always wanted from literature observation so exact it is into speculation that with richard ford or updike. one of the rabbit books ravages on a plane and is conscious of the cold outside and you can scarcely believe is there the sometimes feel it packed in the astute -- sickly -- suitcases and feeling unpack your clothes with the dirty and a rare and beach towels with the chill of death from outer space still in them. >> continuing with the st. down the line fiction writers, notice the great attraction when the protagonist with us early underrated novel on the neighborhood of hammersmith to describe it just as a block or two the place with the oblivious city where his life slowed and recovered. it seems to me in any form or john know we are all the time getting fees in perceptible trips from prescription to reflection to the essayistic crossing back and forth all the time between what is called the metaphysical streets of the physical time. thank you. now you can have some lunch. [applause] >> good morning or afternoon. everything that geoff dyer said is true but you may not go to lunch.

there is a fantastic prose by john updike that says reading is the encounter of the mind. that is really important. the publishing industry is important in facilitating that but there is an enormous difference there and i think it's important to highlight. the second new reaction that people have is essentially commiserating. they look at me and they say oh yeah, it must be tough out there in publishing. every time i pick up "the new york times" and read david carr's column, the phrase the crumbling publishing industry comes up. i think it's worth pointing out relative to the point about the publishing person of the year that last night as i was sitting in my office trying to finish up, was writing a letter to our staff informing them that as one of the gifts we are providing to our staff over the holidays, we are giving everybody a free copy of a short introduction to american history by the paul buyer who was a documenter's who wrote a marvelous book about american history. just as i was putting the finishing touches on the memos somebody sent me an e-mail which was an a

john updike, director of real estate. i believe -- no, okay. i'll take it from here, thank you, kate howard. so, thanks for the opportunity to give go over our real estate portfolio, give you some background. as the chair mentioned, this is really a lot of facts and figures to get you well grounded in the real estate portfolio and probably will lead to a series of discussions on other real estate-related matters. so, the city of san francisco real hayes one of the largest and most diverse land holdings within the city. to give you that context, there are a little over 200,000 parcels, making up 31,000 acres of land in the city, that's excluding the streets which of course the city also controls. so, of those parcels, 2000 of them are in ownership by the city of san francisco. that's almost 6,000 acres, actually it's a little more than 6,000 acres. that means we have ownership of 20% of the acreage within the city and county of san francisco. we also own land far beyond the city. i'll get into that in a bit. but 92,000 acres of land is owned out