K.M. Soehnlein

A Married Man

This blog has been pretty silent lately but life has been exploding with activity. Kevin and I got married last Saturday night, on the first full day of spring, at a glorious celebration in San Francisco, surrounded by family and friends and making our ten-year union official, if not legal. The photo on the right, taken by Daniel Kokin, was snapped just before the ceremony.

The night started with a forty-five minute performance/cabaret emceed by Dave Hickey and Liam Passmore and featuring art made by our friends especially for the occasion. Christine Murray created a hilarious and touching film; Seth Eisen put shadow-puppetry to David Booth's occasional poem; the Cubby Creatures rocked; Fauxnique/Monique Jenkinson fierced us to Led Zeppelin; Chris Black and Lydia Bueschel danced to music performed by Sonya Hunter and Erik Pearson; Maria Maggenti read her ode to friendship and community; Mark Jackson stopped time with words and movement; and a chorus of handsome men -- Erik Pearson, Mike Finn, Paul Isaacs & John Toya -- sang an a capella version of The Rose.  In addition, our siblings -- Maureen, Sheila, Ryan, Karen & Kim -- took everyone down memory lane in a riff on the classic Joe Brainard poem, I Remember.

The wedding ceremony was performed by Rev. Tristy Taylor, a dear friend who had been with Kevin and I the night our relationship began. Our fathers spoke, and our vows were made. Afterwards, John Vlahides toasted us; PJ Jones, Marc Kate and Ken Vulsion kicked up the dance floor; and we ate food made by Kevin Kaminski and served by Out of Thyme Catering, and two delicious grooms' cakes made by Danny Yu. The room at the Lodge was gorgeous; there were flowers on the tables designed by Aaron Caramanis. We ended things with our "first dance," not the traditional slow ballad but a duet from Hairspray called You're Timeless to Me, choreographed by Chris Black with some inspiration from Gene Kelly.

It was a night I'll never forget, full of deeply felt love, a tremendous sense of community, and a spirit of openness and harmony. My only regret is that we couldn't have invited twice as many people -- our greater circle of friends who make our lives so rich and varied and full of laughter. But there are always more parties to come.

We're off now for a honeymoon in Paris. Bon voyage!

This is what a bookstore going out of business looks like.

I stopped by Stacey's, the legendary downtown San Francisco bookstore, today. My heart sank, my stomach knotted and other parts of my body performed in similarly cliché ways, all of them nonethless deeply felt. Stacey's is going out of business -- following other venerable local establishments like A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books and Cody's, not to mention essential faraway stores like the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York and, most recently A Different Light in Los Angeles. All these stores managed to survive the full-frontal assault from the chains in the early 00's, but this credit-crunched economy has proven lethal. Books just don't bring in the bucks, at least not in bookstores. (Ebooks seem to be another story...)

Today, Stacey's looked like it had been looted. Or such was my first reaction, taking in the expanses of empty and half-empty shelves -- all that once-cozy lacquered wood looking naked and exposed. What books remained had been arranged with their faces out (no hard-to-read spines, just full-on cover art), enticing the last buyers like big-eyed orphans hoping for homes. What was left in stock was pretty random. I wandered the depleted fiction section thinking I might find Proust's Swann's Way, the Lydia Davis translation that had just been recommended to me, but it wasn't there, and instead I wound up with a different first-person narrative by a French writer, Grégoire Bouillier, a contemporary author whose Report on Myself is blurbed on the back cover as "Proust in a bottle." (It weighs in at 161 pages, which is about the amount of time it takes Proust to bite that madeleine.)

Everything was 50 percent off (no new inventory being stocked, no special orders taken), so there were quite a number of shoppers, all of them, like me, looking a little dazed and hurried, as if ready to get out before the taint of failure could attach itself too quickly.

The cashier who rang me up had a kind of shocked, almost surly demeanor, which I guess is natural. She's losing her job, after all. I asked for a bookmark, thinking I'd keep it as a souvenir of a bookstore I'd visited dozens and dozens of times over the years and never imagined not being around. No luck. The bookmarks were gone too. So I forewent my usual "no plastic bags" mindset and took one when she offered.  The store's graphic logo suddenly seemed like an artifact from the past, the good old days when an 85-year-old, three-story retail outlet on San Francisco's busiest street could be counted on to last forever.

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UPDATED: Check out Kemble Scott's video of Stacey's last event, a reading  by mystery writer Cara Black. Ingrid Nystrom of Stacey's is interviewed and she says that "the big elephant in the room is that we have too much space." Strikes me that the other elephant in the room is that the average age of the crowd looks to be about 50 -- that ongoing topic, the question of whether young people are reading.

The Last Word from David Foster Wallace

Book readers everywhere will undoubtedly be poring over the New Yorker's long article on the late, lamented David Foster Wallace, which sheds light on his short, dazzling career and his suicide last year at age 46. They're also printing an excerpt from his unfinished novel, set in an IRS office and dedicated to the theme of overcoming boredom in order to discover a pure form of concentrated bliss. The novel's working title was The Pale King, though DFW had referred to it as the "Long Thing," imagining that he'd write 5,000 pages before he could find his material, then would have to chop most of it away to make it something publishable. New Yorker writer DT Max reports:

His drafts, which his wife found in their garage after his death, amount to several hundred thousand words...In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel.

Max's biographical portrait of Foster Wallace is rough reading -- chronicling his years of battling his own body-chemistry with medication, institutionalization and electroshock in between temporary bouts of happiness. I'm struck by the contrast between his razor sharp view on contemporary culture -- in works like Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Funny Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men -- which seemed to never suffer fools, to miss nothing, to shed intelligent light on much that we take for granted, and the annihilating depression he suffered, which seemed to overwhelm his attempts to bring that vision to his art.

And yet for all of that, there's something exhilarating about his story as well: a dedication that emerged again and again despite the demons he couldn't slay. He spent his life trying to write well: trying to write stylistically beyond what he saw others doing, to push himself beyond what he himself had done before. Max writes:

“The Pale King” had many ambitions. It would show people a way to insulate themselves from the toxic freneticism of American life. It had to be emotionally engaged and morally sound, and to narrate boredom while obeying the physics of reading. ... Wallace made a considerable start... He found a style that was amusing and engaging, that captured mindfulness without solemnity. Perhaps someone else reading the novel—Wallace would show it to no one—might have been satisfied. But his own past brilliance stalked him. In his “Author’s Foreword,” he assures the reader, “The very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher.”

Whether or not that attempt to force language to work in a new, truthful and soulful way -- an attempt he may have seen as failing -- led him to hang himself in his garage will certainly be on the mind of his readers as they take in the New Yorker's offerings. For me, having weighed in almost angrily when news of his suicide broke last year, this portrait, and this new fiction, is a reminder that no matter how well we think we know a writer based on what he shows the world, we can never know his private pain. It is only the work we can judge; we must leave the writer alone.