Dan White

This week I am graduating from Columbia’s MFA program. I am very excited about this. Three years ago, around this time of year, I relocated myself, my wife Amy Ettinger, and Robert (our huge, obese cat) to New York City for the program. I can’t be there in person, so I’ll have to hum the “graduation song” remotely while I extend my congratulations to all the other writing folks who are getting degrees this week: Fayne AnsleyPranav BehariJeff BenderAugustine BlaisdellThomas BlaylockMichelle BrothertonMarie EliaDavid FrancisRuth GalmCristine GonzalezNadine GorelikAlena GraedonMatthew HamityMelissa HeltzelAdam KatzAdina KayDoretta LauElyse LightmanKrista ManriqueFilip MarinovichJoshua MartinsonsAshley MurrayMatthew PassetGabriel PilarMiriam SchifferAnna Selver-KassellChandler Klang SmithPatricia SonntagRhena TantisunthornStacy TorresJohnathan Donald WilberAlexis Wolff http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

As I’ve said before, this is a nice city. However, I am not enjoying MUNI. Part accordion, part bus, part cable car, part marionette, the MUNI takes forever to arrive and makes strange squeaking noises as it makes its slow, poky way through the city. I hate sitting on the little reversible seats while waiting for MUNI. They aren’t really designed to hold a human being’s weight. In fact, they have a tendency of dropping you right down onto the indescribably filthy sidewalk if you aren’t careful. But the worst part of it is the ‘transfers’ they give you once you pay your fare. The transfers are printed on what seems to be one-ply Charmin Ultrasoft Toilet Paper. These transfers start to disintegrate the moment you put them in your hand. Also, they are insanely easy to lose. That’s why you always see all kinds of panicked people on the…

Last year, one of my students turned in an essay that really summed up my feelings about the outdoors. “I think it’s very important that we all take some time out of our busy schedules to commiserate with nature,” he said. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

You shouldn’t hang out in my neighborhood unless you like revisionist hippies who were born long after the Summer of Love (a period of peace and harmony that revolved around the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets and lasted — according to cultural historians — for approximately three and a half seconds.) I don’t understand the embittered people who skulk around the Haight just so they can scrap with helpless hippies. The other day I was hanging around near the organic food store — the same one where I knocked the strawberries into the street — and I saw a small bulldog of a man screaming at a hippie who had asked him for spare change. “I won’t give you a handout,” said the bulldog man. “I’m not the government.” “The government takes money away from me and gives me nothing,” said the hippie. “But I’m not the government so…

A few of you asked me for a more detailed run-down on last week’s Steinbeck Fellows reading at San Jose State University’s MLK Library. Peter Malae read from his novel. Lysley Tenorio read a short story. I read a brief nonfiction piece involving my thirsty trek across an arid region of the southern Sierra Nevada range. It was great to get a good-sized (and enthusiastic) turnout. I was also glad to see so many SJSU students there. In fact, the evening went so well that I hope we can get even more people into the next event. By the way, I’m hoping that we’ll do a reading up in SF soon (I’ll post that as soon as I get the details.) http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

It’s very strange to be named Dan White and live in this particular city. I’m a calm, quiet, law-abiding person — and it feels strange to share a name with such a notorious local person. Imagine how you would feel if your last name happened to be “Manson” and you found yourself moving, for some reason, into the Panamint range. People would talk. Or what if your last name was Ripper and you found yourself living in Whitechapel, England? I’ve already had a couple of mildly awkward interactions because of this. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I think it’s time that people phased out this awful expression. What does it mean, anyhow? http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I love San Francisco. However, I’m noticing a small problem. Skinny, vintage-clothes-wearing, Conor Oberst-worshipping, authentic-dive-bar-seeking hipsters have taken over this city. They are starting to affect my life. For example, I am in serious need of new glasses but I can’t find anything that doesn’t have thick black wire rims to broadcast an ironic-nerdy look. I’m afraid that if I wear such glasses, the irony will be lost on a lot of people. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Thanks to everyone who showed up to the Steinbeck Fellows reading. It was a great time — and the crowd was so much bigger than I expected (standing room only. Cool.) in other news, John Prine played for free at an enormous festival at Golden Gate Park this weekend. I joined a small throng of Prinefreaks who made a single-file line that snaked its slow way to the very front. Prine is one of my heroes; his songs are so precise. (no word or phrase feels out of place to me. He can switch gears from heartbreak to comedy and back again. Sometimes he’ll even figure out ways to combine these things in the same three-minute song.) Prine sounded great to me; he battled throat cancer a couple of years ago, and, if anything, his voice sounded scratchier, deeper, croakier and more distinctive than before. More than this, it was…

Come out and see us read at the MLK Library, fifth floor, at 7 p.m. tonight (Thursday, October 4.) I will be reading a very sad story about cacti (and one cactus in particular) http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default