Ambrose Bierce:
"Admiration: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves."
Having spent the last few weeks with my nose deep in Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, and not really understanding what I was supposed to glean from it, I started reading the criticism. I'll spare you all I learned about that book and his intention, as it's not relevant here, but what is is the emphasis on how the Eurocentric world cannot grasp the political gravitas that is given to Latin American poetry and its poets. For us, as things have changed over time, the role of the poet has evolved from bard and historian to someone able to explain or describe the unexplainable. Language has changed, our roles with the world have changed, and yet, I still hold firm to the belief that we are each effected by our local surroundings.
What does any of this have to do with San Francisco?
Nancy C. Peters wrote, "San Francisco has always been a breeding ground for bohemian countercultures; its cosmopolitan population, its tolerance of eccentricity, its provincialism and distance from the centers of national culture and political power have long made it an ideal place for nonconformist writers, artists, and utopian dreamers."
I started researching the massive literary history here and some of the individual authors who have called SF home.
In 1844, Henri Murger wrote Scenes de la Vie Boheme, which "depicted life in the Latin Quarter in Paris, where artists had been renouncing their bourgeois origins since the Revolution of 1830 for love and a more egalitarian society." By 1860, the book had reached San Francisco, inspiring a whole group of creatives.
According to the OldSF website, "In those days San Francisco was a rapacious society that offered boundless opportunities for the savage exploitation of man and nature."
San Francisco's earliest literary scene was both democratic and anarchic, "... so that a vaguely Apollonian standard of order and proportion co-existed anachronistically with violent and macabre stories and homespun accounts of daily life."
During the 1880s and 1890s, the artistic hub of the city was Pacific, Washington, Jackson and Montgomery Streets. Until 1959, when the financial sector pushed them out, this was home to many artists and writers, including Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, George Sterling, Jack London, Sadakichi Hartman, Frank Norris, Yone Noguchi, Margaret Anderson, Kenneth Roxworth, and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, temporarily.
In 1870, a group of men began spending Sundays together in the living room of James Bowman in Russian Hill. They would spend all day drinking and ranting. "...the tablecloth becoming covered with the inspired doodlings of its guests. According to popular account, the hostess frequently refused to wash the table linens, preserving them as a kind of impromptu guest-book of her Salon."
By 1872, the club had become so popular that they moved locations and started charging fees for the exclusive membership.
Rudyard Kipling, during a visit, described the scene, "... in this club were no amateurs spoiling canvas because they fancied they could handle oils without knowledge of shadows or anatomy... no gentlemen of leisure ruining the temper of publications or an already ruined market with attempts to write... My hosts were working, or had worked, for their daily bread with pen and paint."
These men started staging "Jinks", events based on the Scottish drinking game of wits. These events were little, one-time theatrics, which gave Kipling "a wicked desire to hide my face in a napkin and grin."
In 1878, the club had gained such popularity, that they decided to start a retreat in Russian River (the first Burning Man?). Intended to level the economic playing field of the Haves and Have Nots, the exact opposite occurred. The place had extensive No Trespassing signs everywhere, it's own railroad extension, and by 1890, had attracted so many wealthy businessmen and politicians, as to include William Randolph Hearst, Herbert Hoover, Ernest Lawrence and later Richard Nixon.
According to Jim Fisher, author of "Bohemian Club", "...it was this co-opting of San Francisco's creative energies that perpetuated the Bohemian club's reputation for culture... The Bohemian jinks represent an endorsement of the properties man's deep convictions about the arts: we could do it, if we wanted to."
Clearly, San Francisco has a love for it's history and its contributors, a fact reiterated by the renaming of streets to commemorate them. We have Bob Kaufman Alley, Daniel Burnham Court, Dashiell Hammet Street, Isadora Duncan Lane, and William Saroyan Place just to name a few. We cannot forget the Beat Movement or the Summer of Love (as much as we'd like), but are we as familiar with the the huge impact the 1970s had on our literature?
"In San Francisco, propelled by the promotional and organzing energies of Roberto Vargas, there began a whole series of readings by Third world writers of Latin, Asian and black origins."
By now, Bolinas, Berkeley and Santa Cruz had become havens for these writers, and readings in the city were so popular, that you could attend three in a night.
One reading, a benefit for the United Farm Workers, held at the Longshoreman Hall and sponsored by City Lights, included Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, Whalen, Ferlinghetti, Thulani Davis, Jessica Hagedorn, Janice Mikihatini, Serafin Syquia, and Roberto Vargas. They had 2000 in attendance.
What was being drawn to attention with the inclusion of the "Third World voice" was the Takers and the Takees, something they felt was prevalent in the Beat literature.
Are we sensing the age-old theme of our fair city?
Yesterday, on an adventure through North Beach and Russian Hill with Miss Isabelle, we learned something shocking.
At Grace Cathedral (I don't know why I always manage to wind up there or reference that place - I really am not obsessed with it, I swear), we were looking at the gold doors. I was pointing our my favorite part of the sculptures, this one dude's bald head, when the custodian came over, offering to explain the biblical stories. I told him we weren't interested in that, but asked about the little head.
Turns out that was a self-portrait of the artist Ghiberti.
I had remembered that these doors were connected to the famous ones in Florence, but the real connection left me mind-blown.
In case you don't know, here's a brief lesson in art history:
In 1401, there was an art competition to determine who was going to craft the doors, and a 23 year old Lorenzo Ghiberti won, marking the beginning of the Early Renaissance. Obviously, when in Florence, I made a bee-line for them for, as we Americans are sad to experience, seldom do we get to marvel at the first of an era, see the direct line, know from history that this is what started the next several hundred years worth of excessive and exceptional art making.
The doors have stood proudly since, well, that is until Hitler, at the tail end of WWII demanded the doors for himself. Before the Florentines shipped them north, they had molds made. How they ended up in San Francisco, our custodian did not know. Obviously, the war ended and the doors were returned, only to be threatened again in their massive flood of 1966, in which they were washed into the Arno.
Thankfully, the city was able to recover the pieces, but decided it was time to put them behind safe doors. Having heard that San Francisco had made their own copy of it (which is what stands in front of Grace Cathedral), the Florentines asked them if they could have it. "Oh hell no," is what I imagine the priest saying, but what he did do was to lend them the molds back.
What people from around the world flock to see is a replica of a replica, made from San Francisco molds.
As we wandered, I noticed that some of my favorite old antique stores had closed, being replaced by shitty stores that sell flavored popcorn. That the cute restaurant on the corner, that looks out over Washington Square is demolished. I still find myself holding my breathe, waiting for the last shoe to drop.
In this amazing article, which I'll talk more about later, called "A History of San Francisco in 26 stories" on the PacBell building at 140 New Montgomery (in the area of the old Bohemian scene), the author was citing Tim O'Reilly and his book on Frank Herbert (author of "Dune" and former SF resident).
"It is a general principle of ecology than an ecosystem is stable not because it is secure and protected, but because it contains such diversity that some of its many types of organisms are bound to survive despite drastic changes in the environment or other adverse conditions. Herbert adds, however, that the effort of civilization to create and maintain security for its individual members 'necessarily creates the condition of crisis because it fails to deal with change.'"
I'll end on a comedic note.
True to San Francisco's character, new blood makes us nervous.
In 1882, Oscar Wilde came for a visit. His arch nemesis, Ambrose Bierce, wrote a scathing commentary.
"There was never an imposter so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft. Therefore is the she-fool enamored of the feel of his tongue in her ear to tickle her understanding."
As long as people are going to create, there is going to be in-house tension. As long as those creatives are producing mind-blowing things, there will be others ready to take it away. But as long as we maintain our history, none of this will ever be forgotten.
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