Sep 032013
 

Green Apple

Stephen Sparks writes and sells books, and sometimes he writes about old books, forgotten books and unread books, always with a reflective, cadenced, ever-so-slightly diffident style that charmingly frames his passion and intelligence and his amazing ability to reveal the great art in what has been passed over as merely unique and eccentric. Would that we all had readers like this. Herewith he offers an addition to our mighty list of What It’s Like Living Here essays (we have well over forty now), a psychogeographic map, as he calls it, of his San Francisco, a “cryptic alphabet” of the heart. It ends, gorgeously, with a reference to nearby Colma, where the dead outnumber the living, and the fog obscuring “what it will obscure.”

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We call it a city because it is simpler, but it is really a cities. There are as many San Franciscos as there are experiences, opinions, fantasies, dreams, glimpses, memories, understandings and misunderstandings of it. It is never just a place, always more than a geography: it is a collection of photographs, mementos, hills and wind and fog, afternoon drinks on crowded patios, and of course, bookstores.

I imagine a psychogeographic map, one that reveals in bright colors the places I frequent while the rest of the city—its eastern edge, its tangled, thickly greened heart—atrophies or diminishes into darkness. What shapes do my peregrinations take? I draw it and create a cryptic alphabet, untranslatable.

I live below the southern border of Golden Gate Park. Seated at my desk, where I spend many unproductive hours, I look into the San Francisco Botanical Gardens. The Garden’s collection includes plants from across the world—from Chile to the Mediterranean; across the street from my apartment are native Californian plants, less exotic, but, like all Californian flora to me, an eastern transplant, no less astonishing in their resilience and adaptation. There are redwoods growing here, planted a hundred years ago. From a placard placed at the entrance to the grove, I learn that redwoods can only survive within forty-five miles of the coast, where the incoming Pacific fog condenses on the needle-like leaves before falling in fat drops to the soil below. In effect, a redwood waters itself and, with its shared root system, it waters its neighbors as well.

Redwoods

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Before moving here—and even now, six years later—I hadn’t thought myself much of a city person. I came here, for reasons I’ve never entirely understood, from a flat eastern seaside town popular with tourists for three months of the year and for the remainder desolate, boarded up, abandoned. In that place it was easier to self-mythologize: I lived the life of an exile, from what or where I couldn’t say, but on winter nights, when half of the streetlights were shut off and the salt-tinged wind creaked rickety signs on the boardwalk, the illusion of banishment was comforting.

In San Francisco, a city of exiles and passersby, of transients and tourists, it’s more difficult—to the point of impossibility—to conceive of myself as banished. If everyone is an exile, no one is. Even so, it’s true that I don’t entirely feel comfortable here; I’d list the usual complaints about encroaching gentrification, the Google buses, the fungal proliferation of boutiques and niche restaurants, the staggering rents, but to what end? San Francisco, a seven by seven mile squarish shape surrounded on three sides by water, can only contain so many people. For a time I’m one of them.

Maybe it’s the hesitancy of the earth here—does it want to be solid? does it want to crumble into the sea? Whatever the reason, I’ve never quite felt as rooted as those redwoods, which, I’ve learned, hold tight not by going deeper, but by being more expansive. Perhaps there’s something to be learned from them.

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DeYoung

My daily commute, by bicycle, leads me through the museum concourse in Golden Gate Park. I pass the Academy of Science, with its living roof, the DeYoung Museum, with its twisted tower (the panoramic view from which never fails to impress visitors), the statue of Cervantes and his immortal duo, another statue of stately Goethe and Schiller, and come out on the north side of the park, where seven long blocks ahead I see a wall of verdant growth, the Presidio.  San Francisco’s northwestern quarter is green and despite the drawbacks of living on this corner of the city (the fog, the wind, the seeming remoteness from the cultural life of the city) I feel lucky to have landed here. It feels only half-city, a compromise.

If I continue north on my bicycle after exiting the park, ignoring for a moment my obligation to turn east on Clement St., the heart of “new new Chinatown” or “new new new Chinatown,” depending on who’s labeling, to get to the labyrinthine bookstore where I earn enough of a living to scrape by, I enter the Presidio, once a landscape of windswept dunes and coastal scrub occupied seasonally by Ohlone Indians and later a military outpost for Spanish, Mexican, and finally U.S. soldiers. After a short, steep ascent—bike maps of San Francisco are color-coded to indicate the grade of the city’s multitude of hills and every cyclist quickly learns to navigate accordingly—I follow one of several winding roads further north. Just at the top of the initial climb into the Presidio is a breathtaking view, of which San Francisco has almost too many, of the Bay and Alcatraz; on my left the Goldsworthy spire points toward the heavens.

Golden Gate

Today I want to cross the Golden Gate Bridge and so stick to the westernmost road, hugging the edge of the city, the country, the continent, coming out just below the toll plaza. Is there a psychic corollary to living on the edge like I do here, especially one as fragile as San Francisco? I remember my first experience of earthquake: things swayed, as if someone plucked a cube of Jell-O. I expected it to have been… staccato, abrupt.

So much of what I love about San Francisco is getting out of San Francisco. There is no more apt symbol of this than the Golden Gate Bridge, a ubiquitous symbol for a reason: it is a marvel. Crossing it, I inevitably think of early explorers’ inability to locate the entrance to the Bay. Its mouth seems vast as I’m buffeted by winds and chilled by swift incoming fog, but for two centuries of European exploration, it lay undiscovered, a small passageway leading to an enormous, fertile body of water that even now, plowed by container ships so large they are measured in by twenty-foot increments on their way to and from the Port of Oakland, is capable of wildness. A friend who swims in the bay—too cold for me—once collided with a seal; both man and beast came up, wide-eyed, and quickly churned wakes in opposite directions. The same friend tells stories of swimmers who get caught in strong currents and are funneled out of the bay into the vast, bone-chilling Pacific.

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Pacific

And now I too feel myself getting swept out to sea, away from San Francisco, out toward the rugged Farralon Islands and unfathomable Pacific beyond, a sea that Melville rightly describes:

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

Green Apple

Resisting the pull—but Point Reyes! Mount Tamalpais! Big Sur!—I make my way back to Green Apple, where I’m surrounded five days a week by a quarter of a million books and untold volumes of dust. My San Francisco is intimately bound up with this place: it’s the hub from which my experience of the city radiates. Green Apple has only a few slits of natural light: it is designed, like the objects it contains, to focus attention inward; also like books, it is as much a passageway, leading me back out into the dazzling sunlight, wonderstruck and receptive.

Life

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Temp-001

Out again, I watch the fog rolling in—evening is coming on. I’ve never been satisfied with the verb rolling. The fog doesn’t move that way, it streaks, it seeps, it may come on little cat feet, but it stays; its tail may dreamily twitch, but its ears never prick up at the sound of movement. It settles in.

I look up when I step outside. Here, where the temperature rarely deviates to extremes and the sky, when it is blue, is a cold blue unique to this place, I always look up. The view from my window reveals the western side of Sutro Hill and the massive Sutro Tower, for many a more ubiquitous landmark than the Bridge.

Like the Bridge, Sutro Tower is a conduit, a portal: it’s a telecommunications tower, bringing the rest of the world—or that sliver of it that makes it onto television and the radio—to the city. When I wake up, I draw the curtain and look for it. Some mornings it’s there, others it’s not; sometimes it’s parts, sometimes it’s whole. Its appearance or absence guides my decisions about the day. When I crave the shelter of the fog, I stay in my neighborhood, The Sunset, feeling very much perched on a lonely edge of the world. Should I crave sunshine, I know that a fifteen-minute commute east, on the other side of that hill, will bring me to sunshine. This ability to choose one’s weather is tempting to narcissists—it can start to feel that the world was made for our moods.

Sunset

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San Francisco breeds and eludes the desire to tell. An old friend who I haven’t corresponded with much over the past few years recently implored, “Tell me about living in San Francisco.” I started to reply, describing the city and my life here, but soon found myself unable to continue. Was I overwhelmed by the task? Was it the city that stopped me or myself? How well must one live a place to become part of it?

Stairs

For instance, I left unmentioned the secret stairways I go in search of—yes, there’s a guidebook, but it’s necessary to make some discoveries on my own—and, as an inveterate walker, ascend into the silence above the city. At twilight the hills are especially alluring, twinkling car lights and fiery, visually confusing sunsets competing for attention. Looking east from the top of 17th St., near Twin Peaks, I take in a vast swath of the Bay Area: from downtown San Francisco to the Bay Bridge—now strung with lights—across the Bay to Oakland, the Berkeley hills, and beyond, Mt. Diablo. (From the peak of Diablo, I once read, you can see more of the earth’s surface than from any other point except Kilimanjaro. Although I later learned this was factually untrue, I still like to believe it, and recall with wonder an afternoon I spent near its peak with M., sheltered from the wind behind an outcropping of stone. From up there we could see the across the windmill-studded Central Valley to the snow-capped Sierras, which cast a rain shadow so enormous Nevada and Utah are rendered desert, in the east; to the west, rare clear skies and the curved horizon beyond the Farallons, where the Great Whites breed.)

Bay Bridge

Even here, I’ve offered only one city, not a cities. I haven’t touched upon afternoon ferry rides to Sausalito, where, if you’re hardy enough, you can tramp up (up, up) into the Marin Headlands, never once having sat in a car; I left unmentioned the poetry room at City Lights or the shape of late afternoon shadows at Vesuvio’s, the iconic bar next door; I’ve neglected the Conservatory of Flowers; failed to elaborate on the lack of cemeteries in the city—there are only two, the rest are in Colma, where the dead outnumber the living… But then, every account is patchy. Perhaps there’s no better homage to San Francisco than to let the fog obscure what it will obscure.

Conservatory

— Stephen Sparks

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Sparks

Stephen Sparks (@rs_sparks) lives in San Francisco and blogs at Invisible Stories. He somewhat regularly contributes to Tin House and 3:AM Magazine.

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Apr 262013
 

An absolutely wonderful essay on the forgotten and neglected late 19th century author Marcel Schwob by Stephen Sparks who, among other gigs, contributes to the site Writers No One Reads which I have mentioned before, as I have mentioned Stephen Sparks before — a man whose passion for books makes everything he writes tantalizing and exciting. Reading Sparks inevitably sends you off on curious, bookish adventures in a dozen different directions at once.

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By condemning Schwob to the category of the myopic scholar tracing obscure references through a series of increasingly arcane books and manuscripts, we risk overshadowing his emotional sensitivity, which is as keen as his erudition and is the mark of an artist who deserves a better fate. This sensitivity manifests itself in his curiosity about the individual, which is apparent in the preface to Imaginary Lives, a book once described, in a quaint (and, to modern ears, damning) romantic manner, as the “lives of some poets, gods, assassins and pirates, and several princesses and gallant ladies.” In a passage lamenting the inadequacies of ancient biographers—“Misers all,” he sighs, “valuing only politics or grammar”—Schwob emphasizes his belief in the necessity of an art that unclassifies rather than classifies, one that cares less for the sweeping generalization than it does in uncovering each individual’s anomalies:

Contrary to history, art describes individuals, desires only the unique… consider a leaf with its intricate nerve system, its color variegated by shade and sun; the imprint of a raindrop; the tiny mark left by an insect; the silver trace of a snail; or the first mortal touch of autumn gold. Search all the forests of the earth for another leaf exactly like it. I defy you to find one.

via Marcel Schwob: a Man of the Future » 3:AM Magazine.

Mar 292013
 

Stephen Sparks blogs at Invisible Stories and co-curates Writers No One Reads and buys books for Green Apple Books at San Francisco. His blogs are a lifeboat for the eccentric, great, lost and ignored books, a growing book list to die for, an endless source of really good reading material, books with personality, the anti-consumer lit list.

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When I pick up the book—and I do, I do— I can, ten years on, detect a faint scent of cedar, a lingering reminder of the months I locked the book in a chest, hoping to later find it anew. I’m more inclined now to notice physical details, yellowing pages or a corner worn smooth by time, than the words contained between the book’s covers. We’re growing old together, the pair of us, ever-mysterious and unknown to each other.

Given this intimacy, it may not come as a surprise that despite my not-having-read-the-book, I nevertheless recommend it, based on… not false pretenses exactly, but a feeling that this book, the one I haven’t read but feel a deep affinity for regardless, deserves to be read—by others.

via A Book I Haven’t Read | Tin House.

Feb 202013
 

Stanley Crawford is an amazing and amazingly ill-known writer. I interviewed him when I had my radio show back in the mid-nineties. Stephen Sparks blogs elegantly at Invisible Stories and is an editor at Writers No One Reads; both are sites you should haunt every spare moment you can afford.

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“Sometimes when I am weary of seeing things in that flat, three-dimensional manner once so much boasted of, two plus two, and all the rest, there seems to be no longer any precise moment when old Unguentine vanished from my life, it seems rather an almost gradual process that went on over many years and as part of a great rhythm, as if, through some gentle law of nature, his disappearance would be followed by his gradual reemergence, that he would come back, so on, so forth.”—Stanley Crawford, Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine

Here we find ourselves all at sea just eight pages into Stanley Crawford’s 1972 novella, this long sentence playing out across the water to give an early inkling of the lulling bewilderment we’ll grow accustomed to in the voyage ahead. It’s narrated by Mrs Unguentine (always Mrs, just like the eponymous ship), who relates a few pages prior that her husband, man overboard Unguentine (never Mr) “had been steering all those years with no idea of what he was steering towards” and whose legacy of aimlessness she’s doing her part to maintain.

via Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine | Tin House.

Jan 262013
 

Serendipity: the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for; also : an instance of this (Merriam-Webster).

A week ago Melissa mentioned Aloysius Bertrand who influenced Baudelaire; she was reading Paris Spleen. At the time this did not quite register on my tracking mechanism. But early this morning, sleepless as usual, I was looking at Unjustly Unread (which you ought to read daily with your eggs and bacon) and happened upon the video of Ivo Pogorelich playing Ravel’s “Le Gibet” from Gaspard de la Nuit. Who could not be drawn, before dawn, to something called “The Gibbet?” I hunted around and discovered it was from a group of poems by Aloysius Bertrand. You can find the whole thing in French on Project Gutenberg. I found a translation by Nancy Bricard. E.g. “…the bell that tolls from the walls of a city, under the horizon, and the corpse of the hanged one that is reddened by the setting sun.” I listened to other piano performances and discovered that Pogorelich really has the most lorn and mournful affect.

Unjustly Unread lives in a cluster of other sites well worth looking at (most sites seem to live in clusters of like minded author/curators — an observation of Internet anthropology). So see also Will Schofield’s 50 Watts and Stephen Sparks’ Invisible Stories.

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LE GIBET

Que vois-je remuer autour de ce gibet?  —Faust

Ah! ce que j’entends, serait-ce la bise nocturne qui glapit, ou le pendu
qui pousse un soupir sur la fourche patibulaire?

Serait-ce quelque grillon qui chante tapi dans la mousse et le lierre
stérile dont par pitié se chausse le bois?

Serait-ce quelque mouche en chasse sonnant du cor autour de ces oreilles
sourdes à la fanfare des hallali?

Serait-ce quelque escarbot qui cueille en son vol inégal un cheveu
sanglant à son crâne chauve?

Ou bien serait-ce quelque araignée qui brode une demi-aune de mousseline
pour cravate à ce col étranglé?

C’est la cloche qui tinte aux murs d’une ville, sous l’horizon, et la
carcasse d’un pendu que rougit le soleil couchant.