Click to enlarge
In retrospect, what amazes and flatters me the most is that editor Matt Asprey’s labor of love — an almost complete collection of Jack London’s writings about San Francisco and the Bay Area environs — began with an essay that I wrote in 2003 for an Irish literary journal, Dead Drunk Dublin, titled Ghost Land, a very frank and personal essay about the writer’s life, alcoholism, Heinold’s First and Last Chance saloon, the Oakland waterfront, and, of course, Jack London.
Matt, a creative writing instructor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, came across my essay online while on vacation in San Francisco a couple of years ago (interestingly enough, he was staying at the Green Tortoise youth hostel on Broadway, a mere two doors down from the Golden Eagle Hotel where Lela and I were living in 2007 – a time when I was working on a project for Vesuvio Cafe, The Ragged Promised Land, extrapolating and celebrating Jack Kerouac’s writings about San Francisco and California); Ghost Land, Matt tells me, inspired him to take the BART train across the Bay and visit Heinold’s Saloon in Jack London Square and soon a book was born that I was more than happy to lend my original essay to as a preface and to serve as an editorial mentor of sorts, suggesting selections from Martin Eden and The Sea Wolf, among others (Unbelievably, I was consulting Matt via e-mail and one telephone call during our recent stressful and press-chronicled road to homelessness).
Here is the back cover copy of this beautifully designed volume:
From one of America’s greatest writers, this delightful collection – the first of its kind – contains twenty-three adventurous tales set in the San Francisco area.
If San Francisco has taken hold of the world’s imagination through the hardboiled stories of Dashiell Hammett, the prose and poetry of Jack Kerouac and his fellow Beats, through Orson Welles’ Lady From Shanghai and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, it is as a romantic city of vast suspension bridges and foggy back alleys, not as the tough wild west of Jack London’s day. These stories will transport you to a vanished age. Pre-quake San Francisco was a tough town, and Jack London — hobo, sailor, oyster pirate, hard drinker — was pretty tough, too.
Although most famous for his stories of the Klondike and the Pacific, London wrote extensively about his home town. This collection contains such classic stories as ‘The Apostate’ and ‘South of the Slot’, extracts from John Barleycorn and The Sea-Wolf, and London’s classic eye-witness report of the 1906 Great Earthquake and Fire.
In addition, London’s overlooked 1905 story cycle Tales of the Fish Patrol is included in full.
Between my much-heralded, landmark essay, Running with the Wolves: Jack London, the Cult of Masculinity, and Might is Right (1999, maintained at the Sonoma University Online Collection of Jack London Studies), debunking the long-held theory that London was the pseudonymous radical political writer Ragnar Redbeard, and now this fantastic, much-needed work in London academia, I would say that my name is prety well solidified against the gigantic name of a man who inspired me to become a writer — as I wrote in Ghost Land, it is impossible to grow up in the San Francisco Bay Area and not feel the long shadow of Jack London …
… this book (of which I am immensely proud) is one of those weird accidents that can happen to a writer if you hang in there long enough: you inspire other writers to create works of long-standing value and that is worth far more than the paycheck that you spend hours and days struggling to collect.
The website for the book (Sydney Samizdat Press) is here and the Amazon.com listing — sans description and photos, which is forthcoming in the next few days — can be found here.
And in case you’re wondering … yes, I do have a percentage stake in book sales so purchasing a copy (or two or three, the holidays are just around the corner) will help support a worthy cause.
Thanks, RJ. Your copies are on the way. Cover images are up now at Amazon.com
Congratulations on getting Jack London’s San Francisco Stories back into the light. For an encore you may want to consider Jack London’s reportage on the Russo-Japanese War. Of all London’s many adventures none excited me more than the obstacles he faced and his creative solutions for merely getting to the war zone. Those stories of his passage from Japan to Korea, his odyssey with elements of the Japanese Imperial Army up through the Korean peninsula, etc. are well told and may have inspired some of us San Francisco boys to visit the “Land of the Morning Calm,” even in time of war.
On the other hand, one lollapalooza may be enough for you.
It’s good to see you back on the page, Rodger. I hope you’re feeling better.
You may want to fix the link to Mathew Asprey’s blog.
I just clicked it and it went straight through to the S.F. Stories website, if that’s what you’re talking about.
Such a great idea for a book. It was also reassuring to see the Golden Gate labeled as such, decades before the bridge was there.
Awesome. Ordered.
Thanks, Will, and please let me know what you think; it’s really a terrific book.
In Alameda, across the channel from Jack London Square, we parked our truck so I could work for the general contractor on the adjacent property, A.E. Barnhill. For a time we built tilt-up concrete building for the startups bubbling up in Freemont and the Santa Clara Valley. One evening, when the Bank of America was staying open late, we stopped for a drink in the bar next door before going into the bank to do our business. Chris and I left the bar and hurried along the sidewalk to the bank. Suddenly everything went white. Moments later Chris helped me to my feet. I had landed face down on the curb and stuck my proboscis in the asphalt paving of the street. She handed me a wad of tissues to staunch the flow from my nose and mouth. We did our business at the bank, drawing concerned looks from tellers and other patrons. It wasn’t until we returned to our camp at Work Street, where a mirror was available, that I could view the damage. Where four fairly new porcelain crowns had been—front incisors upper and lower, there were only serrated steel posts. Above those missing crowns was a scabbed nose, no more and no less crooked and crooked than before the fall, but now gashed across the bridge. Both eyes were swollen and darkly bruised. I looked almost as bad as I’d looked the night after a fight with several angry parachutists (they lack a sense of humor). The wounds eventually healed, but the bits of black asphalt remain imbedded to this day. The dental damage was cured by VA oral surgeons who removed my teeth and stumps and steel post and made a full set of dentures.
Today I accompanied our daughter to the dentist. I picked up today’s co-payment tab and I’m suffering more from sticker shock than I did from the fall back in Alameda. Luckily A.J.’s cobra insurance plan—which cost me $1500 in premiums—payed half of the charge for the crowns she got today; but the co-pay still came to $2,235.00. Please watch your step out there, friends.
You’ve probably heard of and/or seen “London House,” the place purported to have been the author’s residence during a 1906 stay here in Los Angeles to purchase livestock. But if not it’s this quirky quaint square three-story space near the Paramount lot on an alley called La Vista Court off Van Ness, a block south of Melrose.
I learned about it when I lived in the neighborhood way back in the ’70s. Haven’t checked it out in a few years.
Hard to tell from the Google Street View ( http://tinyurl.com/2creg4u ), but it’s a unique place. There used to be a large dutch door on the second floor with a block and tackle above it and by the entry hung a bas relief of London and a plaque that read “Jack London Slept Here.”
But that legend isn’t true. The home was built and owned by London’s sculptor friend Finn Frolich, but it was most likely built after London died and the bas relief made and mounted by Frolich in London’s honor.
Yep, that myth about London was deunked many years ago by Lionel Rolfe in his wonderful book, “Literary L.A.”, Will. But I once lived three blocks from a house that Steinbeck lived in for a few years in La Crescenta (the source, once again, was Rolfe’s book on authors who have spent time in L.A.)
Steinbeck lived in Los Angeles? DOOD! I gotta get me a copy of that book! Maybe put together a “LAterary” group bike ride.
Steinbeck lived in a house behind the present day Target in Eagle Rock. He might have stayed down here his whole life, but he was kicked out by his landlord.
The reason he was kicked out was because Steinbeck has so fixed up the place in his first few months of living thre that the landlord himself wanted to live in it. As John and Carol were only a few months down here by that point, they decided to move back to the Monterey peninsula.
BTW, across the street from Steinbeck’s old house is a place that labels itself as “Tortilla Flats”.
FYI Steinbeck’s LA address: 2741 El Roble Drive, Los Angeles, California 90004. Of course, it didn’t have that five digit zip at the time he lived there.
Thanks Joseph. Yeah, I found that Eagle Rock addy while searching through “Steinbeck: A Life in Letters.” My eyes popped out when I saw it was located behind Eagle Rock Plaza because that little section was on my route back when I was a Sparkletts man in the early ’90s. And then my jaw dropped when I Google Streetview’d the place. Turns out the occupants at that address were customers of mine!
That’s quite a coincidence. I went to check it out about fifteen years ago, when I was on a Steinbeck kick. I don’t remember not being on a Steinbeck kick, but sometimes it is more of a kick and other times it is a slow and grudging bending at the knee.
Anyway, around the corner from that place is a home on the hill where a guy sells a bunch of cacti. His whole yard is fill of them, and they are all very carefully arranged as though in a nursery. For me, actually, that place was more memorable, and we found some cacti from there on odd trips to Eagle Rock.
One thing about Steinbeck: some good critics didn’t mention him. Pritchett, who wrote of everyone, didn’t write of him. Gore Vidal is very spotty. I wonder about that. It may be like Deleuze never mentioning Sartre much.
I had another Steinbeck story recently; I have to tell brother Shannon about it. Yesterday I was talking to a woman at the demo counter of Trader Joe’s–I know lots of these, but this one we know well. She’s from Bakersfield, about 60–and she told me that when she was growing up in Bakersfield, The Grapes of Wrath was banned from the school library. And the public library. They had to drive somewhere far to get a copy. And this would be, like, in the 1960′s. Wow.
I have to tell Brother Shannon about it because I gave her The Devils of Bakersfield to read. She was very interested to read it.
Rodger, long time no speak.
I live in the Jack London house now. Lionel is coming to film for a documentary soon, but the myth may not be so; the house was built earlier than 1920. We just unearthed some aerials.
I’m living in John Carradine’s old apartment.
Best,
DL
Well, hello, stranger! Let Lionel know that I am a huge fan of “Literary L.A.” — if I’m not mistaken, he wrote a follow-up or an updated volume to the book?
Will – the “door to nowhere” is still there, as is the hook that Finn used to hoist sculptures in and out of the building. Jack’s bas relief remains.
OMFGHFS! Will the coincidences ever cease? Not only is my jaw now in permanent dropped mode from the news that Donna Lethal actually lives in London House, but then I hop the Intrigue Express over to her blog to find she contributed to “Weird Hollywood” with my friend David Markland whose launch party I missed this week (damndamndamn).
Donna, if you ever have a party at your place and you’re in need of a bike valet or a dish washer or bouncer or coat checker bartender: Will Work For House Tour.
Gee, thanks! Too bad you didn’t make it to the party, because I brought Kitten with me. I think Lionel updated his book; he’ll be over next week or so with a “bunch of books” as promised! My place is too small to have a party, I’m sorry, and my pit bull has taken up permanent residence under Jack’s frieze, which makes for quite a sight. Will, I do need some things done around the house, though, so that’s good to know – and we are going to have a HUGE garage sale soon, so I will keep you posted! I probably shouldn’t post where I live, I have had a stalker for years.
ps. Rodge, you up in SF now? I’ll be there soon.
Boy, you have a lot of catching up to do, Donna. Start here:
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2010/sep/26/hostile-toward-homelessness/
Rodger! My copies arrived (as did a late addition of Rolfe’s “Literary LA”) and they look awesome!
And Donna if by Kitten you mean THE Kitten Natividad? Coincidence No. 46DDD: Some of the fondest memories of that brief stage of my life (hey I was 18!) when I frequented the Body Shop on Sunset were her performances.
Will – who else? Rodger, the last we spoke you were just decamping LA. I was looking at your picture (of the reading) and was hoping you were in SF. Am reading the article now.
Will, I interviewed Kitten on-camera back in 2000 for the documentary “Wadd”. So glad you got the books. Mine just arrived from Create Space this afternoon but I haven’t opened the box yet.
Donna, I decamped from San Francisco in November 2007; there’s a pretty good lit-themed essay about my times in North Beach that I wrote for my column at Pop Matters last year called “Sunday in Kerouac Alley”.