SSM, day 4: "A Guide to San Francisco" by Damion Searls, and "A Guide to Berlin" by Nabokov

I've been reading a lot of Dalkey books lately because, well, because they are located here at the University of Illinois with me, and also because they kickass. So I was scanning through them today, to see if I had any story collections, and found Damion Searls' What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, which I knew absolutely nothing about (I think it was put in my hand with the recommendation, "you should read this."). It is small (only about 100 pages) and I saw it was stories (only 5) and so that was good enough for me.

A little more research (reading the titles of the stories, and the acknowledgments, and the blurbs) and I discovered the stories are basically all "covers." Here's a bit of what Ed Park says in his blurb:

Searls is the kind of sharp, utterly confident writer who can cover Nabokov and Hawthorne the way the Pet Shop Boys joyously dismantle a U2 or Willie Nelson song and turn it into a blast of blissful clarity.

That's a pretty rad blurb and kind of makes you want to read his "version" of Nabokov, no? Least it did me which, in turn, led me to tracking down the original and reading that as well (it was originally in the New Yorker, which means if you are a subscriber you can access it online! (another great aspect of covers: when they make you go out and reread/relisten, or even discover the original for the first time!)). What I loved about reading them both back to back was noticing the similarities as well as the differences;and  seeing Searls go above and beyond "covering" it and making it his own, like the best covers do.

Both stories start in a bar with the writer meeting a friend and then telling said friend about his day in a kind of "guide to the city" fashion. After that short intro/set-up, Searls' story continues in 5 short sections: 1) The Sky, 2) The Cables, 3) Pentimento, 4) Millefleur, (and finally back to...) 5) The Bar (these sectons echoing Nabokov's original The Pipe, The Streetcar, Work, Eden, and The Pub).

So many great things to say about both stories, but I'll highly recommend you pick up Searls' new book and also track down Nabokov's story anyway you can, as a fun compare and contrast. I'll also leave you with a couple excerpts from each story, and then a meandering digression...

from "A Guide to Berlin":

I think that here lies the sense of literary creation -- to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right -- the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.

and the digression:

section 3) Pentimento of "A Guide to San Francisco" starts:

The first time I visited San Francisco...

A phrase which made me put down the book and think of my own first time in the city. I'd just moved to California after college and... wait... as I thought about what I thought was my first time in the city, I realized I'd actually been there as a kid. Actually, maybe I hadn't, but I know for a fact my family drove through and stopped in Oakland, and why we would have skipped SF seems mysterious to me. But anyway, I remember because throughout the late 80s and into the early 90s, I looooooved me some Bash Brothers. The Oakland Athletics, for whatever reason, were my favorite team and possibly my most crushing sports moment was when Kirk Gibson hit that bomb of the Eck and the Dodgers would go on to win the Series. 

    

 So, this is why I remember being in Oakland: my extended family lived in southern Cali and every few years we would take a road trip south to see them and I very specifically remember begging my parents one year, and them acquiescing, to stop at Oakland's ballpark. I remember my dad begging some crew person to let us in to the Stadium when it was closed because the A's were off playing some road game somewhere else. We were let into the stadium and my parents still have the photo my dad took of me, in my A's Starter Jacket, in the stadium.

So, after this long remembrance, I went back to the story, and what would Searls be devling into, but memory!

The first time I visited San Francisco, as a high school student, I took the ferry over glittering waters to the western edge of the city, walked around downtown and then back toward Coit Tower to the south... Except the ferry arrives at the east shore of San Francisco, Coit Tower rises up to the north, and I have never again found the green field at the base of the hill, the streetside benches I sat on, the record store I stopped into.

-aaron

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

Damn, another winner from Burch. The Searles book is really quite good. One of the few where most of the protagonists are writers that I actually liked.