Knowing where all the movie theaters are in the Bay Area taught me a considerable amount of geography. The Embarcadero Center, spanning five blocks and connected with hypnotic tile, is not just named conveniently for its adjacent landmark. It’s also the home of an excellent art house theater. You can almost see it in The Conversation. There’s Harrison Ford, lying to reporters in the breezeway. Leave San Francisco, and things get less glamorous. You sit in boxy multiplexes, designed with […]
The Reading Life: Henry James in a Panic
I will not be the first or the last person to think of her experiences as an American in Paris while reading a Henry James novel. But I can’t help it. The Ambassadors does one trick, among many others, very well: it takes me back to all the comparisons I made, but barely understood, between my life at home and my life abroad. “We’re all looking at each other–and in the light of Paris one sees what things resemble,” […]
The Reading Life #1: All Roads Lead to Flannery O’Connor
I told many people the story of the suitcase lady. After I met her, I wrote the story out in an email, and I copied and pasted that into other emails, to others who find themselves saddled with my daily correspondence. Weeks later I was still talking about it. On a train leaving San Francisco on Christmas Eve, my hand held up to shield the mid-day sun, I heard myself ask my dad, as a rhetorical ending to the […]