34. The Great Night

The Great Night, Chris Adrian
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook, 310 pages, 2011

Holy Shakespeare I am behind on book posts. It's actually been more than a month since I read this now. The Great Night is Adrian's retelling (more of an homage, really) of A Midsummer Night's Dream, set in Buena Vista Park in modern-day San Francisco. Oberon and Titania are recast as supernatural parents who have recently lost their young son to leukemia; the acting troupe becomes a group of homeless people determined to speak out via musical theater about (what they believe is) the mayor's plan to turn the city's homeless into food, and the original play's four lovers are now three heartbroken San Franciscans who become lost in the park on their way to a party. It reminded me a lot of early Francesca Lia Block, after Weetzie Bat but before all the dark confessional stuff, seamlessly and whimsically weaving faeries and magical creatures into a modern-day urban scene--not literary, necessarily, but entertaining and bawdy and a whole lot of fun. On the other hand, my opinion of the book is mixed--I agree with one review (which I can't find now) that said the portrayal of Titania and Oberon as godlike creatures who ultimately cannot prevent or deal with their son's death was by far the best-written and most moving part of the book. The stories of the three human lovers never quite reach a satisfying conclusion, only a threesome.

20. Tales of the City

Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin
HarperPerennial ePub edition, 358 pages, 1978


Dang I need to catch up. I especially want to post more about Japan, but I have 4 book posts to get through too!


After reading this whole book I still can't decide if I liked it or not. It was originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s, and it is traaaash. It's very dated, I didn't like any of the characters, and it does this thing I hate where it pretends no one is born in San Francisco and everyone moved there to escape a stifling Midwestern upbringing. (Get out of my city, yo.) But it has its moments--the conversation between Anna Madrigal and Edgar Halcyon about how San Franciscans are reincarnations of the people of Atlantis got me right in the chest. And I still kind of love it in the way I love any book (movie, article) that lets me walk the streets of my beloved city and pass all the landmarks in my memory, not the touristy stuff that everyone knows but Mt. Davidson, Seal Rocks, Colma, the Marina Safeway.


This was also the first ebook I read on my new Kindle (more on that later), and while I absolutely love Kindle reading, my caveat for this particular ebook is that the text quality is HORRIBLE. Stray words at the end of paragraphs (widows and orphans for those knowledgeable about typesetting), weird spacing, question marks sprinkled throughout the text in place of various symbols, and at least one or two typos per chapter (and the chapters are like a page long). We're talking really bad typos here. The worst one was at the beginning of a chapter--a character's name, Beauchamp, was supposed to be the first word of the chapter but instead they wrote "eauchamp." With the lowercase "e" as a drop cap. I know I'm a copy editor but this goes beyond the kind of nitpicking I normally do; I think it would be distracting to the average person. I am actually embarrassed for the people who put this ebook together and I would not pay money for it again.


Next up: Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell

Literary homesickness

Here in Japan I'm reading what I can get my hands on, which mostly consists of the piles and piles of books I bought indiscriminately in a kind of feeding frenzy the last time I was in an English-language bookstore in Tokyo. I definitely have enough to keep me busy until July when I go home, but these are the ones I'm aching to get my hands on once I touch down in the U.S.:

The Great Night

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin

Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Tales of the City

San Francisco, I miss you.

edit: and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I'm going to stop now before this gets out of control

This post puts the HELLA in HELLA ANGELENO

My graduation ceremony was on Sunday, so I got to spend a couple days in the city with Ray and Vy this week. Half off pizza night at Pizza Orgasmica and dim sum at Golden River were on the top of my to-do list.

Counterclockwise from top left: ha gow (shrimp dumplings), chive dumplings (on Vy's plate; they are very garlicky and my new favorite dim sum dish), chashu bao, noh mai gai (lotus leaf-wrapped sticky rice with chicken and Chinese sausage), hahm seui go (the dish that unfortunately has no English name, so they'll call it "meat dumpling" or "meat turnover" but then half the time you order the meat dumpling and it's a DIFFERENT meat dumpling and then you're like DAMMIT I WANTED CRISPY GOOEY GOODNESS), and... a different kind of shrimp dumpling, can't remember what it was called. The ones in the middle are yet another shrimp dumpling. Apparently Ryan asked a friend of ours who lives in LA Chinatown where to get good dim sum and he said there wasn't any (!!!), so I had to stuff myself in preparation for my return to the godless south.

After lunch we headed to Vital Tea Leaf in Chinatown to be screamed at and served tea by Uncle Gee (no relation to the other Gee we all know and love). As we approached the store he was busy trying to convince some tourists that his tea would make them sexy, so I walked up and said "We don't NEED to be any sexier, but can we have some tea?" which I'm pretty sure made me a prime target for his teasing the rest of the time we were there since I eventually ended up in a chokehold. This time there were some elderly tourists from Arkansas next to us, and seeing him play to them kind of ruined the effect, like when you're taken in by a magic trick but then the magician shows the trick to someone else and you see right through it. But I'd still recommend this place to anyone hitting up Chinatown--it's a comedy routine that comes with a sampler of 10-12 gourmet teas, free of charge.

(A note on photo quality: As we strolled around taking pictures Ray said he was thinking of buying a real camera so he wouldn't have to use his cell phone, and asked how many megapixels mine was. I looked at the sticker on the camera and said "Uh, 2.0?" He laughed and said his PHONE was 8 megapixels. I got this camera for my 17th birthday. I have no plans to upgrade. Deal with it.)

One of my favorite things about San Francisco is the views down side streets--everything is so packed together that there are unexpected glimpses of things wherever you go. Sometimes it's the Bay Bridge:

Other times the Transamerica Building or the Ferry Building:

One of the dangers of living in a place like this is that you start to think you're the center of the world. Even when I lived four blocks from the Pacific Ocean and would walk down there every day to bask in its immensity, I still knew that the city was at my back, beautiful and funky and free and alive at all hours of the day and night. I can't even begin to explain it--I was a little person in a big city, but I was so connected to it that I felt like I was the city, and nothing outside of it mattered. (Ever seen this New Yorker cover?) But I'm moving on again, and this time I want to feel small.