Gary Snyder

  Since I've always been drawn toward the eastern side of things, Gary Snyder resonated with me really well. What I got from his essays was a very "eastern" sense of appreciation for nature, and a disgretion for industrialization.  He had nature, the wild, spirit, art and the imagination as one concept, and then modernization, economic growth, civilization and science as an opposing concept.  His plea was that we let go of all this civilization and rediscover the profundity of being in touch with nature.

  Not only did Snyder preach this, but he also practiced it.  The lifestyle that he described the beat poets living was that of a renunciate: renouncing extra desires and luxuries.  They had the education to get professional jobs, but they chose to disassociate themselves with professionals, the government, or anyone that had to do with the mainstream system.  They lived like bums, with just enough of what they needed, but nothing that they wanted.  It reminded me of a Buddhist wanderer, surviving to write poetry.

  A line that I reallly liked was in "The Yogin..." and he said, "One of the few modes of speech that gives us access to that other yogic or shamanistic view (in which all are one and all are many, and the many are all precious) is poetry or song."  For Snyder, art and imagination are related to the spiritual realm of wildess and chaos that precedes our modern world of organization and logic.

Brechin's Symbols

  In Imperial San Francisco Gray Brechin examines the relationship between metal and nature and how they contributed to the development of San Francisco into an imperial power.  Both cole mining and agriculture are necessary for the birth of an imperial city, Brechin explained.  But the two are psychic opposites.  Cole mining, as an archetype, symbolizes industry, metal, artificiality and Brechin even goes as far as to associate it with death.  He uses many examples of how cole mining emulates death, like how the cole mining industry destroyed central valley.  Agriculture, on the other hand, also represents the creation of industry and commerce, but unlike cole mining, it emulates life and beauty and art wherever it goes.

  To me this dichotomy he laid out was very interesting.  He used cole mining and metal to represent the 'dark' half of the picture, as cole mines were described as 'hell on earth.'  And he used agriculture and nature to represent the 'light' half of things.  He also showed how cole mining laid the foundation for sky-scrapers and more forms of development.

  This dichotomy seems to be a recurring theme for the artists of san Francisco.  It is the same dichotomy as Ferlingetti, Ginsberg and Brautigan described.  It is the opposition between the organic and the artificial, the wild and the controlled, the artist and the industry.

Brautigan's poetry

  Brautigan's poetry is definitely my favorite thing that we've studied so far.  I thought it was beautiful, sexual, and passionate.  I really liked "The beautiful Poem" and "I've never had it done so gently..." and others.  I thought his appreciation for sensuality and beauty was sensational.

  It came up in class whether his poetry was sexist.  Personally, I think that it is not sexist at all.  It is a really unfortunate notion that talking about a woman in a sexual way is "sexist" and "degrading."  In my opinion, thinking that that is sexist, is sexist in itself.  If everytime a woman is sexual we say "That is horrible and demeaning!" then women will be even more ashamed to express their sexuality.  This makes female sexuality even more taboo, even more innapropriate.  I found Brautigan's poetry very empowering to women.  In this book he appreciated his wife so much that it was incredibly touching.  Her sexuality was shown as very powerful, which is not separate from her as a person being powerful.  It seems that in this world we have put women and their sexualities as opposing dichotomies, severed them into two halves.  She is either a person, or a sexuality.  If she is a person she's good, if she is a sexuality she is bad.  Why have we done this?  Why can't we let women be sexually free?  Why can't women be powerful beings and powerful sexual beings all at the same time?

  In my opinion, if this is what we are pointing fingers at in the fight against sexism, we have it all wrong.   We are telling women to fear their sexualities, we're saying, "if you are sexual that will take away from all of your self worth."  In this way we are controlling and regulating the female sexuality instead of letting us embrace and own our own sexualities.

'Trout Fishing in America' and Loss

            In, Trout Fishing in America Brautigan used words “Trout Fishing in America” to mean many things.  Sometimes it was the literal act of trout fishing in America.  But sometimes it was a person, like in “The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America” and in the stories about Trout Fishing in America Shorty.  In another case Trout Fishing in America was a hotel on Columbus and Broadway in San Francisco.  It was also more inanimate things like a disguise. 

A theme that I noticed that tied all these things together was that trout fishing in America always seemed to pertain to some kind of death, loss, or absence (negativity).  One story that I thought was interesting was “Trout Fishing in America Terrorists.”  In this story the sixth graders write “trout fishing in America” on the backs of all the first graders.  It said that it took a little while to get it off the backs of the first-graders, since it was written on their clothes.   However,  “…after a few more days trout fishing in America disappeared altogether…”(40).  This was symbolic to it’s fading to death.

Another example of this is in the two stories about Trout Fishing in America Shorty.  He had no legs because a trout chopped them off, and he was crippled and helpless.  He disappears and then reappears later in the book.

Yet another example is in “Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity”(80).  In this story he finds a diary of a man who has been trout fishing his whole life and never caught a trout.  He tallied up his Total Trout Lost, which equaled 239.  This theme of trout fishing and loss is threaded throughout the whole book.