San Francisco bound!!

We're heading out to San Francisco in a few days, so what am I thinking about? Cioppino? Alcatraz? Hippies? No - I've been thinking about San Francisco books. I'm mostly familiar with the Beats, of course - my novel Jack's Boys is about the children of a washed-up Beat wanna-be. But many of the Beats of the San Francisco scene were East coasters - Jack Kerouac grew up in Massachusetts, and Allen Ginsburg was from Newark. Even Lawrence Ferlinghetti, publisher and proprietor of legendary bookstore City Lights, is from New York City. Ferlinghetti's own book, Coney Island of the Mind, is another milestone of the era - here's a sample that shows his lushness, detail, imagination, and the containment of entrenched, borderline despair that defines much of the Beat sensibility. He's also 92 years old, still living in San Francisco, and his City Lights bookstore is still going strong.  We plan to visit, so I'll let you know if I run into him.

After that, my San Francisco author intelligence is woefully lacking. My only attempts to rectify this situation was to get a copy of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op out of the library and read the first story, The Tenth Clew. (A clew, by the way, is a clue. Apparently Hammett doesn't get modernized spelling.) This is a neat little story about the nameless Continental Op, a private detective for the Continental detective agency, and his involvement in the murder of a wealthy man that's been set up to look like revenge from a mysterious Frenchman. All the clews are revealed to be a deception, however, and the Continental Op nearly ends up drowning in the San Francisco Bay before uncovering the truth. If you like mysteries, Hammett's are one of the sources from which all modern mysteries flow, and are well worth checking out.

Other writers in the exceptionally vibrant and Ramberg-ignored San Francisco literary scene include Armistad Maupin, Dave Eggers, Philip K. Dick, and Amy Tan. I'm not sure what I'll be doing for blogging over the vacation but hope to stay in touch.