Couple in front of me is just starting their trip.
They decide to go to Concord.
She take a Dramamine.
A family gets on.
All the kids have chartreuse turtlenecks with their names on them.
We go by an old trailer park, another lumber yard,
new condos on the west slope of Albany hill.
>> Okay.
>> There's a lot of that.
>> On 304 he says, for a state college type jock, sit down on a nearby bench.
Woman walks by with three children, one in her arms says of the car she passes,
it looks pretty full.
And then so often I've noticed that people who grew up in the country,
work in the suburbs, service the people who work each day in the city.
>> Yeah. >> So
people are coming from the country to work in the suburbs to work for
the people who are coming into the city.
>> And Labor Day changes that.
>> Right, >> Yeah.
>> because people go out to the country to vacation.
>> Right, kind of reverse it a little bit.
>> Yeah. >> Labor Day's kind of an important day
even though it's got its labor symbolism,
it really doesn't have anything to do with that, alas.
Other social observations?
>> In the middle of three by three, there's this great critique of
social mobility and physical mobility,
or social mobility being physical mobility in some ways.
More parking lots, more condos, why didn't someone just shoot old Henry Ford?
Is housing contingent on transportation or vice versa?
Only in our time have people begun to live away from their work.
And that says a lot about this post-war modernity of people leaving the city.
And then there's the necessity for things like freeways and.
And once people have left the city and they have their cars now,
they have their detached homes and everything.
Their condos.
>> What it does to the psyche, how large is your turf?
>> That's a great one.
>> A power mower for every home.
>> A power mower for every home.
It's almost like the Death of a Toad all over again.
[LAUGH] >> So, let me perform.
I've just set my bar up here.
I'm going to read the last part of this poem.
It's not been recorded by Ron Silliman, that we know of.
I hope we can get him to record it, although it would take a while to read it.
I want to read the last part of it, just because partly because I just love reading
it, and partly because I think it might be a good chance for
us to wrap up with a quasi close reading of this last.
And I think the poem accelerates at the end.
The pain becomes more acute.
He passes by his own home, that is to say,
his boyhood home, which we learned about in Albany.
He gains a perspective of the sort that John Ashbury
gains in his imagination when he climbs up the church tower in Guadalajara and
gets to see the scene that he's just seen.
In a way, Ron achieves these perspectives.
Retrospectives, it turns out to be,
because his life has been San Francisco at various times.
And then as we rush toward the end,
he's got to finish this thing, he really thinks a lot about what he's done.
So here we go, I'm going to go from 310 to 311.
I try to figure how many stations I'll go by today.
71 couple in front of me is just starting their trip they decide to go to Concord.
She takes a Dramamine, a family gets on,
all the kids have chartreuse turtlenecks with their names on it.
We go by an old trailer park, another lumberyard,
new condos on the west slope of Albany Hill.
On my left, my old high school, through a thin haze,
barely see the outline of the city, no Golden Gate,
a dozen kids dark down the car, others follow, cooler now.
They got off, daddy a kid says to another.
Kids now running in opposite directions, still fine.
Tourists in Berkeley.
The car.
Crowd's in a hurry.
I'm feeling weary now.
I wish my ears would pop.
A small woman with a thick accent beside me.
Two sits besides me.
Two young people, a couple are with her.
They seem to really like her.
She wears a yellow dress, a copper bracelet.
There's a motorcycle parked on the freeway.
The city, more visible from Oakland, but not very.
I got off at McArthur to transfer.
My hand hurts, I wobble walking.
A woman comes up, asks me what I'm doing.
We discuss writing.
She wants to try it sometime.
Asks me, am I writing things?
I shrug.
I don't ask her name.
The daily city train comes.
I get on.
It's so crowded I have to stand.
I keep writing.
I'm much more conspicuous now.
People are staring.
I can't hold on and write at the same time.
I nearly fall.
I'm going to have to stand all the way back.
We'll be back under the bay in a second.
80 miles per hour, a man watches me write this.
I remember what Einstein said when asked to
explain the theory of relativity in 25 words or less.
What time does the station get to the train?
It's coming.
And Barckadero, my writing is a scrawl, an act of death, it's a description.
I'm describing these people who watch me, shirt, curly gray hair.
Here's the station.
I get up, sit down.
I can still feel the pulling forces.
I'm about to board the slow,
upward path of the escalators through the ticket gate with the wrong ticket,
then back up to the street, where I will Earth surface, then home, 451, 9676.