Jeannine Gailey — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 05:16:00 +0000

Notes from California:
A sunny 80 degrees in San Francisco, got to visit the friendly swans at the Palace of Fine Arts, and walk around the Presidio and the Golden Gate Park’s Fort Point. Calla lilies and pink ice plants in bloom, and not a single cloud in the sky! Also, delicious kinds of food of all sorts. But who can eat when it’s so nice outside?
Friday night we went to visit City Lights bookstore, sandwiched between multiple neon strip clubs, and the fabled upstairs poetry room. Glenn was fascinated with a book on Sylvia Plath’s art work, and I finally got to see some of Ron Silliman’s books. His work (at least the books that were there – “N/O” and “Age of Huts”) read a lot more like someone’s journal notes than I expected from all his talk about the avant-garde and Language poetry. Hm! Beautiful cover of “Age of Huts.” I also found some books I hadn’t seen before, books by Amy Gerstler and Julianna Baggott, both of whom wrote collections with a lot of persona poems. Overall, I’m still an Open Books girl, I think.
The art galleries in San Francisco were fabulous. I discovered a new favorite artist – kind of in the same surreal mood as Yumiko Kayukawa, but without the manga/80’s-ad flavor. More in the eerily beautiful vein of a fairy tale illustration gone slightly awry. Here’s a link to Rene Lynch’s amazing Secret Life of the Forest…girls with swallows in their hair, a girl looking at the observer with an owl hanging overhead, girls running from wolves in the woods. Would someone like to buy me one of these? Swoon!
Off to Monterey tomorrow…spending the night in sunny suburbia, maybe checking out some neighborhoods in the Silicon Valley outskirts on the way. Passed enough company headquarters to make my former-techie heart pound. Yoohoo, Yahoo! How much is the median rent in Los Gatos? Watsonville? Pacific Grove?

Do you know the way to san jose – Webbish6