SFLit Study Guide IDs

This is all continued off of Max's blog at downmobileur.blogspot.com/
I'm just working on filling it out and posting more so here is mine, I will try to continue to update this.
1) "Westward the course of empire takes its way ..."
• George Berkeley

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The first four acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama of the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

The City of Berkeley was named after Bishop Berkeley who composed these lines in the late 17th century.

2) Gray Brechin's concept of "the contado"

Contado is an Italian word which refers to the territory commanded by a dominant city. The contado provides essential resources and labor to power the capital.


3) "A Walden Pond for Winos"/ Washington Square in SF

• Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America. p17
Walden Pond for Winos is a vignette about Brautigan’s relation to the hobos in Washington Square in SF, where they drink port wine and discuss making money off a flea circus.

4) Tony Bennet, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco"

Tony Bennet released this song on a 1962 album of the same name. It is one of the two official anthems adopted by the city of SF. It is played after SF Giants home game victories.
We were shown Union Bank of California’s 2001 use of the song in a promo video where SF local hula dancers emote the words with hand gestures.

5) Moloch

Moloch is the name of a figure in the Old Testament which was worshiped by a tribe. Moloch was a god who required great sacrifices in a fiery manner. Allen Ginsberg employed Moloch in Howl, part 2. Moloch is used as a metaphor for the American city, thus aligning McCarthy-era America with the demon.

6) "I was certainly surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far out city on the left side of the world"
7) "Such was life in the Colden Gate:/ Gold dusted all that we drank and ate, / And I was one of the children told, 'We all must eat our peck of gold.'"

(a peck is a 2-gallon volume of any dry substance)

A Peck of Gold
by Robert Lee Frost

Dust always blowing about the town,
Except when sea-fog laid it down,
And I was one of the children told
Some of the blowing dust was gold.

All the dust the wind blew high
Appeared like god in the sunset sky,
But I was one of the children told
Some of the dust was really gold.

Such was life in the Golden Gate:
Gold dusted all we drank and ate,
And I was one of the children told,
'We all must eat our peck of gold.'

We should look at the two central images in this poem, Dust and Gold. Dust is representative of the poor and lower class of San Francisco, with gold representative of dreams of the riches. We see the juxtaposition, poverty and wealth, dust and gold.

8) North Beach
9) "Coming Into the Watershed"
10) Citizen Kane / William Randolph Hearst
11) Hetch Hetchy Reservoir

This is a reservoir in Yosemite national park. 65mi northeast of Merced, this reservoir is formed by a concrete dam. It’s primary purpose is to supply drinking water to San Francisco.

12) Alcatraz Is Not an Island
13) "The Day They Busted the Grateful Dead"
• Brautigan's The Pill vs. The Springhill Mine Disaster p. 104:
The day they busted the Grateful Dead
rain stormed against San Francisco
like hot swampy scissors cutting Justice
into the evil clothes that alligators wear.

The day they busted the Grateful Dead
was like a flight of winged alligators
carefully measuring marble with black
rubber telescopes

The day they busted the Grateful Dead
turned like wet breath of alligators
blowing up balloons the size of the
Hall of Justice

• Brautigan operating in the prophetic mode, evoking images of injustice and the mechanism of the state imposing its will against one of the greatest symbols of 1960s counter culture, political freedom, etc.
14) Turtle Island
• Gary Snyder, p. 243: Concept of North America as "Turtle Island," de-familiarization of 18th century to present day understanding of USA
• Marks a return to the naturalist/native concept of the land and its creatures
• Criticizes the "discovery" discourse describing the colonization/founding/expansion of America and "frontier" mentality
• Deconstruction of modern concept of the community centered around urban and suburban spaces - return to the wild
• Introductory Note from Turtle Island (1969):
Turtle Island - the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millennia, and reapplied by some of them to "North America" in recent years. Also, an idea found world-wide, of the earth, or cosmos even, sustained by a great turtle or serpent-of-eternity.
A name: that we may see ourselves more accurately on this continent of watersheds and life-communities - plant zones, physiographic provinces, c ulture areas; following natural boundaries. The "U.S.A." and its states and counties are arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here.
The poems speak of place, and the energy-pathways that sustain life. Each living being is a swirl in the flow, a formal turbulence, a "song." The land, the planet itself, is also a living being - at another pace. Anglos, Black people, Chicanos, and others beached up on these shores all share such view at the deepest levels of their old cultural traditions - African, Asian, or European. Hark again to those roots, to see our ancient solidarity, and then to the work of being together on Turtle Island.

15) beatitude/ The Beats
• Tied to St. Francis, love of all things; fostering the unity of people, animals and the environment that we share
• In Beat context, has to do with getting out of an individualist mindset and exploring the universal connectivity of life, living
• Could have to do with the contrast between beatitude (love of life) and downbeat, which can be seen as (one of) the human struggle(s)
16) "...our beautiful but lethal Golden Gate Bridge"
• "Reclaiming San Francisco" p. 121 - Suicide in the City by Ann Garrison. Discusses the Golden Gate Bridge's symbolic appeal as a mechanism for suicide, citing the city's large population of at-risk groups (elderly people, unmarried people, Caucasians and Asians, substance abusers, upper and upper-middle classes and terminally ill) as a possible reason for SF's status as a suicide capital.
• Specific appeal for the bridge attracting these cases could have to do with its symbolic location as mouthpiece to the Pacific, end of the Western frontier, etc.
17) City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, SF
• Bookstore popularized by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, first paperback bookstore in country and backing publisher (City Lights Foundation) for much of the Beat literature
18) "Franciscan" San Francisco
• Referenced in Brechin preface, p. xxxii - most noted as the contrast between St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals and the environment, and Brechin's image of Poe's Maelstrom which sucks in animals and resources from the surrounding waters.
• Highlights the city's idealistic foundation and the ways it now poses an urban dichotomy
• from You Are Here (You Think), p. 138 - "... noting the resemblance of this ultra-urban site to natural landscapes of canyons and gullies replete with migrating falcons." ... make your own connections
19) The concept and role of "metatourists" in "You Are Here (You Think): A San Francisco Bus Tour"
20) legacies of the Beat Generation as portrayed by Nancy J. Peters
21) Bayard Taylor
22) "angelheaded hipsters"

The third line of Alan Ginsberg’s Howl uses the words “angelheaded hipsters”:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…”

23) Timothy W. Drescher's concept of "street subversion"

• Reclaiming SF, p231
• “the political geography of murals and graffiti”

24) "[ ] created a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature. Several phrases and the title of Howl are taken from him."

Jack Kerouac, as featured in the dedications of Alan Ginsberg’s poem, Howl.


25) "Subterranean Homesick Blues"

This is a video by Bob Dylan shown in class in which Dylan holds up cards for the emphasized words in the songs. It is taken from D. A. Pennebaker's film, Dont Look Back (a documentary on Bob Dylan's tour of England in 1965)