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BOHEMIAN_ZERO

                                            January 30, 2019

For some time, I've been bluffing my way around not
quite knowing where the word "bohemeian" came from.

I understood that Bohemia was an eastern
european country, but I also understood that the
term "bohemian" had only a loose connection to
anything having to do with that country...

But the connection is even weaker than I
thought-- evidently people in Paris thought
the Latin Quarter was inhabited by people from
Bohemia (really, I gather they were Romany,
aka "gypsies"), and the artist-types living in     "neogypsy" would've
the cheap district on the left bank got called     made more sense.
"bohemians" by extension.

                                                                [link]
   There's a literary work that put this scene on the
   world stage, Henry Murger's "Scénes de la Vie Bohème",
   often translated as "The Latin Quarter".                       
                                                                  
   This collection of short-pieces was the original source
   for the many and various visions of Bohemia presented
   over the years, including things like the opera "La Boheme"
   (about which I know nothing, and care almost as much)
   but also things like the depiction of the Parisian
   life in "Design For Living".

   And it was clearly the model for Ed Sanders
   "Tales of Beatnik Glory", an old favorite of mine...


                                          BOHEMIAN_GENIUS


      In the early 1860s, Bret Hart started
      publishing a newspaper column, using            SILVER_HEART
      the handle "The Bohemian":
                                                             For a time,
      "For his *Era* columns, which he started writing       the term
      in 1860, he created a new personality for himself      "Bohemian"
      called 'the Bohemian.'  Just as 'Mark Twain'           was synonymous
      enabled Samuel Clemens to scrap his impulses           with "news-
      toward respectability and cultivate a bad-boy          paper man".
      image, the Bohemian enabled a mild-mannered clerk
      to moonlight as a literary vagrant.  The Bohemain
      drifted 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, Ben Tarnoff, "The
      Bohemians" (2014)

          Roughly around the same time (perhaps a little
          earlier?) there was a Bohemian scene in New       Pfaff's opened
          York, centered around Pfaff's in the West         in 1855.
          Village (on Broadway near Bleecker Street).


      In 1872 there was a "Bohemain Club" started in SF
      to carry on the tradition of "the sixties", but to
      pay the bills they eventually went after members with
      money rather than just spirit, and the money quickly
      took over, leading to the oddly named "Bohemian Grove"
      phenomena.

            "By the time Oscar Wilde stopped by in
            1882, the transformation was complete.
            'I never saw so many well-dressed,
            well-fed, business-looking Bohemians
            in my life,' he remarked."  p.252, 
            Ben Tarnoff, "The Bohemains"


          
      There's a book by Clarence E Edwords called   
      "Bohemian San Francisco", which is essentially           
      restaurant reviews from 1914.                 
                         
                    [link]





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