Jules Older explains why it’s so annoying to live in San Francisco.............

WRITERS LIFEGUARD

My friend Al was introducing me to his colleagues at the San Francisco Chronicle. “Jules, this is Annika; like you, another San Francisco transplant.”

“Annika,” I said, “What's the most annoying thing about San Francisco?”

Enigmatic Swedish smile. “Why don't you tell me.”

“The most annoying thing about San Francisco is the level of brilliance here. How can I compete with so much smart?”

She knew just what I meant, and so will you when you read Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon, who lives next door in Berkeley.

When I read the first ten pages, I muttered to Effin, “He’s showing off.”

After 50, I changed it to, “He's showing off, but he has a lot to show off.”

At 100: “Jesus. It’s Bonfire of the Vanities moved to Berkeley, set to a jazz beat and trebled down on word play.”

Trebled down? One sentence. Not a paragraph, not a page, not even a chapter, but an entire section is composed of one. bloody. sentence. And it works.

Here are some shorter examples:

“Walter broke off a piece of a smile and tucked it into his left cheek as if reserving it for future use.”

 “He addressed the class... in a soft, stupefied, increasingly breathless tone like an astronaut pleading with a mad supercomputer to open an airlock.”

“Vulgar language," Chan said... "Always the first and last refuge of the man with nothing to say.”

And this: “Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands.”

See why it’s so annoying to live in San Francisco? If I practiced my craft for the next thousand years, I could never come up with “a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands.”

&#8212    Jules

PS Al was taking me around the Chronicle because I was about to start as the paper’s newest Slope Dope, a.k.a. ski and snowboard blogger. On Tuesday, I’ll begin an important, two-part interview with another Lifeguard, Auden Schendler, on global warming and what can/must be done about it. Al, Annika, Auden and I are all ski fanatics, and if the snow turns to rain, there will be nothing to fanaticize about. Check Slope Dope out here

Jules Older