Places
Where are the cultural hills? In The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott argues that terrain was one of the main factors that contributed to lengthy existence of anarchists—or, more properly, people who resisted rule by the state. They took to the hills, the forests, where tax collectors, census workers, and military conscriptors found it hard to follow. San Francisco is a famously hilly city, but it was not all of the hills in the city where Forteans concentrated—nor was it hills necessarily. Rather, they took to—or came from—the Bohemian enclaves. Philip Lamantia remembered, “San Francisco was terribly straight-laced and provincial, but at the same time there were these islands of freedom—in North Beach at bars like the Iron Pot and the Black Cat, where intellectuals met to talk. There was a whole underground culture that went unnoticed by the city at large.” These could be found across the region. Most stereotypically, Bay Area Bohemia took root in densely-populated areas rife with multi-family homes, apartments, and residential hotels, such as along Telegraph Hill and its Montgomery Block. What geographer Richard Walker calls the “ecotopian suburbs” were also home to some Bohemians—these are the mock cabins and craftsman houses tucked into hills of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Marin, surrounded by oaks and redwoods and eucalyptus. Although they look natural, these suburbs were built: the coast range of the Bar Area was mostly grass when European settlers arrived, and developers had to create the landscape as well as built the houses, using as their model Yosemite and trying to evoke that valleys romanticism and combine it with mysticism and Masonic ideals. This part of Bay Area Bohemia stretched far south, through San Mateo and to the Monterey Peninsula, where an earlier iteration of Bohemia had taken refuge after the devastation of 1906.
Kenneth MacNichol had been part of that Bohemia of the early 1900s, visiting with the likes of Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) and the doyenne of San Francisco poetry of the early twentieth century, George Sterling (1869-1926). It was here that some of the earliest evidence of MacNichol’s interest in alternative lifestyles appeared. He planned, for example, a trip into the desert where he could study primitive mysticism. (whether he made the trip is unknown.) He also wrote an article extolling the virtues of “New Thought,” and the American metaphysics. Sterling himself would become Clark Ashton Smith’s largest champion. Much later, Henry Miller would take up residence here and become something of a guru to vagabond Bohemians who came to visit, especially conscientious objectors who, released from wartime service or camps, made pilgrimages to his small house. Others of the Forteans lived not here, on the Monterey Peninsula, but still in the ecotopian suburbs: Shipley and de Ford lived in Sausalito until Shipleys death and Garen (1916-2009) and Kirk Drussai (1919-1991) moved between various suburbs south of San Francisco. E. Hoffman Price lived in this general area, too. Anthony Boucher lived in Berkeley.
The multi-family dwellings were especially rich with Forteans. Kenneth MacNichol established his writing school—Pencraft University—at 478 Union on Telegraph Hill. Robert Barbour Johnson also lived on Telegraph Hill. Miriam Allen de Ford relocated to the Ambassador Hotel in the Tenderloin—but not far from the public library. Kenneth Rexroth harnessed much of this Bohemian energy. A veteran of Chicago’s bohemia and New York’s Greenwich Village in 1927, the year that Sterling committed suicide at the Bohemian Grove. Rexroth saw San Francisco as a backwater, untouched by modernism, and so fertile ground for a new kind of approach to the arts and life. He stood against consumerism and, as World War II broke, the permanent war state. He was interested in Orientalism and translated a number of Asian poets. Rexroth established some of the foundational structures of Bay Area Bohemianism. He formed a Libertarian Group which held meetings Wednesdays on San Francisco’s Steiner Street. As many as 200 people might attend these meetings of “philosophical anarchists.” Among the group was Lewis Hill, a pacifist who founded the Pacifica Foundation in 1946 and then KPFA in 1949, the country’s first listener-supported radio station, broadcasting from Berkeley.
What makes these areas the equivalent of Scott’s hills is that the residents were free from the ruling ideology: they could conduct their life with or without regard to scientific developments, as they saw fit. Careers here were not dependent upon science, as they were say around Lawrence Livermore Lab or the defense contractors that spread through the eastern suburbs in the years after World War II. Attention could be focused elsewhere. Henry Miller, for example, had already inveighed against the “air-conditioned nightmare” that America had become before he arrived on the Monterey Peninsula. There, he could live a simpler life, spending his time cutting firewood, painting, and writing. In much of the region, art was a constant topic of conversation. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), who was friendly with those who formed the Berkeley Renaissance, said the local culture in the late forties “required you to have a really thorough grounding in the classics.” And where science was allowed into Bohemian enclaves, it could be twisted and changed to serve other purposes. After Bern Porter left the Manhattan Project, he introduced what he called “sci-art,” the application of scientific techniques to solve problems of art. He imagined, as an example, sci-lit, in which flashes of light would substitute for the alphabet and allow for the creation of new forms of human expression. There is no evidence directly tying Porter to Fort, but he was certainly familiar with Forteans—publisher of Henry Miller, Philip Lamantia and Circle, friendly with George Leite and Kenneth Rexroth. Whatever his degree of interest in Charles Fort, his project was certainly Fortean, taking science away from the scientists and tweaking it to create new realities.
Where are the cultural hills? In The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott argues that terrain was one of the main factors that contributed to lengthy existence of anarchists—or, more properly, people who resisted rule by the state. They took to the hills, the forests, where tax collectors, census workers, and military conscriptors found it hard to follow. San Francisco is a famously hilly city, but it was not all of the hills in the city where Forteans concentrated—nor was it hills necessarily. Rather, they took to—or came from—the Bohemian enclaves. Philip Lamantia remembered, “San Francisco was terribly straight-laced and provincial, but at the same time there were these islands of freedom—in North Beach at bars like the Iron Pot and the Black Cat, where intellectuals met to talk. There was a whole underground culture that went unnoticed by the city at large.” These could be found across the region. Most stereotypically, Bay Area Bohemia took root in densely-populated areas rife with multi-family homes, apartments, and residential hotels, such as along Telegraph Hill and its Montgomery Block. What geographer Richard Walker calls the “ecotopian suburbs” were also home to some Bohemians—these are the mock cabins and craftsman houses tucked into hills of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Marin, surrounded by oaks and redwoods and eucalyptus. Although they look natural, these suburbs were built: the coast range of the Bar Area was mostly grass when European settlers arrived, and developers had to create the landscape as well as built the houses, using as their model Yosemite and trying to evoke that valleys romanticism and combine it with mysticism and Masonic ideals. This part of Bay Area Bohemia stretched far south, through San Mateo and to the Monterey Peninsula, where an earlier iteration of Bohemia had taken refuge after the devastation of 1906.
Kenneth MacNichol had been part of that Bohemia of the early 1900s, visiting with the likes of Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) and the doyenne of San Francisco poetry of the early twentieth century, George Sterling (1869-1926). It was here that some of the earliest evidence of MacNichol’s interest in alternative lifestyles appeared. He planned, for example, a trip into the desert where he could study primitive mysticism. (whether he made the trip is unknown.) He also wrote an article extolling the virtues of “New Thought,” and the American metaphysics. Sterling himself would become Clark Ashton Smith’s largest champion. Much later, Henry Miller would take up residence here and become something of a guru to vagabond Bohemians who came to visit, especially conscientious objectors who, released from wartime service or camps, made pilgrimages to his small house. Others of the Forteans lived not here, on the Monterey Peninsula, but still in the ecotopian suburbs: Shipley and de Ford lived in Sausalito until Shipleys death and Garen (1916-2009) and Kirk Drussai (1919-1991) moved between various suburbs south of San Francisco. E. Hoffman Price lived in this general area, too. Anthony Boucher lived in Berkeley.
The multi-family dwellings were especially rich with Forteans. Kenneth MacNichol established his writing school—Pencraft University—at 478 Union on Telegraph Hill. Robert Barbour Johnson also lived on Telegraph Hill. Miriam Allen de Ford relocated to the Ambassador Hotel in the Tenderloin—but not far from the public library. Kenneth Rexroth harnessed much of this Bohemian energy. A veteran of Chicago’s bohemia and New York’s Greenwich Village in 1927, the year that Sterling committed suicide at the Bohemian Grove. Rexroth saw San Francisco as a backwater, untouched by modernism, and so fertile ground for a new kind of approach to the arts and life. He stood against consumerism and, as World War II broke, the permanent war state. He was interested in Orientalism and translated a number of Asian poets. Rexroth established some of the foundational structures of Bay Area Bohemianism. He formed a Libertarian Group which held meetings Wednesdays on San Francisco’s Steiner Street. As many as 200 people might attend these meetings of “philosophical anarchists.” Among the group was Lewis Hill, a pacifist who founded the Pacifica Foundation in 1946 and then KPFA in 1949, the country’s first listener-supported radio station, broadcasting from Berkeley.
What makes these areas the equivalent of Scott’s hills is that the residents were free from the ruling ideology: they could conduct their life with or without regard to scientific developments, as they saw fit. Careers here were not dependent upon science, as they were say around Lawrence Livermore Lab or the defense contractors that spread through the eastern suburbs in the years after World War II. Attention could be focused elsewhere. Henry Miller, for example, had already inveighed against the “air-conditioned nightmare” that America had become before he arrived on the Monterey Peninsula. There, he could live a simpler life, spending his time cutting firewood, painting, and writing. In much of the region, art was a constant topic of conversation. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), who was friendly with those who formed the Berkeley Renaissance, said the local culture in the late forties “required you to have a really thorough grounding in the classics.” And where science was allowed into Bohemian enclaves, it could be twisted and changed to serve other purposes. After Bern Porter left the Manhattan Project, he introduced what he called “sci-art,” the application of scientific techniques to solve problems of art. He imagined, as an example, sci-lit, in which flashes of light would substitute for the alphabet and allow for the creation of new forms of human expression. There is no evidence directly tying Porter to Fort, but he was certainly familiar with Forteans—publisher of Henry Miller, Philip Lamantia and Circle, friendly with George Leite and Kenneth Rexroth. Whatever his degree of interest in Charles Fort, his project was certainly Fortean, taking science away from the scientists and tweaking it to create new realities.
