Ah, Bartleby. Ah, Humanity.

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.

“We are now in the midst of the egg season, and the Egg Company and the Light Keepers are at war.”

The Farallon Islands sit just 27 miles west of the Golden Gate, but they seem a world apart from the high-rises and trolley cars that have come to define San Francisco. The seven main islands jut up from a jagged eight-mile underwater ridge and are anything but inviting. With constantly rough seas and tumultuous weather the Islands have been nicknamed the "Devil's Teeth" by sailors. Not to mention the fact that the Farallones are the western most tip of the Red Triangle, a swath of ocean that has had the highest amount of Great White shark attacks in the world. A single day in October of 2006 the scientific group called Tagging of Pelagic Predators (TOPP) photographed no less than 40 different white sharks around Southeast Farallon. 

But despite these harshest of conditions the Islands haven't managed to escape the imperial contado of San Francisco. In 1853 a lighthouse was constructed on Southeast Farallon, the largest and only inhabitable island, in order to facilitate easy access to and from the San Francisco Bay for the thousands that poured in each year in search of gold. The islands, though they didn't contain gold, were home to thousands of small seabirds called Murres. The bird's eggs were pilfered by San Franciscans and brought back to the city to sell, a dozen could bring a dollar to the egg-picker and during the peak months of May and June the Islands yielded 500,000 eggs a month. However, once the lighthouse keepers, realizing that there was money to be made, started to collect eggs themselves, a full-on egg war commenced. Men were killed (only two) and the bird population was decimated. Finally in 1881 the government claimed sole ownership of the island and declared egg collecting illegal.

The egg-collecting combined with the threat of oil spills from San Francisco's shipping lanes spurred President Theodore Roosevelt to sign Executive Order No. 1043 in 1909, creating the Farallon Reservation which protected the northern islands in the chain. 

But all was not said and done for the Farallones and the exploitation practiced by San Francisco. From 1946 to 1970 the waters around the Farallones were used as a dumping site for radioactive waste. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that around 47,500 containers, each one a steel drum holding 55 gallons of nuclear waste, were dumped near the Farallones. It is amazing that the White Sharks and the five species of pinnipeds, some 10,000 individuals, have survived this environmental destruction. The primary military agency which used the dumping site was the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in San Francisco.

Scientists from PRBO Conservation Science, a Petaluma, CA based organization (Petaluma is a city that is itself nestled comfortably in the San Francisco contado, being just a short trip up the 101) have been on the island every day since 1968. In 1969 all the islands became protected when they became a National Wildlife refuge. In 1970 the United States terminated all radioactive waste dumping.

For more information check out Thayer Walker's article in The Surfer's Journal "Over the Deep: Mind-Surfing and Research at the Farallones"

or

http://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=100

or

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

What will you do when you get lonely and nobody's waiting by your side? Yeah, Clapton said it, but before him was Hemingway and Brautigan. In Big Two Hearted River Nick Adams returns to nature and fishing, the things he has known intimately since he was a boy, in an attempt to resuscitate himself from post traumatic stress from the War. He relies on the tranquility and pace of the river to heal himself from atrocity. 

"He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it," (Hemingway, 167).

There is a romantic sense of the pastoral in the two-part short story, with the river and the woods as a place to return to whenever one needs it. When one is compelled, by the rigors of society and civilization, to escape, it is there waiting, the river and the trout.

Professor Wilson touched on how Brautigan, in a post-Hemingway flower-power era, sees the co-opting of nature, and the privitization of former wilderness as a spin-off of the Hemingway pastoral ideal. He highlighted the packaged and sold form of nature as seen through The Cleveland Wrecking Yard in which a trout stream is no longer part of "a long undulating country with frequent rises and descents, sandy underfoot" (Hemigway, 165) as it is for Nick, but as something "stacked in piles of various lengths...there was a loudspeaker," (Brautigan, 106-7). The serene is fragmented and distorted by technology and profit-above-al-else capitalism. Professor Wilson seemed to stop short, for what are the consequences of a society that has bought and sold its wilderness? 

For one it's a society bereft of animals (all bought up, sorry) but it also seems like a society in which the opportunity for healing is gone. Take Nick Adams. Had he gone to rehabilitate in the river and found pieces and piles of a fabricated stream his chances of salvation would dry up. Or, take parts one and two of Brautigan's Knock on Wood, in which streams and waterfalls are houses and flights of stairs. The child, in a moment of youthful exuberance, becomes determined to fish a creek he has seen from a distance. 

In the end it is only a flight of stairs. In stark contrast with Nick, who doesn't need a map and judges his location by the sun and the position of the river, this kid needs to knock on wood to make sure that it's not a stream.

The real meat of the story comes in The Reply of Trout Fishing in America, "There was nothing I could do. I couldn't change a flight of stairs into a creek." As if to say, it's too late, there is no return to the big two hearted river of the pastoral. You had better do as the child does, and be your own trout, because emancipation from the demons within and without can no longer be found along the banks of any river. We had all better knock on wood that we can (again, thanks Clapton) make the best of the situation, before we finally go insane.

Ferlinghetti

The old men are waiting/ for it to be finished/ for their glorious sentence on earth/ to be finished.

Ferlinghetti writes of the disappearance of his San Francisco in "The Old Italians Dying"; the disappearance of the international place, with its many faces, facets and quirks that he winds his poetry through. Throughout his collection of San Francisco Poems Ferlinghetti heralds San Francisco as a place apart, a place where things are possible like nowhere else. Not only are the old Italians dying, but Ferlinghetti's San Francisco in dying.

Ferlinghetti moves from the panoramic to the individual.  We begin with a wide angle view of "all over America" and  zoom inwards to "Washington Square", then further to "Washington Square San Francisco", then to the "Church of Peter & Paul" and finally to the "old men who are still alive." This locates the reader in a specific place and with a specific group of people who are witnessing the passing of an era, of a generation. Although the poem references Italians dying all over America, the ones who seem to matter are the ones in San Francisco, and this zoom effect highlights the specific locality.

Dante's Paradiso is  referenced twice, each time as something that is unfinished; an unfinished phrase, or an unfinished story. San Francisco, he seems to be saying, had all of this potential, and like Dante's vision of heaven, it could conform to everyone's personal vision of a perfect city. Yet its potential went unrealized.

Now with the passing of one of the components that made it such a wonderful city, perhaps Ferlinghetti is one of the Italians "still alive on the benches/watch[ing] it all with their hats on". They seem to be waiting for the realization of their Paradiso with the full knowledge that it won't ever come. 

The poem leaves us with a dark image of a "black boat without sails," something potentially beautiful, but incomplete and bare. The image of San Francisco moves from a city of dreams--a city of and with a future--to a city that was.