City boy
I’m back. After meandering through London, Copenhagen, and Vienna with my family for the last couple of weeks, I was excited to return to San Francisco and reacquaint myself with the city hidden in the fog with fresh eyes. Seeing many different cities in a short period of time was a wonderful experience, both expanding my understanding of how people live and inspiring new ways of seeing what my own city could feel like.
I’ve been to London four times now, but I doubt I have a very good sense of what the city is like. My family always stays in central London, spending most of our time in high-traffic touristy areas. However, the city feels much more artistically inclined than any city I’ve lived in. Perhaps it’s the advertisements for plays everywhere, the multitude of bookstores, the free entry to many beautiful art museums, and instrument cases on the trains. Maybe it’s just the older buildings that I associate with the aesthetics of the artistic or the stories from my London-residing friend about the artistic impulses of the people she meets.
Regardless, while in London, I found myself feeling creatively inspired, wanting to steal away my free time to read, to scribble notes about writing whenever there was a lull. I was snapping pictures left and right, considering all of the angles and the edits I could make when I came back. In Copenhagen, these impulses dimmed a little bit, while most of my energy was dedicated to not freezing. While in Vienna, visiting the Belvedere Museum and witnessing the works of Gustav Klimt made me wonder if I should abandon writing and become a painter. The beauty of The Kiss and Judith, along with his other works, stopped me in my tracks, immense achievements that resulted from years of work.
From my travels, I always seek to find ways to bring some of the novelties of what I’ve experienced back home with me. Was there a way for me to bring the artistic inspiration of life in London to San Francisco? Could I find an artistic tenacity like Klimt in my own town?
In his 2008 essay “Cities and Ambition,” Paul Graham suggests that great cities send messages about what type of ambition is valued there. As examples, Graham suggests that New York tells you to make more money, Silicon Valley tells you to become more powerful, Los Angeles tells you to become famous, San Francisco tells you to live better, Paris tells you to do things with style. I haven’t spent enough time in most of these cities to refute any of these claims, but they seemed true enough to me at first glance.
However, as I thought more about the descriptor of San Francisco, I wasn’t so sure. Sure, there was a good amount of people in San Francisco who sought to optimize their lives, through meaning making or cold plunges, but were they the ones who defined the message of the city? In my four years, I feel like I’ve experienced different versions of the city, depending on the people I spend time with. Do the DJs and the startup founders and the theory readers and the poets all experience the same messages from the city? I doubt it.
But by the same token, could surrounding yourself with certain people make you more likely to hear a different message from the city? In the company of peers, would the streets turn into the muses, inspiring creative thought? Could the fog offer clarity and the evergreen grass lead us to discovery?
After writing (mostly) weekly for over six years, I can confidently proclaim that I’m a writer (a person who writes). However, I think there’s room to be more of a writer (a member of the literary community). Even as I’ve developed strong relationships with my online writing group and a small number of other writers, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for me to invest more into my local writing community. I rarely share my in-progress work, I don’t know the literary history of the city that I live in, and generally, I wonder how writing could make me feel more connected to other people.
I have multiple friends that are DJs, which gives my social life a specific shape and sound, but I wonder how my life would look if I spent more time with writer types more often. I have fantasies of attending readings at bookstores and performing at poetry open-mics and somehow managing to recreate the sense of literary community that many only find through MFA programs or fancy fellowships. We would read poems and write poems and think in new ways and help each other get better and better.
Recently, writer and consummate literary citizen Gabe Hudson passed away far too young. I didn’t know much of his work, but I read many accounts of members of the literary community mourning his passing in memoriam. Lincoln Michel wrote, “Gabe loved literature. He loved writers. He especially loved writers doing their own weird thing with humor and heart. He was at home boosting, cheering on, promoting, and championing writers.”
When people pass, so much is lost: facial expressions, idiosyncratic laughs, individual mannerisms. Such things can never be preserved beyond memories — unique aspects of a person that must be cherished. Yet, in other ways, there’s room for inspiration for those who remain behind: opportunities to attempt to carry on the spirit of the actions of the person who passed. No one can replace another person, not really. In the case of Gabe Hudson, I wish to try and follow his example in my own local literary community: to love literature and writing with intensity, enough for it to overflow, to reach the writers I meet who love words just as much as I do.
We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza. Consider calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire or donating to Palestine Children’s Relief Fund for humanitarian aid.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
PLAYLIST - november 23 - a bit shorter this month
POEM - “Mowing” by Ada Limón - The light’s escaping the sky, /
and there’s this place I like to stand, it’s before the rise, so I’m invis- /
ible.
If you liked this piece, consider subscribing to get emailed when I have a new post (every Thursday).
Astute observations about SF! I lived there for a while and can attest that there’s a space there for everyone, like microcosms; somehow the like-minded find one another. There was a keen sense of acceptance even as it juxtaposed the abject poverty.
any recommendations for Copenhagen (other than staying warm?) headed there in a few weeks!