di prima and ihotel lecture notes

DIANE DI PRIMA

the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is "it all adds up"
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
-- Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter #75”


LTEL 155B SYLLABUS (CONT.):
Week 8:
Mon. Nov. 14: Midterm taken in class.
Wed. Nov. 16: Read the poems (letters # 1-70) in Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters (pp. 1-94).

Week 9:
Mon. Nov. 21: Finish reading di Prima, Revolutionary Letters (pp. 95-160).
Wed. Nov. 23: Start reading Karen Tei Yamashita, I-Hotel (any one-three “floors”/ or chapters of the overall 10). ( KTY to visit our lecture...this class or the next one.)

Week 10:
Mon, Nov., 28: finish I-Hotel. (KTY to visit?)
Wed. Nov 30: Last class session: show some Waldman/Dylan: Students read their post-beat works/sites/projects etc....

Week 11:
NOTE: Final Projects will be due by 4-7PM on Tuesday, December 6, which is the final-exam time slot (bring to Baskin Lecture Hall our classroom).
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Diane di Prima (1934- ):

“You Say You Want a Revolution”: Spreading Utopian Anarchism across San Francisco, “Turtle Island” America, and the Post-Beat World.



1934: Born in Brooklyn, New York and has strong ties to Greenwich Village Bohemian culture; started writing at seven, influenced by grandfather from whom she took abiding ties to Italian utopic anarchism;

1951, studied physics at Swarthmore College for two years and dropped out;

1958 first book of poems published, This Bird Flies Backwards, full of wry love poems.

1961, started the literary mimeograph The Floating Bear with Leroi Jones, with whom she also started New York Poets Theater of one-act plays;

1964, with her husband Alan Marlowe she founded the Poets Press and published first books by Audre Lorde, David Henderson et al;

1968 ff.: moved to SF and became part of the Diggers & SF writing scene; she starts to study zen with Roshi Suzuki; world tribalisms and socialist quests from Cuba and China to the Diggers in the Haight Ashbury of SF. Always quests to align revolutionary visions of altered world practices and arts with First peoples of Turtle island and polytheistic magic practices; “raising rebellion into an art.”

1969, Memoirs of a Beatnik published by Olympia Press and later by Penguin.

1971, City Lights publishes the serial poem, Revolutionary Letters [“something you could understand at one hearing, something like Guerilla Theater” she first read out by a bullhorn from a flatbed truck in NYC] distributed widely by underground press before it is published by City Lights;

1974, teaches poetry in opening sessions of Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO.

1978, starts to publish feminist muse poems called Loba, which she keeps adding poems to over the years.

1980, helps to establish Masters Program in Poetics at New College of California in SF.

1981, begins work at psychic and healer, which leads to her writing and teaching in the San Francisco Institute of Magic and the Healing Arts.

1990, Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems published by City Lights.

2001, Recollections of My Life as a Woman published.

2010, she is appointed by Mayor Newsome as Poet Laureate of San Francisco. ...


“I think the poet is the last person who is still speaking truth when no one else dares to. I think the poet is the first person to begin the shaping and visioning of the new forms and the new consciousness when no one else has begun to sense it; I think these are two of the most essential human functions.”
-- Diane di Prima, in Brenda Knight, ed., Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (1996).

“Don’t forget, however great your visioning and your inspiration, you need the techniques of your craft and there’s nowhere, really to go get them because these are not passed out in schools. They are passed on person to person, and back then [in earlier days of the Beat Generation] the male naturally passed them on to the male. I think maybe I was one of the first women to break through that in having deep conversations with Charles Olson and Frank O’Hara [as well as mentorship relations with Ezra Pound, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi at SF & Tassajara zendo, and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche at Naropa].
-- Diane di Prima to Anne Waldman.

“It is some essential clarity I value [in di Prima’s poetry]—which in these initial occasions of her writing is already moving to declare itself: food, places, friends, nights, streets, dreams, the way. She is an adept and flexible provider of the real, which we eat daily or else we starve…She is true.”
-- Robert Creeley, “Foreword: for Diane” to Pieces of a Song.

“… a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated, and twentieth- century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes.”
-- Allen Ginsberg on di Prima’s body of work.

“Diane di Prima is the original outlaw poet; she wrote herself a wild, authentic life without regard for the rules during an era when being such a female creature was truly transgressive. Her writing is crucial as history; as literature it is enduring and bewitching.”
-- Michelle Tea, blurb for extended edition of Revolutionary Letters (2007).



SOME GOOD LINKS (there are many others online if you look around):

Diane di Prima reads “April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa” at Naropa Institute:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVN9lamJyoQ&playnext=1&list=PL1667173FD5DDB050


Diane di Prima reading in the “Lunch Poems series” at UC Berkeley in 2008 (introduction by Robert Hass):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk629z7REWY


Diane di Prima reads from Revolutionary Letters (#7 ,#13, #16, #49)

in 1969 in NYC on the radio:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PvEaSLY5L0


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Some possible “blog”-- or even “final project” topics!-- for writings on Revolutionary Letters (but follow your TA’s section mandates and suggestions):

1) Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters is an historically evolving “serial” work, as she adds new letters in response to new events and configurations of herself, the city, the country, the world. Write your own version of a “revolutionary letter” in a poem or in a brief essay, working in some aspects of the contemporary situation you face.

-- see “Twelve For/From Diane di Prima” based on twelve cut-up, collaged, and repurposed phrases from Revolutionary Letters putting some links between Psyche and Geography as phrased into the urban space of the contemporary City [here, San Francisco]. Others?

2) Discuss one of the Revolutionary Letters in which a woman’s point of view and values adds something different or new to the beat perspective on the world, and its beatitude quest.

-- poems of revolutionary love (p.5; p. 11 on love emerging from “people left to themselves”; Memorial Day 2003 (Letter #93, p. 143)
-- healing tips for action and health (p. 12).
--defensive weaponry cum Buddhist compassion and yogic tactics (pp. 15, 21, 26, 44);
-- forges a new diet for the revolutionary body (pp. 56, 70, 73);
-- “women’s alchemy” of blood, labor, birth (#44, p, 57).
-- “my body a weapon as yours is” (#66, p. 83); “Dee’s Song” (p. 155).
-- learn “magic” as an alternative knowledge (#46, p. 59, #59, p. 76; p. 87, Tibetan healing chant); alchemy by Inward Fire (#74, p.101).
-- women protest against bulldozer to protect olive groves (#90, p. 139).
-- woman warrior figure portrayed in “Canticle of St. Joan” (p. 157).

3) What other worlds, other cultures, other ways of connecting to an alternative to American dominant culture are enacted in The Revolutionary Letters?

-- appeals to Turtle Island, Native American way of life as a more balanced ecology of planetary belonging (pp. 34, 37, 46, 49, 53, 59 72, 78; “New Mexico Poem,” p. 150).
-- embracing the “we” solidarity of world revolution across different urban and national sites(pp. 42, 38, 40, 43, 51 [“PEOPLE’S PLANET”).
-- invokes “Arab song” to project another world view against US going to war (Letters # 77 #78, #79, #80, #81, #82; 9/11 poem of global feedback, Letter # 88).
-- uses imagination of poetics to create an alternative cosmology (Letter #75, p. 103, “Rant”)

4) Discuss one of more of the “revolutionary letter” poems that can be connected to Occupy Wall Street-like tactics of revolutionary urbanism or urban-space repurposing that is now taking place in the Bay Area as around the world.

-- poems that seem “anti-urban” in their stance but actually de-create and negate urban forms under capital in order to forge and create new forms (pp. 28, 45, 47, 77, 53).
-- picking “be-in” sites and demo sites (Letter # 8, p. 17).
-- campus & city seizure tactics of the commons (Letter #15, p. 27).
-- construct “hiding places” inside your home & neighborhood p. 38)
-- altered geography maps (pp. 34, 50, 20).
-- tips for urban occupation in revolutionary times of urban action (p. 9)
-- “the vortex of creation is the vortex of destruction” (Letter # 12, p. 23).
-- embraces San Francisco and its “woods” (#53, p. 68; #70, p. 93).
-- towards an anti-productivist driven planet, refusing over-consumption (p. 28); refusing the global assembly line of exploited women (p. 44; Letter # 67, 84).




Rob Wilson

TWELVE FOR/FROM DIANE di PRIMA: A POST-BEAT LETTER

It’s a good idea, Psyche, you turn away from the conditioning
hauling in the galaxy like some used geography from the Interzone
eyes & hands, knives & guns, psychological remnants of tools
this dark a song full of bargaining is getting old on the mass media
notebooks by the dozen carved up into winter scarves for the homeless
the undead are homeless too and walk back-streets of San Francisco

this war against the imagination needs some televising online
to become a new prosody of pithy characters, do you see?
Psyche split from Geography, in cities around the world, our bombs are dropping, bags of rice burst open so we can give them to Mars for free

tired of it so am I bald eagle on this f lying flag where a
porcelain city glitters & splits into a million shards revolving into slums


(RW poem in homage to Diane Di Prima as Political/Poetic “Muse” of the Future)




KAREN YAMASHITA


Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita: “Thank you. I’m very honored [to be nominated for National Book Award in 2010].
I think the work of the previous books made the I Hotel possible; that is to say that I learned while writing how to research, to create form, structure, and narrative voice, and to follow a writing practice intuitive to my own process. The research for Brazil-Maru, based on the history of Japanese immigration to Brazil, was similarly extensive, and I employed practices of interviewing learned from those years. In writing Tropic of Orange, I continued to experiment with voice and narrative perspectives. While researching Circle K Cycles in Japan, I became more confident about moving within a community as recorder and participant while building a contemporary archive. The archival research for I Hotel, however, was far more extensive than in the previous projects. I spent endless hours reviewing old underground newspapers, flyers, graphic art, literature, audio speeches, documentary radio and video, books, and music of the time.

PBAJ: I Hotel is dedicated to Asako and her grandchildren. Do you have a reader in mind as you write?
KTY: My mother, Asako Yamashita, is 93 years old. I suppose she won’t mind her age broadcast at this late date as she, though hard of hearing, has been an avid reader, her mind still very much engaged in current events, the state of the economy, and politics. She reads the New York Times every morning, and she’s the reader who cut out the notice about the National Book Awards. I think it became a reality for her when she read it there. My mother and father and their generation of Nisei Americans lived through the war having to be removed from the San Francisco bay area and sites all along the Pacific Coast to concentration camps. It’s probably not Asako as a particular reader that I have in mind but perhaps that legacy of struggle that extends to a continuing movement for civil and human rights that may be a guiding spirit.
….KTY: The International Hotel or I-Hotel was/is a real place. It was a hotel built around the turn of the century, 1900, on Kearny and Jackson streets between Chinatown and North Beach in San Francisco. In the pre-war era, Kearny Street was known as Filipino- or Manilatown, lined by restaurants, bars, and storefronts that serviced the Filipino community and was mostly populated by Filipino migrant laborers. By the 1960s, the I-Hotel was rundown but cheap housing for a bachelor community of elderly Filipino and Chinese, men who had lived out their lives as agricultural field labor, cannery workers, merchant mariners, longshoremen, union activists, busboys, and cooks. As tenants, these men made their last stand to prevent the destruction of the hotel to be replaced, under the guise of redevelopment, by a parking lot. From 1968 to 1977, community and student activists and eventually thousands of supporters in the San Francisco and East Bay areas congregated at the I-Hotel to prevent the eviction and destruction of the hotel.
This narrative technique has been, for me, an ongoing question from the first novel on. I suppose it began in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest in experimenting with a narrator who is a ball, and it continues in all of my work. It’s become an obsession, but maybe this last book has flushed it out of me. As a creative writing teacher, for many years I used Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler as a teaching tool, to encourage students to find and experiment with narrative voice. I think once a writer discovers the construction, limitations, and pleasures of a voice, the writing often takes care of itself. As for the I Hotel, embedded in the assumptions of the ten novellas and their narrative voices is also a literary project that has to do with Asian American literature.”

Some Book Review comments on I-Hotel:
Weighing in at slightly over 600 pages, author Karen Tei Yamashita’s National Book Award-nominated I Hotel is an encyclopedic compilation of facts, personages, and allusions both common and obscure that could very well represent a turning point in Asian-American literature. A novel that took its author 10 years to write, I Hotel actually consists of ten “hotels”: loosely-associated novellas that detail the variegated strands of activism within San Francisco’s Asian-American community, circa 1968-1977…
Concurrent with the protests of both San Francisco State and UC Berkeley, students and social activists rallied to protest what was clearly a case of the city’s marginalizing a long-established community of color solely for reasons of gentrification. The I-Hotel quickly became the locus of Asian-American political activity for nearly a decade. Yamashita takes great care to make this point explicit, such as when she has a collective “we” succinctly state: “By now we understood the joke about the Red Block on Kearny and swimming around in radical alphabet soup—... On the face of it, we were all radical activist revolutionaries, and we were all united to defeat a capitalist-imperialist system of greed.”
As in her previous works, Yamashita incorporates satire and the surreal in prose that is playful yet knowing, fierce yet mournful, in a wildly multicultural landscape. The novel reveals how the civil rights movement intertwines the Black Panthers, Yellow Power, the Indian takeover of Alcatraz, the formation of the United Farm Workers, protests against nuclear proliferation, and the rights of the disabled – and the fascinating contributions of Asian Americans in each.
You may find yourself putting down the book and going online to find out more about this compelling history, and guessing whom the fictional characters are based on. Mo Akagi appears to be Richard Aoki, field marshal for the Black Panthers. Edmund Yat Min Lee bears a resemblance to Ling-chi Wang, activist and retired UC Berkeley professor of ethnic studies. Arthur Hama might be Takeo “Edward” Terada, a Japanese immigrant who painted Coit Tower murals.

….In the final pages, Yamashita assumes the voice of the community – the “we” who ask, “But why save an old hotel?” In lyrical, elegant prose, she explains how the hotel became a symbol, a rallying cry for people putting aside their differences to unite for a cause.
“Each room was a tiny home, a place of final refuge for a lifetime of work … when we saw the elderly tenants thrown out on the streets, maybe we saw ourselves, our own stories of struggle and sacrifice connected to their stories, and we knew that whatever our kids had been trying to do, we could agree on this one thing – the honor due to those who’ve gone before.”

Some notes on Brechin

Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1999).

“Contado” in this ‘cultural studies’ approach to urban space means the expansive space of SF’s vast urban-to-suburban-to-rural periphery (the “hinterlands” of the countryside) providing the city core with material resources (water, timber, stone, agriculture, shipping and so on) as well as huge labor needs and inputs to build up the wealth and splendor of the “imperial city” a la Rome or Constantinople.

This “Contado” framework goes far beyond the 47 square miles, 43 hills, and 800, 000 population of physical San Francisco city to High Sierras, Silicon Valley and Big Sur if not to Alaska and Pacific Rim and Mexico for resources and its survival as an economy and a life-sustaining bioregion.

For example, consider that Hetch Hetchy Reservoir [completed in 1934] water is tunneled and piped 160 miles westward to SF and provides 85% of water for SF residents. [See map in Imperial San Francisco]

Consider Silicon Valley as another expansive and transformative “contado”: SF has become by now the world’s fourth most important “city-region” on the cutting edge of global techno-financial economy (after NY, London, Tokyo), based on maintaining ‘edge’ in techno-knowledge economy as a “global hub for business and innovation” and “magnet” to creative and talented people.

“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, p. xxiii).

“No arena on the planet is now free from the process of global urbanization, wilderness has ceased to exist” (Brechin, Imperial SF, p. xxii).


Sounds like the rural fishing abodes and trout streams of Brautigan?


Brechin’s key methodological sentence: “Power [of urban empire-building] veils itself” (Imperial SF, p. 71).

How does power and control and influence “veil itself?:

via sublimating mythologies and histories centered in narratives and tropes of aggrandizement and conquest (“pioneer” settler storeis; gold rush lone miner figures of the Golden State; versus the hydraulic mining apparatus and the huge financial capitalist investment involved in placer and hydraulic mining).

via architectural and pictorial monumentality and sublimity of epic romance and wilderness preservation; the gold coated urban splendor of the city and its city hall and museums and statuary etc.

via “displacement” effect of shifting the costs and damages of this imperial buildup of grandeur and growth to urban peripheries and hinterlands as well as down to later generations to deal with the effects (“earthly ruin” is shifted down time and space in a process of “downwind, downhill, and downstream” movement (p. 27).

via “invisible” structures and dynastic patterns of domination and hegemony over the city space and its peoples and history: what Brechin calls the inverted “pyramid of mining” spread across a huge urban contado via “remote control of power” and the workings of “phantom capital” (97), as with the urban skyscrapers as inverted mine-scapes with the dirt, labor, and death hidden from everyday urban view (pp. 68-70 ff.).

e) Brechin activates a process of denaturalization/defamiliarization of SF urban-scapes and romantic frontier history to expose the “imperial splendor” as a feat of “urban ruin” and social immiseration to many of the have-nots or the marginals in this grand urban space where so many live homeless.

LECTURE NOTES 3

SFLecturesRobWilsonF2011Part3
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For Trey Highton’s blog site (for section B), go to:

I'm following SF Lit and think you'll be interested in it as well. To check it out, follow the link below:
http://sflit-trey.blogspot.com/?psinvite=ALRopfU2J1PtXS3d99IB1QgFYsnbgvwCVXTSH_bzzkfJCXpPoC0EoinazCrHTRdA9-d2Ut00bjlJ_91WY4ZZJTgrXaDztHpcew

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To: robseanwilson@gmail.com

Hello,

I thought maybe you'd find this interesting, especially along with the Beat-atitude book. A number of my friends are in seminary at Union College and are really involved in the "Occupy X" movement.

I also noticed today an interesting new facebook page related to the Occupy Cleveland movement: https://www.facebook.com/notes/harrison-kalodimos/occupychristianity/10150408611365351 and also attached a photo of some of the "religious people occupy Wallstreet" movement.

Take care,
Katie Trostel

(TA for section C)
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OccupyChristianity
by Harrison Kalodimos on Sunday, October 9, 2011 at 12:04pm

The occupation movement represents a growing recognition of just how much influence money can buy in our society. The structure of our society has allowed a relatively small number of wealthy people to amass an enormous amount of power at the expense of our democracy. This is not because bankers or politicians are particularly bad people, but rather because they operate within a system that offers them such excess of power that they are quickly corrupted by it.

Recognizing that it is not the individuals, but rather the hierarchy in which the wealthy operate that begets abuse, the occupation is doing something incredibly important. They are operating without hierarchy in a system that does not allow any particular individual to amass excess power. This represents a keen understanding that the means and ends of any movement are inseparable. If you wish to create a new society, your every action must reflect the society which you hope to create.

This is where I feel the occupation movement has enormous overlap with Jesus’s Christianity. He was born into a world which was rife with abusive hierarchies. The Romans, the Pharisees, and the rich were all using their power to abuse those without it. Each of these groups felt like they deserved their power–the Romans by virtue of their birth into the Roman Empire, the Pharisees for their religious self-righteousness–but Jesus begged to differ.

He then set about overturning all of these abusive power structures, not by violent opposition or by claiming power to himself, but rather by publicly lifting up those who were the downtrodden–the poor, the lepers, the outcasts–and making them his own people. Jesus did not just preach about the fellowship that man ought to have with one another, he lived that message in a radical way. Jesus overturned the predominant hierarchies of his time by living out a set of principles that gave the lie to the oppressors claims to power, and in doing so started in motion the creation of a new society in which the downtrodden could be uplifted. So this brings forth a challenge to Christians. Do our actions resist the abuses of power that are flagrant in our society or are our actions complicit in those abuses?


Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997):

His formation as THE Beat poet-prophet of local and world impact is heavily tied to the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village and North Beach SF in 1954; extended stay in India and travels in South America; King of the May in Eastern Europe; a world celebrity of beat poetry in London and Paris, Russia, and Chicago. Now being translated into Chinese, and having a delayed impact.

Joan Baez pays homage to the risk-taking, freedom-seeking politics of Allen Ginsberg:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKrbR_2apZQ&feature=related



BD & AG in SF, 1965 (Dylan had wanted this/related photos in the alleyways of North Beach near City Lights Bookstore to be used as the cover of his blockbuster Columbia Records album of 1966, Blonde on Blonde)




Allen Ginsberg’s “America” is a Cold War satire, Jeremaic critique, and prophetic vision, to try to invent and project an alternative invisible republic of liberated bodies and souls to counter the over-regulated “square” conformist society of the time (as in Time magazine hegemony):


“Sunflower Sutra” (pp. 35-38)


In the Back of the Real” (56-57)

Listen to NPR interviews of Allen Ginsberg, 1997/1994, in which he discusses “Howl” and “America” and the Beat utopic community he had long been connected to and projects in these poems.

First “subterranean” artistic space Howl reading in 1955 at Six Gallery in San Francisco is portrayed by participant-observer Kerouac in The Dharma Bums (1958).

James Franco re-enacts this reading in the Rob Epstein/Jeffrey Friedman film Howl (2009):play part of scene 1 and scene 2, on writing Howl, digitalized images thereof, and its court room trial in 1957.

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On Reading HOWL:

The “plot” or rough narrative arc of Howl as a quest for a Beat vision of “beatitude” can be compared to the three stages of Dante’s Divine Comedy in its movement from “Inferno” through “Purgatorio” to “Paradiso,” enacting the quest of the “angel headed hipsters” burning for illumination through various stages of excruciating confinement and capture by the false gods/idols of Moloch (sections I and II); through the purgation of Carl Solomon in a mental institution and his rebirth and transformation (“and resurrect your living human Jesus” in section III); shifting into the cosmic Litany of the “Holy” section which blesses the beatitude of polymorphous forms and worlds on all de-sublimated fronts (section IV).

-- crucial to this process of self and world alteration is the transformation of imagery and syntax described as “elipse” and “catalogue” and bop prosody “meter” and “images juxtaposed” on pp. 19-20 of Howl at end of first section.

-- note the polymorphous worlds the poem connects the community of subterranean forces and form to:

“Mohammedan angels” [9], marijuana from Laredo and Mexico [10], mind-quests in Canada [10], Asian Buddhism in “Zen New Jersey” [11], “Tangerian bone-grinding and migraines in China” in excruciating vision quests and drug experiments [11], world literature and philosophy from “Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah” [12], disappearing into volcanoes of Mexico [12], taking ship to Spain and Africa [12], European and German jazz of the 30s [17], “who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys” [18], to Judeo-Christian scriptural passages [20] among others that accrue in the assemblages & linkages of Howl.

“The appeal in “Howl” is to the secret or hermetic tradition of art ‘justifying’ or ‘making up for’ defeat in worldly life… .In publishing “Howl,” I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding inside U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy.”
-- Allen Ginsberg, preface to the annotated facsimile edition of Howl (1986).

Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, & Burroughs as Beats in Paris (1958-1963), after earlier formation of bohemian artistic “subterranean” community in NYC (1943-1953) and SF (1954-1957), find freedom and permission to experiment in art and life and world-transforming projects, and accrue international cultural capital in Europe (Beat Hotel, 4, 19 and everywhere in book).

Allen celebrates Russia’s success with Sputnik and outer-space exploring technologies in 1957, shifting subject from nuclear hegemony over the future to America as it can “lead world to Fraternal Freedom full of comradely hip judgement” and [surpassing Russia] in poetry, to enrich world” (Beat Hotel, 46)



I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass....

....I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.

-- Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” section 1, 5.


Dylan and Ginsberg pay homage to the spirit of Jack Kerouac at his gravesite in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1975: scene from Jerry Aronson,
The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiH9QZzGc_s


As quoted in passages in Beat Attitudes, Gilles Deleuze explains the psychogeography and Beat movement writing as a process of multiplying “conjunctions” with forces and sites and angels of amplifed being outside the self ( as in those “angel headed hipsters”...and...and...and...who...who...who...)

“Writing carries out the conjunction, the transmutation of fluxes, through which life escapes from the resentment of persons, societies, and reigns. Kerouac’s phrases are as sober as a Japanese drawing, a pure line traced by an unsupported hand, which passes across ages and reigns. It would take a true alcoholic to attain that degree of sobriety.”
-- Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues [with Claire Parnet] (51) (1977); Beat Attitudes (46).


“To fly is to trace a line, lines, long, a whole cartography [of the imagination]. One only discovers worlds through a long, broken flight. Anglo-American literature constantly shows these ruptures, these characters who create their line of flight, who create through a line of flight. Thomas Hardy, Melville, Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Miller, Kerouac. In them, everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside..... the flight towards the [American] West, the discovery that the true [Asian] East is in the West, the sense of the frontiers as something to cross, to push back, to go beyond. The becoming is geographical.”
-- Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues [with Claire Parnet] (36-37) (1977); Beat Attitudes (44-45).

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.”


------------------------




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

LECTURE NOTES 1 (sans pix)

City Lights Bookstore (opened by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953); Pocket Poets series founded in 1955; Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is published here in 1957, after the famous Six Gallery reading immortalized in The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac.
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Excerpt from The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, documentary portrait by Jerry Aronson:

Scene enacts the quest for post-beat beatitude as an empowering source for writers and cultural-political activists and “dharma bums” who seek enlightenment & transformation “like a rolling stone”from one end of the country (New York City, Boston) and the world (London, Paris, Tangier, Mexico City) to the other (San Francisco):

Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg visit the grave-site of Jack Kerouac at his hometown in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1975 during the Rolling Thunder Review and they read Kerouac’s writings, poetry, and death as Jack’s spirit resurrects to empower them as “beatitude” (otherwise known in this course via a complex pun as Beat Attitude):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiH9QZzGc_s&feature=related

---------------------------
“Subterranean” spaces of art, culture, poetry, and freedom, are sought for in various urban and bohemian undergrounds and alternative life-worlds for the Beats, from North Beach and the Castro to Greenwich Village East & West and London and Paris et al:

Ponder Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” in D.A. Pennybacker bio-documentary video Don’t Look Back (1967):

http://new.music.yahoo.com/Bob-Dylan/videos/view/Subterranean-Homesick-Blues--2141379


"The word 'Beat' came from Kerouac's original coinage, 'Beatitude' that meant a state of utmost bliss. To Kerouac, it was the idea that the downtrodden are saintly, thinking in a Buddhist context. These are the precursors of the counter-culture. The Beat messages were anti-war pacifism, demonstration against the war, anti-materialism, anti-technocracy...like the Luddites."
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Lyricizing Non-Lyrical Reality," interviewed by Aryanil Mukherjee for Kaurub (2005) [quoted in Beat Attitudes].

“It’s seeing the rooftops of Frisco that makes you excited and believe....” -- Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (PJK, 350).

On San Francisco as exactly such a exciting and inspiring literary and social-left vortex, see Beat Attitudes (pp. 20, 29, 45 et al)


“But if no second coming [in the post-Beats and, later, in us], then no first coming [in the Beats] either; unless we are born again, we are not born at all. Nothing happens for the first time.”
-- Norman O. Brown, “Resurrection,” Love’s Body (201) (1966).



The left-coast goddess muse activist from Carmel and Palo Alto, Joan Baez here singing Dylan’s beat-drenched song “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” from Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde (1966), the one he wanted the City Lights alley to appear on, the one that is now called “Jack Kerouac Lane” or something like that:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fkx-elBdKi4

See passages from Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish (Paris 1957-New York City 1959) (San Francisco: City Lights Books (1961)).


Rob Wilson

TWELVE FOR KEROUAC

Departing Massachusetts out of the musty house
ancient eyes crawled past
diesels on the overpass NJ turnpike south just a
boy-of-my-generation longing to become Pei-Hsu scriptures

ex-radio godhead eyes
drifted westward cold mountain, road-drunk and sardonic
attacking dog-armies went past bird-loving masters
drooling over spaghetti, corn bread, beer munchies, I

sank onward to Inchon with my sillier self I
praised the Holy Ocean of Eternity spooning
out wisdom inside the (Seoul/soul)
seahorse’s delicate imagery of glue
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LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (b. 1919-- )

“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 new film by Chris Felver called “Ferlinghetti” (see video flyer for this and the film trailer):

http://www.sparringwithbeatnikghosts.com
------
LF born New York City to Paris/Sorbonne for doctorate then moves to San Francisco, 1950.

LF cofounds City Lights Books in 1953

Under editorship of LF, Pocket Poets Series in paperback started up in 1955, and Howl appears in 1957 and sells millions.

LF named first Poet Laureate of San Francisco (1998)

San Francisco Poems (2001), a compendium of essays and poems from prior works. Read Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Dog” (p. 37 in San Francisco Poems (2001), originally appeared in A Coney Island of the Mind (1958).

RCA Victor Dog images:
http://www.google.com/search?q=rca+victor+dog+images&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=J0p&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=EhmKTqSrCpPCsQKawpz_BA&ved=0CEMQsAQ&biw=1253&bih=582

The dog Nipper painting of “His Late Master’s Voice” (1898); it became the RCA Victor records logo as of 1900:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipper

RW on the urban poetics and politics of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco Poems (City Lights Foundation, 2001):

You can find at least 4 modes/genres of SF-based poetry at play in Ferlinghetti’s San Francisco Poems, which gathers 50 years of SF-based work from Pictures of the Gone World (City Lights Pocket Poets Number One, 1955) to How to Paint Sunlight (New Directions, 2001):

A) Paradise/Eden Almost Found or Realized/Lost in SF:
Earliest poem, “A North Beach Scene” (p. 32) shows this sensuous push towards “kingdom come” and the reign of a “renaissance of wonder”

See also “At the Golden Gate Park That Day” (p. 61)

“The Changing Light” (76) as epiphany of light and cloud and portrayal of SF exceptionality

“At the Golden Gate” (75) plover linked to Asian quest for finding a quasi-Buddhist state of bliss

B) LF affirms the mongrel multicultural queer plurality of SF: what he calls the “Far-out city on the left side of the world,” a poetic city, an edge, a frontier of social innovation and freedom beyond the white-settler Manifest Destiny frontier
See “Baseball Canto” (41): SF Giants as multicultural and mongrel mix undoing the white Anglo canon and forms with new inputs and modes and mixtures

“The Old Italians Dying” (44)

“Green Street Mortuary Marching Band” (68)

“The Great Chinese Dragon” (49)

C) Internal and counter-cultural exile and distance from US America and its hegemony of the “corporate monoculture” (p. 26), what Rexroth calls LF’s “disaffiliation” and “disengaging” the military-industrial “Social Lie” (p. 186); see also Ginsberg’s “America”

“To the Oracle At Delphi” (79): a jeremiad against US global empire of force and capital

“Great American Waterfront Poem” (59)

“The Dog” (37) as a poetic dissenter, urban flaneur, and free spirit enjoying life in this special “franciscan” city


D) SF is now marked by what LF calls “The Great [Class] Divide” tearing apart the older bohemian, labor friendly and artistic SF: class-divided antagonisms and segregations are given over to the boom-and-bust dynamism of the SF contado, as street people and scavengers collide against the palatial lifestyles of the wealthy urban oligarchy; see LF “Inaugural Address,” p. 10:

“I Saw One of Them” (73)

“Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes” (59)

“Yachts in the Sun” (78)

“The Artist” (67) with drunk and poor

See also the essay by Nancy Peter in touching on LF’s “Chaplinesque populism,” and post-hippy turns to more multicultural gender/ethnic diversity in SF publishing, pp. 211-213).
Week Three: October 12 (Wed):
Moving from Ferlinghetti to Ginsberg in larger socio-poetic contexts of City Lights bookstore and press, San Francisco “mongrel” left-coast culture and politics, the search for “beatitude,” forging a green queer plural “ecopoetics” within and against the imperial “contado”:

In Beat Attitudes as in prior works, L. Ferlinghetti remarks on the formative cultural vision of Kerouac, Ginsberg, & the Beats and its abiding SF and world cultural impact:

"There was a whole new school of poets brewing [at North Beach], and there were pioneering artists around the School of Fine Arts who later became famous as San Francisco Figurative painters and abstract expressionists. It was the last frontier, and they were dancing on the edge of the world."
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "The Poetic City That Was," in San Francisco Poems (26) (2001).

"The word 'Beat' came from Kerouac's original coinage, 'Beatitude' that meant a state of utmost bliss. To Kerouac, it was the idea that the downtrodden are saintly, thinking in a Buddhist context. These are the precursors of the counter-culture. The Beat messages were anti-war pacifism, demonstration against the war, anti-materialism, anti-technocracy...like the Luddites."
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Lyricizing Non-Lyrical Reality," interviewed by Aryanil Mukherjee for Kaurub (2005).

"Well, Kerouac had this idea that [the Beat Generation] was to do with the Beatitudes. He was in search of enlightenment. I think he thought he could find it through alcohol, which is probably why he drank so much."
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, comment to Justine Shapiro, Globe Trekker-- San Francisco (2000).


For a multitude of Lawrence Ferlinghetti images, early and late (see):

http://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1253&bih=582&q=ferlinghetti+kerouac%27s+grave&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2&oq=ferlinghetti+kerouac%27s+grave&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=s&gs_upl=2558l13675l0l15429l42l42l2l29l5l0l203l1651l0.10.1l11l0#hl=en&gbv=2&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=ferlinghetti&oq=ferlinghetti&aq=f&aqi=g1g-m1g-S8&aql=&gs_sm=s&gs_upl=18573l21259l4l23671l15l15l0l0l0l6l258l2463l0.7.6l15l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=9e90fce91eaebb5f&biw=1253&bih=582




The Diggers giving out free food and clothing in the Panhandle section of SF Haight Ashbury off Fell Street, “Summer of Love,”1967...

San Francisco Bay images as a huge “contado”, starting with Google images:
http://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1276&bih=697&q=san+francisco+bay&gbv=2&oq=san+francisco&aq=5&aqi=g10&aql=1&gs_sm=c&gs_upl=2697l5776l0l14178l13l13l0l7l7l0l175l787l1.5l6l0