San Francisco: Biography of a City

This is the website for the course SF: Biography of a City for Spring 2008 and 2009 at SFSU (I've revived this website only for the Fall 2010 version of the course: I do not expect to have time to significantly update the blog, but you never know). This is a site where information, images, research, and ideas can be shared in an on-line community. This course studies the cultural life of the city from its days as a Spanish settlement named Yurba Buena to the founding of modern San Francisco in the mid-19th century, all the way to the present. This particular version of the SF course treats the historical and cultural life of the city as coextensive with modernity and, therefore, something that is still happening and that we, ourselves, are participating in. This is why my versions of the course are often subtitled "A History of the Present."  This is a fun class where we learn about this extraordinary city, including all the naughty stories from the 19th century, the gossip, and the unique character of this place. We will, also, think seriously about place and exclusion, particularly the genocide of native peoples (both Native American and Mexican), and the history of race in the city, particularly with regard to  Chinatown and the Chinese Exclusion Act. We will study psychedelic music, the Summer of Love, Ginsberg's Howl (and its censorship battles), film noir and the city, and the Harvey Milk assassination, among much else. Cities are not merely places, but desires. And desires are abstractions; they're not things. Not only is this one way of thinking about cities, in general, it is a way to enter into the unknown, the poetic, the different, and invisible materiality of the cultural life of this city: which is nothing if not, in part, a history of very strong desires (all of which, I think, can be mapped out in different directions). The materiality of the city must, of necessity, include these immaterial elements. This is why I am calling this blog Invisible SF. The point, of course, is not merely to make the city "known" (the same way, for example, Ishi was "known"), but to enter into that which remains unknown and, therefore, still vital: the life of the city.