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                                               January 27, 2019
  Ben Tarnoff,
  "The Bohemians" (2014)

  subtitle:

  Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers
  who Reinvented American Literature

  Mark Twain is the most famous
  product of this scene, though        "Harte led the charge.  He ...
  much more central was Bret Harte.    staked out a literary region as rich
                                       as any riverbed.  For his [Golden
    Two other writers                  Era] columns, which he started
    Tarnoff singles out:               writing in 1860, he created a new
                                       personality for himself called 'the
      Ina Coolbrith                    Bohemian.'  ... The Bohemain drifted
      Charles Warren Stoddard          through the city, visiting fairs,
                                       balls, theaters, hotels-- anywhere
                                       the 'street music' played at a lusty
                                       pitch.  In unsparing ironic prose,
                                       he showed Californias to be sillier,
                                       stupider, and generally more human
                                       than they considered themselves." p.42

  Ina Coolbrith was a woman
  who got kicked out of the
  housewife-and-mother
  business early on, going         "In 1865 she was twenty-four.  Instead of
  through a divorce in LA and      'mending husband's stockings,' she rode the
  landing in SF as a single        streetcar to the end of the line and
  woman working as a teacher       strolled along the sand at North Beach, not
  and writer.                      far from where Jessie Benton Frèmont once
                                   lived on Black Point."  p.98


  Charles Warren Stoddard was a
  homosexual man-- back before it
  was cool-- who had aquired a
  fascination with the Tropics early    "Like Paul Gauguin three decades
  on.  His story includes bombing       later, Stoddard saw the Pacific
  out of school in Oakland and          Islands as a refuge from
  scoring a trip to Hawaii ("the        civiliztion.  He considered the
  Sandwich Islands") and having a       people primitive, unembarrassed by
  homosexual affair with one of the     their sexuality, uncontaminated by
  locals.                               the shame that weighed so heavily on
                                        him."  p.92-93

                                        In 1873, Stoddard published "South-
                                        Sea Idyls",

                                        "... his comic chronicle of the
                                        Pacific Islands.  It was the best
                                        thing he ever wrote, and it brought
                                        him his first national fame." p.249


       Bret Harte is not someone I've ever taken
       very seriously-- I guess I had him filed
       away in the same box as Zane Gray as an
       early author of Westerns.  Looking at a
       few of his short-stories now, I don't
       think that's far wrong, except that he
       clearly has a darker edge to his writing
       than I remembered-- he's more of a
       predecessor of Cormac McCarthy than, say,
       Max Brand.


          There doesn't seem to be much in the way of
          social or artisitc innovation that can be
          attributed to this bohemian society of
          post-gold rush San Francisco.

          The one thing that it can solidly lay claim
          to is its adoption of the culture of the
          California mining camps as a subject of
          fiction-- the "breakthroughs" being Twain's    San Francisco was
          "Jumping Frog" (1865) and Harte's "Roaring     also the setting of
          Camp" of (1868).                               Mark Twain's first
                                                         one-man show in 1865.


             "... The use of vernacular led later writers to take a
             deeper interest in dialect, in how English evolved
             in different corners of the country.  The use of frontier
             humor disrupted the distinction between high and low,
             and unleashed the imaginative possibilites of popular art.
             These innovations helped pry American literature away
             from its provincial origins in New England and push it
             into a broader current ... "   p255


San Francisco's literary efforts                             ANTIAMERICAN
walked the boundary between:
                                           19th century American writers
   the eastern establishment               had to sell themselves to
   vs. the new western frontier            Europeans as primitive wild
                                           men living out beyond the
   the civilized urban                     boundary of civilization.
   vs. the rough, rural
                                                  Kind of like gangsta rap
   and north vs. south                            for the suburban kids.

There's an evident tension between                BEING_REAL_BEING_KNOWN
two poles-- though more accurately
it was a set of tensions between
multiple divisions.  The directions
only line up into a simple duality          DUALISM_TRAP
roughly at best, and only sometimes.

                               OUTCROPPED





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