Basque Country

Maman

Getting to Europe from California has always been a trial, but lately the ordeal of the journey has begun to outweigh the pleasure of the arrival for me.  I’ve seen the sights I really wanted to see, sometimes more than once, so at this stage I either return to someplace I liked before or visit someplace new in which I have only a middling interest.  For the first trip to Europe since our wintery sojourn in Venice last year we decided to do both: return to Spain, a country we hadn’t visited since 2000, to go back to a little town on the Costa Brava called Cadaqués that’s particularly dear to us, and for something new add the Basque Country, a part of Spain that lies north of Madrid, on the Atlantic (the Bay of Biscay), which I had only a modest interest in seeing.  To get there we first had to endure a 10 hour flight to London, a 3 and a half hour flight to Madrid, plus another hour flight to Bilbao and all the airport residence making the connections.  By the time we arrived on a gloomy, drizzly Monday evening, we had been awake for 30 hours and were fried, but we still had to catch a bus to the Guggenheim museum and drag our luggage through the drizzle across the Nervion River to our hotel on the opposite side, near the Calatrava pedestrian bridge.  

The Matter of Time

In the morning we walked farther down, away from the museum, to the Casca Viejo, the old town, ducking into a café for some Spanish ham with coffee when the drizzle turned to rain.  When it let up, we headed back toward the museum, crossing over the soaring auto bridge and climbing down the catwalks.  Fog was rolling across the shallow pond at the rear of Frank Gehry’s fantastic building and under the high arches of the legs of “Maman,” Louis Bourgeois’ Spider sculpture, as we approached.  We lingered in the atrium, where Frieda wanted to savor the complex intersecting curves of the interior, before entering the gallery containing Richard Serra’s monumental steel plate constructions collectively referred to as “The Matter of Time,” though “The Matter of Space” felt more appropriate as, walking through them, I felt the physical space around me pulling and stretching and twisting like taffy.   Nothing else measured up to them, although Frieda was fond of Jeff Koons “Puppy” out front, which is certainly playful in the mode of Dali.  For convenience we had lunch in the cafeteria upstairs.  We couldn’t pick up our rental car until 4 o’clock as Avis was closed for siesta.  When we got there we discovered we would not get the Audi A3 we’d been promised, but instead a Fiat 500L 1.3 liter diesel.  I was rather disappointed, but half the cars on the road in Europe are diesels now.  Diesel fuel is cheaper than gas there and they get better mileage than gas cars.  Between the cost of fuel ($7/gal. for gas and $6/gal. for diesel) and the many toll roads, it’s expensive to drive in Europe.  I declined the GPS at $15/day extra yet we somehow made it back across town to pick up our luggage at the hotel and hit the road to San Sebastian.   

The front of the museum with Puppy

San Sebastian, Donostia in Basque, was a retreat for Spanish royalty in the 19^th century.  It boasts a spectacular crescent beach called La Concha fronted with mansions reminiscent of the palazzos lining the Grand Canal in Venice and Atlantic waves suitable for surfing (which Spanish royalty, alas, did not do).  The waves and the water temperature make it less suitable for swimming than the Mediterranean, not that we were tempted, given the continuing inclement weather that closely resembled that in Bilbao.  The Basque Country is the wettest, greenest part of Spain, otherwise a pretty dry land.  It’s also famous for its food, and the old town of San Sebastian is full of pintxos bars where the art of Spanish tapas is taken to the highest level.  Every inch of the bar surface is covered with plates of different snacks in colorful profusion.  You order short beers called cañas, or wine poured from a height so as to aerate it, called txakoli, and then grab what you want, wiping your mouth with a paper napkin that you drop on the floor.  It’s all run on an honor system where, before you leave, you tell the barkeep what you had and pay up.  You’re supposed to remember it all so it’s best to move on before having too many different items.    

San Sebastian from our hotel balcony

The morning dawned still drizzly, so we took the car north, into France, to see Biarritz, an elegant little town where French royalty used to summer back in the 19^th century, and then worked our way south through St Jean de Luz and Hondarribia, on and off drizzle all the way.  We had sandwiches from a street vendor in the former for lunch, and then strolled the sturdy seawall that protects the heart of the town from oceanic incursions.  In the latter we ascended to the upper town for some wine and cheese in Charles V’s castle, now an expensive parador.  From there we took a scenic road, a narrow country lane where we first encountered wild horses grazing alongside, then a herd of sheep meandering across it, before emerging onto a more substantial highway.  Back in San Sebastian we returned to Parte Vieja.  This time we had a list of bars recommended by Rick Steves, but discovered they were all filled with Americans and no better, in some cases not as good, as the bars we had chosen by whim the night before.  When we emerged from the last it was pouring rain so we took a taxi back to the hotel. 

Biarritz

Our last day in San Sebastian we explored the Gros district, meandered down to Zurriola Beach, the prime surfer hangout, and ate churros from a street vendor.  In the evening we made our way back to Parte Vieja and bar hopped to the tune of our own whims again, leaning toward the places full of locals.  This time we ordered the hot pintxos from the chalkboard menus posted.  As everything was listed in Basque, we had no idea what we were eating.  Frieda suspected one dish featured bull testicles, but they all tasted great.  To finish we returned to a place we’d discovered the first night called La Viña and had some amazing cheesecake, their specialty. 

   

By morning the rumor that the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain had been dispelled: it falls mainly along the Atlantic coast, where we were. So we headed north, into France, and east, toward the Mediterranean. Although it was still drizzling slightly when we set off, we gradually drove out of it. As patches of blue began to break through the cloud cover while we blew across southern France at 140 kph on a wonderfully open toll road, the Black Keys’ “El Camino” blasting on the stereo, a sense of exhilaration and freedom overtook me, the kind of feeling that started to make the trip seem worth it.

 

Unamuno

As a young man

Frieda had an assignment in a class she’s taking to translate a poem of Miguel de Unamuno, so we got into a conversation about him.  Perusing the bookcase I spotted a copy of his magnum opus: The Tragic Sense of Life.  It was one of those books that I didn’t recall where I’d picked up but kept around thinking well, maybe I’ll read that some day.  Inside the cover was the name “Tanya,” the sister of a girlfriend I had back in the early 80s. 

Unamuno was a Spanish writer who lived from 1864 to 1936.  In addition to poetry, he wrote plays and fiction, but The Tragic Sense of Life is his philosophical testament.  He was raised a devout Catholic, but in college discovered science, and this set up a lifelong conflict for him, because the knowledge of science lacked the promise of personal immortality that had so comforted him as a boy.  Unamuno really, really did not want to die, a sentiment with which I have some empathy.  He considered the longing for immortality to be the essence of human striving, as illustrated by our positing, across cultures, immortality as the core of divinity, the basic quality of godhood.  He felt it was the primary secret that our thirst for knowledge ultimately seeks.  But, although he was dissatisfied with science due to its failure to unearth this secret, he also knew he couldn’t go back to the simple faith of his childhood, and this was the root of the tragic sense referred to in the title.  

Middle-aged

His thoughts document an early-20^th century Spanish variation on a long phase of Western intellectual development through which we are still passing, albeit in a later stage, the struggle between reason and faith brought on by the Scientific Revolution.  Ever since the beginning of the Scientific Revolution Western thought has concerned itself with the collision of the new perspective with the old religious one.  The new perspective, I would argue, really goes back to the Greeks, their idea of the individual thinking for himself.  Toward the end of the Roman Empire an alien, Levantine mysticism bled into Europe, an intoxicating ideological drug known as Christianity that called, in exchange for the promise of immortality, for submission to authority (all monotheistic religions are, by nature, authoritarian and thus hostile to democracy), and the West fell into a narcotic trance for a thousand years.  In the Renaissance Greek thinking, the individual, reawakened, and science grew out of this uniquely European perspective.  Consequently this is really a struggle between our native inclinations as Westerners, as the heirs of Greek civilization, and a foreign ideology that has overlain them.  But Unamuno didn’t look that far back.  For him, Catholicism felt like his Spanish nature. 

Part of Unamuno realizes that there is no going back to childish beliefs, to superstition and fairy tales; that religion is part of the childhood of our species, a childhood we have outgrown.  Yet his emotional longing for immortality will not allow him to completely let go of it.  At times his desperation is so great he seems to imagine that immortality is something he can just conjure out of thin air, as if wishing for it would make it so, rather than something that must be clawed from nature bit by bit. 

 

Old

While longing for immortality, he nevertheless recognized that the Christian vision of it is absurd.  What would we do in Heaven: would there be TV and sports teams, film and music, food and relationships—sexual relationships?  Would there be anything at all of what we know and love about life?  Or would we just sit on a cloud strumming a harp for eternity?  There is nothing plausible about the Christian promise of immortality.  Doctrinally, virtually everything about Christianity is, by turns, outlandish, preposterous, or ridiculous.  It’s a relic of an earlier age; ultimately, a con.  Nevertheless, like many today, he couldn’t shake it off.  He was caught between reason and faith, unable to commit to either.  The book is a self-contradictory, rambling record, rife with rhetorical questions, of his attempt to wrestle these incompatible perspectives into some sort of reconciliation. 

It was a hopeless endeavor, of course.  Despite mighty efforts, he could not definitively shake off Catholicism because it was such a deep part of his personal and national identity as a Spaniard, and he was unable to rise above the latter to become a fully fledged European thinker.  Ironically, had he been able to manage this he would have secured a greater degree of literary immortality, because he would have been seen by later generations as having been ahead of his time, rather than of a piece with it.  In the end he fell back on one of the great resources of Spanish culture, the figure of Don Quixote, as a symbol of his own impractical pursuit of an unreachable goal. 

What makes life tragic for Unamuno as well as the rest of us is, of course, that we all must die, and cannot go on learning and growing.  No one is going to be saved no matter who they submit to.  Unamuno went through enormous mental contortions to try to circumvent that conclusion, but they were to no avail.  A blood clot in his overworked brain laid him low at the age of 72.  Alas, all we can do about this is to grant him a posthumous shadow of life by reading him.

So, anyone want a copy of The Tragic Sense of Life?  Tanya?

Cayucos

Dino exploring the beach in Cayucos

Hwy 1 from Carmel to Cambria may be the most scenic drive in the world.  In my experience only the Amalfi coast in Italy comes close, and there you have to put up with those oversized buses the Italians insist on putting on a road half the width of Hwy 1.  Plus, Route 1 has the added advantage of being a whole lot closer.  The ideal instrument for traversing this somewhat twisty road would have been the Porsche, but Frieda wanted to take Dino Ferrari, our white collie, along for the ride, and he’s just too big to fit comfortably in the back of a 911, so we had to employ the Volvo.  It turned out that, for a leisurely drive, it was perfectly adequate.  I let Frieda steer and spent my time gawking at the scenery rather than carving apexes.  As we cruised through Big Sur I spotted a young man sitting in the shade by the side of the road, leaning against a redwood, with his nose in a book, and was reminded of my first visit to this spectacular area many years ago, when it was the haunt of well-heeled hippies.  I couldn’t see, as we sped past, whether it was Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, or Jack Kerouac he was perusing, but I still caught a whiff of the old magic that had charmed all of them and me as well.  At the southern end of the drive there’s a tight, twisty stretch of road.  The first time I drove it I was headed north from Ojai in a Corvair Corsa and worried that if the entire road was that serpentine I wouldn’t reach Santa Cruz until after dark.  But it turned out I had nothing to fret about.  That stretch only lasts a few miles.  In no time at all we had passed Cambria and reached our destination, the quaint little beach town of Cayucos, just north of Morro Bay.  

From our terrace in Cayucos

Going south the beaches darken from pearl in Carmel to cocoa in Cayucos, where the sand is punctuated with black, agglomerative rock formations ranging in size from a steamer trunk to a small cabin.  When we arrived it was sunny, but a strong, cool wind was coming in from the sea and I wished I’d worn my hoodie as we lunched out on the Sea Shanty’s deck with Dino.  The Shoreline Inn, right on the beach, was also dog friendly.  Dog compatibility seemed to be trending in the area, catering to empty nesters or DINKS like us, families filled out with canine kids.  The 3 of us went for a walk on the beach there and we found that, just as in our own neighborhood, Dino was the star of the show, fawned upon by everyone we met, while he, as usual, reveled in the attention, smiling and prancing for all like a movie star on the red carpet.  For dinner we got take-out fish tacos from the Smoke House and enjoyed them with a bottle of wine on our terrace, from which we could see, adrift in the haze, Morro Rock, a few miles to the south.  

Dockside and Morro Rock

Next day we drove down to Morro Bay for lunch at Dockside, where a combo was playing Dave Brubeck as fresh fish were being unloaded nearby.  It was quite enjoyable, with excellent clam chowder, fish tacos, and cold Stella Artois to wash it down.  The place even had leashes attached to the perimeter bench to hook Dino up and prevent him from wandering and becoming a nuisance.  Surprisingly cool breezes interrupted the warmth now and then and made us shiver.  Nevertheless we stayed until the combo quit, then wandered south along the docks checking out the restaurants and shops, the Rock looming over us, before circling back to the car.  The Rock, which was once quarried for granite, is connected to land by a sandy spit with a road, so we drove out to it. On the bay side was a nice, quiet beach, while on the ocean side it was choppy, tempestuous.  From there we headed down to Los Osos and Montaña de Oro State Park.  We had thought of taking the Bluff Trail with Dino but found it was closed to dogs, so had to content ourselves with the pebbly beach at Spooner’s Cove where Dino could romp on leash.  Back in Cayucos for supper we picked up shrimp cocktail, clam chowder, and salad at Duckie’s Chowder House, all quite tasty. 

Spooner's Cove

In the morning we cruised farther south to Avila Beach, noted for being a southern-facing beach shielded by highlands that wrap around the northern side of the town and protect it from the north wind and northwesterly swells. It’s the first beach, as you head south, that feels like southern California, and that makes it a strong candidate for an easy winter getaway. Not only was it notably warmer than Cayucos, with calmer waves, but the town also had a more chichi air. The beach was a dazzling eggshell, devoid of the rocks and clumps of kelp that litter the beach in Cayucos. We explored the waterfront for an hour or so, had some ice cream, and then hit the road back north, up through the Salinas Valley, a less scenic but quicker route home. Dino, who in the past has been a nervous car passenger, finally learned to relax, sleeping in the rear much of the way. He was tired from being on the go all morning with his people, time he normally would be snoozing

Avila Beach

When we got home I read in the news that the atmosphere had passed another milestone, 400 ppm. of CO2.  The last time the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was so high was 3 million years ago, long before the advent of homo sapiens, a time when sea levels were 50 to 75 feet higher than they are today.  In other words, our profligate dumping of CO2 has dialed in the programming for this level to return, dooming the world’s coastal cities, not to mention the lovely little towns I had just visited, and yet still we continue, business-as-usual, to dial in ever higher levels.  Stubbornness, a reluctance to change our ways, may prove an evolutionarily fatal quality for our species.

Indian Wells 2013



Practice Court



It’s relaxing to have a familiar vacation, a place you go every year.  For us that’s the tennis tournament at Indian Wells, in the Coachella Valley of California.  It’s a beautiful, landscaped venue with spectacular views of the rugged mountains nearby.  But our excursion got off to a somewhat inclement start this year.  As we were cruising east on I-10 raindrops began to appear on the windshield of our Ford Focus rental and soon the semis were kicking up a thick swirl of opaque mist.  Since it was lunchtime anyway, I pulled off at Carl’s Jr. in Banning for one of our 2 or 3 fast food meals of the year (there are simply no other options out there).  By the time we got back on the highway the flash shower was over and we pushed on over mostly dry pavement.  It was still colder than usual, however, so after unpacking at the motel we headed for Tsingtao, our favorite Chinese place, on the corner of Highway 111 and Portola.  To our shock and dismay, it was gone, vanished, nothing remaining of it but a dark sign and a ‘for rent’ poster in the window.  We were forced to resort to an internet search to unearth a substitute a few miles away, which turned out to be barely tolerable. 

Outside the Main Stadium

Indian Wells is the biggest tennis tournament on the west coast and every year (this was our 10^th consecutive visit) it gets bigger.  The goal this year was 400,000.  Court 6, for example, which used to have merely 3 tiers of white folding chairs, now has 3 of permanent, bolted-down chairs plus four tiers of bleachers.  There are currently 8 match courts and 16 practice courts but by next year there will be 9 match courts and 24 practice courts.  Stadium 2, currently a towering scaffold, will be rebuilt as a concrete arena seating 8,000 (the main stadium seats 16,000).  We’ll hardly recognize the place.  The large, polyglot crowds that show up now make it hard to do the kind of court-hopping we used to do in the early days.  If you try that now, you’ll be unlikely to get a decent seat for anything.  Now you pretty much have to pick a court, get there early to seize the best seats you can find, and plan on holding them all day, while taking turns on snack and restroom runs. 

Relaxing on the Lawn

Friday, our first morning there, was sunny but chill.  When we got to the venue at 11, I was comfortable in a long-sleeved shirt over a tee.  The match of the day we were really interested in was the rising young American Jack Sock against the Croatian giant Ivo Karlovic.  It was the 2^nd match up on Stadium 2 so we headed over there to try to get good seats on the south end, where the sun is behind you.  We got some decent ones but had to sit through Petra Kvitova’s (she of the famous chicken squawk) defeat of Olga Govortsova in 3 sets, in order to hold them.  When Jack showed up he seemed in control, winning the 1^st set 6-3, and taking the 2^nd to a tiebreak.  Meanwhile, however, dense clouds were blowing in from the north and the temperature was dropping like a stone.  We kept adding layers and had put on our full complement by the time Jack lost the tiebreak.  Then he fell apart as the thermometer continued to plunge.  By the time he was beaten, we’d had enough of shivering, and high-tailed it for the car.  At least it didn’t rain, which had seemed possible.    



Ernests Gulbis



Saturday was warmer, and we went back to Stadium 2 to see David Ferrer, the #4 seed, get clobbered by Kevin Anderson in the first major upset of the tournament.  Then we watched 2 more matches that didn’t much interest us in order to keep our choice seats for the match between the young Australian hopeful Bernard Tomic and Richard Gasquet of France.  Once again, Tomic failed to live up to the hype and Gasquet beat him quickly in straight sets, enabling us to dodge over to Stadium 3 to catch the Gulbis/Tipsarevic match.  It was dark by that time, and getting cold again, so there weren’t a lot of people and we got fine seats on the north end.  I’ve always thought Ernests Gulbis an underachiever, but this night, for once, he played up to his potential, completely blowing Tipsarevic, the #9 seed, off the court 6-2, 6-0.  Gulbis was playing so fast, slamming serves right at Janko and blasting forehands past him with such power, that Tipsarevic was reeling, like a punch drunk boxer bouncing off the ropes.  He looked like he’d been hit by a hurricane.  I’m glad I finally got to see Gulbis play as well as I believed he could.  (He won another round before going out in a very tight 3 set contest with Rafael Nadal, who went on the win the tournament.)



Grigor Dimitrov



Sunday was a gorgeous day, abundant sunshine, in the low 70s, with a light breeze, the air dry and crystal clear: perfect for tennis.  We got to the venue just as it opened and secured front row seats at the south end of Court 7 where Frieda’s current favorite player, Alexandr Dolgopolov, was scheduled to play the second match.  We prefer to sit at the end because you can see everything without having to swing your head back and forth, you’re closer to the players, and you have their view, with the ball coming at you just as if you’re playing.  But we had to sit through a boring women’s match before the Dog came on.  Frieda, of course, was impatient for the women to finish and get the hell off the court.  Then, when The Dog finally showed up, his play was lackluster and he lost the 1^st set to Carlos Berlocq, a 30-year-old Argentine clay courter with a career high ranking of 37 (the Dog is 24 and has been ranked as high as 13).  In the 2^nd set his play improved and he squeaked it out in a tense tiebreak.  He was up a break in the 3^rd set and seemed to have Berlocq on the ropes when he pulled something in his left leg.  The Dog called the trainer but he had nothing to offer and afterward Dolgopolov rapidly fell apart, failing to win another game.  Frieda was bitterly disappointed.  We stayed around for Tommy Haas/Andujar and the French/Polish doubles match that followed, and then the beginning of a match between 2 youngsters, Matthew Ebden of Australia and Grigor Dimitrov from Bulgaria.  Dimitrov has been talked up for a couple of years now as ‘Baby Fed’ (as in Federer), and I was impressed by the smooth power of his game.  I would have liked to stay for the entire match but it was dark by now, getting colder by the minute, as it tends to do in the desert, and we had to get on the road for the hypnotic drive back to Ontario.  Later I read that he disposed of Ebden in straight sets, but went out to Djokovic in the following round.  However, he’s on my radar now as someone to watch. 

Chabon vs. Ferrante



Telegraph Avenue



I was an early enthusiast of Michael Chabon, starting with The Mysteries of Pittsburg and continuing through A Model World, Wonder Boys, Werewolves in Their Youth and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but after that he seemed to grow absorbed in family life, writing for youngsters, and ruminations on Jewish identity and, despite my admiration for his ability to compose marvelous sentences, I lost interest.  But then his latest, Telegraph Avenue, fell out of my Christmas stocking, so I took a stab at it.  To my dismay I found it tough going.  The compositional facility was still there, with a fresh angle of attack on nearly every sentence, yet the characters remained dead on the page, lifeless tokens you never believed in or cared about, and the situations never gelled into a story with any propulsive force.  The style is mannered, artificial, contrived, tarted-up, gimmicky, a disguise for the lack of anything of substance or import to say.  It’s so self-consciously clever that it becomes a barrier to experiencing anything beyond itself.  Despite being initially amusing, at some point it just becomes tedious.  I had to push myself through the book by an effort of will and, after the third section (p. 250), a single sentence that ran on for 12 pages, my progress ground to a halt.  I just had no desire to continue.

That was around Valentine’s Day, when Frieda gave me a novel called My Brilliant Friend by an Italian writer named Elena Ferrante.  Just to satisfy my curiosity, I read the 4 page Prologue, wherein the son of the narrator’s childhood best friend calls to tell her that his mother has disappeared: her clothes, her jewelry, her pictures, all her belongings, gone.  She has erased herself.  The narrator, a woman in her 60s, vows not to let her get away with it, but to thwart her wishes by recording everything she knows about her, the story of their friendship.  She will create an homage that is, at the same time, an attack, an act of revenge.  It’s a vow that sets the tone for the ambiguous and tense relationship the book describes, one that both feeds and depletes, between friends who both love and compete with one another.  I was hooked. 

Naples

Over the next 48 hours I managed to put it down on a number of occasions, but I didn’t want to, and was alert for any opportunity to pick it up again, until I finished all 331 pages.  Its plain style, in contrast with Chabon, doesn’t call attention to itself, but instead brings the characters and their poor suburb of Naples in the late 50s to life.  I felt I was living the narrator’s life with her, knew her friends and their families, and cared what happened to them.  That’s because the characters are not only fully formed, they are alive, they change, they discover things about themselves and others, the circumstances of their lives are in constant flux and it alters them.  You peer into their depths.  Ferrante’s work is intensely, intimately personal, she digs into the roots of personality with an exceptional candor and honesty.  Her characters remain true to themselves, authentic, even while changing.  When she describes adolescence, she nails what it’s like to be a passenger in a body that is out of control, and she describes it without letting any distortions of vanity creep in.  At the same time the story carries you; you forget that you are reading, you feel you are experiencing. 

Ferrante’s book is the story of a deep and complex friendship that begins in 1st grade.  The narrator, Elena, is attracted to Lila because Lila is bad.  She is prone to nasty pranks, and defiant of authority.  Yet she is a brilliant student, brimming with potential.  She is a model of courage and assertiveness who pushes Elena to exceed what she would be able to accomplish on her own.  In the beginning, Elena worships Lila, but over the course of the novel the power gradually shifts, the pivot being when Elena goes on to middle school while Lila is held back by her ignorant, plebian father, until by the end, when the 2 girls are 16, it is Elena who has become Lila’s brilliant friend who will conquer the larger world as Lila sinks back into the morass of her origins.  Appropriately for an author trained in the classics, there is a whiff of Greek tragedy in the book, the tragedy of unfulfilled promise. 

Apparently her earlier novels, The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter, are all darker, less serene, lacking the joy that occasionally breaks forth in this book, so I’m not sure if I want to go there.  But My Brilliant Friend is supposed to be the 1^st of a trilogy, and I finished it eager to learn more about the lives of the people I met in it, so I’m awaiting the sequel with keen anticipation. 

Overnight in SF



Hotel Kabuki



Winter’s a good time to visit San Francisco insofar as hotel rates drop as much as 50% from their summer levels, despite the fact that there’s rarely any of the chilly fog that plagues the summer months.  Of course it may be cold or rainy, but sometimes you get these brilliant sunny days when the air is so clear you can see Point Reyes 20 miles away, an ultra-high-def day.  We had one of those on a recent Saturday. 

We arrived at the Hotel Kabuki, in Japantown, around 3 Friday afternoon, check-in time, and parked in the garage beneath, where we found an ideal slot for R2 right by the elevators.  Our room on the 9^th floor boasted views to the north and east and we savored them briefly before descending to the street, walking Post to Fillmore and turning uphill.  In the other direction (south) the neighborhood gets a little rougher, high-end shops giving way to jazz clubs like The Boom Boom Room, Rasselas, and Yoshi’s, not to mention the famous Fillmore, although the recent arrival of a pricey restaurant called State Bird Provisions may signal an upgrade trend creeping south.  It’s a popular place and we considered trying it but the menu didn’t grab us and we already have a favorite restaurant in the area.  . 



Tom Papa



The weather was overcast with a cold wind gusting into our faces, so we ducked into a shoe store called Paolo.  Frieda is a shoe nut and, to be honest, I have a weakness for them myself.  A pair of green eel skin lace-ups sang to me but I resisted their siren call.  We escaped the place with our wallets unscathed and poked our noses into a few other shops before heading back to the hotel.  After changing, we caught a cab to Cobb’s Comedy Club on Columbus, near Lombard (the valet at the hotel discouraged us from driving due to the shortage of parking in North Beach on a Friday night).  We had tickets to see Tom Papa, whom we’d discovered on a Comedy Central special.  We were about an hour early for the 8 o’clock show and had our choice of seats.  I picked a table in the second row; the front row’s a little too close for comfort in a comedy show.  Seeing as how there was a 2 drink minimum, I ordered a bottle of Firestone Gewurztraminer (We visited the Firestone Winery on our trip to the Santa Inez valley in October 2011: see post “The Santa Inez Valley”) plus a burger with fries and a salad.  People slowly filed in while we ate and by show time the floor was filled. 

Things kicked off with a mediocre comic from Sacramento followed by one from LA who was better, but not good enough to inspire full surrender.   Papa, even though we didn’t always agree with his perspectives (closing the Post Office), and even though much of his material had no personal resonance for us (parenting), was just as funny as we recalled from our previous exposure.  He had us laughing until our stomachs hurt.  It’s not just what he says, of course, but his gestures, his grimaces, his timing, the whole package.  After the show we ambled up Columbus to Café Greco for some dessert and espresso, and then caught a cab back to the hotel.  These days it seems nearly as easy to find a taxi in San Francisco as in Manhattan.  The cabbie returning knew the city better, so the fare was about a third less than the fare going had been. 

As I mentioned, the next day dawned pellucid.  We drove out to the Richmond, an area sometimes referred to as New Chinatown despite the plethora of Russian establishments, for brunch at Tan Kiang, a place with locally famous dim sum, and then headed over to Land’s End in Lincoln Park to take advantage of the clarity.  From there the Golden Gate was etched in acid on a ceramic blue sky.  When you consider gateways, there is no other in America with as much iconic power as this bridge.  It’s like the vagina of America.  But while we were walking around there I noticed my Tsubos were cutting into my Achilles tendon, despite the fact that I’d had them for years, so we took R2 back to Japantown, parked it in the garage, and walked over to the Safeway on Geary to pick up some Band-Aids to shield my sore heels. 

Problem fixed, we nabbed a cab to Union and Franklin.  Union is another good shopping street and Frieda was after boots.  She found some brown Steve Maddens she liked so I bought them for her.  Then we crossed the street to La Boulange for a couple lattes, plopping ourselves outside to enjoy the warm sun and ogle the fashionistas.  When we’d had our fill of that we meandered on down to Fillmore and turned up the hill.  Fillmore is so steep here that for a couple blocks the sidewalk turns into stairs.  When you get to the top (Broadway) and turn around the Marina spreads out beneath you, with the bay beyond and then the Marin headlands.  It’s one of the great views in the city.  Over the rooftops to your left you can see the northern half of the Golden Gate.  Facing south it’s a gentle descent from here and we meandered into various shops, just killing time until SPQR, the restaurant we were stalking, opened at 5:30.  We had no reservations but got seats at the bar and ordered a carafe of a very nice white from Umbria, a salmon starter, black ink chitarra, and Arctic char, plus, for dessert, a chocolate assortment with hazelnuts.  We were on the road for home by 7:45.  It was a nice little getaway. 

Durrell and Miller



Lawrence Durrell



There was a time, many years ago, when Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller were my favorite fiction writers.  Much of the Alexandria Quartet I read aloud to my first wife.  In those days many, including professors of mine in both college and grad school, considered Durrell to be among the top 5 novelists of the 20^th century, but now, barely more than a decade after its close, he seems largely forgotten.  Both writers reflect the desire, evident over the past couple of centuries, to escape ordinary, mundane, everyday reality for some form of hyper-reality, an uber-reality.

 Durrell and Miller were friends.  The climax of their extensive correspondence came when, after reading Sexus, which went beyond the casual obscenity of the Tropics trilogy to outright pornography, Durrell sent Miller a telegram calling it “disgracefully bad,” and insisting that he must withdraw it at once, before it did irreparable damage to his reputation.  As a young man Durrell had decried British prudery, but at this point his own reawakened.  It’s ironic, given his concern for Miller’s reputation, that it would be his own that was sullied by factors beyond his control, such as the suicide of his daughter and subsequent unsubstantiated rumors that he had molested her, while Miller, who treated the matter of his reputation with blithe, cavalier disregard, and who could certainly be accused of gross neglect of his own children, has skated free. 

Henry Miller



Most people think Tropic of Cancer is Miller’s best and I think a solid case may be made for that, but it is the Rosy Crucifixion, of which Sexus is the first volume, that tells the central story of his life, the saga of his escape from a life of drudgery to one of self-realization and some measure of fulfillment, and the price he had to pay for it.  It comes across as more of what Miller essentially is: not a traditional novelist so much as a raconteur who button-holes you in a bar and starts bending your ear. In between the sexual bouts are rants about living on the edge economically, emotionally, and existentially, an approach he believes makes for the fullest, most intense life, because more than just a writer he is the advocate of a mode of living.  It’s a life style few have the courage for, and even he can only manage it with the crutch of a mystical faith that he is “protected,” for to live so nakedly would be too terrifying in a universe of sheer randomness.  He was like everyone else in this respect: he believed what he needed to believe in order to live as he was predisposed to live.

What strikes me most in revisiting these enthusiasms of my youth in the current context of commercial fiction is how original they seem.  Tropic of Cancer and Justine are like no other books before or since; they are sui generis.   In the decades since their release the processes of commercialization, homogenization, and institutionalization, prominent features of the industrial world, have proceeded apace, so that contemporary novels are far more like one another.  For a time art, and literature as art, took the place of religion as a vehicle of would-be transcendence, but now it is just a commodity like any other.  Writers have lost the revolutionary, shamanistic mystique they had in Miller’s youth and been reduced to craftsmen, priests of the system, celebrants of the Mass of consumerism.  This is not so much the result of any imposition from above as it is due to the corruption of the artists themselves: where once they pursued immortality, the veneration of posterity, now they are satisfied with celebrity.  This diminution of aspiration is due to the fact that we no longer believe in posterity; we are living in the moment, amidst the processes of rapid irrelevance.  The only future we can imagine is dystopia. 

The best contemporary work is the best on account of the sheer beauty of the sentences from which it is constructed, not because of any revolutionary ideas it communicates about how we might strive to reach over and beyond the confines of contemporary society or any big insights about the nature of ultimate reality.  Contemporary literary novels are enjoyed for the sheer play of language, not for any meaning they contain.  They are, as it were, gorgeously wrapped empty packages.  The fun is in the unwrapping, not in what is found inside.  Durrell and Miller followed Joyce in the language play line (Miller once said that he hoped one day to write sheer nonsense and some would say he achieved that goal on more than one occasion), but they still had one foot in the old novel-of-ideas camp.  With them it was language and the big idea, language and meaning.  Now it’s just the language.