of art history, a windowless room of orphans and exiles.
I also spent hours in the hushed back room full of files from the era of Grace McCann Morley, the museum’s inspired, forgotten founding director, and it was then I fell in love with archives and the task of assembling a history out of fragments. I noticed a drawing by Matisse in a letter to her and had it moved from correspondence files to the art collection. I wandered through the history of many artworks like a traveler, learning about the world around them, coming to recognize landmarks I could return to. I worked on a painting by the German expressionist Franz Marc—a mountainscape he had repainted after he’d been to Paris and seen the brand-new thing that was cubism: I had it X-rayed to show the old painting underneath, and I found the data to change the title. To play a role in the writing of art history, even with this one tiny act, was electrifying.
Since Morley, all the directors of that museum have been men, but a few ranks below, women seemed to run everything. I worked under a kind patrician woman out of a tiny office in the library who taught me my job, and I often wandered over to consult the dashing, graying, gravel-voiced longtime librarian Eugenie Candau in her own office, and sometimes I scrounged from her wastebasket the exhibition postcards she discarded. I was ravenous for images. It was a second education as valuable and formative as the one I was getting across the bay at the university.
One day I saw a work of art by Los Angeles artist Wallace Berman that captivated me. It was a grid repeating an image of a hand holding a transistor radio with images bursting out of the radio’s speaker, a piece about pop culture and mysticism with a few Hebrew letters scattered on it. In my na?veté, I went to find the book that I assumed existed on this extraordinary creator. There wasn’t one then, though there was a slender exhibition catalogue surveying his work. I didn’t yet know that I would write that book, or a version of it, some years later. I picked Berman as the subject for my thesis, though it was unconventional for a journalism student to focus on something so far from the news and the realms of news. Berman had died in 1976, having destroyed the recording of the only interview known to have been conducted with him, so there was a lot to reconstruct from archives and interviews with members of his circle. The coincidences that led me to the museum that led me to the image that led me to the project make me grateful for my failure at opening wine bottles.
5
Though I was browsing at City Lights bookstore and researching the Beat poets for that thesis, and interviewing some of them, I encountered my fellow San Franciscan Diane di Prima’s work only later, including her declaration “You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology.” Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.
It formalizes the process everyone goes through, of making the self who will speak, of settling on what values and interests and priorities will shape your path and your persona. You have to find out what kind of tone you are going to take, how you pitch your words, whether you’re going to be funny or grim or both. Often what emerges is not what you intended; it turns out you’re someone else who has other things to say and other ways to say them (what gets called “a voice” is at the outset like some person you don’t know very well arriving at the front door with a different focus and tone than you expected). You discover what ethics are implicit or explicit in how you describe the world, what ideas of beauty you are going to pursue, what your subjects are, which means what you care about, all those things labeled style and voice and tone