derrilect wasn't furiously typing away posting his opinions to a newsgroup. Unfortunately, those cafe terminals didn't really work all that well. Cyber cafes as such have not really caught on here in San Francisco.
Finally I managed to buy a second-hand laptop. At that point I didn't know how many more times I'd have to move before I left the city, and it seemed like there was a good possibility that I'd wind up living in a residential hotel (although even those were pretty full), so it didn't seem like a good idea to buy a desktop system, which I could have bought much more cheaply.
Once I was able to log on from home, I could check the newsgroups for rentals more easily. Mostly all I found were ``Wanted to Rent'' ads, but there were a few people looking for roommates. I didn't answer the ad for my present place the first time I saw it, because the guy said he was in the Castro district and so I assumed he was gay and looking for a gay roommate. But when he posted the ad again a few days later, I answered and after about two weeks of exchanging email, he was finally willing to tell me where the flat actually is and agree to meet.
Which was extremely lucky for me. Based on previous experience with cheap hotels in San Francisco, I had assumed that in September or October they would start having winter rates and if worst came to worst I could get myself a reasonably large room with a bath in the Tenderloin. But worst turned out to be much worse than worst. Not only were the hotels not offering winter rates, most of them didn't have any vacancies at all. Everywhere I went people kept telling me about the 1% vacancy rate for apartments in San Francisco, as if I hadn't already seen that information in the newspapers a dozen times. (There were indeed some vacancies in residential hotels, though, if one were willing to use a bathroom down the hall. Better than sleeping in Golden Gate Park, at least.)
Here on Castro Street, I'm paying $550 a month plus utilities, and I actually have three rooms, sort of. ``Sort of'' meaning that the gas heater in my bedroom is essentially the only heat in the flat, and my roommate finds it intolerably stuffy unless windows are open. (He also has a heater in his bedroom, but apparently never turns it on. I'd guess the temperature at night recently has been in the forties.) So that means that when he's home, I'm basically confined to my bedroom with the door closed. However fortunately he works seven days a week and so is seldom home in the daytime.
I don't know if technically he has a social phobia or not, but he's almost pathologically shy. We communicate very little, even when we see each other. He gets upset if my bedroom door is open while he's home, because he says that seeing me in my room makes him feel like a voyeur. (Yes, I'm fully clothed.)
Aside from the novel writing course I've been doing lots of interesting things, a few of which you might prefer not to be told about. This spring I'm going to sign up not only for the second semester of the novel writing course, but also for one in writing mysteries. Since just the one course took almost all my time, what with writing my own chapters and writing comments for everybody else's, taking two will be sheer insanity. However these courses are things I'll never get a chance to take in Hawaii and so I decided that it would be stupid not to take them this year.
It used to be that when I wanted to do something, I'd see all the obstacles that made it clearly impossible. In the past few years, though, I've taken it as a working assumption that there's always some way of dealing with obstacles. I must say, though, that from a financial point of view, in taking this sabbatical on half salary I'm really skating a lot closer to the edge than I had anticipated. The rental income from my apartment in Hawaii has been discouragingly small, partly because the agency isn't getting much rent for it and partly because there've been a number of expenses. And my paycheck is turning out to be quite a bit smaller than I'd expected, mostly because I elected to contribute to the retirement system at the full rate; I hadn't realize that this would mean they would be taking out three times as much as they would have if I'd elected to contribute at a rate proportionate to my half salary. Anyway, I'm spending money at a prodigious rate. I'll survive, but I hadn't expected to wind up so broke at the end of all this.
Every day, though, I'm reminded that this is where I need to be, not Hawaii. But I'll have to wait for the Hawaii real estate market to dramatically improve so that I can sell my apartment at a decent rate. In that case, the money I've spent this year will be of minor importance. But it sure doesn't look like that's going to happen soon.
But otherwise, I won't be able to retire in the near future anyway, so what am I saving for? I'm old enough now so that I can't be sure of my life or health lasting forever, so I want to have the life I want now, rather than saving up for some day when I'll be too senile to enjoy what I have.
And I also have to wait for the current Silicon Valley boom to play itself out, so there won't be such an excess of money around chasing many too few apartments. I'm convinced that this is a bubble. A whole lot of this money is being spent on people who are doing things like web design, and I think that the world-wide web is the CB radio of the Nineties. As soon as web TV and the new web telephones become more prevalent, people are going to start realizing that the web isn't really all that interesting. There are still going to be a few sites offering things of real academic value, but for the most part, people are going to get bored with the web and advertizers are going to discover that it's not really effective.
Okay, so what else have I been doing this year? I decided to go through the SFSI (San Francisco Sex Information, see my web page) training again. Going through it for a second time turned out to be somewhat boring, but I think I was more successful this time at making friends. One of my fellow students has just decided to become a prostitute (call girl, as we used to say in my day). I thought it was only the decent thing to do to give her a little business. She's certainly not cheap, but we had fun together. And now it turns out that she'll be working the same shift on the phones as I am. (I start tomorrow.) That should be lots of fun. She can handle the calls on prostitution and I can handle the ones on S&M. (Actually, though, the supervisor on my shift is a leading figure in the SM community and a friend of mine, so we'll have no lack of expertise in that area.)
I should have given you many more of my books when I left Hawaii. I mailed about nine or ten large boxes of them here. I had wondered about this a lot. On the one hand, if I were going to San Francisco to have a different life for a year, did it make sense for me to drag a lot of the paraphernelia of my present life along with me? But on the other hand, when I come back to Honolulu will I want to be met by an enormous number of books bought at least two years beforehand? So I mailed off a whole lot to Janet's address.
I had counted on being able to leave those in Janet's house until I was settled. What with all the boxes of Greenery Press books already stacked in the basement, mine wouldn't make that much difference. But then when her crew bought a new house it seemed unreasonable that she should have to deal with my books in the process of moving. So I managed to get them over to Berkeley, where for some reason the Math Dept had been nice enough to give me an office. (Well, I share it with two other people, but the only thing I've used it for has been storing boxes of books.) Then, since I've moved into this new flat, I've been gradually bringing one box of books at a time back from Berkeley on BART and the streetcar, using one of those little luggage carriers they sell at the drugstore. The BART segment turned out to not be much trouble, but the streetcar segment was much more of a hassle, since the streetcars are almost always pretty packed. (Naturally, it turned out that a lot of the books I most wanted were in the very last box I chose to bring back.)
So here I am with two rooms overflowing with books. I don't know why I thought that I would have more time to read in San Francisco where there are so many more interesting things to do than in Hawaii. (One of which interesting things, of course, is going to all the interesting bookstores here and in Berkeley. And I'm incapable of going to bookstores and not buying more books.) But I have been definitely taking the time to do a fair amount of reading. I'll never read all these books, but I've realized that the reason I brought some of these books here was that I didn't consider them essential reading, but knew that if I didn't read them this year I'd never get around to it. So I'll just leave them behind when I go back to Hawaii. Also I have to accept the fact that lots of times I buy a book because it looks interesting and I want to find out what it's like, but just reading thirty or forty pages from it, or even just skimming through the pages, will give me as much as I really want.
I've been working a lot on both my personal and mathematical web pages. On my mathematical page, I've wound up putting an incredible amount of effort into an article trying to explain calculus in a simple way. So far, I haven't been able to find anyone in the whole world who will tell me that there's any value in this, so maybe I'm just making a fool of myself. But that's what tenure is about, I guess.
And I've seen a lot of wonderful movies that I'd never get a chance to see in Hawaii.
I went to a class from the Learning Annex one evening given by Nora Dunn (of Saturday Night Live) on how to be a comedian. More entertaining than instructional, but I was glad I went. And took another class on ``How to Write Any Book in Two Weeks.'' That one had some interesting ideas, although I haven't been applying them as much as I should.
I haven't spent as much time going out to bars as I was expecting to. It seems I've mostly lost interest in going to lots of different bars, but I do still go up to Specs in North Beach (see my web page) once or twice a week. Specs himself usually makes a point of talking to me for a while when we're both there. He hasn't quite figured me out, but it's against his principles to actually ask for information. Several of the bartenders know quite a bit about me (although none of them know about my web page), but Specs just says, ``I don't know what your name is -- and I don't want to know. I prefer not to know anybody's name, so if some law enforcement person shows up and asks about one of my customers, I don't know who he's talking about.''
--Love & kisses,
--Lee
To: Friends
Subject: Mystery Course
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998
Janet ---
I'm going to cc this to a whole bunch of people, so I'll repeat some things in the beginning which I've already told you.
The two novel-writing classes are very very different. Opposite ends of the spectrum. The most obvious difference, of course, is that the mystery writing course is oriented towards genre fiction and the other towards literary fiction (although in both classes we've been told that we can write absolutely any kind of novel we want). There are completely different concepts in the two classes of what's involved in writing a novel. Lewis Buzbee has given us the quote from William Styron: ``Writing a novel is like walking from Vladivostok to Spain on your knees.'' He emphasizes that one should expect it to take several years to write a novel.
On the other hand, Shelley Singer is saying, more or less, ``If you want to make any money at this game, you've got to produce at least one novel per year. So you've got to learn how to get on with the process and be reasonably efficient at it.''
It's simplistic to say that Buzbee's class is about quality and Singer's about quantity, because Singer would certainly maintain that she's also teaching us to be concerned about quality. But for her, that's the secondary issue. The primary thing is learning how to actually get a novel planned and written. Whereas Buzbee's class is like all the other writing courses and workshops I've been in, in that we're asked to write an outline and write some chapters, but nothing is said about how one goes about doing that. (God, if I just knew how to come up with an outline, I'd probably have no trouble in writing the novel itself.) In fact, he's explicitly told us that the actual process is something he doesn't think he can teach us about.
In Lewis Buzbee's class, the emphasis is on how to make what you've written better. Characterization, point of view, ``what is a plot,'' all the traditional stuff one finds in writing books. (Except that when it comes to plot, his answer is from E.M. Forster: plot consists of cause and effect. Rather than the more specific definition, so popular especially in genre fiction, that plot comes from a character with a problem to solve. Buzbee says that a novel begins in a ``broken place,'' and is ``a journey from innocence to experience'' (Andre Gide), which is slightly different.)
I found the first class meeting in Singer's class very enlightening, in that I could finally see how one goes about coming up with the outline of a novel. If I were to describe the process, it would sound like a completely trivial flash of understanding: just decide on the general situation, and then on a cast of characters that will be involved in that situation, and then what the relationships between the characters are. But, stupid me, I had never really thought of it quite that simply before.
Unfortunately, though, I have found the subsequent sessions of Singer's class much less useful. And getting up for a 10 AM class on Saturday mornings is extremely difficult for me, and pretty much wipes out my whole Saturday, and in fact screws up the rest of my week too, since I can't get up early on Saturdays unless I do it for the rest of the week as well. So I may just stop going to Singer's class.
Buzbee asks us to write an outline and three chapters. Since the class is basically non-credit, there's no real compulsion to fulfill that requirement. But we are asked to xerox the first two chapters and hand them out to the class for workshopping, which does make one feel a certain sense of obligation. I, for one, am certainly not going to come to the workshops with my metaphorical black hangman's hood and criticize other people without putting something of my own up as a target for criticism.
Singer's class is also part workshop, but there the process is that people bring anything they feel like (a chapter, an outline, notes, whatever) and read it aloud. For one thing, this means that it takes a lot longer to workshop one student. In Buzbee's class, we workshop six submissions per evening. In Singer's, we have a hard time doing three. Furthermore, I for one have a hard time making intelligent comments on the basis of hearing something read aloud. In fact, even when I can read something for myself, I usually have to read it at least twice before I get a sense of how to criticize it, and then I have to keep looking at it while I write up my comments. (Buzbee asks us to submit written criticism as well as addressing the work in class. He asks us to submit at least one paragraph of typed criticism for each submission, but I sometimes write as much as three or four pages, line-and-a-half spaced. This takes a hell of a lot of time.)
In Singer's class, in any case, it quickly became clear that the idea in workshopping was to be supportive, while making a few minor suggestions for improvement. One of the first pieces read was a chapter from a mystery novel on vampyrism and the vampire clubs here in San Francisco. There was some fairly interesting stuff in it, but there were also a lot of passages that were very routine, predictable.
For instance, the woman detective goes to a vampire club in the Lower Haight. We're told that she has to drive around quite a bit to find a parking space, then locks her car up and sets the alarm and uses The Club on the steering wheel, and then takes pepper spray and I forget what else with her as she walks to the nightclub. At least half a page description of the process of parking her car, and nothing in any of it that's the least bit fresh. If you asked a dozen writers to write a description of parking a car in the city, they would almost all have turned in identical passages. And if you left the passage out completely and just said, ``I arrived at the club,'' the reader would not miss a thing.
So I said to the author, ``You have a lot of interesting things in your chapter. But you've buried these in a lot of things that are boring.'' And Singer and the other students were quite aghast (although the author's facial expression seemed to indicate that she thought my point was valid). They said, ``Oh, no, it's really hard to find parking in the Haight.'' (And in what central location in any big city is it not hard?) And, ``In that neighborhood, you'd really need pepper spray.'' (Well, yeah. So what are you telling me that's new and interesting?)
Now it's always possible that I was wrong and that spending half a page on parking the car was actually good. But what I immediately perceived was that any sort of really negative criticism in this class was definitely unwelcome. So now, mostly I'm just holding my peace in Singer's class. And I certainly don't feel any urge to bring anything of my own to read aloud.
Buzbee, on the other hand, has given us the quote, ``You can't sharpen a knife by rubbing it against a piece of soap.'' And while he doesn't necessarily encourage students to be as severe in their criticism as I am, he doesn't discourage it either. The aim of the workshop is to make positive suggestions for improvement, not to put people down, but when something in a chapter is really bad, students will definitely tell the writer so.
Singer is requiring us to turn in one assignment on the seventh class meeting (although she's indicated quite clearly that she expects most of us to be late in turning it in). This is to be a ``partial": an outline and a first chapter. But it won't get workshopped, she just reads it and comments on it herself. I would sort of like to actually do this for the mystery I've been thinking of writing for several years now: Death of a Dominatrix. On the other hand, I just don't feel any strong sense of obligation to turn that assignment in, so realistically I'll pretty certainly never get around to doing it.
I will say that I read another of Shelley Singer's Barrett Lake mysteries. This was Searching for Sara, which she said she considers the best. And it was much much better than the one she assigned for class: Interview with Mattie. (Although I consider the title Searching for Sara unfortunate, because it keeps reminding me of the movie ``Desperately Seeking Susan.'') To me, the difference seems to be very clearly that in Sara she really cared about her characters. She spent a lot of time visiting the Larkin Street Youth Center and learning about its operation and getting to know about some of the kids there, and it really shows in the novel. Mattie, on the other hand, is about a Berkeley alternative newspaper (basically the SF Weekly or Bay Guardian), and, as she told us, she thought that was a world she was fairly familiar with, so she didn't do much research on it. And whereas the kids in the youth center were clearly characters she really cared about, the staff of the alternative newspaper were basically just chess pieces for her to move around.
--Lee
Janet (and many others) --
Just before I left the City, I had lunch at a trendy SOMA restaurant with Petra. It was only the second time I'd seen her --- and the first time I'd talked to her --- during my whole year in San Francisco. She asked me if I thought we might ever be friends again, and I said, ``Probably not.'' At which point she got mad and said, ``Well, you're just a crotchety old man,'' and launched into a long tirade.
My first thought was, ``I don't have to sit here at listen to this. I'll just get up and leave'' (probably forgetting to leave any money for my half of the check to boot!) But then for some reason, the whole thing started seeming funny to me and I started to laugh. ``This girl,'' I thought, ``certainly doesn't know much about how to be friends.'' Anyway, she did eventually say, ``I'm sorry about what happened between us,'' which were words I'd certainly never expected to hear come out of her mouth. And I did say that I was willing to be friends again. Not that that makes anything different. Willingness is scarcely the issue. Several years ago there was a crucial choice point in our relationship and we both made certain decisions that changed everything. I do have to agree with her, though, that it's a shame when two people that like each other a whole lot can't find a way of being friends that works for both people.
Surprisingly, I didn't spend a lot of time going to bars in San Francisco. Somehow it didn't seem as important as it has on previous occasions, and where I was living didn't make it very convenient --- except for gay bars, of course. It took me nearly an hour to get up to North Beach to Specs on the streetcar and bus, but that's still mostly where I went when I went out at all. I did find a bar on Market Street just past Church called the Expansion Bar, which was once rated Best Dive Bar by the San Francisco Weekly. I liked the bartender there quite a bit, although I never had that much conversation with her. I came in one night and asked if she had a glass of Merlot and she said, ``What kind of bar do you think you're in, anyway? If you want red wine, I have some.''
Two doors up Market Street from the Expansion Bar is the Lucky 13, catering to more of a punk crowd. The first night I went in there, I got served by a brawny bartender with tattoos all the way from his wrists up past his elbows. The woman who was tending bar with him had the same kind of tattoos. I was carrying a bag from City Lights that evening, and after a while the brawny bartender came over and asked what books I'd bought. I showed him (I forget what they were, but nothing new and trendy), and he said, ``I love City Lights Books. When I first got into town many years ago,'' telling me that he was now forty years old, ``I was befriended by the Di Prima family. You know Diane Di Prima, of course?'' Well, yes, certainly I knew of her, although I certainly didn't know her personally. ``And through them, I got to know a number of writers who had been involved in the Beat movement.''
What a city! Where punk bartenders with intimidating tattoos talk about Beat poets. Wheras here in Honolulu, I've met people in the English Department who've never even heard of Diane Di Prima. Or Kenneth Patchen, for that matter, which truly astounds me.
A few weeks later I went back to the Lucky 13 and the same bartender was there again, but this time ... no tattoos!
Oh! I thought. Temporary tattoos.
I did get taken to one gay bar, on Church Street, by that woman Kiki who was at the Bitch Goddess reading at A Different Light. It was interesting the way a number of the gay guys clustered around her and flirted with her. She was not the only woman there, by any means (nor, apparently, the only heterosexual one), but the ambience was very definitely gay. It was not a place I wanted to go back to alone.
The other bar I went to fairly often was the 500 Club, at 17th and Guerrero. The bartender there in the daytime on weekends and on Monday and Tuesday evenings was a woman named Kat who used to be quite famous/notorious as part of the North Beach crowd. I'd met her a couple times at the Saloon when I was living in San Francisco in 1990-91, but mostly I knew of her as someone my friend Brenda mentions from time to time. One night at Specs someone mentioned that she was working at the 500 Club, so I made a point of looking it up in the phone book and discovered that it was about three blocks from where I was living at the time on Guerrero Street. So I started making a point of coming in once a week to see her and continued to do so even after I moved to Castro Street. She didn't know me from Adam, of course, and I didn't try to tell her anything about who I am or talk about Brenda, but one night she came into Specs when I was there, and from then on she had me pegged as a North Beach person, undoubtedly assuming that she had known me back in her North Beach days but that the memory had been lost in that alcoholic fog from the time when she was famous for the number of shots of tequila she could slug down.
Now she doesn't drink. The day had come when she had started pissing blood and had to make the choice between drinking or living. For her, at least, not drinking turned out to be the better choice all around. ``I like the clarity,'' she says.
I was a bit annoyed when I mentioned her name one night at Specs and the person I was talking to (no one I even know), said, ``Yeah, Crazy Kat.'' I'm sure there was a time when she was proud to be called that, probably created the nickname herself, but now she's one of the sanest people I know. I like her a lot, not because of her old North Beach reputation, and not because I'm attracted to her, but just because she's her. She's that kind of person.
Now I'm back here in Honolulu. Once more having successfully made the switch between alternative realities. Funny: in science fiction it only takes a few minutes to go from one reality to another. But when I do it, it takes five hours locked up in the little aluminum tube. And that's not counting the three-and-a-half hour wait in the airport, because one got there an hour and a half early, of course, and then the plane was two hours late in leaving. Of course. (Northwest Airlines, but my experiences with United have been comparable. However I will say that when I flew from Honolulu to San Francisco a year ago, United actually called me at my apartment before I left for the airport to let me know that the flight would be delayed at least three hours.)
When they called pre-boarding for families with small children and half the departure lounge stood up, I knew that this was going to be one of those times when everything that could possibly be bad would be. As it turned out, two small children might have been an improvement over the testosterone-loaded pair in the seat in front of me. By the time we made it to Honolulu, each of them had managed to spill beer all over himself, which was a great joke which they enthusiastically shared with the stewardess. There used to be a rule limiting the amount of alcohol passengers could be served, but maybe that was one of the things that got deregulated by Ronald Reagan. Or maybe the stew was so exhausted at that point that she just couldn't be bothered to make an issue of it. Anyway, at least they didn't spill any beer on me, and I could even be slightly sympathetic, since they'd apparently been on airplanes (and in airports) since early in the morning.
As always, my objective was simply to have somebody pour me off the plane at the other end (Honolulu), trusting that once I got to the airport in the correct city, somehow people would take care of me and I'd wind up where I needed to be. (No one was meeting me, of course.) As it was, the flight delay had negated all my careful planning about arrival time, and my taxi charged forth right into the middle of rush-hour traffic on the freeway.
Sarona had kept telling me that I should rent a car. That was the last thing I would have wanted. To the greatest extent possible, I wanted to be able to give people money and have them take care of seeing that everything went the way it was supposed to. In fact, somebody ought to start a service so that as soon as I get off the plane, I could just give somebody $10 and a piece of paper with my name and address, and the number of pieces of luggage I have, and they'd make sure that me and all my luggage get into a cab and that the driver knew where he's going.
I can congratulate myself, though, that I was functional enough to advise the cab driver on the best exit to take off the freeway. I thought I was doing really well to still remember the names of the freeway exits in this alternative reality, and what lane to be in after taking the exit.
Anyway, my apartment keys still worked. The woman who had rented my place had moved all the furniture around in surprising ways, but most of the lightbulbs were not burned out, and the sheets I'd left behind for her were still in my closet and were clean, so that took care of my biggest concern: that I'd wind up either having to make it to my storage locker before they closed or sleeping on a bare mattress. There was no toilet paper, of course. I've moved often enough to have predicted that. No hangers in the closets either. But the handful of dishes I'd left in the apartment were still there, so I had a plate (although, for the moment, no food) and a glass to drink out of.
I think I slept for an hour first, then went to Anna Bannana's and got a plate of nachos. Astonishingly enough, none of the bartenders were new, although it took me a while to remember their names. It was early in the evening, and somebody had brought in a large fish and was slicing it up and offering sashimi all around. One of the bartenders, Barbie, asked if I was glad to be back in Honolulu, and I told her I'd much rather still be in San Francisco. She gestured to the guy cutting up the fish and said, ``Yeah, San Francisco is nice, but you won't find that in a bar there.'' I nodded and smiled to be agreeable instead of explaining that I don't even like sashimi that much.
Not only were the two bartenders (and all the others I've encountered at Anna's since) still the same as before, but almost all the customers were as well. It's always a shock after one spends an extended period in an alternative reality to find that the reality one left behind hasn't changed at all. How can these people be so limited? I wondered; I've been having these great transformative experiences, and here they are still living their same old lives.
It was Thursday, so tequila was on special at Anna's, and I had a couple of margaritas before going across the street to the Star Market and buying food for breakfast the next morning plus a few frozen dinners and a package of toilet paper.
For the next few days, I was looking at everyone I passed on the sidewalk and thinking that same thing I'd thought that first night at Anna's: how can these people be so limited? I've just been in a city where there are Gay Freedom Day parades and SM clubs and theatres showing an abundance of foreign and independent films and interesting newspapers and dozens of bookstores and bars where people carry on intelligent conversations, and sidewalks where bizarre clothing and piercings scarcely get a second glance, and here people are content to walk around in their middle-class small-town world (because Honolulu is, for the most part, one big small town, or maybe lots of little ones) without even knowing that such things are possible.
And as always when I return from the Mainland, I was intensely irritated by how slow people here are, in every sense of the word. So many of them waddle down the street (that peculiar ``local'' style of walking so common here), and one has to try one's best to get around them.
I know it's not politically correct to think that people are not intelligent just because they speak pidgin, but after living here twenty years, I've reached a point where I just have to abandon political correctness and say that, as far as I'm concerned, most of the people who inhabit this city are just not very bright. I know it's a limitation of my own not to be able to appreciate the marvels of having spent one's childhood at the beach and hiking, and being in touch with nature and the land (the ``aina''), which people make such a big deal of here. But for my part, I'd rather live in a place where people read books.
It's occurred to me that Hawaii, with its strong emphasis on ``local'' culture, and ``local'' traditions, and ``local'' literature, and ``local'' music, and the repeated statements that ``Hawaii is a special place,'' and ``Lucky you live Hawaii'' .... It's occurred to me that Hawaii is in some ways a lot like the Deep South. However on the one hand, we have none of the dark, sinister, ``gothic'' elements that one associates with the South. But on the other hand, so far Hawaii has no writers to compare with Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty.
What local literature is for the most part --- and as far as I'm concerned, this goes for most of the local culture here --- is charming. In fact, when you come right down to it: cute. It was fun for the first couple of years, but twenty years has been much too long here.
The most depressing thing was opening the newspaper and seeing what movies were showing. Almost none of which I would have made the effort to see in San Francisco. However High Art, which I had liked a whole lot (despite the rather extreme heroin usage) was at the Varsity, and in the weeks since, Henry Fool and The Opposite of Sex (which I highly recommend) have showed up. So a few independent films do make it to Honolulu. They're just a little late in getting here and don't stick around very long.
I just saw, incidentally, The Governness, with Minnie Driver. I probably wouldn't have gone to see it in San Francisco because the reviews didn't make it sound very appealing to me. But here last week it was about the only decent choice available, and it turned out I liked it quite a bit. It's one of these Merchant-Ivory style historical pieces.
The thing that really struck me, though, as I walked into the theatre on a Sunday afternoon, was the way that most of the crowd consisted of gray-haired old people. And I thought to myself that this must be really indicative of something or other, either about the state of the film industry or about my own tastes, that so many of the kinds of films I like mostly attract an audience of senior citizens. (Even in San Francisco, I'd notice a whole lot of gray hair in the audiences for films like this.)
But then it suddenly occurred to me that, after all, I'm one of those gray-haired old people myself. And that was a quite disturbing thought.
Here in Honolulu, I've found that my favorite strip bars are still in business. Very reassuring, since a number of other well known places no longer exist. Liberty House, the big department store (somewhat comparable to Macy's) is still open but in bankruptcy, as is the Honolulu Book Store. Submission has completely disappeared, but I'd already been told about that when I met Mistress Bleu (who owned Submission) in San Francisco in August. And I just learned today that Hula's Bar & Lei Stand, the most famous gay bar in Honolulu, is now closing. (Addendum, 1999: It's subsequently re-opened, just outside Waikiki on Kapahulu Ave.)
Anyway, at Club Sandy I found my friend Jessica, who it turned out was working her last night before going back to Santa Cruz, where she's going to college with the ultimate goal of becoming a doctor. Not an MD, I think, but some sort of holistic practitioner.
And at Club By Me, which is about a two blocks from Anna Bannana's (and thus about six blocks from my apartment), I met a dancer who I had a lot of fun with. Last Sunday night I asked her to marry me, which made her laugh. We joked that if Father Guido Sarducci came wandering by we could get him to do the job on the spot, because, as I explained to her, if I waited even one day I'd undoubtedly change my mind. She certain likes me (she says she loves gray hair), but on the other hand, last Sunday was the second time I'd come to see her and the way I gauged her reaction on seeing me again was more like, ``Oh, this is a guy who spends money on me and makes me laugh,'' instead of, ``Oh great, I've been really hoping you'd come in again because I want to become close friends with you.'' Anyway, her hope in life is to live on a farm on the Big Island and have a palomino horse, so we don't exactly have a shared set of values.
Well, I told her how to find Anna's and she says she's been wanting to go there. So maybe I'll see her there sometime and we'll see what happens in that environment.
I mailed about 13 boxes of books back from San Francisco. (At some point, I lost track of the exact number.) And even though some of them were books I'd shipped from Honolulu to San Francisco a year ago in the first place, somehow I think of all of them as being little pieces of San Francisco that I've brought here to Hawaii.
It's important for me not to think of the core of my identity here in Honolulu as consisting of the fact that I'm not in San Francisco. There are in fact things of value for me here (although teaching mathematics is not one of them) in this life that's lived within a very small radius. (Most of my life here takes place within a mile of my apartment.)
I've been thinking that coming back to Hawaii is a little like going into the dark part of the year: December and January. It means slowing down, being much more inward. Strange as most people would find it, life for me in Hawaii, this very outdoorsy place, is much more inward than it is in San Francisco. It can easily turn into depression, but on the other hand, it's also a time when I can get a lot of things done, provided that I've planned ahead well. It's much harder to be productive in San Francisco, because there are so many things to do that are fun.
Life revolves around my books, my music, my computer, and my VCR.
In fact, having seen all the movies I did in San Francisco
has had the side effect of giving me an enormous list of movies I now
want to check out of the library here on videotape. (I want to watch all
the Audrey Hepburn movies they have for one thing. Watching her in a
movie --- Paris When It Sizzles,
with William Holden --- with the sound
turned down one afternoon at the 500 Club made me realize that she was
one of the great silent film actresses. She could say so much with her
eyes that you didn't need to hear the dialogue.)
[Addendum, 1999:
Roman Holiday, Audrey Hepburn's first
major film, is of course a classic.
But Love in the Afternoon, with Gary Cooper and
Maurice Chevalier, really shows her eyes off to their best.
And Funny Face, although not one of her consistently best
performances, had moments, especially the dance scenes,
that really showed off her capability
to have been a great silent film star; I believe that she
could have held her own with Chaplin.
Breakfast at Tiffany's is of course a wonderful film,
and Audrey Hepburn was very good in it,
But it didn't really take full advantage of the
best qualities of Audrey Hepburn.
One should also see her in the 1981 Peter Bogdanovich film
They All Laughed; she appears fairly late in the film,
and though I kept watching for her,
at first I didn't recognize her when she appeared.
But even then, in her fifties,
she had a presence, a charisma, that made me wonder,
``Just who is this European actress?'' until I realized
that it was her.]
Love & roses,
--Lee
-----
Trying to understand learning by studying schooling
is rather like trying to understand sexuality by studying bordellos.
-- Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions
To: Everybody,
Date: June, 1999
I've been pretty busy. I knew that by coming back to Honolulu at the last possible moment last fall, my life here would be chaos for a while. But I'd decided that it would be foolish to sacrifice any time in San Francisco just for the sake of getting my life here organized again quickly. As far as my classes go, certainly my students wouldn't give a damn whether I was organized or not.
I've not been teaching anything very hard this year. In the fall, a small section of Calculus 2 and a course in Discrete Math which turned out to have only 9 students who didn't bother me a whole lot. And in the spring, my associate chairman informed me with regret (his, not mine) that the advanced Differential Equations course I was scheduled to teach didn't get enough enrollment, so I'd be teaching two sections of Calculus 2.
But just to make sure I immediately realized that I was back in the land of mediocrity again, I was given three major projects to work on in the directory of my office computer I label Bullshit. A Sabbatical Report, of course, and an Activities Report for the year preceding my sabbatical, and then, the unexpected one, a Profile on my activities for the preceding five years, which is part of the meaningless post-tenure review which the university does every five years.
Well, I do put more work into these things than the university expects, since I figure that if I'm going to write them anyway, I might as well write something that will be useful to myself as well as to the administrators. (And if the administrators don't like it, so much the better!) The sabbatical report, in particular, was a major exercise in creative writing. I guess that's the sort of thing people have in mind when they talk about Creative Non-Fiction. (Yes, there really is now a literary genre that's called that!)
Otherwise, during the fall semester, I was taking advantage of the excellent audiovisual library here to watch a whole lot of films on videotape. I managed to see almost all of Martin Scorsese's films, and all the Robert Altman films which are in the library. (I think that Altman has made over 100, so I can't complain too much that the library doesn't stock them all.) And several films starring Audrey Hepburn (see my previous Christmas letter).
Okay, back to what's been happening in my life. I lost three teeth during the year I was in San Francisco, so I've been spending a lot of time at the dentist, getting a partial plate made. Very time consuming and not much fun, but pretty much unavoidable.
The other big thing (a really big thing) that's been happening in my life is that I had Lady Atria staying with me for most of January, February, and March. And as Professor Higgins (played by Rex Harrison) sings in My Fair Lady, ``But just let a woman in your life ....''
So that turned a whole lot of things in my life upside down, but it was definitely worth it.
It mades me wonder a little bit about why it seems so completely impossible for me to create a satisfactory life for myself here in Hawaii. I have a job that gives me lots of freedom, as long as I treat it as a nine-month job and do only the things I actually get paid for. And while there are lots of opportunities in San Francisco that I don't have here (like seeing older films on the big screen at The Castro and Red Vic and attending writing classes at UC Berkeley Extension), there are other sorts of opportunities here in Hawaii, like the University's excellent audio-visual collection where I can check out films for free, and the classes in the English Department which I can take for free. Furthermore, the Art Academy shows a pretty fair selection of independent and foreign films, and the Varsity Theatre near where I live shows some of them as well (although six months to a year after they play in San Francisco), and the new megaplex which just opened on the other side of town has promised to use one or two of its screens for independent films. (And thanks to the express bus service that just started this spring, it's not all that inconvenient for me to get to. Somebody in the city government here must have been visiting San Francisco and noticed how popular the green busses on Geary Blvd. and Mission St. are.)
And with both Barnes & Noble and Borders now in town, I can find more books to buy than I can ever read.
But somehow when I'm here I'm always thinking about San Francisco and wishing I were there.
Having Lady Atria here made me realize that one of the things that missing for me in Hawaii is that I just don't have any people I enjoy hanging out with. And Atria remedied that to a large extent not only by giving me the gift of her own presence, but because she's much more outgoing and social than I am, so that she brought me into contact with lots of other people and brought a number of interesting things into my life.
So I've been thinking that maybe if I could just cultivate a circle of a nmber of different women who would come to Hawaii and live with me from time to time, maybe this wouldn't be such a terrible place after all.
I'd better do something, anyway. The economy here is still in the toilet (No! It was in the toilet; now it's down the drain), and although real estate is finally selling again, it's selling because sellers are desperate and selling for lower prices than a year ago. So it's probably going to be at least another two years before I can sell my apartment and get out of here.
The other thing I was doing this spring was taking two classes from the English Department. The one that required me to write all the email (although what I wrote, of course, was much longer than what was required, as always) was a graduate course called The Foundations of Creative Writing or something like that. And the other one was a senior level survey of 20th Century poetry. It was really difficult having these courses at the same time Lady Atria was here, and I thought a little about not taking them after all. But for several years now I've been wanting to learn something about contemporary poetry, and up till now things have never quite worked out. (Last year, UC Berkeley Extension didn't offer poetry classes in San Francisco, only in Berkeley.) So I persevered.
The thing that really attracted me to the graduate course was that one of the books they were reading was Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading. As a few of you know, Ezra Pound was a really major influence on the early part of my life, and so I wanted to find out what contemporary academics have to say about him. Not much, as it turned out. My teacher and most of my fellow students all hated Pound, in fact. Well, in some ways he was an easy person to hate. Egotistical, self-centered. And yet very gracious and generous, in his own egotistical way.
And then in the undergraduate course I was asked to do a fifteen-minute presentation on Pound's Cantos. I complained that I felt like I'd been put into the middle of a Monty Python skit. As it turned out, I talked for close to an hour. And in the process of preparing for that, I read an enormous number of books of criticism on Pound, something I'd never done when I was younger and interested in him. (At that time, most of these books weren't yet written. But in any case, my attitude then was, ``Why should I read a book about Pound and get him second hand when I can read books by Pound himself?'') It was quite interesting, going back and reading stuff from an earlier part of my life, stuff that I left behind many many years ago, and then reading what experts today have to say about it.
Reading anything like The Cantos or Proust or Ulysses or Dante is such a major undertaking that it seems like one's life isn't really long enough to fit it in. But after reading something like this, one's life is never quite the same afterwards.
All English courses seem to be taught pretty much the same way, just as all mathematics courses are taught about the same way. In the English courses (at least those I've experienced) the teacher doesn't actually talk very much. Instead, the students have discussions and give presentations. I guess this is useful, and probably essential, as a way of teaching students to think for themselves. My own purposes, though, would have been served a lot better if I could have attended a series of lectures on the topics of the course. (My teacher in the 20th Century poetry course, incidentally, once took a graduate course at Yale in Wallace Stevens taught by none other than Harold Bloom. Harold Bloom, we were informed, definitely lectured. But whatever my teacher may have learned from Bloom, he certainly didn't share much of it with us.)
But on the whole, I did finish the semester with a lot better understanding of contemporary poetry than I had when I started. Mostly I now know that there's not any particular secret that I need to know in order to understand it. It helps a little bit to know something about what the poet was trying to accomplish, but mostly one just accepts the poem for what it is.
Also, I discovered a really great introduction to poetry by Kenneth Koch called Making Your Own Days which has been very helpful.
Overall, I've done a ton of reading since I got back from San Francisco last year. And a lot of these books were books I really felt the need to read because I wanted to get the information in them. But it seems as if it's been a long long time since I've been able to read anything at all just because I wanted to.
For that reason, I was almost tempted to just stay here in Honolulu this summer. On the other hand, I have an intense desire to be walking the streets of San Francisco again. And also, I know that if I stay in Honolulu an entire summer, I'll just slowly start stagnating.
Anway, I'm out of time and I still having some packing to do.
See some of you soon,
--Lee