Telegraph Avenue (was RE: Rebecca Solnit on San Francisco)

[Monte Davis]

How is Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue (which I'm finishing now) being
received in its Oakland/Bay Area setting? Beyond the "Pynchonesque" and
"Nefastis Building" that Michael Bailey noted last fall, there are many
debts being paid and hommages offered, e.g.:

 

Former NFL star and Branson-like entrepreneur Gibson  "G Bad" Goode is
planning a huge new media store in Oakland, which threatens the fading
used-record shop co-owned by Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe. Goode stakes
Stallings for a ride in his airship, the _Minnie Riperton_ ("She is black.
She is beautiful. And she goes really high")

 

"Archy [was] unable to shake a feeling not just that he was stepping out on
Nat Jaffe, up here dining on shrimp and flattery and all kinds of piquant
sauces, but that he was in over his head, that he was going to be edged into
doing something or agreeing to something that he did not want to do or agree
to, into something at least that he did not understand, some kind of
business being transacted by Goode. memories of watching him on television
as he conducted instantaneous Einstein-deep analyses in the pocket under a
heavy rush (not to mention the simple fact that he was visiting the man in
the cabin of his personal zeppelin that flew on the gas of burning
dollars)."

 

Gasbags aside, anyone else hear the stylistic/paranoiac echoes here?

 

Chabon lives in Berkeley. As an East Coaster with only visiting experience,
I can't address the book's accuracy/authenticity with respect to the real
place. but as an American reader with multiple Californias of the mind
overlapping since the 1960s, I think he engages how we've "run out of
continent" there almost as well as Vineland did, and better than Inherent
Vice did.   

 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Ian Livingston
Sent: Sunday, March 03, 2013 9:55 AM
To: Bled Welder
Cc: rich; "pynchon-l at waste.org"
Subject: Re: Rebecca Solnit on San Francisco

 

Oakland does, indeed have abundant character and culture. It has been the
Bay Area slum for decades, where the arts and ideas fester like lilies on
the shore, are borne over the bay by rumor to be claimed by the elder
sister, while the younger, more impetuous one languishes in skankified
infamy. I like Oakland.

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 3:16 AM, Bled Welder <bledwelder at gmail.com> wrote:

But you're....Oakland.  What is that water that lays between. the
peninsula and Oakland?  Isn't there a large bridge?  Been over it many
times myself.

Not as in, walking, by byself.  Driving.  I think occasionally one has
the misfortune of landing somewhere called Oakland....



On Sat, Mar 2, 2013 at 8:32 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary
>
> good piece on the effects of Google and its ilk on the culture of San
> Francisco. interesting contrast with Gold Rush in the 19th century and
> the mining rush in Wyoming, North Dakota and other places today. lots
> of Pynchonian echoes
>
> Rich
>
> 'All this is changing the character of what was once a great city of
> refuge for dissidents, queers, pacifists and experimentalists. Like so
> many cities that flourished in the post-industrial era, it has become
> increasingly unaffordable over the past quarter-century, but still has
> a host of writers, artists, activists, environmentalists, eccentrics
> and others who don't work sixty-hour weeks for corporations- though we
> may be a relic population. Boomtowns also drive out people who perform
> essential services for relatively modest salaries, the teachers,
> firefighters, mechanics and carpenters, along with people who might
> have time for civic engagement. I look in wonder at the store clerks
> and dishwashers, wondering how they hang on or how long their commute
> is. Sometimes the tech workers on their buses seem like bees who
> belong to a great hive, but the hive isn't civil society or a city;
> it's a corporation.'
>
> Last summer, I went to look at a house for sale whose listing hadn't
> mentioned that the house was inhabited. I looked in dismay at the
> pretty old house where a family's possessions had settled like silt
> over the decades: drum set, Bibles, faded framed portraits, furniture
> grimed with the years, cookware, toys. It was a display of what was
> about to be lost. The estate agent was on the front steps telling
> potential clients that they wouldn't even have to evict: just raise
> the rent far beyond what the residents can afford. Ye who seek homes,
> come destroy the homes of others more frail.

 

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