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We’re excited to announce the launch of “Voices from the Hill” a podcast dedicated to showcasing the incredible talent right here in our literary backyard. As a proud member of this vibrant community, Telegraph Hill Arts & Literature believes our local authors deserve a platform to share not just their published works, but the stories behind them.
If you’re a Bay Area author interested in being on the show, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us at submissions@telhilit.org.
Welcome to Voices From the Hill, celebrating the vibrant literary voices of the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Jennifer Barone, along with Joseph Carboni, owner of Telegraph Hill Books. Each episode, we sit down with a local author to explore their creative process, inspirations, and the unique stories that shape our community.
Jennifer Barone:Today, we're joined by Mark Bittner, a writer whose life has followed anything but a conventional path. You may know him from The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, his best selling memoir that chronicled his unlikely relationship with a flock of wild parrots in San Francisco. But in his new book, Street Song, Mark takes us further back to his days wandering Europe to the streets of San Francisco and deep into the invisible realm of spiritual searching. Part memoir, part meditation, street song is a powerful reflection on freedom, disillusionment, and the invisible forces that shape a life. And today, we get to explore the life behind it.
Jennifer Barone:So let's jump in. Mark Bittner, welcome to Voices on the Hill. It's such a great pleasure to have you here.
Mark Bittner:Thank you for having me.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. So I'd love to kick off our chat about your new book Street Song with a passage that you've chosen to read for us today. And when you read from it, maybe you can also tell us why it holds special meaning for you. Me open this.
Mark Bittner:Okay. I always have a hard time explaining what the book is about. So I'm gonna read from the preface, which gives a good description of what I was trying to do. This is an unusual book. I'm unaware of any other book like it.
Mark Bittner:Whenever someone has asked what it's about, my usual response has been that it's the story of my journey from a comfortable middle class existence in the suburbs to a life of homelessness on the streets of San Francisco. That's true, but not exactly it. The more precise answer is street song is about my experience of a spiritual high tide in the extraordinary but forsaken place it took me to. What do I mean by a spiritual high tide? It's a great energy that rises and falls like a tide, but it isn't material energy.
Mark Bittner:In western philosophical terms, we might call it numinal, meaning that it can't be perceived by the senses. While modern western thought holds generally that we can't know anything about any non physical realm and increasingly dismisses the idea that any such realm even exists, there are eastern schools of thought that maintain can be perceived if we make the right kind of effort. It's from their books, the Asian Wisdom Books, that I first learned of it and through their guidance felt it myself. But it's not something eastern, it's universal. We know of it in the West but not through any philosophical doctrine.
Mark Bittner:It's found more in myth and in the vernaculars, the ups and downs of life for example. Depending on the culture and the system it follows, the energy goes by different names and its workings are described in different ways. The deepest level of the spiritual realm is beyond words and rational thought. Every description is merely an image intended to lead you toward a direct experience of something that can't be described or explained. One Chinese system, Taoism, represents it as the alternation between two complementary spiritual opposites, yin and yang.
Mark Bittner:Mahayana Buddhism describes it as the void, which neither exists nor does not exist and from which everything emerges. In the West, we've usually called it god, a word that has accumulated a great deal of obfuscating baggage. Whatever we call it, Tao, the void, god, the great spirit, it's the vital force in history, in community, in each individual life. We're affected by it whether we perceive it or not. When the tide is low, life seems dark, murky, and confused, often hopeless.
Mark Bittner:When the tide is high, the door to our shared inner being opens. We have access to a brighter, more creative mind and great idealistic movements arise. This differs from western ideas which assume that psychic energy is constant and that change is set in motion by economic, sociological and historical pressures. So what I'm getting around to here is that everybody talks about the sixties and the seventies as the strange time that was caused by whatever drugs, capitalism, technology, the war. But my understanding is that it was a period of a high tide.
Mark Bittner:We haven't seen one since then. They come and go. And that's really what the book describes as my experience of that where everybody suddenly is going, wow, what's going on? Something's going on. And it was extraordinary for the longest time and then it faded away and we're waiting for the next one.
Jennifer Barone:I feel like that concept almost to me feels like concept of critical mass. Like, do you believe, for instance, because you're talking about a lot of spiritual topics in this book that we need to have almost a critical mass of openness to accept or understand or even play with these spiritual concepts?
Mark Bittner:I I think that the the tide itself builds those critical masses. You know, it's like they come and they go and as they come, they get stronger and more compressed.
Jennifer Barone:So you found yourself, I wanna say, swept up in this tide of a critical mass of spiritual maybe movement or awakening. Do you feel like it dissipated at some point?
Mark Bittner:Yeah. Mhmm. I felt it stop. I mean, I it was like when did the sixties end? I I think in the 1974.
Mark Bittner:Mhmm. Because prior to that, I'd been riding each it comes and goes in waves even during its own tides, know. Mhmm. There would be like weeks where nothing is really going on and then suddenly everything's happening. Mhmm.
Mark Bittner:And that was happening generally in the culture. I I kept seeing it even before I became aware of it and but then it receded once in the '74 as I say. I felt it go away and it never came back. Mhmm. And we're waiting for it.
Mark Bittner:I mean, everybody's really frustrated right now because it's a dead time.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm.
Mark Bittner:And it seems like we're powerless to change it.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. Yeah. We have other types of movements like technological movements Yeah. Or these kinds of things. I feel like this latest technological movement almost seems like a connection to conscious awareness and but now we have this like digital AI awareness that's happening.
Mark Bittner:Yeah. I don't think that technology will ever actually be conscious. They keep saying these machines are gonna be as smart as human beings but they don't have free will, they don't have free will, they don't love. You know, It's really just it's sort of like logic. It's reason but it's not there's something beyond logic and reason.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. And
Mark Bittner:that's what human beings have, you know. And it's not it's from the void as the Buddhists would call it.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm.
Mark Bittner:It's the eye of God, whatever you wanna call it, it's that.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. So this book is deeply personal on top of you just mentioning these spiritual concepts. Feel like this book feels, you know, deeply personal about your life and you told me that it took you how long to write this book?
Mark Bittner:It took me eighteen years to write.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. What was the inspiration that made you want to get into this subject, this time period in your life?
Mark Bittner:Henry Miller. Oh. Well, there I read Tropic of Cancer. I decide I I used to wanna be a writer. I wanted to be a novelist and then I just thought the idea of writing fiction, I just, I didn't care for it anymore.
Mark Bittner:And then when I read Tropic of Cancer, oh, you can write creatively, but about your real life. And there's a little section, a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson at the front of the book Mhmm. Where he predicts that the novel would gradually be replaced by people writing the truth about their lives. Mhmm. And I was really impressed with that idea.
Mark Bittner:And I kept it in the back of my mind for the longest time. And it was like, if I'm ever going to write a book, that's the kind of book I'd wanna write. But I hadn't lived anything. Eventually, I had an unusual enough existence. The Parrot book came first because it's more easy to put something like that out there and it did well.
Mark Bittner:So I'm hoping that that makes it easier for me to get this book out but it's been hard.
Jennifer Barone:Do you think even if a person writes fiction, let's say, or another form that they're still kind of writing about themselves in a way?
Mark Bittner:Oh, sure. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Even when they write but when they write memoirs, often they're writing fiction because you'll have these long, long conversations that they couldn't possibly remember.
Jennifer Barone:Was there like something about the story of wild parrots that maybe you pulled into this book, like an aspect of that time period that maybe you didn't get a chance to tell?
Mark Bittner:Well, I always looked at the parrots as part of that whole thing. I mean, it was an extension. My question has always been what is consciousness? What is the mind? And I fell in love with the parrots and I was just feeding them and interacting with them and having fun but I eventually had to start wondering about what I was seeing, know.
Mark Bittner:They're smart and how smart are they? What does that mean? You know, they have personalities. What does that mean? And it became philosophical if you wanna call it that.
Mark Bittner:It became spiritual. I mean, one day I was looking at them and I talk about this in the Parrot book and I was remembering something I'd read by Suzuki Roshi, the Zen master here in San Francisco and I never really understood his book but looking at the parrot's eyes, I suddenly understood what he was talking about and I started reading that book again and it was just like everything was very clear.
Jennifer Barone:Is this Zen Mind Beginner's Mind?
Mark Bittner:Yeah. Zen Mind Beginner's Mind.
Jennifer Barone:Such a beautiful book. Yeah. There's one part of that book actually that sticks out the most for me and he says about a bluebird and he's Yeah. Do you remember that
Mark Bittner:part of the book?
Jennifer Barone:Something to the effect
Mark Bittner:In your mind.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. Something to the effect that Yeah. If you kind of just let go and you can become the blue bird itself. Yeah. If you
Mark Bittner:He'll stop annoying you then.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah, exactly.
Mark Bittner:Was it a scrub jay or a blue bird?
Jennifer Barone:Could have been a blue bird.
Mark Bittner:I know. I remember.
Jennifer Barone:Or a Steller's Day maybe.
Mark Bittner:Yeah. It's probably a Stellar's Day.
Jennifer Barone:Right? They're really loud.
Mark Bittner:Yeah. Yeah.
Jennifer Barone:Well, I mean, this concept in this new book, Street Song, I feel like you are attempting to bring in your direct experience of these philosophical concepts. Did you always have this kind of awareness in your life, you know, going back to the earliest memories that you're working with in street song or were these influences from some of the books that you were reading?
Mark Bittner:It's it's a combination of things. When I was a little boy, I mean, I was raised in a non religious household, but I had quest questions about existence all the time, you know. And I was reading books that addressed my issues but it was really just the direction my life took. I mean, I wanted to be a musician for a while when that was a big deal and but I never really felt like one. Wanted to be a writer because I figured that's they were the ones who knew.
Mark Bittner:I wanted to know. One day I was walking down the street where I grew up. It was a just a big suburban area and I just felt the hollowness of it and it made me wanna cry. And I didn't know anybody else who felt the same way that this existence is lifeless. I mean, what's the use of living if you're not gonna have a life?
Mark Bittner:So from that moment on, I just decided that I was gonna figure out what this was all about. And I just still don't haven't figured it out, but I keep working toward it.
Jennifer Barone:You mentioned to me when we were in conversation that at one point, because you were living on the street, that you were in Caddell Alley.
Mark Bittner:Yeah.
Jennifer Barone:That was right behind this
Mark Bittner:Caddell Alley.
Jennifer Barone:Caddell Alley. Yeah. Which is right behind this bookstore.
Mark Bittner:Yeah.
Jennifer Barone:Which is pretty wild to me. Yeah. How does it feel to be doing a podcast about a book?
Mark Bittner:It's ironic.
Jennifer Barone:And around the corner from the alley.
Mark Bittner:That's ironic. I mean that this intersection right out the window, that was my living room. I was there all the time, that fire hydrant over there, I used to sit on it and talk to passersby. I was homeless on the street for I mean, the real period of abject homelessness was about four or five months. But then I started meeting people and every now and then I'd have a place to crash.
Mark Bittner:But I had been walking around the neighborhood and it was exhausting just trying to stay alive and stay clean and I used to walk up to the top of the hill to sleep in the bushes but it just got tiring. So one day I swallowed my pride and said, alright, I'm gonna sleep in this alley. I I didn't wanna be seen, you know, like it was my middle class upbringing. I didn't wanna be seen sleeping on the street but it was just too exhausting to go up that hill every day so I started sleeping in the alley.
Jennifer Barone:Was this a conscious choice to be living in this way?
Mark Bittner:Sort of and sort of not. I had developed this theory when I wanted to be an artist, a writer or a musician or whatever. I thought I discovered this secret consciousness that you you had a hard experience on the street and that awoken you awakened you to reality. And I thought that all these artists I admired had had that experience. It turns out that they were just channeling what's called the homeless wanderer in some religions or it's an old tradition where you just abandon everything Mhmm.
Mark Bittner:And you rely on fate to take care of you. And that's what I ended up doing but I didn't do it like as a deliberate choice. I just kept getting closer and closer to it and I wasn't able to maintain the, you know, ability to exist within the society. Eventually, just fell out. I got kicked out of the place that I was living.
Mark Bittner:That story I think is in the parrot book as I recall. Mhmm. And I was on the street. I was actually on the street and I was scared. I was terrified.
Mark Bittner:And but eventually I just found my way.
Jennifer Barone:There's stories obviously during well, not exactly that period but Jack Kerouac on the road and the beat poets, were they an influence for you? And they were also really into the eastern religion.
Mark Bittner:Yeah. They weren't a huge influence on me but they were influenced. I came here to North Beach because of its reputation as a writer's community.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. Did you see Cat City Lights when you first
Mark Bittner:came Of
Jennifer Barone:course. Was the first place I went.
Mark Bittner:Yeah. It sort of like a little temple to Yes. Me, you It is. And you'd see Ferland Getty and you'd go, oh, there he is. You know, and I'd see Allen Ginsberg.
Mark Bittner:I saw Bob Kaufman that was who I was a big fan of before I came down here. Had a conversation with him even, you know, shortly after I arrived and that was really thrilling to me.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. I do believe also there's some travels in Europe that take place in this book. How did you get there?
Mark Bittner:When I was in my junior year in high school, I read an article in Life magazine about these hippies that were living in a cave in Crete.
Jennifer Barone:Oh, wow.
Mark Bittner:And that just I love desert island stories and I really wanted to go there and I just decided I'm gonna do this. And as soon as I graduated from high school, I went over to Europe and I was hitchhiking around taking trains too. But I went to the caves in Modelo and I stayed there for about a week.
Jennifer Barone:Anywhere else did you went?
Mark Bittner:Anywhere else did you go on? I went all over but actually I confined myself more or less to England, Germany, and Greece.
Jennifer Barone:England, Germany and Greece. I mean, Greece, ancient Greece. Yeah. The history Yeah. There is incredible.
Jennifer Barone:How did how did you pull some of those memories through this book?
Mark Bittner:Well, I happen to have a good memory it turns out. I mean, I was in love with a German girl during that trip. I fell in love with this German girl and I knew her for about a week and then I had to come home and we stayed in contact for a week or two and then, you know, it just fell off, dropped off to nothing. And I hadn't had any communication with her in like in forty years or more. So but I went looking for her online and I searched and I searched and I searched until finally I found her and she remembered everything and she confirmed my memories.
Mark Bittner:So little details, she remembered them too. Wow. So I've had that happen often where I would verify with somebody else who was part of the environment at the time something happened. Know, is this what happened? And they go, yeah.
Mark Bittner:Yeah. That's exactly what happened.
Jennifer Barone:Was this all in your mind, in your memory like held or did you keep journals?
Mark Bittner:I occasionally would keep journals but not systematically. Every now and then I'd write stuff down. Mhmm.
Jennifer Barone:I was also thinking that the way that you were living might be difficult let's say to carry a lot
Mark Bittner:of trifolds Yeah, or no. I would just have these little notebooks sometimes. Like one time, everything came crashing down on me. This was before I was on the street. I just couldn't continue doing what I was doing anymore.
Mark Bittner:So I thought the time honored thing to do was to just take off down the road without any money and actually I took off with $20 but I felt ashamed of it and just survived by your wits and I did that for several months and I kept the journal during all of that.
Jennifer Barone:There you talk a little bit about the this relationship or direct relationship with the invisible realm and almost giving yourself, I want to say like surrendering yourself to this energy of
Mark Bittner:Which is taking really care hard to do.
Jennifer Barone:Very, very hard
Mark Bittner:to do. Scary.
Jennifer Barone:Very scary. But there's also a layer of almost magical realm that you're dealing with where from moment to moment you're almost receiving maybe a blessing, receiving guidance, receiving direction. It's like having a conscious relationship with another realm of when you release yourself from that. Can you describe what does it feel like or an example, maybe even from your book, of this interaction with being taken care of by the divine?
Mark Bittner:Well, it happens. That's all I really know. I don't know how to describe it. Sometimes it's intuitive. Sometimes it's like there's this big flag waving in front of you, go this way.
Mark Bittner:And sometimes it's just blindly following your instinct. Know, like like if I tried to do something that wasn't right, I'd feel it. I'd feel a big resistance within me but I wouldn't know why. You know? No.
Mark Bittner:Don't don't accept that offer or whatever. Know? There's a there are whole levels that we're just not aware of and you can't really know about them consciously. You can experience them. You can get a sense of what's going on, I think, at that level, but you can't know it.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. You mentioned like the fool archetype a little bit in your preface.
Mark Bittner:Yeah. I was a big fool. I still am but I mean Yeah. It's like you learn hopefully. You know?
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. There's there's something about the fool archetype that I resonate with. It's like that tarot like from the image of the tarot. It's like a person with a
Mark Bittner:with a little head and
Jennifer Barone:a shoulder kind of joyously
Mark Bittner:jumping Yeah. Off the that's how I was when I took off down the road. It was like, oh, I'm on this great adventure. It turned out to be really hard and really difficult but there were beautiful moments but
Jennifer Barone:Yeah, can you give us a beautiful moment?
Mark Bittner:One time I was like I was just surviving on a homes but I would never ask for anything but people were giving me money or whatever I needed. It was very strange and I was in Yosemite and I decided it was time to leave but I was broke and I didn't wanna take off down the road without any money or food. I think I was actually looking for food but I was sitting down in front of the Curry Camp store and just trying to figure out what to do. I kept I was watching the crowd as they walked by me and I'm trying to figure out where is this money that I need or food, where is it gonna come from? And at some point, this old man asked if he could sit down next to me and I was sort of like feeling like, yeah.
Mark Bittner:Well, it's not my table. Sure. Go ahead. Sit down. I did I didn't I was focused on survival.
Mark Bittner:And he kept trying to strike up a conversation with me and I was just sort of like giving him, you know, single syllable answers and but he was persistent, you know. He you know, what are you doing? What do you do? What's your job or something like that and I'm going, well, finally, he had me cornered and I either had to lie to him or tell him the truth and I said, look, I I don't have a job, I don't have a home right now, I'm just traveling around trying to figure out what to do and he just he smiled and he just oh. He had done the same thing when he was young, it was during the depression and he'd taken off on the trains, the rails.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. And
Mark Bittner:he just he said it was the most fabulous part of his life, this old man and he was just going on and on about it and suddenly he stopped and he looked at me and he said, I'll bet I know what you could use. I bet you could use some money. And I'd been, you know, trying to get rid of it and but he knew exactly what I was into and I assumed he would have no idea. He was just a square old man. And he handed to me under the table because his wife was coming toward us and he didn't want her to see what he was doing.
Mark Bittner:Then he disappeared into the sunlight. I mean, he actually walked out into the parking lot and there was all this sun shining down and I lost sight of him. And it was so magical. Was just dumbfounded, I was.
Jennifer Barone:Sort of like an angel.
Mark Bittner:Yeah. Very much like that. I can still see you.
Jennifer Barone:I was gonna say that even in your description of that right now, like how vivid of an image Yeah. It can be held in your mind that one moment, like that brief moment.
Mark Bittner:Tell me, let's go back to the woman in
Jennifer Barone:Germany. Sure. You had this vivid memory from how long of the time period was you returned to each other?
Mark Bittner:Forty years. Forty years is a long time to We're still in contact now. I mean, it's nice. That's incredible. She's a grandmother and she was just a few weeks younger than me at the time.
Mark Bittner:I was 18, she was 18. Mhmm. I spent Christmas at her family's house and that was a big deal because Germans are very exclusive during Christmas. It's family only. Mhmm.
Mark Bittner:But I had nowhere to go and I was crying, though. Was terrible. I had just kept crying and crying because I was leaving and I didn't want to.
Jennifer Barone:How did you wind up finding her again?
Mark Bittner:Well, I had gone back to the she lived in this small town, Ketvig. That's where I met her. And I had gone back there to do research. I wanted to see the town, take descriptions and all of that. And I was staying in this little hotel that was being that was owned and operated by an American woman.
Mark Bittner:And one day when I was doing research, she had an unusual last name, Von Horn, which is really Dutch and I found a woman with that same last name in that same town and the address put her right across the street from the hotel I'd been staying in. So I wrote the American woman at her hotel and I said, there's a woman across the street who I think is the sister or something of the woman that I've been looking for and was in love with and could you ask her if she knows Ursula? And she said, she's a horrible witch but okay, I'll do it for you. And she went and asked her and she said, yes, Ursula is her sister and she'll she gave her my contact information. And it was just this tenuous little thing.
Jennifer Barone:That's incredible. Yeah. Well, it's incredible like to hold somebody in your conscious heart and mind and awareness for so many years.
Mark Bittner:Well, was a really beautiful experience. It was very memorable because it was Christmas and German Christmases are very Christmassy and we're walking around the town in the dead of winter, there's snow on the ground arm in arm and it was like the kind of experience you wanna have and you just think they're a dream. Mhmm. So how long did you spend there before you came back to The States? About a week.
Jennifer Barone:About a week?
Mark Bittner:Yeah. Well, I had been in the town and I hadn't met her. It was during my last week there that we met. Mhmm. And you know, it was one of those things that made the trip feel like it was further because I'd had all kinds of problems too.
Jennifer Barone:For sure. Yeah. Always traveling. There's always ups and downs. But then there's those high moments.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. Well, your book is called Street Song and it and you shared with me some music that you wrote. You said at first that you gave up music at one point, but I feel like music is a really big part of this book. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship to that?
Mark Bittner:Sure. When I was 12, I guess, the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan and it just knocked me out. I was like a lot of people that changed everything overnight. I had never thought of myself as a musician and even after seeing them, didn't think of myself as one but I just loved the music. I just loved it.
Mark Bittner:All those music that came out at that time and then when I came across Dylan, it was like, okay, you can write words and you can do the music too. Wow. Yes. That's for me. But I essentially was not a musician.
Mark Bittner:I could I've always I always was fighting with that, you know, and I was a writer and and I'm not even really a writer. I'm more a seeker. But I can write and I know good writing when I see it. You know, like with music, I'm always sort of unsure of what I'm doing. With writing, I don't take advice from other people because I know what I'm trying to do.
Mark Bittner:I just don't need the advice generally as far as I'm concerned.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. Are you looking for that authentic voice?
Mark Bittner:Yes. I was just trying to tell the story what actually happened in in words that that are elegant but not I don't try. Mean, when I was writing songs, I would get flowery and I would really try to goose a line. But when I'm writing prose, I just try to tell it straight but make it true, make it authentic.
Jennifer Barone:Well, is there an aspect of poetry? Because when I when you mentioned Dylan, for instance, I think about, like, his connection to poets as well. Like, he was taking poets on the road with him in his music. But how does poetry, and you mentioned Ferlinghetti too, play a part in your writing but also maybe in what inspires you in your life?
Mark Bittner:Yeah. Well, I want that dimension in there. But you can't write a whole like this is a 400 page book at least and you can't have 400 pages of dense poetry. I wouldn't try to. But that element of vision and understanding and some elegance in the language has to be there or it's boring to me.
Mark Bittner:It's just journalism.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. Yeah. There's there's something to poetry I feel like that it that pulls you into an abstract realm as well. Yeah. And that pulling is kind of in line with maybe some of the spiritual concepts for me when I think about the the practice of writing Yeah.
Jennifer Barone:And writing poetry. But also what you were mentioning earlier about wanting to have like a pure voice Yeah. In what you're doing.
Mark Bittner:I've never really written much poetry. I've written some, but song is a good equivalent. And my songwriting was extremely compressed, too compressed to be good song because songs have to be a little bit verbal, a little bit casual.
Jennifer Barone:Were you playing music on the street
Mark Bittner:when you were living on the street? Yes, actually. Thank you. I was a street singer and it was part of this vision I had of going down to the street and saying the truth. You'd get so far down that you would have this hard experience of reality and then you'd see what was real and I wasn't very good with groups and so, know, solo singer, singing on the street.
Mark Bittner:I actually, I remember reading once about Edith Piaf that she started her rise to the top from from the streets. I said, that sounds like a good myth to have. I'd like to have that too. And so I became a street singer over in Berkeley. I did it in Seattle too but most of my street singing was done in Berkeley and, you know, it was a matter of just standing in one place and delivering.
Mark Bittner:Mhmm. I mean, you have to deliver a song and you have to be really energetic because nobody will listen to you if you're just sort of being quiet singing pokey songs. I was singing high energy, loud songs, fully engaged, that kind of thing. Mhmm. Could only sing for about a half an hour or thirty, forty minutes until I'd lose my voice.
Mark Bittner:But I wasn't screaming, I was singing. I was just singing real hard. So street song, it's it's threefold, I think. It's like it's what I was doing. I was a street singer.
Mark Bittner:Street song is also like it's the Whitman esque idea of the pay on to the streets because that's where, you know, I lived along the streets in three different towns and I don't remember what the third is but I mentioned it in the preface somewhere.
Jennifer Barone:Is there something that music brings to your life that's different than let's say writing?
Mark Bittner:Oh yeah. I like the soul man aspect. Not in the sense of like the guy dancing across the stage but the person standing and singing his truth. I love that. I've seen it happen live a few times and it just knocks me out.
Mark Bittner:I saw Van Morrison do it once. In fact, when I read here in this store last year or wherever it was, I read that section in the book. It was just like I was transfixed because he just delivered and I wanna do that. You know?
Jennifer Barone:I was here for your presentation of that and I remember that. I always wanted to see Van Morrison because he has such an incredible Yeah. Voice. But also his his songs just have this poet poetic sensibility.
Mark Bittner:But he looks like a Reno Street thug.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. That's true.
Mark Bittner:He doesn't look like a poet at all. That's true.
Jennifer Barone:Well, you know, poetry, I feel like everybody's life can have poetry. Yeah. Know? I feel like, you know, it's poetry is found in the everyday.
Mark Bittner:Well, it's naturally there. It's built into our existence but we don't always see it. That's all. Every now and then, like, well, a really weird coincidence but that's not when we say that, we mean it's like it's an accident but it's not an accident.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. Exactly. Yeah. So, music is a really big part of this book and you shared with me like some beautiful songs that you Some of them were were covers but some are original songs. How many songs have you written?
Mark Bittner:Not very many, probably around 30.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. And then you have some beautiful duets with quite a few different women musicians as well as you're playing with other musicians who are bringing other instrumentation.
Mark Bittner:Can you talk a little bit about that process? Well, I was gonna do this. I just thought some since I was writing about my voice and singing, would do a recording of me singing and playing guitar like I did on the street. But when I got into the studio, I couldn't do what I used to do anymore because it required a certain kind of focus and energy toward the music that I didn't have any longer. Plus I'd never been in a studio before and it was like a big toy.
Mark Bittner:So I went toward the approach of layering instruments on top of one another and it I just got into it. I loved doing it and I don't know why but I never there aren't any other male voices on the album except for mine but I like singing with women. Yeah. So I have like three or four different one of them is my sister but women singers singing with me.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. Well, I wanna wrap up our conversation on this question maybe. I feel like your book is attempting to go back in time. It's very personal about this experience. But in one way, I feel like you're attempting to describe what's almost indescribable.
Jennifer Barone:Can you talk a little bit about, like, what do you feel through the experiences of this book, through the writing of this book, and then the sharing? What is it that you're looking to leave people with? Is it with more questions than answers maybe about life or what what do you what is your wisdom that you'd like to impart?
Mark Bittner:When I read a book, I want it to change my life. I want it to present something to me that I can recognize as being true and that will motivate me to work in a particular direction. I mean, that's the kind of book I'd wanna write. And I had this very unusual experience on the street and the path that took me there. The one of the things that I do in the book is show the steps along the way because it can sound really flaky.
Mark Bittner:Oh, he was living in the suburbs and then he went to the street. Oh, well why did he do that? Know? I think when you see a homeless person, you look at them and you go, I do. It's like, well how did he get there?
Mark Bittner:What were the I mean was did he take too many drugs or what? I just wanted to show the steps. They were not I didn't have drug problems. I didn't have mental health issues. I had a real strong desire to live a real life and I didn't know how you do that.
Mark Bittner:But I thought I'd grown up in a cushy suburban existence. I want I need a hard experience just to be a man, you know.
Jennifer Barone:Do you feel like that we need to have a hard experience in order to have an awakening of reality?
Mark Bittner:Yeah. Well, it's inevitable. It's really I don't think we need it so much as it's just gonna happen because I, you know, like I was imagining imagining as I wrote out a lot of this stuff like they're gonna think that I'm a fool but of course, I mean, whoever has walked down this path didn't start out as a fool. Mhmm. You have to.
Mark Bittner:That's what you are when you begin. But you have this glorious like like the tarot card. You you're this mighty adventure into the into the future.
Jennifer Barone:It's my favorite archetype.
Mark Bittner:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jennifer Barone:I feel like anytime you're striking out, you need to be the fool.
Mark Bittner:It could be at the cover of this book.
Jennifer Barone:I'll be a fool for love. I'll just admit that. Mark Fittner, it's been, like, such a pleasure to get to know you and to get to know your work and to have you here on this podcast. Thank you so much.
Mark Bittner:Thank you for having me.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. Thank you for sharing your journey. Thank you for sharing your work with us. And for listeners who would love to learn more about Mark Bittner and his work and his forthcoming book, Street Song, you can visit markbittner.net and also find him on Facebook. And find Mark's books at your local independent bookstores including Telegraph Hill Books.
Jennifer Barone:Anything else you'd like to add, Mark? No. Thank you so much.
Mark Bittner:Alright. Thank you.
Jennifer Barone:This podcast is brought to you by Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature. If you enjoyed today's episode, please follow, subscribe, and leave us a review. Visit TelHiLit.org to find out about our local events such as author talks, writing workshops, and more. Consider making a donation to support our public programs. If you are a Bay Area author interested in being on the show, we'd love to hear from you.
Jennifer Barone:Reach out to us at submissions@ TelHiLit.org. Thanks again for tuning in. I'm Jennifer Barone along with Joseph Carboni at Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature. And this has been Voices from the Hill. Until next time, keep reading, keep writing, stay inspired, and come visit us at Telegraph Hill Books in North Beach, San Francisco.