LECTURE NOTES 2

SFLecturesRobWilsonF2011Part2

Notes towards defining the “contado” of San Francisco historically, and environmentally, as a global-local ecological/ ecopoetic space:


Rob Wilson
“Worlding San Francisco: Refigurations of Watersheds, Oceans, and Urban Space in the Literature and Cultural Studies of San Francisco”

I) Starting from Santa Cruz

This talk (in Taiwan) grows out of a large undergraduate Literature course on the geo-material formation and literary-poetic heritages of San Francisco that I have taught since 2003 at the University of Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz, situated on the coast 75 miles south from what John Steinbeck called “The City” to which all California literary roads would lead, has long been a part of San Francisco’s greater Bay Area “contado.”

“Contado” is a term I shall go on to define (via UC Berkeley urban geographers, Grey Brechin and Richard Walker) in environmental and critical ways I hope you will find useful in thinking about cities like Taipei or Kaohsiung as complex spatial formations connected to issues of watersheds, oceans, place, and social justice that cut across the more usual “urban-wilderness” or “country-city” divides.

During the Gold Rush days of 1849, Santa Cruz provided abundant supplies of timber and limestone to help build up what Brechin calls the financial wealth and architectural grandeur of “imperial San Francisco,” it later served as a summer beach resort and surf-culture Boardwalk from the 1880s to the present, and nowadays (ironically speaking) it provides critical theory and cultural studies of “left-green” affiliation in works like my own co-edited The Worlding Project (published by New Pacific Press there), as well as more techno-cultural and micro-electronic contributions to the wealth and grandeur of Silicon Valley.

The left-leaning undergraduates in the Humanities at UCSC for the most part feel vitally part of San Francisco and its “beat” subterranean traditions, and are more than glad to be able to go up there on weekends to do site-specific research into this Pacific Rim city and its cosmopolitan influx and borderlands outreach. (An essay of mine in the recent “urban imaginaries” special issue of IACS is on “Spectral San Francisco” contains further background for this talk.)


II) Far-Out San Francisco on the Left-Side of the World:

I would like to invoke a few quotations to give you a feel for the build-up of San Francisco as place of creative-destructive dynamics and what Alfred Hitchcock (as well as poet George Oppen) portrayed as its “vertigo” effect:

"Now scarce a day passed [in the autumn of 1849] but some cluster of sails, bound outward through the Golden Gate, took their way to all the corners of the Pacific. Like the magic seed of the Indian juggler, which grew, blossomed, and bore fruit before the eyes of the spectators, San Francisco seemed to have accomplished in a day the growth of half a century."-- Bayard Taylor, Eldorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire (pp. 240-41).

"They [original San Franciscans] had their faults, but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather” (1971). -- Kenneth Rexroth, meaning San Francisco’s wildly polytheistic, bohemian, and anarchistic culture was not connected to that of witch-hunting New England Puritanism.

Gazing across the Pacific Ocean to resources of Japanese Zen and Chinese poetry, literary-social activist Kenneth Rexroth notes in a 1971 interview on San Francisco poetics, as globally interconnected to the trans-Pacific: “Oceans, like steppes, unite as well as separate. The West Coast is close to the Orient. It’s the next thing out there… SF is an international city and it has living contact with the Orient.”

“[San Francisco has become] this far-out city on the left-side of the world”
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, inaugural address on becoming first Poet Laureate of SF in 1998.

In the wake of all that wild-west, bohemian, beat, hippie, queer, anarchist, and cosmopolitan experimentation in SF:

“Somebody once said, if you want to go crazy, go to San Francisco. Nobody will notice.”
-- Paul Kantner, guitarist for Jefferson Airplane, now Jefferson Starship (SF Chronicle, September 16, 2008).

III) “Worlding San Francisco”: [SKIP]

If “globalization discourse now presumes that the ‘world space’ is at the mercy of market norms promulgated by [neo-liberal] US policies” that are reshaping the world from Beijing to Paris, this can lead to what Jean Luc Nancy calls (in The Creation of the World, or Globalization [2007]) the immonde [117] or “glomus” [37] being delivered to the planet by the reign of the world-becoming-market. “Worlding” would alter this given frame.

“Worlding” as a critical practice enacts an opening of space, time, and consciousness to other values and multiple modes of being. Spatially, a worlded criticism seeks to disclose altered and emergent connections and articulations that cut across place, area, city, and given regional forms.

In The Worlding Project collection of 2007, “worlding” as a critical tactic enacted a world-making verb more than a pregiven noun. This was meant to suggest various tactics aimed to counter what some call ‘globality achieved.’

“Worlding implies a fully culture-drenched and being-haunted process of ‘de-distancing’ the ever-globalizing world of techno-domination and its badly managed nuclearized standing-reserve. ‘Worlding,’ as an active-force gerund, would turn nouns (world) to verbs (worlding), thus shifting the taken-for-granted life-forms of the market and war into the to-be-generated and remade. As such a gerundive process of situated-articulation and world-making, ‘worlding’ thus would help deepen and show how modes and texts of contemporary being and uncanny worldly dwelling (as in reading the language of first-world novels against the imperial grain, for that matter) can become a historical process of taking care, and setting limits, entering into, and making the world-horizon come near and become local and informed, situated, instantiated as an uneven/incomplete material process of world-becoming” (Rob Wilson, “Worlding as Future Tactic,” The Worlding Project, 211-212).

The boundaries and study-objects of areas and disciplines are being remade, as regions/parts are situated into wholes, articulating counter-worlds, via forms of “new spatiality” that have emerged in literary and cultural study, open to more fluid and emergent forms of relationality and inter-connection like “Oceania,” “Inter-Asia,” “Asia/Pacific” or the circum-Mediterranean. My approach here aims to reframe “San Francisco” as an urban-world space.

IV) Reframing San Francisco’s urban-wilderness world as “contado”:

The “contado” space of SF’s vast urban periphery (“hinterlands” of the countryside) has long provided the material resources (water, timber, stone, agriculture, shipping and so on) as well as huge labor needs and creative inputs to build up the wealth and splendor of the “imperial city” a la some Rome or Constantinople of the Pacific coast.

This “contado” framework goes far beyond the smallish 47 square miles, 43 hills, and 800, 000 population of physical San Francisco city proper and connects urban well-being to the watersheds and back-to-the-land movements of the High Sierras to the north, Silicon Valley, San Jose, and Big Sur to the south, if not to the mineral and oil recourses of Alaska and the current transnational assembly lines of the Pacific Rim and Mexico for resources and survival as an economy and as a life-sustaining bioregion.

To supplant existing Bay watersheds and reservoirs, for example, fresh lake water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir has been tunneled and piped 160 miles west, since 1934, and now provides 85% of water use for SF residents.

Brechin draws his spatially expansive framework of “urban power” from post-imperial Italy: “Italians, with their long experience with city-states [like Rome], have understood this relationship [between city and countryside “hinterlands”], though more in economic than ecological terms. For them, the civilized world was a duality made of the city and its contado—that is, the territory that the city could militarily dominate and thus draw upon. The contado provided the city with its food, resources, labor, conscripts, and much of its taxes, while its people (the contadini) received a marketplace and a degree of protection” (Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin [1999], p. xxiii).

Assuming that the power of empire-making and global urbanization veils itself in sublimating mythologies and architectural monumentality like the gold-plated SF city hall or the myriad urban monuments to the pioneers and the Native Sons of frontier mining, Imperial San Francisco goes beyond the spatial obviousness of urban borders. Brechin relentlessly reveals the huge “displacement” effect of this environmental contado, whereby the costs and damages of urban growth and urban wealth are displaced to the urban hinterlands and rural peripheries and down to later generations, as urban splendor pushes its ecological costs “downwind, downhill, and downstream” spatially (p. 27), as well as “down-time” historically as with the mercury-tainted rivers from the mining days that are still endangering life.

Working in the cultural critique tradition of Raymond William’s The Country and the City (1973), Brechin denaturalizes and defamiliarizes the urban borders and discloses rural connections. In a related study overcoming containment of nature and ecology by pastoral myths, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area (2007), Richard Walker refuses the “environmentalist dichotomy” or false binary of a “rural pure countryside” posited against an “unnatural ever-degraded city.” Rather, in order to reveal the social relations and patterns of labor and profit that have shaped both in geomaterial interaction, we need to see what Walker calls “the city in the country” (as in those urban wine tastes in Napa Valley) as well as the “country in the city” (as in all those organic foods from Watsonville and the Salinas Valley and those framers’ markets at the SF Ferry Building and filling the Metreon Theater) (xii-xii, 6).

Not a square mile of “nature” in the Bay Area has not been worked over by human labor and fought for by a green activism to survive, as in the “urbanized greensward” of Golden Gate Park or the protected vistas of the Muir Woods and Mount Tam so beloved of Gary Snyder, Rebecca Solnit, and Tom Killian et al as zen space. The Bay Area’s “remarkable amount of open space—green, blue, and golden” has been fought for and won by a century of environmental protection policies now integrated into the fabric of urban development (249).

As you well know in Taiwan with its Hsinchu-San Jose nexus, the latest transformation of the Bay Area connects the finance and creativity of SF to the expansion into a Silicon Valley contado: SF is considered the world’s fourth most important “city-region,” so-called, in the global economy (after NY, London, Tokyo), based on maintaining some ‘edge’ in techno-knowledge economy as a “global hub for [servicing] business and innovation” and serving as a “magnet” to attract creative and talented people. The creative-destructive effects of this are still being measured, as in a Jeremaic work like Rebecca Solnit’s Hollow City, which tracks the “hollowing out” of artistic, bohemian, and subterranean post-beat cultural forces in SF by the influx of yuppie technocrats (see “Spectral City”).

V) Worlding North Beach: Trout Fishing in the City [save to use for the Brautigan class sessions]

To get at the transforming and transformative spatiality of San Francisco, let us start with an image many of you might recall, from the cover of Richard Brautigan’s hippie-era novel of 1967, Trout Fishing in America. Much of this highly poetic novel is set in Washington Square Park in the North Beach neighborhood of City Lights Bookstore fame:

This cover image of the “Walden Pond for Winos,” drop outs, misfits, and dharma bums opens out episodically to the fishing streams and pastoral wilds of the Pacific Northwest and Idaho, many of whose streams are shown to be ecologically deformed, filled with hunchback trout, wino fish, marred by media pollution and industrial filth, policed by FBI and urban police forces looking for “trout fishing in America terrorists” or student communists, culminating in the wholesale commodification fish streams dismantled into parts like flies and deer and waterfalls on sale at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard in the city. The book serves as a kind of pastoral lament for the lost America of Thoreau’s Walden Pond and Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, with the pastoral setting of North Beach reduced to a kind of green-poetic skid row:

"The three of us huddled in the [Washington Square] park, talking. They were both broken-down artists from New Orleans where they had drawn pictures of tourists in Pirate's Alley.
Now in San Francisco with the cold autumn wind turned upon them, they had decided that the future held only two directions: They were either going to open up a flea circus or commit themselves to an insane asylum...
They talked about making little flea wheelbarrows and pool tables and bicycles."-- Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing In America (1967), "A Walden Pond for Winos.”

Brautigan (1935-1984) had been a poet living in the San Francisco North Beach scene since migrating there from Tacoma in 1955, at age 20, and he published poems in the Beatitude Anthology and underground outlets, full of social beatitude exalting the socially humbled and broken. His sardonic poetic wit comes out in a chapter portraying “4/17ths of a haiku” which is the beat traveler’s response to a property sign put up by sheriffs to block fishing trout streams of the Pacific Northwest: NO TRESSPASSING (9).

While the “Trout Fishing in America” quest becomes embodied into a maimed, broken down, and homeless character named Trout Fishing in America Shorty, “Trout Fishing in America” is also Brautigan’s poetic name for a lost pastoral ideal of urban-rural harmony, a figure of ecological ruination and loss: the baffled fisherman was “leaving for America, often a place in the mind” (72). Hippies in Mark Twain-garb from frontier days and a granny dress loaf with their soul under the statue of Ben Franklin in search of this pastoral America, gone to market forces, security regimes, and war.



VI: Gary Snyder’s Coming into the Sierras Watershed and “Shasta Nation” [SKIP or paraphrase a bit]

Brautigan might agree with Brechin’s grim assessment three decades after Trout Fishing In America, “No area on the planet is now from the process of global urbanization. Wilderness has ceased to exist” (Imperial SF, xxii); but try telling that to Gary Snyder, who has forged a coherent and consistent eco-poetics from Earth House Hold (1969) to the present, as gathered in his fittingly titled collection, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds (1995).

For Snyder is a poet activist coming down from that same beat era who has long believed in the regenerative power of wilderness, what he calls “the practice of the wild,” and deep ties of the Pacific Rim city to the powers of emplaced consciousness and reinhabitory energies in the wilderness contado.

In Snyder’s geo-poetic reframing of San Francisco into what he calls in his 1992 essay “Coming into the Watershed” that has become crucial to the field of American ecological criticism, “The San Francisco/ valley rivers/Shasta headwaters bio-city region” are all inter-connected (by slashes here) and lead to an exclamation mark of gratitude (233) as ethical attitude.

Snyder elsewhere calls this SF bio-community from his home in the Kitkitdizze Sierras bioregion, the “Shasta Nation” (255) where the regenerative energies of the wild and the sense of primordial planetary belonging can lead Euro-Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans and North Beach dharma bums on the re-worlding path to “become ‘born-again’ natives of Turtle Island” (“Coming into the Watershed,” 234), as in some ecologically interconnected, planetary, and re-nativized counter-conversion to place.

In Snyder’s earlier essay on urban place, “North Beach” from The Old Ways: Six Essays (1977), he imaginatively enacts an uncanny bio-poetics of the region as contado and as counter-history and counter-culture. North Beach is portrayed as a “non-Anglo” multicultural habitat where the Costanoan native peoples had lived for over five thousand years are the Bay, and then later became a place of Alta Californian dairy farms, before waves of Irish, Italian, Sicilian, Portuguese, Chinese (Kuang-tung and Hakka) and “even Basque sheepherders down from Nevada” settled in (3).

Beneath the Transamerica Pyramid corporate high-rise, Snyder evokes the Montgomery Block of artists ad leftists who had lived there before the Beats, and no less importantly he unearths “a tiny watershed divide at the corner of Green and Columbus” where “northward a creek flowed” towards the Fisherman’s Wharf, all covered by oblivious landfill now (5). By evoking the remnants of the bioregion and the occluded history of settlement, Snyder aims at “hatching something else in America; pray it cracks the shell in time” (6). That something else is a vision of San Francisco that would see it connected to living watersheds, to a sense of bioregional belonging, and to the influx of place-tied values that come down from Native America and global cultures.

San Francisco’s ties to the wilderness contado in the Pacific Sierras and the Northwest Cascades are memorably shown in Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel, The Dharma Bum, which enacts a kind of Buddhist dialectics shuttling between the “samsara” of SF Beat urban life and poetic ecstasy in North Beach and Chinatown and the “nirvana” to be found in the mountains, where both he and Snyder worked as fire-watchers at sites like those Jack called “Desolation Angel.”

As Kerouac writes of his retreat to the mountain-minded wilderness, “I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world,” The Dharma Bums (105).

The hero of this quest for a more tenderly bonded planetary mode of living is Gary Snyder, who opened this practice linking urban life to the regenerative energies and values of the wild outback: “Japhy [alias Gary Snyder] leaping up: ‘I’ve been reading Whitman, know what he means when he says, Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that’s the [beat] attitude for the Bard, the Zen Lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production...I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to the mountains to pray... and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures..,” The Dharma Bums (99).

VII) Tracking Some “Oceanic” Lines of Flight to and From San Francisco:

The Afro-jewish poet Bob Kaufman, in “West Coast Sounds—1956” (poem Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, 1965), shows that the cultural miming of black spaces and modes has been displacing SF ethnic enclaves via the growth of “San Fran hipster land,” absorbing the hinterlands of art. So Kaufman, like a closed-down sardine factory in Monterey Bay, splits for the global south and Mexico, if only to preserve his life and poetic vision of beatitude:

San Franers, falling down.
Canneries closing.
Sardines splitting
For Mexico.
Me too.

Later, Maxine Hong Kingston crossed the streets of San Francisco beat culture in Tripmaster Monkey with lines of flight to spaces across the Pacific Ocean, like Hawai’i in The Fifth Book of Peace, where a culture of protest against American wars and a simpler mode of living apart from consumer demands could be created, in line with Gary Snyder and Lew Welch and the Zen Buddhist counter-culture:

“[Moving to Hawai’i] Wittman [Ah Sing] was not much attached to stuff, trying to live by The Red Monk’s [the Beat poet Lew Welch’s] advice that fifteen things are too many. Be open-handed; be free. Let the bookstores and libraries take care of the books. Read them and give them back or away. To be free in America: rid yourself of impedimenta.”-- Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace (2003).

Literature, as I have been invoking it here, can help us to see links of the city to the wilderness and the planet. Like geographical cultural studies, poetics can thus help us to overcome and reframe what Lawrence Buell has called “the foreshortened or inertial aspect of [the] environmental unconscious” (Writing for an Endangered World, 22), so that we can develop better modes of re-inhabitation and a “watershed consciousness” aware of our ties to rivers and the global commons of the ocean.

Writers like Brautigan, Snyder, Kerouac, Bob Kaufman, and Maxine Hong Kingston et al can help us to see the occluded contado and expanded worlds of urban-rural belonging, in a capacious and tender sense the Beats of San Francisco called the cultivated if at times ecstatic sense of planetary “beatitude.”


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On the “Franciscan” name [and Beat heritage] of San Francisco:

“San Francisco refers to Saint Francis of Assisi—an especially important saint for California because the Franciscan order, which he founded in the thirteenth century, was entrusted by the Spanish government with the spiritual care of CA. San Francisco Bay was so named in 1595. The mission was dedicated in 1776 as La Mission de Nuestro Serafico Padre San Francisco de Asis a la Laguna de los Delores, “the mission of our seraphic father St Francis of Assisi at the Lake of [Our Lady of] the Sorrows.” for this reason it is still called Mission Dolores. A village at Yerba Buena Cove, founded in 1835, eventually became the main settlement of the area and was given the name San Francisco in 1847. San Francisco County, which is coterminous with the city, was named in 1850).”

William Bright, 1500 California Place Names

Beat Franciscan “tenderness towards existence”/ Beatitude quest:
"Beat doesn't mean tired, or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like Saint Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of golds: the vibrations of sincerity."

-- Jack Kerouac, "Lamb, No Lion" in Good Blonde and Others (51).

On the Social Meaning of “Beatitude” or “Social Beatitude”:

"I think that [we] would like to see a little more economic justice, or social justice--Jesus stuff."

Best Takedown Of A Fox News Producer Ever:

http:// /best-takedown-of-a-fox-news-producer-ever/?rc=fb.fan

City Lights Booksellers and Publishers website for updated information on new books, forthcoming events, bookstore readings:
http://www.citylights.com/

“Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day” in Santa Cruz is coming up on Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at the Del Mar Theater, 7:00 PM for a screening of a film by Chris Felver called “Ferlinghetti” (see video flyer for this and the film trailer):

http://www.sparringwithbeatnikghosts.com