In Trip Master Monkey, San Francisco appears on the surface to be a playful place; one where parties and trips, and poetry exchanges occur daily. It looks like a place where, though maybe you are patronized by someone who isn't in the know like Louise, there is still an occasion for games, riffs and, almost most importantly, a chance to condescend.
When viewed beneath the trickster world of our King of the Monkey's we see a San Francisco that is haunted by the tropes and history that bind it together. The text lurches forward in awkward Frankenstein steps because of this very tension. When it's playful it flies by, but when Kingston gets down to the nitty-gritty, psyche-stuff it slows way down. She, or Whitman rather (although in this text it is often hard to see where Whitman's thoughts end and the of the narrator begin), reference Brautigan, Melville, Kerouac, Joyce, Ginsberg and Olson in a way that sounds a lot like despair.
Hollow city, By Rebecca Solnit, represents San Francisco as just that, a city hollowed out. She sees a city that was notorious for its multiculturalism and tolerance that has turned around and co-opted all of the cultures into one cookie-cutter, rich man's culture. An argument against hers could be that this is not a unique occurrence to San Francisco, but that it happens all over the world as things that are seen as counter-culture become absorbed and reformed by the masses. The fact that it happens elsewhere cannot be a reason not to lament the disappearance of a city. Where Ginsberg's "America" was a lament in verse, Hollow City takes the form of a lament in prose.
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