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Rexroth’s San Francisco
Columns from the San Francisco
Examiner (1960-1967)
and San Francisco Magazine (1968-1975)
Introduction
January-July 1960
Here I Am
A Night Out in the City
Beckett and Ionesco
In Praise of Amateur Shakespeare
The Civil Rights Sit-ins
Poets in the News
Kabuki Theater
The Popularity of Poetry
August-December 1960
The Tao of Fishing
Riding in the Mountains
Art of Grace and Modesty
Why I Like Opera
Why I Don’t Like Jazz Festivals
Aida and Ornette Coleman
Matters of Taste
The Greatest Fiction
Christmas
1961
Pacifica Radio KPFA
Hemingway
1962
Reveling in Cultural Diversity
Golden Gate Park
The Persistence of Pseudoscience
Last Stand of la Vie
Méditerranée
In Praise of Live Music
1963
The Film Elektra
By the Waterfall
Performing in the Parks
The Chinese Theater
Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary
1964
H.L. Mencken
Ralph Stackpole and the Coit Tower Murals
Tom Jones and The Ginger Man
Charles Mingus
Greeks and Buddhists in Afghanistan
The Harlem Riots
Wonder and Meditation in the Sierras
Mysticism, Ethical and Chemical
Wagnerian Tartuffery
1965
The Mafia Invasion of North Beach
Proposals for Chinatown
Bob Dylan
Cowboy Diplomacy
The Strategy of Peace
Wine — French versus Californian
After the Watts Riot
The Quiet Center
Poetry on Record
Voices Outside the Inn
January-September 1966
The Subculture Facing Armageddon
Environmental Blitzkrieg
Urban Alienation Renewal
Marijuana
Lively Arts versus TV Culture
Marxism and the Persistence of Alienation
The International Cultural Revolution
What Is Immoral?
Camouflaging the Rape of the Environment
September 1966-June 1967 (trip
around the world)
What I Will Miss in San Francisco
Wandering the Streets of London
The Provos of Amsterdam
Bolshevism as State Capitalism
The Arts of Finland
Tintoretto and the Painters of Venice
Buddhism and Hinduism in India
Thai Buddhism
1968-1969
The May Revolt in France
The Ecological Point of No Return
Radical Movements on the Defensive
The Ecological Revolution
1970-1972
Women’s Liberation
Architecture and Religion
1973-1974
Old Chinatown
Bohemian San Francisco Between the Wars
Organized Vice, Then and Now
1975
The San Francisco Renaissance
The Beat Era
Haight-Ashbury and the Sixties
The New Rock Music
End of a Golden Age
In early 1960 the San Francisco Examiner (a Hearst
newspaper) offered Kenneth
Rexroth a job writing a weekly column. He accepted. By May 1961 the column had proved popular enough
that he was asked to do two and sometimes even three per week.
The association was an odd one. Although Rexroth was by that time a
well-known figure in the Bay Area,
he was known primarily as a political and cultural radical,
and even (somewhat misleadingly) as “the godfather of the Beat Generation.” But
he was willing to work for
the Examiner as long as
they gave him complete freedom to
write whatever
he wanted. They did so until mid-1967, when they fired him after he
wrote a particularly
scathing article on the American police. He then shifted to the
San
Francisco Bay Guardian (1967-1972) and San Francisco Magazine
(1967-1975).
Altogether he wrote over 800 columns for those three publications. I’ve
read them all with interest and often with
astonishment at his detailed practical knowledge of so many
facets of life. But many
of them
are inevitably ephemeral and would be of limited
interest to present-day readers. For this online selection I
have chosen about a tenth of them which I think
retain some contemporary relevance or offer
intriguing glimpses of earlier days.
His Examiner columns often appeared on the same page
with reactionary columns by people
such as Barry Goldwater and reactionary editorials by
the owner, William Randolph Hearst Jr.
This strange and challenging context often makes for lively reading. Somehow
Rexroth manages to convey
unconventional and at times even rather subtle ideas to ordinary readers with
only the slightest modification of the style he used when addressing more hip or
radical or sophisticated audiences.
Nevertheless, such columns could hardly be expected
to be as consistently excellent as
his more carefully composed works.
He himself considered them
primarily as a job to help pay the rent while he did other writing that he
took more seriously. They were usually dashed off at
the last minute, and the Examiner did not always do a
very careful job of proofreading them.
I have silently corrected obvious typos,
added an occasional comma that seems to be necessary to make the
sense clear, and taken the liberty
of composing new titles (the
original titles were composed by Examiner editors
and often do not give a very good idea of what Rexroth is actually talking about).
Footnotes and bracketed comments are mine. Omissions
are indicated by bracketed ellipses:
[...].
For the moment I have not included any of the Bay Guardian
columns, which tended to be almost exclusively and
depressingly “political” in the most narrow and quickly
dated sense (specific denunciations of LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, and
countless lesser politicians and officials who are now largely forgotten).
If sufficient interest is shown, I may
eventually post
a more extensive selection that
will include such articles. But personally I find his
more modest and “positive” efforts to
encourage participatory communitarian tendencies, and his
accounts of how he himself deals with the day-to-day problems and possibilities
of life, more enduringly interesting than
his
repetitive grumblings about how everything is going down the tubes,
which he tended to get increasingly into in the
late sixties and early seventies.
This selection is substantially the same one that I
proposed to several publishers in 1985. At that time none were sufficiently interested, and I
put the project on the shelf. I still think it would make a nice and probably
reasonably popular book (ironically, there is a very attractive, profusely
illustrated French edition of these same columns).
But meanwhile, while we’re waiting for American publishers to
take interest in the vast, scarcely tapped trove of unpublished Rexroth writings, the
advent of the Web has made it possible to make such material generally
accessible without worrying about printing costs or potential sales.
In my little book The Relevance of
Rexroth I have presented my own views on Rexroth
(including criticisms of some of the views he expresses in these columns).
Here, as in the other Rexroth writings posted at this
website, I have let him speak for himself.
I think you’ll find him both entertaining and instructive, and maybe even
inspiring.
Ken Knabb
May 2002
Rexroth’s
San Francisco (columns from the San Francisco Examiner and
San Francisco magazine). Copyright
1960-1975 Kenneth Rexroth. Reproduced here by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth
Trust.
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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