After Brittany read from her novel Softcore, several people who’ve recently moved from San Francisco to Manhattan tell me they’ve been drinking too much, not eating at night, smoking cigarettes, feeling physically uncomfortable and enjoying the decaying facade of health and control. 

It’s okay to just admit you miss San Francisco, I think, even if it does seem so willing to cannibalize itself. My mind scans over an inventory of new housing developments, their bleak similitude. 

Dispatches of additional precarity come through friends. Eli’s might close because of zoning issues. Eli’s, which I feign hating, but really will always love because they stayed open 24 hours a day after the ghost ship fire. I still remember dissolving into a kind of all-enveloping need there, a feeling that prefigures language, as strangers and friends gathered, waiting to find out who was with us and who was gone.

Now, too, the Villancourt fountain, which chokes out green streams and when drained, was revealed to be holding several electric scooters, a pair of shoes, a shopping cart and uncountable beer cans in its murky waters, is set to be destroyed. The entire Embarcadero plaza might be remade. To mock the construction site, a monstrous 45 foot naked woman, repurposed from burning man 2015, will be installed just across the way. At night it lights up.

Neither the bar nor the fountain particularly matter, especially in the face of so much more substantial loss. But, there is something devastating in watching the infrastructure of your formative memories crumble so casually. Perhaps that’s our punishment for living on the edge of  Western expansion. There is a hollowness to the way obsessive progression circumvents physical history. Even when I’m there, I miss San Francisco.

But now, I’m not there. After moving, I watched the world I’d managed for three years crumble in just eleven days. My apartment’s rent went up, my position at a small literature non-profit dissolved: I thought I’d come back, but now I have the feeling of arriving in a clearing and losing the gap in the woods that had been my path. 

Margaret Kilgallen Series: Part 1

I go online about the artist Margaret Kilgallen and find a 1996 video from the SFPL's public access television show At The Public Library.

John DeMerritt and Dominic Riley pull up to the main branch in a cab and short the driver ten dollars. He’s upset but quickly recognizes them as “The Book Boys” from At The Public Library and waves them off, inadvertently running over their tote bag, crushing their rentals. The two men are in off-brown suits, they’ve got slicked back hair and loosely knotted ties.

Once inside, they engage the staff boisterously, and to ill affect. Marie Keller, the library's preservation manger half-heartedly plays along, speaking as little as possible and retaining a didactic professionalism. In every way her body language signals a desperation to escape. 

Margaret Kilgallen, an employee of the preservation department, is beautiful and unbothered. She’s in a simple blue tank-top and has her hair clipped back in symmetrical berets. Her calm subdues the cartoonish book boys. “Margaret and I met at dog obedience school,” one of hosts says, and she gives a slight nod before breaking into a wide mouthed smile, in perhaps the most artful dismissal of a joke I’ve ever witnessed. 

Using a thin wheat paste, silicone release paper and a handheld weight she repairs a torn page in a library book. Once finished she's suddenly shy and turns away. No one in the preservation department is comfortable being on camera, I’m struck by a time when one wasn’t accustomed to constantly being filmed, or the possibility of being filmed. 

She repairs a fissured tear in the front page of a signed book

EXICAN
TERLUDE

I pause the video to scrutinize the blurred image, uncovering the title: “Mexican Interlude,” by Joseph Henry Jackson, a pulpy travel account from 1936. It sells online for fifteen dollars. A Kirkus review from the year of its publication describes it as “delightful,” although “there was nothing particularly unusual in the ground they covered…”

I feel a poignant connection to the banality of this preservation. It makes me feel close to the artist to know that she repaired books I have no interest in reading. My own experience of carefully uncovering the title is mirrored back to me in the act of its delicate suturing. 

“DROP WORDS OUT OF CONVERSATION AND SHATTER!”

— Madeline Gins

Painting by Corita Kent

I keep thinking I'm recognizing people at a party in Manhattan, but they're actually faces from my Instagram explore algorithm. This wounds me in a vague, dispiriting way.

Aki emails a website where you can find your astrologically harmonic coordinates. Mine all converge in Siberia. I'd be happiest in Siberia? 

I’m desperate to keep life from its impending change – to invent stillness out of a world in motion. I’m addicted to not being subjected to time, crave the moments when the burden is explicitly shared. 

Please email me back! At theadora.walsh@gmail.com