Well, gentle reader, be careful what you wish for, as they say. I wished for a professional copy editor to go over my book manuscript, someone with a real publishing background, and damned if I didn’t find a highly qualified specimen who works for the University of California Press. It was my assumption that this copyediting project was a bit like dry cleaning. You send your pullover out and voilà, it comes back without the gravy stains. In a plastic bag. Maybe a piece of tissue paper stuck between the sleeves, just to give the whole thing a je ne sais quoi.
Wrong.
This editor has assured me that I have lots of work ahead. She wants me to go through her changes, one by one and give a thumbs up or thumbs down. And that’s only the binary part of the task. She also wants me to reconsider certain word choices. Changes of tense. Speaking of tense, the whole thing is making me highly strung. I thought I was done with this sucker. It would either be transformed into ink and paper. Or it wouldn’t. Never contemplated this.
I have a feeling that most people will either love or hate “The French Dispatch,” Wes Anderson’s latest film. I’m not sure what to say. But if you feel like going out, and these days I feel enormously like braving the COVID-19-infected world, well it was just what I needed. Naturally, urinary reality being what it is, I had to leave briefly for a pee in the middle of the movie, and returned quite agitated. I hate missing part of something. Anyway, I realized later that there was nothing to miss. In fact, the entire movie is a delightful mindfuck. There appears to be a plot, but there isn’t. This is best experienced in Tilda Swinton’s art history lectures, enlightening the viewer on the school of expression that grew out of the ville de Ennui-sur-Blasé, setting for the film. I found it delightful nonsense. And in the end it left me with a strong urge to visit France.
Meanwhile, the film concluded, I found myself visiting the Mission District. Jane and I set out from the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in search of Turkish food, only four blocks away. But these just happened to be four parts of the once familiar Valencia and Guerrero Streets that I haven’t seen for almost two years. Thus the pandemic. I am older. The Mission is older. There seem to be more poor people on Mission Street than before. San Francisco’s C. G. Jung Society has recently set up psychoanalytic shop at the corner of Mission and 22nd Streets. I can take pride in helping with the wheelchair access to this new building, by the way.
It was all slightly disorienting. I had thought that San Francisco City College’s Mission Center was somewhere else. It isn’t. And where is that knife shop where I got Jane a present? It disappeared. Sure are a lot of people eating outside at one of this pandemic era’s parklets. I made a mental note.
It was a good sign that I could make a mental notes. It was dark, even after 50 years after my shooting…I can feel the anxiety level rise as the sun descends in any American city. And there was the simple fact of not having been out for a couple of years. I am getting used to urban reality. It is getting used to me. And above, all I am getting out.
Which takes me back to Tilda Swinton, art historian. In the movie, she stands before a screen, TEDTalk style, and holds forth. She is not only earnest, but determined. She reeks of logic and erudition. She is babbling total nonsense, which is indeed full of sound and fury. And I like it.