This event is held in partnership with the San Francisco Historical Society.
It will be conducted via Zoom. Please register (button to the right) to receive the Zoom credentials.
Please email Taryn Edwards if you have any questions - [email protected]
Join author John Briscoe and former MI Executive Director Ralph Lewin for a lively conversation about Briscoe’s new compilation of comic verse, A Child’s Christmas in San Francisco.
About the book:
“Handsome, fiendishly ingenious. And unfailing.
I can almost hear the cable cars clanging at Market and Powell
because of the bargains they’re getting at Owl.
— Robert Hass, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and Poet Laureate of the United States, 1995–1997
At the core of A Child’s Christmas in San Francisco are seven poems, composed, author John Briscoe tells us, by generations of San Francisco school children. Over the week before Christmas these children paired iconic San Francisco food and drink with the days of the week. Each day got a poem featuring a particular food or beverage. Those included Red’s Tamale (Tuesday), sourdough (Wednesday), Bull Pupp (Thursday), It’s-It (Friday), pisco (Saturday), cioppino (Sunday), and the martini (Monday). In this way, Briscoe observes, the young poets showed “a precocious affection for the culinary tradition and abiding spirits of Christmas in their City of St. Francis.”
Briscoe was one of those children. “For the occasion of those seven days, we composed ditties of juvenilia, in verse from bad to worse, to celebrate the days of the week and their paired food or beverage soulmates. From Sutro Heights to South Beach, from Bernal Heights to the Bayview, we composed, and competed, and conceded to the best of us.”
These then are the best productions of San Francisco’s youthful versifiers. As presented by Briscoe, they are sly and surprisingly sophisticated comic verses that bring to life a forgotten San Francisco, one spiced with wicked innocence and fueled by the city’s unique culinary offerings.
Like the season it recalls, this book is celebration, a feast that is guaranteed to delight.
Books are available directly from the publisher or can be ordered by your local book seller.
John Briscoe, president of the San Francisco Historical Society, poet and writer, is also a lawyer who has tried and argued cases in The Hague, the U.S. Supreme Court, and scores of other courts, and written extensively on law. Among his books not dealing with law are Tadich Grill: The Story of San Francisco’s Oldest Restaurant (2002); The Lost Poems of Cangjie (2016); and Crush: The Triumph of California Wine (2018). Crush took first prize in the 2019 Top Shelf Book Awards for 2019 in the category history, and the 2020 Oscar Lewis Award in Western History, given by the Book Club of California. Briscoe is a Distinguished Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ralph Lewin previously interviewed John Briscoe in 2018 for his book Crush: The Triumph of California Wine. He is the Executive Director of the Peter E. Haas Jr. Family Fund. Prior to joining the Fund, Ralph served as Executive Director of the Mechanics’ Institute. Ralph previously served as president and CEO of California Humanities, a statewide partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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