I took a picture of this wall on Valencia in the Mission. I was walking in the San Francisco afternoon fog on my way to the dentist, where I thought there might be a problem, but where everything turned out to be fine.
In the morning over coffee, and at lunchtime, and in the waiting room at the dentist's office on Mission Street I was reading my way into Rachel Cusk's new novel, The Bradshaw Variations. In my opinion, Rachel Cusk is the best young novelist on the planet.
The following chunks of text (jackhammered out of the novel's smooth pavement) are from chapter VIII:
What is art?
It is the opposite of waste, of redundancy. Thomas goes through his cupboards and finds box after box of obsolete junk. Cables, computer parts, a whole case of grey plastic cartridges still sealed in their airtight transparent wrappers. The printer they were designed to fit no longer exists, and there is no other printer compatible with them. Yet they will last forever.
He finds three tiny pairs of headsets, unopened, coiled in their little plastic sacks like embryos. They came with a mobile phone that has since been upgraded. The headsets don't fit the new phone. Yet they will last forever.
He finds a whole file full of instruction manuals for things that are broken or that he no longer owns. It is called progress, the replacing of one thing by another, the making of one thing meaningless by another. The meaningless things do not live, and nor do they die. Most of the people he knows think that progress is good.
Art, he thinks, is not progress.