FINALLY

One week ago today Cathy Guisewite announced she would be ending her thirty-four year run of the popular Cathy comic strip. The final daily will appear on October 3rd 2010. That is all.

A Non-exhaustive Guide to Exhausting a Place, in Four Steps

"One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the infraordinary*. . ."

So begins the jacket copy on the slim and elegant edition of Georges Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris just published by Wakefield Press (translated by Marc Lowenthal).

Perec's quest was a humble one, but fascinating despite - or more likely because of - that: to catalog everything that passed before his gaze as he perched at a cafe table for an entire weekend. He watched and noted each passing bus, the mysterious comings-and-goings of pigeons, debris floating in the breeze, deliverymen, church-goers, groups of tourists with cameras at the ready . . . everything within the limits of Perec's concentration finds its way into this delightful little book, whose contents reveal - in that magical way by which the whole proves more substantial than its parts - the workings of one of the great (and sadly under-recognized) writers of the 20th century.

Rather than attempting to exhaust the contents of the book by offering a synposis (for details, see Lily Hoang's review at HTMLGiant), I'll offer a quick guide (I'm off for the weekend in 5 minutes) to embarking on the same adventure yourself:

1. Perec's attempt spanned three days, and in the process of exhausting a place, he exhausted himself. You might not have three days, but an hour should suffice.
   
2. Find a suitable place to perch for whatever length of time you've allotted yourself, preferably by a cafe window, or on a stoop, a porch, a patch of grass, the library, a bookstore, the mall, the top of a hill. Any place works as long as you have a view of some sort of life.
   
3. Be sure to be well-supplied: a notebook, a pencil, coffee, snacks. (If you're like me, snacks are the most important part of any undertaking, however taxing or non-taxing they may be.)
4. Bring a sense of wonder: sure, it might sound boring to sit in the same spot for a certain length of time and note everything that passes, but you'll be surprised, I bet, by the number of common things you habitually overlook.

_____

* Infraordinary being defined as "the humdrum, the nonevent, the everyday—'what happens,' as Perec put it, 'when nothing happens.'”

We're Giving It Away

Not sure if y'all saw this story in the S.F. Chronicle today. Here's an excerpt:

San Francisco is an urban grid of 7 miles. But to author Rebecca Solnit, it is a place of limitless landmarks, treasures and meanings - teeming with butterfly habitats, queer sites, murder mysteries, World War II shipyards, blues clubs and Zen Buddhist centers. This fanciful interpretation of space is the subject of Solnit's forthcoming book Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, co-created with a team of cartographers, artists and writers. The book is Solnit's visual tribute to the city she loves. But like everything she's done, it's original and intellectual. The 22 maps Solnit presents capture San Francisco's red/blue political terrain, its place in cinematic history and identity politics, and its double role as environmental hotbed and toxic polluter.

Now through December, SFMOMA is displaying (and selling) seven of the book's maps and hosting a series of events around them. In July, the "Monarchs and Queens" map was unveiled, which juxtaposes the habitats of local butterflies with the shifting locations of queer public space.

Green Apple is lucky enough to have been given a supply of these maps to give out for free, so stop by and ask for one while supplies last.

Walnut Creek Rock City

Ever wonder what's going on in Walnut Creek? Well I'm on top of it for you. Check this out: Unbound: A National Exhibition of Book Art. I stopped out there last week. Pretty nice. BART stops right by the gallery (well, a few blocks away), and the gallery itself only costs five bucks to get in. Well worth it for a bit of quiet afternoon entertainment. Plus when people are all like, "What have you been up to?" You can quaff your wine and say "Oh I finally got around to visiting that little gallery outside of the city. You know the one." And then walk away.

Seriously though, it's a fun show and it's nice to get out of the city once in a while. You'll get some reading done on the train too.

Top Shelf

In each Sunday's Book Review the San Francisco Chronicle runs a list of recommendations from local independent bookstores. This week, we offered some of our favorite selections. Check 'em out here.

And click here for an archive of past selections.

Vintage Contemporaries

In the Early 1980's, Gary Fisketjon at Vintage Books published a group of young authors under the Vintage Contemporaries imprint. The books were all paperback originals, and shared a common design scheme. Many of the writers published under the banner of Vintage Contemporaries went on to become the great authors of their generation: Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Tobias Wolff, and a kid named Cormac McCarthy. I thought of this series recently when I realized that two of the authors from this series, Richard Yates and Frederick Exley, are the titular subjects of two works of fiction this coming Fall. Odd coincidence?

In Exley, by Brock Clarke, due out in October, a young boy in Watertown, N.Y. (setting for the great A Fan's Notes), goes in search of the author of his father's favorite book. The boy's father is hospitalized, and the boy thinks that Mr. Exley is the only one who can help. Doesn't help that Exley is dead.

And then we've got Richard Yates, due out next month by author Tao Lin, whose last book was Shoplifting From American Apparel. Not having read a word of this book, or even a description of its contents, I can't say whether the author of Revolutionary Road plays a part in the book beyond the title. I can say that, when I first started in the book biz oh so many years ago, Revolutionary Road was generally accepted as the best book you had never read. That's of course no longer true.

I'll finish with a short excerpt from Exley. In this scene, the young narrator examines his father's copy of A Fan's Notes, the talismanic book that holds such a powerful sway over and maybe holds the secret to the riddle of his father:

"I looked at the cover again. The corners of the cover were torn and wrinkled, the spine was split, and so many pages were dog-eared that you might as well consider the whole book dog-eared. It looked like it really was the only book my dad had read in fifteen years: it looked used, but more than that, it looked loved."

Hard to picture having that reaction to a Kindle.

Confessions, Cannons, and Lady Thoughts

SS passed his blogging post on to me for the day, and he picked a heck of a day to do it, because The Guardian recently ran an article that got me, and plenty of other lady (and non-lady) readers and writers on the internet*, pretty riled up.

The heart of the message of the article, which is about contemporary female writers who write about their experiences -- which coincidentally happen to include being female (funny how that happens) --- is not a bad thing. At the most interesting (ahem) point in this article, the writer quotes Emily Gould, saying "If a woman writes about herself, she's a narcissist. If a man does the same, he's describing the human condition." True, and important.

But where I take issue with this article is in its rather absurd attempt to trace all female writing about being female to Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City novels. Most specifically, this sentence: "Before Candace Bushnell, books like Gould's that sought to capture the dilemmas and dichotomies of modern womanhood with a wry, humorous honesty, were almost unheard of." The article concludes by rounding up what it adorably terms "Grin And Share It: American Confessional Classics", thereby doing exactly what it criticized: using the word "confessional" as a stand in for "girl-thoughts". The list, which contains some perfectly good and probably smart and entertaining writing, to be sure, defines this four book literary cannon as ranging all the way from Sex and the City to Julie and Julia. Which hardly seems like a range at all.

So, while I wouldn't dissuade anyone from reading any of the books mentioned above, I thought I'd put together an alternative list, some of which *gasp* pre-dates Sex and the City. And those that don't, well, certainly weren't written to be paired with a Cosmopolitan and designer footwear (but hey, read how you read). And I resisted the urge to throw in the cannon of historical bad-ass women folk like Sylvia Plath, Virginia Wolf and Joan Didion, and further resisted the urge to really shock and awe with some Kathy Acker or Monique Wittig. I stuck with the Guardian's parameters of "modern confessional". Here we go:

1. Beauty Talk and Monsters, by Masha Tupitsyn, is a collection of semi-autobiographical stories, mostly told through the lens of movies. In these stories, Tupitsyn blends actual experience with her own pop-cultural literacy, blurring (or revealing the already blurred nature of) the lines between reality and learned narratives.

2. Plainwater, by Anne Carson. This book of essays, poems, and essays that read like poems, meditates on relationships, travel, mythology and water almost seemlessly, as if all of the above are one topic. Carson's writing is hypnotic, her insight and vision of the world completely sharp and unique while being entirely relatable. A great traveling book.

3. I Love Dick, by Chris Kraus, is a collection of love letters Kraus and her husband sent to a professional acquaintance after meeting him once. The recipient's name is Richard, and I'd tell you to get your mind out of the gutter if it weren't for the fact that I think Kraus knew exactly what she was doing when she named her book. Raw, honest, and slightly disturbing, it will make all your crushes seem normal.

4. Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All Girl Road Novel Thing, by Erika Lopez, is a simultaneously lovely and gritty illustrated partially true coming-of-age-when-you're-already-an-adult story. It's shocking, touching, and laugh-out-loud funny.

Got more? Of course you do. Women have been writing about being women for as long as people have been writing about being people. So share 'em, and we'll all be the better for it.

*I refuse to use the term blogosphere, but that's what I'm talking about. And that kind of self-contradiction is exactly what footnotes are for.