Back in 2007, I had an unusual encounter at the Geary Club, a San Francisco bar near Union Square. A guy on the barstool beside me laid out his big idea—it was an era of Big Ideas—called dublit.com, a web site for people to freely upload and listen to spoken word recordings. It was to be a repository of audio essays, non-fiction, short stories, chapters from books, and so on.
I told him I was a writer, and I was interested in supporting it, if I could.
Fast forward one year: dublit.com’s launch party was a smashing success, and I vowed to make good on my pledge. Using nothing more than my iBook’s microphone and built-in audio software, I recorded two of my short stories, “Of Potential” and “Some of the Things He Thought That Year” (both available in my collection, A Concordance of One’s Life).
Later, San Francisco lit mag Instant City published my ode to The Owl Tree (another Union Square bar) and its recently-deceased proprietor, a lifelong city bartender and colorful character named C. Bobby. I read the remembrance at the magazine’s release party, which was recorded and made its way onto dublit.com as well.
I recently discovered these old spoken word recordings on a backup. (I thought they’d been lost.) I uploaded them to the Internet Archive, where they should remain available for years to come.
You’re free to listen or download them. I’ve included a PDF of each short story alongside the audio, if you prefer to read or read along:
Sadly, many of the beautiful and sublime things I’ve mentioned are now gone: Geary Club, C. Bobby and The Owl Tree, the original dublit.com, even Instant City. So much loss against the wages of time, which ruthlessly spends down our youth with no regard for our future.
It’s pretty much what’s printed on the tin, but with a few surprises. Why are there two Mason Streets in the city? If Division Street divides two neighborhoods, what does Divisadero Street divide (if anything)? And is it true that two of the numbered east-west streets actually intersect?
It’s a goofy but fun way to look at San Francisco’s layout and history. I hope you get as much out of reading it as I did putting it together.
2016 was a busy year for blogging. Amazon accepted Bridge Daughter for their Kindle Scout program, which entailed a month-long nomination process before they agreed to publish it. It was the start of a fairly intense roller coaster ride, most of which I captured in blog posts along the way.
Amazon’s imprimatur on the novel opened many doors. With a single email sent on a single day of the week to a mere sliver of their customer base, Amazon could generate hundreds of book sales, as though rubbing a lamp to summon a djinn. Amazon’s backing also led to a movie production company inquiring about film rights. They read the book and they asked questions, but ultimately they passed.
(Amazon dismantled the Kindle Scout program in 2018, which I still consider a tragedy.)
Of the long-form blog entries in 2016, I produced three that I remain proud of. I’m torn which to feature here. My account of Don Herron’s Fritz Leiber tour still evokes nostalgia. Don Herron is the creator of the classic Dashiell Hammett tour in San Francisco. Getting a chance to meet Herron and take his lesser-known Fritz Leiber tour was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as he no longer leads it save for special occasions.
Another piece I’m proud of is my review/analysis of the Generation X cult classic Slacker, one of my favorite films. This entry has an untold side story: A few months after posting it, an online film aficionado site on Medium asked if I was interested in adapting the review. Unfortunately, what the editor wanted me to write about wasn’t what I found interesting about Slacker, and the opportunity fizzled out.
On Literature by J. Hillis Miller
The third is a blog post I keep returning to as a kind of manifesto: “Fiction as a controlled experiment,” a write-up of my thoughts on the book On Literature by J. Hillis Miller.
Miller was a scholar at Yale and U.C. Irvine, and known for promoting deconstruction as a means of literary criticism. I discovered On Literature on a shelf of used books in a Tokyo bookstore, and assumed it would be thick with postmodern terminology and abstruse theories. Instead, On Literature is personal and ruminative. Parts of it read like a confessional. Miller admits to a lifelong love of reading, and writes in glowing terms on several children’s books he marveled over in his youth.
What caught my attention the most, however, is when he confesses to viewing a work of fiction as a “pocket or portable dreamweaver.” He describes books as devices that transport the reader to a new “hyper-world” for them to experience. The way he describes it reminds me of the linking books in the classic video game Myst.
Myst linking book
This quaint vision of narrative is unfashionable in the world of literary criticism. Miller’s vision is also, in my view, charitable to lay readers, who are less interested in high theory and more interested in enjoying books, and curious why some books are more enjoyable than others.
But I do think this vision—”a pocket or portable dreamweaver”—is also a useful guide for an author developing a story or a novel. Miller insists a work of fiction is not “an imitation in words of some pre-existing reality but, on the contrary, it is the creation or discovery of a new, supplementary world, a metaworld.” That is what the creation of story is—not merely revealing or reporting an already existing world, but creating a new one in the author’s mind, and, in turn, recreating it in each reader’s mind. These multiple worlds are similar but never exactly the same.
Miller died in 2021 due to COVID-related issues, one month after the death of his wife of over seventy years. Reading On Literature makes me wish I could have enrolled in one of his courses. Whereas so many of the European deconstructionists seemed intent on subverting the power of literature, Miller was plainly in awe of the written word, and strove to promote it. We need more readers like him.
Last night, I saw a live performance of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” at the San Francisco Symphony. One of the people I went with had never seen the original television cartoon—yes, it’s true.
Afterwards, she asked a simple question: “Why did Charlie Brown pick such a bad tree for Christmas?”
As we walked, we talked a bit about Linus’ speech at the end, and how the story asks about the “true” meaning of Christmas. This was all fine, but it merely danced around her question of the tree.
What I said next sprung from me. It wasn’t something I formulated or ever considered before:
“Charlie Brown recognizes something familiar in the tree. It’s been overlooked and doesn’t seem to have much to offer anyone, which is what he’s experienced in life. At the end, the other kids see the beauty in the tree, and in decorating it they’re appreciating Charlie Brown too.”
I don’t claim this is a deep insight, or even an original one, but it came to me all at once. I watched the TV show as a child in the 1970s, and rewatched it countless times over the years, and yet I’m still finding meaning in this Christmas tale.
At my local branch of the San Francisco Public Library I happened to notice this little surprise on the New Arrivals shelf: A fresh copy of A Man Named Baskerville, all prepped and ready for checking out. (Here’s the online record, if you’re interested.)
If you’d like to read my books and haven’t yet, keep in mind your local library may have an online suggestions program for acquiring lesser-publicized titles like Baskerville or Bridge Daughter. Check your library’s web site, recommend some books, and you may soon be able to read and share.
What draws you to science fiction? I’m drawn to the “what-if” element of science fiction. Storytelling is a kind of controlled experiment, a chance to live another life or in another time without the use of exotic technologies. Novels are rather like the Myst linking books transporting you to another age. J. Hillis Miller calls books “portable dreamweavers,” and speculative fiction is perhaps the purest distillation of that idea. That’s why I turn to science fiction time and again.
And:
While taking inspiration from those giants of the genre, how does your book both honor and freshen up cyber-noir?
In most mystery novels, the detective is not deeply involved in the mystery he’s solving. For In My Memory Locked, Naroy is absolutely at the center of the crime—and he’s not sure why. He’s even uncertain he’s not the perpetrator. I couldn’t tell the kind of detective story I wanted to tell without science fiction.
The discussion also touches on my Bridge Daughter series, the differences between San Francisco and Tokyo, and how we’re already living in a cyberpunk world, even if we don’t have quarter-inch stereo jacks in our heads.
Read the full interview here. Thanks to Arina at Queen’s Book Asylum for having me!
The first chapter of my novel Man in the Middle opens a year ago today.
It’s an odd anniversary to observe, the setting of a book. I didn’t start writing it a year ago today. That came later, after a bit of soul-searching if I really wanted to write a novel about the pandemic during the pandemic.
In some ways, though, I did start writing the novel a year ago. I began keeping a daily diary last March when it grew apparent that the spread of COVID-19 was going to be more than a particularly nasty flu season. The first entry on March 14 is a little over a week before the book’s time-frame. I set the novel’s opening chapter ten days later, March 24, to coincide with the timing of California’s statewide order to lockdown and shelter-in-place. I was tempted to open the book earlier, as my entries on the 21 and 22 both demonstrate the alarm rising within me, as the hard realities of the pandemic started to loom.
The early diary entries show me obsessing over the peculiarities of the then-present moment. Those were days of keeping John Hopkins University COVID-19 map open in a persistent browser tab, so I could check it every few hours. The red dots across the forty-eight contiguous states gave the effect of an America with a case of chicken pox; later I would call it a “creeping horror.” The buses running across San Francisco were suddenly empty, and in a few days most lines weren’t running at all. Downtown San Francisco businesses boarded up their windows, even the storied hotels, which normally operated with doors open twenty-four hours a day. After a trip to Costco for supplies, and witnessing panic-buying first-hand, me and several other beleaguered shoppers took the elevator down to the parking lot. A woman in the back began singing “There’s no way out of here.” At least people still had a sense of humor.
Dog running down a near-empty Geary St., San Francisco on March 17, 2020. I lived near the intersection the dog is approaching. Normally the traffic would be bumper-to-bumper. In a few days, the windows would be boarded up and the streets even more deserted.
During this time period, I jogged down the center line of Montgomery Street at 4:30pm on a Thursday—the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District, normally thronged with stockbrokers and bankers, suddenly looking like the set for a zombie movie. I also recorded having an on-again-off-again cough and running nose, which left me reeling between paranoia and chiding myself for being paranoid.
The nucleus of Man in the Middle is buried in my diary entry for March 22: “It would be funny if we emerge from our shelter-in-place hibernation four months from now and discover the rich and powerful have rewritten all the rules to further favor themselves.” (Four months from now. Ha.)
So many failures of those early weeks have been tossed down the collective memory hole. Multiple times I noted news reports of government officials from both sides of the aisle claiming broad martial law powers during a pandemic. Social network users were suggesting it was time for “appropriate” shaming of people for wearing masks—you read that right—while the media sought to pretend it never downplayed the coronavirus over the flu, or ever referred to COVID-19 by the city it was first detected in.
Months after the first vaccine was greenlighted for the general population, and after a year of lockdowns, fervent hand-washing, and face masks, COVID-19 numbers are still ticking the wrong direction. Or, they’re not. Maybe there is no way out of here.
