Into the Wild: Bukowski and Drinking

A few weeks back I wrote on my brother from another mother, that fella from the Midwest too, Monsieur Hemingway.  I particularly loved his letters back to his home and family from Paris, a love of mine that normally leads me to North Beach, of all places.  It ain't Paris.  Hell, it ain't even Italy (but don't tell the wait-staff that--I want them to keepa speakin'-a Italian, ifa you knowa what I mean).  But North Beach manifests in a great cafe culture.  You order a drink or two or cannoli or two and you sit with your book or your journal and you watch the world.  You hope other artists show up.  You hope to overhear a great debate about the writings of Sartre and Camus.  Or, barring all of that, Jo, you snob, you just listen and let the world wash over.

Probably the only disappointing aspect of Charles Bukowski's is something inconsistent with Hemingway--and that's a hatred of baseball.  Bukowski was not a baseball guy.  I can forgive him for it.  I have forgiven him for it about two hundred times since I moved here.  Not everyone likes baseball, after all.  The number one complaint that I've heard is that it's a slow sport.  (Usually the people who say this to me don't watch hockey either, which I would think would be the polar opposite of baseball, but watch football instead, a sport where much of each quarter is spent slamming into each other at the 45-yard-line just trying to get a down.)  Still, I'm trying to be open-minded.  So it's okay that Bukowski likes the ponies instead of sluggers or hurlers.  I'm fine with that.

I found Bukowski's "Sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way" about the same time that I found the Vesuvio Cafe.  But one at a time, gentle reader.

When I first moved to California in 2004 I was unemployed by my own hand as well, and living in Sunnyvale with my roommate, my brother.  My writing cafes were on Murphy Avenue in Sunnyvale and off of Dana in Mountain View.  I would park the car, unpack my HP laptop, and go sit with caffeine for two hours and write emails back to people I missed in Missouri.  On one of those sojourns in Mountain View I wandered around and found a two story bookstore in Mountain View one afternoon, a bookstore I found out was later a California chain called Books, Inc.  (It's still there, by the way.  Yes, I'm just as shocked as you are.)  I wandered around as I normally do with my book selection process, trying to find the best book to leave with, when I picked up the Bukowski volume, read the first page, and knew I was done shopping.  I took Bukowski back to the cafe with me and didn't bother with the laptop.  I just spent two hours reading his gruff, sympathetic voice.

Since buying that book in 2004, I've dabbled in it.  This year I sat down and read him every morning, after finishing my morning pages, one poem at a time, until I was done.  I knew I couldn't keep him, and I knew where I wanted to give him away.

The Vesuvio.

On another trip to Books, Inc (that was lethal stuff, finding that bookstore) in 2004 I came across a book chock full of San Francisco cafes, and I decided that while I didn't want to learn how to park in San Francisco, I did want to learn how to get around there.  North Beach, while a hike from the N-line (I didn't take buses until I moved to San Francisco in 2006), was a favorite.  I loved the beat culture--I had brought "On the Road" with me from Missouri as a part of a small, migrant collection.  Walking up Columbus, I found City Lights Books and one of the cafes in the cafe book that I could write on and cross off the list, Vesuvio.

I know that seasoned San Franciscans will probably disagree with me, but I don't think it would be much of a stretch to call Vesuvio a dive bar.  The space is dark despite a wall of windows, decoupaged from floor to ceiling with any manner and color of coasters, flyers, paraphernalia, and statements.  I walked in, and, miles from home had no desire to get drunk--the only thing I could get without alcohol was coffee or juice.  I went with coffee, a dollar a cup in 2004, and climbed up the narrow stairs to the second floor.  The Vesuvio, in all of it's funkiness, looks out over Jack Kerouac Alley to City Lights and to engraved sidewalk blocks with Ferlinghetti verses stamped in them.  Color, like a coat, is everywhere, and crammed.

I haven't been back since that writing in Vesuvio, until this past Saturday.

Once a year San Francisco has an event called Santa Con, a self-made, city-wide convention of men and women who want to dress up like Santa for a day and go revel in the streets.  There were groups of them at Vesuvio Saturday.  Across from me, completely unrelated to the revels, were two women with a pit bull in the booth with them, talking about the DVD boxed sets available of the Real Housewives and Jersey Shore.

Ah, but in front of me, dear reader, was another scholar, deep in a book, sipping his coffee, and doing his level best.  Level best at what, you ask?  Beats me.  Beat poetry.  Take a beat.  Prop Bukowski against the window.  Write with a vodka cranberry.  Pack up, leave Charles for a hope of a scholar, and walk out into the night.

Just the way Bukowski would have done.

Onward.

That Song by Elton John, or, Litquake

I have been a little out of sorts over the past few weeks, floating just under the surface of a freshwater pond, looking out from under the water to the blue sky above and telling myself to maintain optimism.  I am happiest when I do that, and lately it's been a challenge, particularly with my writing, or the writing world in general.  Folks are lined up, on Twitter, on Facebook, in my Google Reader blog feed, with writing miseries and how I am to expect that the writing world sucks and will never change.

Yet, it's supposed to be worthy of writing about.

Where, I ask myself, holding my breath in the pond, is the hope of being a writer?  If all is screwed, then why make notes?  Why curve off some letters into thoughts?  I needed a Church of Hopeful Optimistic Writers, San Francisco Parish.  I needed a family of fellow scribes from all walks--poets, journalists, novelists, short story writers--to comfort me.  I didn't want the answers.  I just wanted hope.

I have lived in the Bay Area for seven years, and have always wanted to go to Litquake, the Bay Area literary festival held every year in October, but have never been able to go.  The reasons why are no longer important, but finally making there is.  I had my writing groups on Monday and Tuesday nights, an interview on Wednesday morning, and then Thursday came and the reasons for staying away were irrelevant at last.  I reviewed the rest of the week's events and found the following:

Thursday Evening, San Francisco Public Library's Main Branch

• Religious Renegades - Writing about religion in a secular city
• Literature as a Window to Iran - Self-explanatory
• Where News is Headed In the Bay Area - Partnering Technology with Getting the Story Out in the Bay Area

Saturday Afternoon, Z Space in the Mission District

• Short Story Writers Panel - Discussing their craft
• Novelists - Discussing their craft

Saturday Evening, Litcrawl

• Various venues in the Mission
• My destination was 826 Valencia, but they were full up before the "doors" opened, so I headed home

I required only one thing of myself:  to attend with no expectation of what I would hear.  I wanted hope, but if the panels were full of negativity like the internet, then I had the option to head home.  I didn't find what I wanted to see based on preconceived notions, like "Iranian literature...they're all going to talk about American stuff in Tehran," or "Nobody reads short stories, so why listen to the writers?"  None of the world outside of the pond surface came with me.  

By expecting nothing and shelving everyone else's negativity for the day, I found I could come up for air, even get out of the water.  Let me stress again, there were no answers given, no solutions established.  Writing doesn't work that way.  But there was hope in abundance.  One woman had written a novel about Hester Prynne's child, and she was from East India; she spoke of how people asked her at the time of the novel's release, "Are you supposed to be writing that story?"  She too saw the negativity, the giving up of others.  The panel joined her in saying that, given the choice between squashing the external force keeping you from writing and writing the thing everyone feels you have no authority to write, you should go for the thing you have no authority to write.  The others, they all agreed, can sit back there and complain about the world and hold its rules to gospel while you learn to fly.

We're not going to tell you how to fly, mind you, they said.  Just know that you can.  That you have your own answers, no matter "how the world works."

Play ball, and bless you, scribes.  

P.S. - This song is the inspiration of today's post of Life For Rent.  The video is choppy, yes.  I picked it because the lyrics fit for me and the courtesan's character seemed to represent the world above the surface, while the poet sings of hope, a bird insistent to rise out of the pond.  Oh, yeah, and "Moulin Rouge" is my and my brother's favorite Baz Luhrmann movie.  The French subtitles are free of charge.