It appears that I’m going to be in San Francisco on December 6. Probably not for more than 24 hours. The very generous Robin Sloan will be talking to me at a place called Kepler’s Books.

I haven’t been in the Bay Area in probably ten years. Frank Chu didn’t have corporate sponsorship yet. Oakland was being gentrified. Ish. The place was just starting to go weird again, after that “between the wars” period of the dotcom bust. All those apartments south of Market standing empty, their vendor signs trumpeting their “T1 lines in every unit!” fading and warping. Just starting to have to fight through wheezing vegans flocking for their fucking soy chai lattes just to get a cup of fucking coffee. Gigs in parking lots. Feeding entire long tables of people at sushi joints for less than forty bucks!

I remember the first time I pitched up at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. It was a place I’d been reading about for years. It was 1997, maybe? Christ. Nearly twenty years ago. (I mean, it was a shithole, and two or three blocks down I remember Grant Morrison spotting a NAMBLA publication in a store window. But you could see around all the crap.) I wasn’t quite thirty, and hadn’t quite had all the romance beaten out of me. This was a place that books came from, where a culture briefly grew.

For almost a decade, the Bay Area was one of the most comfortable places in the world for me. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Going back is going to be weird. Even for a day. Still. Maybe I’ll get to see City Lights one more time.

 

READING: NECESSARY TROUBLE, Sarah Jaffe (UK) (US)