Dear Yebem,
Nice piece on Beserkely. Captures the true flavor of the place.
I appreciate your perserving my secret identity. Waclaw
Rubenstein, indeed. And the high-IQ psychotic. Marvelous accolade.
Vladimir H. Lukasiewicz
BERSERKLY -- MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPED QUADROPHRENIA --
[Revised Edition]
by ALEX DELEON
BERSERKELY, WRITTEN FEB 17, 2001
After dinner talk with Lee Scott in Duvall, Washington, about the old days in
Berkeley and San Francisco.
In my various nomadic moves about the globe, one of the few
places I once did feel myself very strongly attached to, for quite a number
years in fact, was BERKELEY, California -- especially with the University of
Calif. at Berkeley. In those days when you said “I’m going to Berkeley"
this automatically meant the College Community of that middle-sized
East Bay city, and nothing else. There was actually quite a bit more
to the city of Berkeley than just the College Community, but it was
essentially a college town, and the University was easily the largest single
employer in the City.
In those days the student enrollment was said to be around
25,000 and the rest of the campus community, faculty support staff and
peripheral workers was probably another ten or fifteen thousand, so that
something like half the city directly depended on the University for sustenance.
In addition there were literally scores, maybe hundreds of little business
establishments all around the campus -- restaurants, all kinds
of merchants, bookstores, movie theaters, etc., etc. which catered primarily
to students and campus employees, so that the campus community was really
a city within the city -- a city unto itself.
The campus itself occupied a gigantic wooded oblong plot of
ground several square miles in area set on rising ground sloping upward to
the cyclotron complex in the Berkeley hills, about a half a mile wide from
north to south and well over a mile east to west if one included all the
wooded hills behind the football stadium in Strawberry Canyon. From the
base of the Campanile in the center of the campus proper, or from the
outdoor terrace of the student union, one was already high enough to catch
glimpses of San Francisco Bay, and from the International House steps at the
top of Bancroft Way there was a spectacular view, especially picturesque at
sunset, of the Golden Gate Bridge many, many miles away on the horizon across
the bay.
The campus life in which I was involved, however, centered
mostly on a four block strip of Telegraph Avenue, the bustling business street
leading up to the campus, and on certain parts of the campus itself --
primarily the humanities complex around Dwinelle Hall and the Student Union,
which was kind of a sub-city within the sub-city of the campus --the
precursor architecturally of what today would be a shopping mall. These
were my main stomping grounds and sometimes an entire week would go by
without my ever having strayed much more than one or two blocks from this
intensely active strip of territory.
Shattuck Avenue, another major business artery parallel to
Telegraph, which catered more to the general shopping community, was only about
three blocks down, but already seemed to be beyond the pale ?Eif not on the
very edge of outer space. Whole areas of the campus that catered to
Engineers and business majors were also Terra Incognita. It was actually a
rather topologically constricted world, but there was so much going
on -- intellectually-wise, sex-wise, adventure-wise, fun-wise -- you
name it-wise -- that it felt like the center of the Cosmos so, why bother
going anywhere else?
My association with this community started in the fall of 1957
when I went up there from Los Angeles to visit Elmera Schrogin, a girl
friend from UCLA down south -- and was immediately enthralled with the place,
so much so, that I applied for an inter-campus transfer and enrolled at
UCB the very next semester, Spring 1958 -- and then the association with
Berkeley lasted -- on and off -- until 1977 when I moved to Japan.
In between, for nearly two decades it seemed that I was always
bouncing back and forth between L.A. and Berkeley, but there was a
particularly intense all-Berkeley period between 1961 and 1963 during which I
considered myself to be a committed Berkeleyite .
This was when I was finishing up a degree in Linguistics and
also a period during which it seemed that the main topic of social discourse
was Berkeley itself -- how great it was to be in Berkeley -- what an
exceptional place Berkeley was -- how anybody who chose to be there was, by
definition, exceptional, and how for some mystical reason Berkeley
attracted the absolutely best minds in the land, and the girls with the
loosest morals.
At a time when it was still considered to be somewhat taboo
for young couples to live together unless they were married, in Berkeley
unmarried boys and girls living together in “open sin" -- was the norm --
almost a social requirement. The proof that Berkeley was the intellectual
center of the univerese -- and forget about Harvard or Princeton -- was that
there were at the time EIGHT Nobel Prize winners in the physics department
alone, and god knows how many others in other departments -- There were
scads of world famous scholars in every field: such as Teller, the father of
the H-bomb, in Physics, Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, also a Nobel prize
laureate, in literature, famous mathematicians, logicians (Alfred Tarski),
anthropologists, sociologists, Sanskrit scholars, writers like
Aldous Huxley -- on and on -- a truly high-powered faculty, but maybe the
biggest attraction for young people like myself was the highly
permissive sexual atmosphere, the free-wheeling party life, and the avant-garde
social aura.
There was also an incredibly in-bred aspect to this socially
free-wheeling community which gave it something of the feeling of Paris in
the twenties or maybe Rome in the days of Caligula. The kind of thing you
often heard over coffee at the “Med"-- ( an Italian coffee shop that served as
“Berkeley’s collective living room") -- might run something like this:
“So, I walk into this party and look around -- and suddenly I
realize that I’ve had sex with everybody in the room" --- or its variant,
that Everybody in the room had already had sex with everybody Else
in the room -- - While such claims may have been slightly exaggerated, they
definitely reflected the overall picture. Blase is the only word that
could describe the prevailing Berkeley attitude toward middle American
middle-class values --- and since I was at the time in the very midst of rejecting
my own set of middle-class Jewish values, I took to Berkeley like a fish to
water -- or maybe, more like a pig to shit!
Social life in Berkeley was so wild and wooly and there were
so many people on the verge of madness walking around -- everything from
harmless eccentrics to out-and-out high IQ psychotics -- (like Marty Horowitz, the
anarchist physicist who made home-made high explosive bombs in his
apartment) -- or Abdullah, the brilliant, fat mulatto Islamic studies scholar,
who one day walked into the library with a shotgun and started blasting
away in the name of Allah -- or the artist, Hernando Pevner, who used to stage
nude pot-parties for artists and models at the “Telegraph Hilton"
as he had named the squalid tenement he was manager of -- or of Waclaw
Rubenstein, the brilliant logician and Beethoven specialist, who used to
get his stooges to move his stolen grand piano through the streets to his next
abode whenever the collection agency gestapo would start breathing
too hotly down his neck -- so that, before long we started referring to our
beloved town as “Berserkly"--- which wasn't too far off the mark ...
TO BE CONTINUED in the Bulgarian Journal of Pedagogy and
Social Psychology
_
Nice piece on Beserkely. Captures the true flavor of the place.
I appreciate your perserving my secret identity. Waclaw
Rubenstein, indeed. And the high-IQ psychotic. Marvelous accolade.
Vladimir H. Lukasiewicz
BERSERKLY -- MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPED QUADROPHRENIA --
[Revised Edition]
by ALEX DELEON
BERSERKELY, WRITTEN FEB 17, 2001
After dinner talk with Lee Scott in Duvall, Washington, about the old days in
Berkeley and San Francisco.
In my various nomadic moves about the globe, one of the few
places I once did feel myself very strongly attached to, for quite a number
years in fact, was BERKELEY, California -- especially with the University of
Calif. at Berkeley. In those days when you said “I’m going to Berkeley"
this automatically meant the College Community of that middle-sized
East Bay city, and nothing else. There was actually quite a bit more
to the city of Berkeley than just the College Community, but it was
essentially a college town, and the University was easily the largest single
employer in the City.
In those days the student enrollment was said to be around
25,000 and the rest of the campus community, faculty support staff and
peripheral workers was probably another ten or fifteen thousand, so that
something like half the city directly depended on the University for sustenance.
In addition there were literally scores, maybe hundreds of little business
establishments all around the campus -- restaurants, all kinds
of merchants, bookstores, movie theaters, etc., etc. which catered primarily
to students and campus employees, so that the campus community was really
a city within the city -- a city unto itself.
The campus itself occupied a gigantic wooded oblong plot of
ground several square miles in area set on rising ground sloping upward to
the cyclotron complex in the Berkeley hills, about a half a mile wide from
north to south and well over a mile east to west if one included all the
wooded hills behind the football stadium in Strawberry Canyon. From the
base of the Campanile in the center of the campus proper, or from the
outdoor terrace of the student union, one was already high enough to catch
glimpses of San Francisco Bay, and from the International House steps at the
top of Bancroft Way there was a spectacular view, especially picturesque at
sunset, of the Golden Gate Bridge many, many miles away on the horizon across
the bay.
The campus life in which I was involved, however, centered
mostly on a four block strip of Telegraph Avenue, the bustling business street
leading up to the campus, and on certain parts of the campus itself --
primarily the humanities complex around Dwinelle Hall and the Student Union,
which was kind of a sub-city within the sub-city of the campus --the
precursor architecturally of what today would be a shopping mall. These
were my main stomping grounds and sometimes an entire week would go by
without my ever having strayed much more than one or two blocks from this
intensely active strip of territory.
Shattuck Avenue, another major business artery parallel to
Telegraph, which catered more to the general shopping community, was only about
three blocks down, but already seemed to be beyond the pale ?Eif not on the
very edge of outer space. Whole areas of the campus that catered to
Engineers and business majors were also Terra Incognita. It was actually a
rather topologically constricted world, but there was so much going
on -- intellectually-wise, sex-wise, adventure-wise, fun-wise -- you
name it-wise -- that it felt like the center of the Cosmos so, why bother
going anywhere else?
My association with this community started in the fall of 1957
when I went up there from Los Angeles to visit Elmera Schrogin, a girl
friend from UCLA down south -- and was immediately enthralled with the place,
so much so, that I applied for an inter-campus transfer and enrolled at
UCB the very next semester, Spring 1958 -- and then the association with
Berkeley lasted -- on and off -- until 1977 when I moved to Japan.
In between, for nearly two decades it seemed that I was always
bouncing back and forth between L.A. and Berkeley, but there was a
particularly intense all-Berkeley period between 1961 and 1963 during which I
considered myself to be a committed Berkeleyite .
This was when I was finishing up a degree in Linguistics and
also a period during which it seemed that the main topic of social discourse
was Berkeley itself -- how great it was to be in Berkeley -- what an
exceptional place Berkeley was -- how anybody who chose to be there was, by
definition, exceptional, and how for some mystical reason Berkeley
attracted the absolutely best minds in the land, and the girls with the
loosest morals.
At a time when it was still considered to be somewhat taboo
for young couples to live together unless they were married, in Berkeley
unmarried boys and girls living together in “open sin" -- was the norm --
almost a social requirement. The proof that Berkeley was the intellectual
center of the univerese -- and forget about Harvard or Princeton -- was that
there were at the time EIGHT Nobel Prize winners in the physics department
alone, and god knows how many others in other departments -- There were
scads of world famous scholars in every field: such as Teller, the father of
the H-bomb, in Physics, Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, also a Nobel prize
laureate, in literature, famous mathematicians, logicians (Alfred Tarski),
anthropologists, sociologists, Sanskrit scholars, writers like
Aldous Huxley -- on and on -- a truly high-powered faculty, but maybe the
biggest attraction for young people like myself was the highly
permissive sexual atmosphere, the free-wheeling party life, and the avant-garde
social aura.
There was also an incredibly in-bred aspect to this socially
free-wheeling community which gave it something of the feeling of Paris in
the twenties or maybe Rome in the days of Caligula. The kind of thing you
often heard over coffee at the “Med"-- ( an Italian coffee shop that served as
“Berkeley’s collective living room") -- might run something like this:
“So, I walk into this party and look around -- and suddenly I
realize that I’ve had sex with everybody in the room" --- or its variant,
that Everybody in the room had already had sex with everybody Else
in the room -- - While such claims may have been slightly exaggerated, they
definitely reflected the overall picture. Blase is the only word that
could describe the prevailing Berkeley attitude toward middle American
middle-class values --- and since I was at the time in the very midst of rejecting
my own set of middle-class Jewish values, I took to Berkeley like a fish to
water -- or maybe, more like a pig to shit!
Social life in Berkeley was so wild and wooly and there were
so many people on the verge of madness walking around -- everything from
harmless eccentrics to out-and-out high IQ psychotics -- (like Marty Horowitz, the
anarchist physicist who made home-made high explosive bombs in his
apartment) -- or Abdullah, the brilliant, fat mulatto Islamic studies scholar,
who one day walked into the library with a shotgun and started blasting
away in the name of Allah -- or the artist, Hernando Pevner, who used to stage
nude pot-parties for artists and models at the “Telegraph Hilton"
as he had named the squalid tenement he was manager of -- or of Waclaw
Rubenstein, the brilliant logician and Beethoven specialist, who used to
get his stooges to move his stolen grand piano through the streets to his next
abode whenever the collection agency gestapo would start breathing
too hotly down his neck -- so that, before long we started referring to our
beloved town as “Berserkly"--- which wasn't too far off the mark ...
TO BE CONTINUED in the Bulgarian Journal of Pedagogy and
Social Psychology
_
