Monkey Freak-Out

Wittman is just weird. He’s definitely an interesting character to say the least. It’s hard to figure out exactly how to describe someone like him. I think Wittman’s true self shows in his crazy monkey freak-out with Nanci. And I think Nanci realizes how insane he is and gets out of there. Wittman goes a little psycho and starts hopping up onto tables and pretending to be a monkey. This would be a disturbing sight, especially to Nanci who has virtually just met Wittman and agrees to go up to his apartment.

Wittman is over-the-top. He’s dramatic and passionate about almost everything he speaks of, often repeating himself and raising his voice as if to emphasize whatever it is he is talking about. He is eccentric and an artist, qualities that can quite often go hand in hand, as is the case with Wittman. He is poet and just might be a bit of his rocker, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t want to be caught in his apartment with him while he reads me his poetry and pretends to be a monkey, tasting and crumpling papers, squatting, pouncing, scratching. He picks at imaginary fleas and springs from chairs to mattresses to chests around his room.

He takes on different personas, like Superman (referring to Nanci as Lois and taking off his glasses) and the King of Monkeys, whoever or whatever that is. Wittman uses these personas to act out as he explains conversation to Nanci.

At one point Nanci even asks him not to freak out and uses the chair for protection against Wittman, as if he will wildly fling himself upon her. Wittman believes he is not freaking out, however, and that he is simply telling the “real truth.”

When Nanci leaves, she tells Wittman that he scares her. And the narrator says, “How fucked up he is.”

What is Wittman Ah Sing’s deal?

Final Paper Proposal

For my final paper, I am going to explore in depth the recurring "theme" of contado. More specifically, I want to focus upon the connectedness of everything in the San Francisco contado and the periphery it extends into from an environmental standpoint. I want to look at the aftermath of mining, logging, and the accumulation of a water supply that is all part of the San Francisco contado, which furthers this theme and begins to construct an understanding of interconnectedness of all things within this contado.
I am interested in this because I think that it is important to understand a dominant city's influence over it's surrounding area. The glory of a city (San Francisco) came at a cost not only for the building materials and the very stuff that was used to erect this great city, but at a cost to nature and the well-being of it's inhabitants and those within the contado. In a sense, the San Francisco contado effects all of us, and we are all connected, making us players each playing a role in the development and urbanization of a city such as San Francisco.
Writers, many of which we have been studying in this course, are playing the role of nature's voice. These writers are speaking for the nature that is being destroyed through the exploitation of its resources and the industrialization of San Francisco. Grey Brechin and Gary Snyder are two writers that are centered around the idea of the contado and it's effect on the environment. I have also read the works of environmentalists such as Richard Tucker, who will help in discussing the influence of environmental destrcution over the surrounding periphery.
Many of these writers migrated to San Francisco, another example of this idea of contado.
Working Thesis: The notion of interconnectedness, as portrayed by the idea of "contado," is most emphasized by the environmental damage that was caused through San Francisco's construction.
Since this proposal, mainly my thesis, is still a work in progress, I am sure to come across certain problems while I dive further into this topic. But for now, I am content with the topic I have chosen and will continue to pursue it.

What is a Dharma Bum?

Jack Kerouac’s character Japhy Ryder (the Gary Snyder representation) coined the term Dharma Bum. While Ray Smith (the Jack Kerouac representation) does not outright explain what exactly a Dharma Bum is, he drops a plethora of small details throughout the story. This is perhaps to say that a Dharma Bum cannot have just one explanation, but rather a collection of definitions and rationalizations.

Most Dharma Bums are religious, the ways of this religious wanderer are taken from Oriental scholars, practices in Zen, Buddhism, and the various mythologies of Japan, China, and India.

Kerouac, or Ray Smith, personifies the term through the use of a Bodhisattva, “meaning ‘great wise being’ or ‘great wise angel’” (Kerouac 12), that ornaments the world with his or her sincerity. This great wise being illustrates truth and the pracitce of kindness, two important values of the Dharma Bum. In the case of Kerouac’s Novel The Dharma Bums, his enlightened, angelic beings were often bohemians, a writer or artist who does not live to the conventions of society.

A so-called Dharma Bum is a “wanderer of the world in search of Truth, the True Meaning, or Dharma, to gain merit and be a Hero in paradise.” Most of this truth is found in observing the world that surrounds a Dharma Bum, and through this realization of what truth is, come inner peace and understanding.

The mindset and mentality of a Dharma Bum is “charity, humility, zeal, tranquility, wisdom, ecstasy.” One main goal of the Dharma Bum is to find happiness in solitude and freedom. Dharma Bums often feel most solitary in nature, where they can feel completely liberated from the confines of society, and achieve an inner happiness.

These wanderers live like bums, divine vagabonds, wearing old, worn-out clothing from secondhand stores like Goodwill. They are filthy dirty, but enlightened Dharma saints. Most outsiders see them as eccentrics, who drink tea, meditate, wander aimlessly through nature, and engage in adventurous sexcapades.

In relation to Jack Kerouac’s original coinage of the terms “Beat” and “beatitude,” a Dharma Bum and a Beat are synonymous with one another. Beatitude, according to Kerouac, meant a state of utmost bliss, the idea that the downtrodden are saintly, thinking in a Buddhist context.
Perhaps Kerouac’s notion of the Dharma Bum is just another type of Beat, a more earthly-centered, rural, religious Beat. Undoubtedly, a Dharma Bum also practices anti-materialism and pacifism just as a Beat would.

Kerouac’s term beatific meant happy and holy, two characteristics that can be fittingly used to describe, in short, a Dharma Bum.

Can many Beats also be classified as Dharma Bums?

Transformation, Anyone?: A Response to Gary Snyder's 'Four Changes'

In Gary Snyder’s A Place in Space, his essay “Four Changes” addresses four of the most prominent American shortcomings, as well as proposes ways to solve them. If I may speak quite frankly, after reading this, I wanted to applaud Snyder. He knows what’s up.

The “four changes” are as follows: population, pollution, consumption, and transformation. Snyder calls for a change, as implied by his essay’s title and his method of addressing these shortcomings. Each of the four changes explains the situation concerning the topic of change, outlines some sort of aspiration to go about changing this situation, and proposes a social and political action that can be taken in order to come to some sort of solution to the problem at hand.

He illustrates the human condition for mankind’s desire to reproduce, pollute, consume, and transform, as if they are all inevitable, but obvious faults of Americans. While he may be generalizing, and stereotyping Americans, what Snyder says is true. Generalizations and stereotypes exist because they are true, granted not everything can be generalized, but most can. His generalizations don’t hinder a seriousness to his essay. He addresses serious issues in today’s society, issues that should be addressed, but aren’t. Snyder should run for president. All this talk of McCain and Obama and blah blah blah… get Snyder in there, he’ll really give us all a trip and who knows, maybe he’s got the sort of mindset to start turning things around in this world. He’ll really show you transformation.

Snyder’s implications for his “four changes,” can be directly applied not just to America as a whole, but on a smaller scale, to San Francisco. San Francisco undoubtedly exceedingly reproduces, pollutes, consumes, and transforms just as the rest of Americans do. But again, as I have mentioned before, San Francisco works as an effective microcosm to the nation within and just beyond its periphery, or contado.

Within the ecological element, Snyder tackles the concept of pollution as a major fault of America. He addresses the problematic situation of pollution: “The human race in the last century has allowed its production and scattering of wastes, by-products, and various chemicals to become excessive. Pollution is directly harming life on the planet—which is to say, ruining the environment for humanity itself…GOAL: Clean air, clean clear-running rivers: the presence of pelican and osprey and gray whale in our lives: salmon and trout in our streams; unmuddied language and good dreams” (Snyder 35). Here, Snyder outlines the problems that pollution is causing to human and animal life on the planet and proposes an eventual goal to reach by the resolution to the problem of pollution. Snyder goes on further to propose the proper action needed in order to solve the pollution problem. He suggests, “effective international legislation banning DDT and other poisons—with no fooling around…DDT and such: don’t use them. Air pollution: fewer cars. Cars pollute the air and one or two people riding lonely in a huge car is an insult to intelligence and the earth. Share rides, legalize hitchhiking…walk more” (36). His writing is somewhat humorous, and perhaps we find it funny because it’s so clearly the truth: it’s-funny-‘cause-it’s-true. He may have a straightforward manner in explaining these changes, like they’re so simple, but are they really that hard in reality? Government just needs to step in, as Snyder notes. It’s as if to say, C’mon people, is it so hard? It’s not rocket science.

All the while, Snyder maintains a poetic element in his essay, and adds to it the effect of a creative re-telling of potentially important political and global issues. He takes serious issues and twists them around where he’s sort-of-kidding-but-sort-of-not; his tone is serious while he addresses it so nonchalantly. These are weighty concerns he deals with, and while he may seem his Zen-self on the outside, he has a much more serious depth to his overlying tone.

We sometimes use humor to convey a much deeper meaning, and I feel this is comparable to Snyder’s approach to identifying and proposing a change for four major issues of American society.

Is this technique of Snyder’s effective in getting across a huge concern? Should other problems be approached this way?

Vote for Snyder.

The Beethoven Monument

The statue was unveiled nearly a century ago, and upon it’s reveal to the world, Golden Gate Park was enlivened by crowds in their Sunday’s best, as a symphony played Ludwig Van Beethoven. The German flag and the American flag covered the statue on this day in August, 1915, and underneath stood a gift from Germany to our nation to celebrate the German-American Alliance. After a brief speech, the flags were pulled off to uncover the Beethoven monument, which still stands to this day.

The statue stands fifteen feet tall and portrays Beethoven with his lion-like hair and intense facial expression, intended to reflect his musical ability. At the base of the granite pedestal, on which a likeness of Beethoven’s head is perched, stands a bronze allegorical figure holding a lyre, personifying the “Genius of Music.” This monument is a work of art created by German sculptor Henry Baerer, who came to the United States in 1854 and has contributed numerous sculptures to the parks of New York, Queens, and San Francisco.

We often erect statues or monuments to commemorate something, whether it be a past historical event, a person, or a celebration of some sort. In this case, it was to commemorate not only Beethoven and his extraordinary musical talent, but the alliance between two countries: Germany and the United States.

It has seen the world around it transform, as San Francisco grew, and is still growing. It has been witness to deaths and births, and the time-tainted transformation upon this world. Today, the bronze of Beethoven’s face is corroding away, a white, powdery residue dripping down his face, strikingly resembling tears on his already expressive face. This is undoubtedly a result of acid rain, “the byproducts of industrial expansion,” as Gray Brechin states in his work titled Imperial San Francisco. And just as the statue has observed the city develop and expand, the city’s growth is leaving its evidence on Beethoven’s face. Rain as acidic as lemon juice is falling from our skies and raining down upon our greatest material commemorations, our grand creations to honor even more grandiose peoples of the past. Somehow, this idea of all our monuments and statues and buildings being destroyed by what we are creating seems so wrong, it’s like a slap in the face to all those artists and to those to whom these monuments mean something. Our obsession with growth and development and urban expansion is proving to be so detrimental, it is corroding granite and bronze and marble. Just imagine what this must be doing to plants and trees and even our own skin. It has to hit close enough to home in order for a big enough change to stop the harm we’re inflicting upon our planet. Maybe if our skin starts corroding away like the metal and rock skins of our idols and heroes, we will find, and bring, change.

It seems these statues, like the Beethoven Monument in San Francisco, are the one static thing in such a rapidly changing imperialistic environment. Our understandings of our intentions for building such monuments seemed to have faded with time, as we regard these statues with reverie only for their face value and their aesthetics. They no longer strike up the feelings within us that they did when the entire city celebrated the unveiling of such significant statues. The statues themselves seem to become forgotten in the corners of our imperial cities, tucked away and ignored. We ignore this beauty, just as we ignore the beauty of our earth by destroying it and letting it be destroyed.

What is it that we have forgotten when looking upon our various commemorations?

When will we learn that enough is enough?

The Contado Connection

It’s been somewhat difficult attempting to connect this idea of “contado” to the works of Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and Brautigan. I hope I’m not alone on this, and maybe I am just speaking for myself.
So, I’m going to start off simply.
According to Gray Brechin in Imperial San Francisco, the world (more specifically San Francisco) is “a duality made of the city and its contado—that is, the territory that the city could…dominate and thus draw upon. The contado provided the city with its food, resources, labor, conscripts, and much of its taxes, while its peoplereceived a marketplace and a degree of protection in return” (xxxi).
Contado offers a notion of connection within the periphery. And this is where I’ve made my connection (pun intended): just as the city was supplied by the contado, these writers are supplied by this contado, and use a periphery to draw upon and act as the foundation of their inspiration, whether it includes the hub of the city or not.
Not only were natural resources used in the making of a great city like San Francisco, but these resources were gathered in places considerably far from the city itself. The city uses its ccontado as a means of builiding itself, of production and development. The gold that was mined plays into the idea of contado by constituting as a major part of the wealth of San Francisco and its elite. But this mining for gold “had caused far more damage than it was worth” (Brechin 59). Lumbermen and farmers themselves were to “blame for muddy streams and flash floods” (51).
So just as the contado was drawn from for construction, the contado is also effected in its destruction. The actions of miners and loggers, farmers and lumbermen, all contributed to the destruction of the environment within the contado. Miners and lumbermen “effectively devastated the mountain range and rivers that drained them” (44). Although they believed the wealth they acquired justified their actions, “fortune could not undo extinction” (26). There was “no thought of the morrow, the destiny of one race meant the holocaust of another” (9).
The pollution caused by such development and large scale efforts had led to the destructrion of national monuments. Acid rain has begun to dissolve these statues and monuments, a doing of the “byproducts of industrtial expansion” (2). Pollution “lodges today in the sediment, fish, and wildlife” (62).

I believe it was Thoreau or Emerson (one of the two) that once said everything on this earth is connected in some way or another.
I was surfing the other morning and suggested that my friend try opening his eyes underwater, because it was clear and the morning light penetrated the water beautifully. His quick refusal was met by my overt outburst of questions: Why not? You won’t just try it once? Afterall, I told him, it was just salt water and our body (especially the fluid in our eyeballs) is composed mainly of salt water. (Why do you think our tears taste salty? I asked him). Another surfer overhead my talk of salt, and paddled over to us, where we sat waiting between sets. I must have talked to this man, a rather intelligent, whimsical older gentleman in his late fifties or so, for about 15 minutes while my friend just listened probably thought we were crazy. But this random stranger and I struck up a conversation about the connection of every living thing on this planet. We dissected our bodies down to the salt water, then to the atoms, to the quarks, everything. And we were all made up of the same elements, created from the same materials billions of years ago at the start of the Universe and our planets, Earth included, where “The Big Bang” theory plays in. (This is where I said it that someone’s point of view would decide the “bonds” of everything, in that depending on what kind of person you are, you either believe in God’s Creation, or The Big Bang. Or both. But even God molded us out of clay. He created us all the same and made us out of the same things). So this common building material of life was shared by every living thing on this planet, offering a relationship between everything, if not just a commonality. This is when I mentioned Thoreua’s saying (or maybe it’s Emerson) that everything is connected. Aren’t we all examples of walking contados?
San Francisco’s connection to the world around it, however big or small this “world” may be, is nonetheless profound. The city’s water supply comes from 160 miles away. This alone is part of the contado idea here, and San Francisco’s periphery extends all the way to Hetch Hetchy.
On a much larger scale, can’t San Francisco’s contado be considered a sort of microcosm of the larger world’s contado, in the sense that everything is connected?

Richard Braughtigan's Trout Fishing in America

I’m not exactly sure I’m following Richard Braughtigan’s whole Trout Fishing in America idea. Sometimes it’s a person (like the old, legless man in the wheelchair), a hotel, or just an idea to represent something that was once abundant and is now gone or going (like the trout populations in streams across the country with the increase of America’s desire for camping and the natural).

I get this notion that this personified and itemized idea of “trout fishing” is something precious, and perhaps is something that meant a lot to Braughtigan, if it wasn’t just some obsession he had and liked to write about. Trout fishing in America works as a kind of symbol throughout the novel.

Braughtigan’s piece on the Cleveland Wrecking Yard and the trout stream for sale was something that Monty Python could do justice to. Braughtigan and the Monty Python cast share a little bit of the same sense of humor. This concept of selling a trout stream and all that comes with it—trees, flowers, bugs, fish, animals, grass, ferns, birds—is farfetched, yet it’s put together and formulated well, almost as if a clean substitution of something else for “trout stream” and “deer” will make complete sense. Braughtigan makes the completely abnormal seem, well, completely normal.

He has a way of telling his story very straightforward, and it flows like an organized stream-of-conscience, made evident by his throwing in of random things here and there. For the most part it all makes sense, but it’s hard to tell why or how, it just does.

I did like the story of the 6^th graders writing Trout Fishing in America across the 1^st graders back, though. It was funny, but still, I’m not exactly sure why. I have yet to discover the deeper meaning, if there is one (I’m assuming there is), behind Braughtigan’s trout fishing theme.

What Braughtigan might be getting at is the commodification of America’s wilderness and the California bush (as illustrated by his piece, A Note on the Camping Craze That Is Currently Sweeping America) in the sense that pieces of America can be bought or sold, whether it be paying for a campsite or selling actual lengths of trout stream. Nature isn’t being appreciated the way it is supposed to be appreciated, so instead Braughtigan uses these creative ways to relay a message about America’s gradual obtainment of what can’t or shouldn’t be physically obtained or owned.

What is Richard Braughtigan's Trout Fishing in America?