LPPM MMV "Esoteric Language"

[Dave Monroe]

Worshipping at City’s Literary Shrines By JOE EATON
Special to the Planet
By JOE EATON Special to the Planet (08-20-04)

San Francisco has Mark Twain; Oakland has Jack London.
Berkeley has had its share of literary lights as well.
Some—George R. Stewart, who memorably destroyed the
town in Earth Abides; Robert Hass, Maxine Hong
Kingston, Josephine Miles, Ishmael Reed—had, or have,
university connections. The town has also been
hospitable to Beat poets, speculative-fiction writers,
and other non-Establishment types. Heyday Books has an
entire anthology (Berkeley! A Literary Tribute) of
fiction, poetry and memoir set in Berkeley, with
contributors running the gamut from John Kenneth
Galbraith to Thomas Pynchon.
For most of what follows, I’m indebted to Don Herron’s
The Literary World of San Francisco and its Environs
(City Lights, 1985).

Just after writing Howl in 1955, Allen Ginsberg moved
from San Francisco to 1624 Milvia St. in Berkeley, now
the site of a nondescript apartment building. Jack
Kerouac described the cottage that once stood there in
The Dharma Bums, as the home of poet “Alvah Goldbook.”
Shopping for produce in Berkeley inspired Ginsberg to
write “A Supermarket in California,” with its vision
of Walt Whitman “poking among the meats in the
refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.”

At 1943 Berkeley Way, now swallowed by an apartment
complex, Kerouac first saw On the Road in print.
Kerouac’s mother and the legendary Neal Cassady were
there when he opened the package from Viking Press.
Yes, Beat icons had mothers, and Jack Kerouac had a
close, if troubled, relationship with his. 

1325 Arch St., in the hills north of campus, was the
home of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and his second
wife, Theodora Kroeber, author of Ishi in Two Worlds.
Their Bernard Maybeck-designed house is also the
birthplace of their daughter, science fiction and
fantasy writer Ursula K. LeGuin (The Left Hand of
Darkness).

Another genre fiction landmark is Greyhaven, in the
first block of El Camino Real, where Marion Zimmer
Bradley, creator of Darkover, presided over a communal
sanctuary for fantasy writers.

Anthony Boucher (real name William Anthony Parker
White), a key figure in fantasy, science fiction, and
mystery fiction as author and editor, lived in the tan
stucco house at 2805 Ellsworth St., and later on Dana
near Derby. It was Boucher who first introduced the
work of Jorge Luis Borges to American readers, in a
short story he translated for the unlikely venue of
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

Then there’s Philip K. Dick, dubbed “our own homegrown
Borges” by LeGuin. Dick, who moved around a lot, was
at 1126 Francisco St. for a while, in a frame house,
now painted yellow, with a pine tree in front. Long
before Blade Runner and Minority Report became hit
movies, Dick—living hand to mouth—had to subsist on
not-for-human-consumption frozen horsemeat from the
Lucky Dog Pet Shop at 2154 San Pablo Ave. (several
changes of ownership ago). There was talk at one point
of creating a Lucky Dog Award for rising science
fiction writers, but I don’t think this ever got off
the ground. 

http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=08-20-04&storyID=19484

Courtesy o' Google News Alerts ...

http://www.google.com/newsalerts?q=&hl=en

So far, I've got "Pynchon" and "clingfilm" ...

> "Presumably intelligent talk flickered around the
> room with the false brightness of heat lightning:
> in the space of a minute Siegel caught the
> words 'Zen,' 'San Francisco,' and 'Wittgenstein,'
> and felt a mild sense of disappointment, almost as
> if he had expected some esoteric language,
> something out of Albertus Magnus." (MMV, p. 7)

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