At the conservatory

This conservatory is in Golden Gate park, a beauty of rolling hills and walking paths. This train set is in the south wing, and is made up of largely of discarded junk like computer boards and bottle caps - there's even a baseball park on the far side.
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Day two... We go to a Spa

We spent the morning at the Kabuki Spa in Japantown, not far from the hotel. Being a Minnesotan, I'm a bit leery of pleasure (you never know where it will lead). But a massage and a spa are a couple of the best things you can do for yourself. There's a steam room so full of steam you can't see across the room, and it was incredibly calming to sit and stare at the foggy lights and let myself disappear into the steam. We moved on to the dry room and the hot pool, but the second go-through on the steam room was a bit less serene, as this tall, bearded hippie fellow was salting himself up next to me, and finding that zen sweet spot is a bit tough when you're being pelted with second-hand cleansing salt. Oh well. It was still better than a midwestern winter. Follow that with a dunk in a 55 degree tub, then a nice warm soak, and the shock in contrasting feeling is almost self-punishing enough to be approved of by even the most dour Midwesterner.

Next up, Golden Gate Park.

On our way...

The bags are packed and we're on the plane after the worst performance
by an airline check-in guy ever. I'm sure by now the house-sitter has
settled in, and probably eaten all our secret stash of chocolate
bunnies already. Next stop, Denver, then San Francisco!

Picture of the day

When in doubt, post a dog picture.

This is Sir Remington Rio, lord of Nordeast, defender of the realm, terror to squirrels and rabbits.  His cute is not of your cute, mortals. Look on him and adore.

San Francisco bound!!

We're heading out to San Francisco in a few days, so what am I thinking about? Cioppino? Alcatraz? Hippies? No - I've been thinking about San Francisco books. I'm mostly familiar with the Beats, of course - my novel Jack's Boys is about the children of a washed-up Beat wanna-be. But many of the Beats of the San Francisco scene were East coasters - Jack Kerouac grew up in Massachusetts, and Allen Ginsburg was from Newark. Even Lawrence Ferlinghetti, publisher and proprietor of legendary bookstore City Lights, is from New York City. Ferlinghetti's own book, Coney Island of the Mind, is another milestone of the era - here's a sample that shows his lushness, detail, imagination, and the containment of entrenched, borderline despair that defines much of the Beat sensibility. He's also 92 years old, still living in San Francisco, and his City Lights bookstore is still going strong.  We plan to visit, so I'll let you know if I run into him.

After that, my San Francisco author intelligence is woefully lacking. My only attempts to rectify this situation was to get a copy of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op out of the library and read the first story, The Tenth Clew. (A clew, by the way, is a clue. Apparently Hammett doesn't get modernized spelling.) This is a neat little story about the nameless Continental Op, a private detective for the Continental detective agency, and his involvement in the murder of a wealthy man that's been set up to look like revenge from a mysterious Frenchman. All the clews are revealed to be a deception, however, and the Continental Op nearly ends up drowning in the San Francisco Bay before uncovering the truth. If you like mysteries, Hammett's are one of the sources from which all modern mysteries flow, and are well worth checking out.

Other writers in the exceptionally vibrant and Ramberg-ignored San Francisco literary scene include Armistad Maupin, Dave Eggers, Philip K. Dick, and Amy Tan. I'm not sure what I'll be doing for blogging over the vacation but hope to stay in touch.

Dead before 30: James Dean, actor

The romantic fascination of celebrities who die young could well begin and end with James Dean. Handsome, mercurial, essentially unknowable, working in a medium that encourages false faces and magic deception, Dean amassed a body of work so slight and so concentrated in tragic romance, his fate as pin-up boy and shorthand reference to longing and teenage rebellion was perhaps sealed even before his untimely death.

Photo of the day...

My neighborhood has its own feng shui. It's about a feel for what's right over rigid rules for where things 'should' be. It's about discovering comfort in nature and a natural arrangement of objects. Things, left to themselves, will establish a beauty without and outside of humanity's misguided fetish for order. Nature tends to chaos, we believe, and what's more natural than nature?

Nothing.

Short Story Review: Madame Rosette, by Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl came to writing the children’s classics for which he is best known relatively late in his life. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, The Witches – all of these came only after he’d already made a name for himself as the writer of morbidly wicked adult fiction in the late forties and fifties. His best known adult works are "Lamb to the Slaughter," about a woman who clubs her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb, then feeds the murder weapon to the investigating officers, and "Man from the South," about a compulsive gambler who wagers his own car against the little finger of unsuspecting strangers. (The last of these has been filmed numerous times, most recently by Quentin Tarantino as a segment of the movie Four Rooms.)

Photo of the day... now with haiku!

The trees, looking down,
see the great sky above and
tumble through themselves

Publication

A story of mine, First Avenue, has just been put on-line by the good folks at Lit Up Magazine. You can read the story at this link. This story is a self-standing excerpt from a novel I wrote called The Acronym. It's an epic drama that follows two families across several generations, and their entanglement with anarchists, labor movements, shadow corporations, and a semi-sentient computer virus that may or may not want to take over the Internet. Enjoy!

Shoe, Part 2

I am pleased to report that my neighbor's shoe, first reported in December at this link, remains resting on the corner of their picnic table. I hail this proud and hearty survivor of a harsh Minnesota winter.

I will provide further updates as they warrant.

Morning photograph and haiku

Powerlines slicing
peach-hued dawn, moon retreats as
houses shed their frost.

Open letter to the lamp-post from 59th street bridge song (feelin groovy) by Paul Simon

Dear Lamp-Post:
It was a simple question, wasn't it? "Wat'cha knowin'?" Or was that too much for you? Yeah, you know what I'm talking about, lamp-post. Years ago, this guy, Paul Simon. You remember. Little guy, stoned off his ass, wandering the street, mumbling groovy this, groovy that, dooby dooby doo. Stared at your flowers, then asked you for some rhymes. You didn't answer, lamp-post, and now I've got this stupid song stuck in my head.

Oh, I suppose you found him intimidating, or were scared, and maybe I understand you not wanting to engage stoned folk-hippies with small talk, but really, lamp-post, it was the sixties. Everyone was like that. You could have spared me a lot of embarrassment by throwing out a little something. Like, for instance, "What am I knowing? I'm just sittin' here glowing!" Cute little rhyme, good answer, Simon loses his train of thought, the whole hook of the song is gone. Would have nipped the whole thing in the bud. Simon doesn't write the song, it's not stuck in my head, and I never tell a senior partner his sportcoat was 'groovy' and get the stink-eye of a lifetime.

Groovy, lamp-post. I said 'groovy.' Worse, I meant it. Now, I don't know about 59th street, but here at a prestigious accounting firm in the midwest, to an aging schmuck with hair-plugs like a Ken doll, NOTHING is 'groovy,' especially when it comes from a network administrator who's humming folk songs in the john instead of upgrading the email server, and what's the deal with those Word 2007 documents he can never open? Huh?

Thanks for nothing, lamp post. If I'm never on 59th street it'll be too soon.

Dead before Thirty: Stephen Crane, Author

Stephen Crane, writer (November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900)

It may have been Stephen Crane Virginia Woolf was thinking of when she derided the state of her era’s literature for being more interested in matters of men and their wars than in the thoughts of women as they sat in drawing rooms. Crane’s signature piece, The Red Badge of Courage, has but one woman with a speaking role, and his other great work, The Open Boat, has no women at all. His life, as well, was one of adventure, gambling, war, and brothels.

One can little blame Crane for his material any more than you can any writer for the things they write about, but it’s undeniable that in his day Crane was both masculine and popular. While writing his first novel, the self-published Maggie (at the time a scandalous portrait of a fallen woman), he lived for a time in the notorious Five Corners of New York, amongst prostitutes and criminals. The Red Badge of Courage contains extended scenes of epic Civil War battles, and a central character who aches above all things to be considered heroic, to be tested and found worthy, and in the end considers himself both. In story after story, Crane explores men and their need to test themselves against each other in a world which cares nothing for their survival or death. It is little wonder that Hemingway considered him an inspiration, and popularized him when his literary reputation had fallen.

During his life, Crane achieved great fame on both sides of the Atlantic, and after the success of The Red Badge, parlayed his fame into a series of adventures as field reporter in the American West and later the Spanish-American war, where he traveled for a time with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Then, Crane fell into disrepute when he began a long-term relationship with Cora Taylor, the madam of a Jacksonville, Florida brothel. After a brief stint covering the Greco-Turkish war for the Hearst syndicate, Crane settled in England with Cora, where he lived the life of a profligate ex-patriot, throwing lavish parties that only left him deeper in debt. He struck up friendships with HG Wells, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James. In 1900, he collapsed during a party, the tuberculosis he’d been living with finally catching up to him. He died in a spa in Germany in June, not yet 29 years old.

Over a hundred years later, Virgina Woolf may have the final laugh. Bookstores have become the playground of chick-lit bestsellers of single women chatting over lattes, and war stories are requisitely broody, irony-laden apologias for the cliché of war as a pointless relic of barbarous times. One reads his poem War is Kind, and you may not regret that his star has faded.