BOOKPATHS

Stevenson House, 530 Houston Street, Monterey, California, U.S.

The adobe where Robert Louis Stevenson stayed while courting Fanny Osbourne is now part of Monterey State Historic Park.  Stevenson memorabilia is on display, including furniture, first edition books, manuscripts, and personal belongings of the author.  The Stevenson House is open 1:30-4:00 p.m. Sunday to Wednesday and 1:00-4:00 p.m. Saturday; the garden is open daily.  Guided tours, however, are currently canceled due to state budget cutbacks.

(Photograph from California State Parks website.)

San Francisco, California, U.S.

Bruce Weber reports on San Francisco’s Litquake.

It was, over all, a pep rally, an emblem really of the school spirit that San Francisco literary life has established in the last decade or so. And though the city has a venerable history in letters, the community of writers has never been as, well, communitylike as it is today. Like the thriving theater culture in Chicago, which coalesced around a few key companies and created an important center for the art form without becoming a rival to New York City as a center for theater commerce, so San Francisco’s writers have come to recognize and trumpet the idea that this city prizes their craft, its solitary difficulty and what can emerge from it, even though there isn’t much of a publishing industry here. – from “In Praise of Amy Tan and San Francisco’s Literary Life,” by Bruce Weber, The New York Times

Point Lobos; Big Sur Coast, California, U.S.

See the “California Coast through Edward Weston’s Lens.”

From moody sunsets to crashing waves, Kim Weston…tells the stories behind his grandfather’s eerily beautiful images of Point Lobos and Big Sur.  Edward, the famed photographer, captured the area for almost 20 years until his death in 1959. – from The New York Times

The American Bookbinders Museum, San Francisco, California

Sam Whiting visits Tim James, the “founder, financier, curator, display builder and text writer,” of The American Bookbinders Museum.

The concept is that bookbinderies for hundreds of years looked like little shops," James, 57, says, opening the door to his own little shop of a museum, which is marked by a sandwich board on Harrison Street at 16th. Inside are nine nonelectric pieces of equipment made of wood and metal and resembling antediluvian torture devices. – from “Bookbinder Opens Working Museum in S.F.,” by Sam Whiting, San Francisco Chronicle

The American Bookbinders Museum Website

Oakland, California, U.S.

Blues City: a Walk in Oakland, by Ishmael Reed (New York:  Crown Journeys, 2003)

In Blues City, Ishmael Reed invites readers to join him on his explorations of Oakland, the city he calls home.  Readers follow Reed on walking tours, to parades and other events, into historic buildings, restaurants, businesses, all reflecting the many cultures that enrich this city.  But, while Reed celebrates Oakland, he also expresses anger at the politics behind its increasing development and gentrification. By book’s end, readers share with Reed both the hope and sadness he feels as he walks the streets of “blues city.”

Before writing this book, my knowledge of Oakland was like that of the early astronomers of the universe.  The universe was a small neighborhood of my concerns, and I had very little knowledge of the goings-on outside of the center of the block on which I live.  My routine usually took me to the university and, perhaps three times a week, for walks around the Emeryville marina, from where I could gaze out on the bay and on clear days see Alcatraz and the ocean beyond the Golden Gate Bridge.  In fact I live on the border between Oakland and Emeryville, and my post office is located in Emeryville, a booming city where gambling is legal.  If I hadn’t written this book, I would not have become acquainted with Oakland’s many worlds.  Nor would I have met the many volunteers, the true heroes and heroines of the city who strive to keep the heritage of Oakland alive in the face of fierce and often malevolent forces of development. – from Blues City: a Walk in Oakland, by Ishmael Reed

Publisher’s Website

Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, California, U.S.

“Today, the Contemporary Jewish Museum opens a retrospective of over 100 works by children's book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, including rare and original pieces from his 1963 classic Where the Wild Things Are, the book about an angry boy named Max whose mom sends him to bed without dinner (San Francisco Chronicle).”  The exhibition, “There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak,” runs through January 19, 2010.

Big Sur, California, U.S.

Scott Timberg follows “Robinson Jeffers’ poetic path in Big Sur.”

But before the arrival of $120 prix fixe dinners, before the human potential movement was founded at the Esalen Institute, Big Sur was associated with one of America's most austere and, for a while, famous artists. He settled just north of the coastal stretch, in a foggy, barely inhabited area he loved for its remoteness. And even when Robinson Jeffers became so celebrated that he landed on the cover of Time magazine for his poems about hawks, stallions, sex and imperial decline, he kept working on his poetry and on the rough stone tower he built himself. – from “Following Robinson Jeffers’ Poetic Path in Big Sur,” by Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times

Fresno, California, U.S.

My Name is Aram, by William Saroyan (London: Capuchin Classics, reprint 2009; and various other editions)

The short stories in My Name is Aram transport readers to Fresno, “from the year 1915 to the year 1925,” as they follow the experiences of Aram Garoghlanian, of Armenian descent, beginning at age nine and concluding with his leaving town as a young man.  Published in 1940, William Saroyan pulled from his own memories of his native town to write his classic work.

As for the world at Fresno, California, if some of it is gone, so is some of the writer’s youthful impatience with it.  It was, as a matter of fact, and probably still is, as good a town as any in the world for a writer to be born into, being neither too large nor too small, too urban or too rural, too progressive or too backward, too athletic or too lame, too intelligent or too stupid, too arid or too lush, but in all these things, as well as in all others, and in several unknown anywhere else in the world, so delicately, so nicely, and so delightfully balanced as to give the spirit of the growing writer almost exactly the right proportions of severity and warmth, and firmness and flexibility;  the mind a critical and yet compassionate understanding; and the impulse to write an abundance of material by nature so rich in the elements of comedy as to require little or no labor to select and chronicle.  Consequently, the writing of this book, more than the writing of any of the writer’s other books, has been without effort, strain, or any of the other kinds of wretchedness said to be experienced by writers as eager, if not more eager than this writer to send a message down the ages, as the saying is.  On the contrary, the writer simply wrote the words while his spirit enjoyed their meaning. – from “Note,” My Name is Aram, by William Saroyan

Related Websites

Publisher’s Website

William Saroyan Foundation

William Saroyan Collections, Fresno County Public Library

San Francisco, California, U.S.

Tania Ketenjian visits with Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books.

City Lights is more than just a bookstore, it is a place of pilgrimage. In the 1950s, tour buses would stop in front of it so that people could get a glimpse of real 'beatniks'. It was here that Allen Ginsberg’s 'Howl' first appeared, changing the landscape of poetry and publishing. City Lights was the first all-paperback book store in the country and it was dedicated to selling banned books. Its early publications of poetry have become classics — from Frank O'Hara’s 'Lunch Poems' to Gregory Corso’s 'Gasoline'. And Ferlinghetti, who turned 90 earlier this year, is the man behind it all. – from “City Lights Books, the Shop Where Beat Was Born,” by Tania Ketenjian, The Times

Big Sur, California, U.S.

Not Man Apart: Lines from Robinson Jeffers, photographs of the Big Sur Coast; David Brower, editor (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club, 1965; out of print, but available)

Reading lines from the poetry of Robinson Jeffers while looking at the stunning photographs by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Philip Hyde, Steve Crouch, and others, pulls you into the Big Sur landscape, amazing you with its beauty, while inspiring you to care for this extraordinary coastline. Not Man Apart was one in a “series” of exceptional exhibition books published by the Sierra Club.

No one reading Jeffers can escape the impress of the untamed Pacific environment upon which he brooded.  He was its most powerful embodiment – an incarnation of the spirit of place so intense as to epitomize Lawrence’s demand that there be no deflection between the poet and what he expresses.  Jeffers’ peculiarly distinctive style, developed by degrees from the unpromising conventional prosody of his youth, has the roll of surf and the jaggardness of rocks about it.  Something utterly wild had crept into his mind and marked his features.  I cannot imagine him as having arisen unchanged in another countryside.  The sea-beaten coast, the fierce freedom of its hunting hawks, possessed and spoke through him.  It was one of the most uncanny and complete relationships between a man and his natural background that I know in literature.  It tells us something of the power of the western landscape here at the world’s end where the last of the American dream turned inward upon itself. – from “Foreword,” by Loren Eisley, Not Man Apart

Related Websites

David Brower Center, Berkeley

Sierra Club

Big Sur Land Trust

Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation