Photos of Paul Kantner, Jack Sarfatti and Gregory Corso in North Beach by David Gladstone.
"I love this book! It is a fascinating and hilarious magical mystery tour of that unmapped land called Bohemia." writes Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides.
Herbert Gold is a distinguished author and journalist in San Francisco. He has just published a history of Bohemia (Simon and Schuster, March 1993) that will appeal to both cultures literary and scientific. Gold has joined company with John Updike whose books, The Witches of Eastwick and Roger's Version explain the "New Physics" better to the public than Hawking's editors did in the over-hyped Brief History of Time,which has now been turned into an under-whelming interactive CD ROM peddled by Scientific American. It's not a Big Bang for the buck! :-)
I first met Herb Gold when I was an 18 year old physics major at Cornell. Tom Pynchon was in some of my classes. Gold was filling in for Valdimir Nabokov who was off writing the screenplay for Lolita. Herb introduced me to European literature (Dostoyevski, Goethe's Faust, Tolstoy, Proust). I would see him outside of class either in Willard Straight Hall or in Noyes Lodge where Kirk Sale, Richard Farina, Peter Yarrow, Tom Pynchon and other emerging literati and people of talent would gather.
Curiously enough, Noyes Hall was given to Cornell by the grandfather of my future Grand Passion "S" of six years. Her grandfather on her mother's side was Rudyard Kipling's close friend and a partner of Railway Baron, E.H. Harriman. The entire story is to be found in the book, EDIE, by George Plimpton, editor of the Aga Kahn's Paris Review and Jean Stein, heiress to the MCA super-fortune left by her father, Jules Stein. Even more remarkable is the fact that S's paternal grandfather wrote an essay in 1908 that anticipates the New Physics in which the Future causes the Past. Herb Gold explains all this in Chapter One of his book fitting me into the Bohemia of Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso (shown in David Gladstone's photo sleeping in my North Beach flat), and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in that sizzling cauldron of creativity that is San Francisco's North Beach. Gold connects North Beach of the latter 20th century to the Bohemia of Vienna Paris, London and Greenwich Village of years gone bye. Gold's richness of prose is a joy to read.
Gold's book should be made into a docu-drama especially since I am featured in it, and as I am an unabashed publicity hound : -) a would be Movie Star! My name in lights on Broadway! "Oy! Oy! Oy! Zeta Beta Toy, Vat did ya do to my little Yiddish Boy?" False modesty is not one of my vices! Actually, I have no vices. Yiddish Vaudeville would have been for me, were it not dead and were I not waspified by the Cornell Savoyards in my tender years when I first met Herb at Telluride House in the Groves of Academe in 1957. It was in Ithaca with Herb Gold that the imprint of the Penelope archetype was made on my Wandering Jewish Soul that appeared in my future liaisons with several Amazon Women who run with Wolves -- and bite like them too!
I went to Midwood High School in Flatbush in the 50's as did Woody Allen. I was exposed to some of the same influences that nurtured his comedic genius.
My appearance on Gold's stage is in the very beginning (pp.14-17) "Protocols of the Elders of Bohemia". A play on Protocols of the Elders of Zion an antisemitic tract by the Tzar's Secret Police still loved by conspiracy kooks and crypto-Nazi's. Gold is very Jewish and pro-Israeli and should not be classed with the latter. However, the title of the first chapter evokes memories of pop-occult books like the French Morning of the Magicians by Pauwels and Bergier, the British Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft, The Edge of History by William Irwin Thompson, and The End to Ordinary History by Esalen's Michael Murphy.
Gold's prose in this book is very rich with literary images. If one were to check them all out one would get a very good liberal education.
"America may not have been greened, but it was boheemed." p.13
Bohemia is a nonlocal "virtual community" linked by cultural telepathy, the quantum voodoo of Bell's theorem, the sympathetic magick of Aleister Crowley, the Chapel Perilous of Robert Anton Wilson, the occult "morphogenetic fields" of Rupert Sheldrake, the "implicate order" of David Bohm, faster than the confined speeding photons bouncing "higgledy piggledy" in the tiny fiber-optical tubes of that magical "information super-highway" promised us by Clinton, Gore, Gates and Clarke, though seen long ago by Ted Nelson.
Bohemia is the highest form of the modern solid Republican neo-conservative idea of the "free market economy", it is the purest expression of democracy, it is the transubstantiation of Saint Augustine's "City of God" to Planet Earth.
This was written before Newt Gingrich's Coup d' Etat!
"Like ailanthus, the tree of heaven, Bohemia grows in any alley where there's a bit of fertile dirt and noninterference."p.14
"The Bohemian physicist ... contributes a balanced scientific non establishment for this expanding society. I don't mean to disparage the work, either. ... among all the blatherers there sometimes appears a breakthrough thinker. Originality has always required a fertile expanse of fumble and mistake. That's the beauty of the option. Your wastrel life might turn out to be just what's required to save the planet."p.14
"Sarfatti's Cave is the name I'll give to the Caffe Trieste in San Francisco, where Jack Sarfatti, Ph.D. in physics, writes his poetry, evokes his mystical, miracle-working ancestors, and has conducted a several-decade-long seminar on the nature of reality and his own love life to a rapt succession of espresso scholars. He sings Gilbert and Sullivan songs. He suffers tragic reverses among women.. With ample charm and boyish smiles he issues nonnegotiable demands ... It's Jack Sarfatti against the world, and he is indomitable...One of his soaring theories is that things which have not happened yet can cause events in the present .... Obviously this has consequences for prediction, the nature of causality, our conceptions of logic. ... With just a little more, one more grant, one venturesome patron, one young woman with a trust fund, he can build the machine to prove his theories ... here's a sheet of paper with guaranteed algebra, and citations from Faust.
He has published papers in respectable physics journals. His poetry is widely photocopied. His correspondence with the great in several fields is voluminous, recorded on computer disks. Cornell University BA., University of California Ph.D., his credentials are impeccable.Following is a quotation from a lecture given to a San Francisco State University physics seminar on 30 April, 1991:
CAUSALITY-VIOLATING QUANTUM ACTION AT A DISTANCE?I open a page "randomly" (in deference to the hard-boiled skeptics who believe that the Universe is "sound and fury" and that we are accidental) to Gold's chapter "Israel" and on p.115 I find:by Dr. Jack Sarfatti
... the universe is created by intelligent design but the Designer lives in our far future and has evolved from us ...
Perhaps all of the works of cultural genius, from the music of Mozart to the physics of Einstein, have their real origin in the future. The genius may be a real psychic channeler whose mind is open to telepathic messages from the future. The genius must be well trained in his or her craft and intellectually disciplined with the integrity of the warrior in order to properly decode the quantum signals from the future. The purpose of our existence would then be to ensure, not only the creation of life on earth, but the creation of the big bang itself! We obviously cannot fail since the universe cannot have come into existence without us in this extreme example of Borgesian quantum solipsism. Existentialism is wrong because it is an incorrect extrapolation of the old physics. Breton's surrealism, with its Jungian idea of meaningful coincidence, is closer to the truth. This would then be the final secret of the Illuminati - that charismatic chain of adepts in quixotic quest of their "Impossible Dream" of the Grail. Enough of my subjective vision. Now on to the objective physics." pp. 15-16
"So now I am in the first hour of one of my deaths.The thought made me dizzy. I was reminded of Jack Sarfatti, Ph.D. physicist and reincarnation of the eleventh-century mystic Rabbi Sarfatti .. with rapt descriptions of how events from the future cause events in the past."
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