Spotted: The Sunset, SF
What are you up to today?
I'm about to get a tattoo from Candi Kinyobi at Tuesday Tattoo. She's great. She's actually finishing a piece on my leg.
Have you gotten a few tattoos with her?
She's doing a number of cat illustrations for me because my husband and I have four cats. We're really into cats. So she's finishing up a cat by a Japanese artist called Kuniyoshi who was a ukiyo-e artist in the 19th century. I found this illustration and it kind of inspired the whole thing.
What is your occupation?
I'm a writer and a bookseller.
Where do you sell books?
Up at Browser Books in Pac Heights. My husband's the book buyer there, so I don't work as much in the store as I used to. That's where we met so I used to be in the store all the time. Now I'm in there for fewer hours.
So your main occupation is writing?
Writing poetry, stories, and doing freelance work. That kind of thing.
What kinds of subjects do you gravitate toward?
I don't know — you know, I think most poets wouldn't admit it, but poetry's pretty much always about yourself! [laughs] Or your own feelings. It comes from whatever your observations are of the world. I don't know, there's something about — for me it's always been the search for beauty — which doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't pain or other emotions in it, but there's something sublime about any subject matter that ends up being a poem. It can be anything. I think it has to be something that the poet can make into the sublime. It can be simple or complicated, sad or happy, but there is a kind of a beauty that's achieved that is — sublime is maybe a better word than beauty because it doesn't imply that everything has to be positive. There's some level of artistry that makes something a poem rather than just whatever raw material it came out of.
Who are some authors that you've come across recently that you admire?
There's so many! I'm reading Dos Passos right now, who's wonderful and did this very sort of experimental narrative. He was a contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but his form is a little bit more experimental than theirs. He's still telling narratives, but he's really trying to capture the language of people. Manhattan Transfer is all New York people, so he's trying to do the accents and backgrounds of people. I'm toward the end of the USA trilogy that he did. It's this huge project that covers this sort of late 19th century through the early twenties or mid-twenties — I don't know, I'm not at the end of it yet. But that's his great work — his major project where he's trying to chronicle all these events. So he has these very personal stories that seem separate at first and then weave together. And then, in between, he has these kind of newsreel clippings. Almost like little bits that you might have read in the newspaper or heard on the radio. And then he has his own sort of stream-of-consciousness narratives. There're these three narratives that are going on all the time. It's an interesting style.
I think he's popular in academia and stuff, but he's not always the book that people necessarily pick up to read before bed, you know? He doesn't have the sort of cachet of Hemingway or Fitzgerald. He also became really conservative at the end of his life so he lost popularity there because of his politics. He saw the Spanish Civil War, and so he abandoned, like a lot of people did, their extreme left-wing politics because he saw what happened with communism in Spain. He's a really interesting writer and he's a great storyteller. Despite the fact that he's into doing this thing formally, he definitely doesn't give up storytelling for it, which I admire a lot, because plotting is not my strong point.
What are your favorite things to do in the area?
I don't live in this area, I live in Bernal Heights, but anywhere I go in the city, I love to eat! I think my favorite thing about this city is all the different cuisines. And, you know, not even necessarily the famous restaurants or the chef-driven places, but all the different regional cuisines. It's amazing. I could never move! [laughs] That and the museums. And just walking around. This is the ultimate flaneur's city — just being able to walk everywhere. And you know, it doesn't help that public transit can be very annoying.
Luckily it's compact enough so you can really walk if you have to.
Exactly — you're like, the bus is coming in 20 minutes; I can walk there in 20 minutes.
What's something that's caught your eye recently?
I used to live in the Richmond and now I live over in Bernal Heights. So noticing the difference between those two parts of the city. We've lived in Bernal Heights a little under a year, so noticing just how the different parts of the city are, and just the different vibes. I mean, it's still the same city, and there are a lot of similarities but, suddenly being in the Mission and being in the heart of all the controversy that's going on there now with the displacement and all the horrible things that are happening over there, I see the city from a different perspective than I used to when I still read about it but I didn't live over there.
And lastly, how would you describe your personal style? I love this — is this a shirt?
No, it's a silk scarf. It's Siamese or Thai — I don't know because I have some old ones.
And your shirt has a penguin print! That's adorable.
I'm also wearing my Britannica jeans which came from, I want to say Wasteland — somewhere over in the Haight — that I love and wear to death. Because actually I love skirts, and high-waisted stuff. It's hard to find jeans. I usually don't wear a lot of jeans. I've just been wearing a lot of wide-leg clothes lately because I can't wear anything close to the tattoo! [laughs]
