My Life and Thoughts

In concluding the story of the n+1 Bay Area tour, mention should also be made of the events at USF and Stanford.

We were actually invited to USF, which made it a unique venue for us. I got there 10 minutes late because I had somehow parked in Cole Valley and then had to walk like half a mile uphill. Would Philip Roth walk half a mile uphill to get to his own literary reading? I don’t know; that’s just the kind of devotion I have to my craft.

We were reading in the law school, directly across from a church devoted to one of my favorite saints: Ignatius of Loyola. When I got to our room it was completely deserted, except by a bearded intellectual who was standing behind a huge coffee dispenser. The sight of an intellectual, partially obscured by a samovar-shaped object, produced a charming Chekhovian effect.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola Church, San Francisco (across from the USF Law Building)	K.S. Stanislavsky as Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya (1899); note samovar in background.

Because the other readers were nowhere to be seen, I concluded that I was in the wrong room. I then realized that I had lost the piece of paper on which I had written the room number, as well as the name of the guy who had invited us, and also Mark Greif’s phone number. Fortunately, I did have the number of Keith Gessen, whose fans have by now brought My Life and Thoughts a total of 79 viewers. Gessen’s closest rival, with 44 hits from Google, is the word-phrase combination: “venerability ‘Joan Silber.”

“Keith Gessen” and “venerability ‘Joan Silber’”: we do two things here, but we do them right.

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Somewhere in Brooklyn, n+1 editor Keith Gessen was writing a note to the Orthodox Jewish lawyer whose taillight he had smashed while returning the Budget rent-a-truck in which he had retrieved Issue 6 from the printers’ warehouse—a fine illustration of the go-to, D-list spirit, by the way, because you don’t need me to tell you that Jann Wenner isn’t driving to Pennsylvania twice a week to pick up the new Rolling Stone. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, the n+1 panel discussion continued to generate interesting controversies and exciting revelations, including the disclosure that the tall mysterious man in the black dress, whose early departure had captivated the imagination of so many audience members (see previous post), was actually the D.J. for Saturday’s n+1 party.

All too often, as a writer, one never learns the identity or motivations of the various striking figures who leave early during one’s readings. Why did they come? Why did they leave? Where are they going? It all just finds its way onto the list of “life’s little mysteries.”

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Where did we leave off? Ah yes—with the direct empirical proof of the existence of McCone Hall, and the retreat of the bearded “doubter,” proclaiming, like the Apostle Thomas, the truth of the Word. At that point there were still 20 minutes before the reading. I had left home early, hoping to have time for coffee with the literary historian Luba Golburt.

Instead, what I had time for was hanging out alone in the basement of McCone Hall. Dear reader: if what you look for in a basement is spaciousness, solitude, and a faint buzzing sound, then you will love McCone Hall. I had a moderately good time observing some silicate boulders. I also read some faculty bios, posted in the same glass display case with the boulders. One professor had actually attended the University of Colorado, at Boulder.

The basement of McCone Hall also houses a computerized micromill used for high-resolution sampling across “fish otolith growth bands.” Fish otoliths are calcified stones that you can find in the inner ears of fish. A week ago, I didn’t even know that fish had ears, let alone earstones.

Otolith segment from a juvenile chinook salmon; image by Reg Reisenbichler, US Geological Survey.
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All three of the readings were really fun, but the highlight, for me, was probably Berkeley. First of all, I got to take the BART, which is always a pleasure. This time, for example, the train stopped in the Powell St. station for twenty minutes. What a treat! All too often, commuter trains are in such a hurry to get from one station to another, that the individuality of these stations just dissolves into a kind of blur. Now, for once, I was able to give the Powell St. station the attention it so richly deserves, drinking in that easily overlooked je-ne-sais-quoi which differentiates it from stations like Montgomery St. or Embarcadero.

Powell St. BART	Embarcadero BART

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