My main purpose for the year was to live in San Francisco. The secondary purpose (the one I told the University here) was to write a book on finite rank torsion free abelian groups (putting it in the more general context of modules over dedekind domains).
This sabbatical turned out to be extremely worthwhile for me, just as the previous one had. I rented an apartment on Stockton Street, over the tunnel, just across the street from where they were then constructing the new Ritz-Carlton Hotel. It was only two blocks from where the two cable car lines cross, about a fifteen minute walk from BART and a twenty-minute walk from North Beach.
I had some doubts about whether I could actually figure out how to write a book, but after a while I realized that it wasn't that much different from organizing a graduate course. The only major mistake I made was thinking that there wasn't really a lot of material to include, which resulted in my deciding to write in great detail, so that ultimately the whole project became much bigger than I was willing to deal with. The book did get at least 90% finished, though, and one day I'll probably finish the remaining 10%.
For that year, I was living out the dream I'd had since I was about 20 years old. I was working on a book in the mornings, then hanging out in the bars in San Francisco's North Beach in the afternoon, going back home to sleep for an hour, and then either working on the book some more in the evening or going out again.
Of course the book was not a novel but a research monograph, and North Beach was no longer a center of Bohemian artistic and literary culture, but mostly a place where a lot of drunks and tourists hung out. But that didn't really seem to make much difference.
Actually, I did meet a few of the old Beats. I became fairly good friends with one of Neal Cassidy's old girl friends and spent a couple evenings with a guy named Richard Miller who's written some very strange novels. Somebody told me where Ferlinghetti and some of the other old Beats ate breakfast every morning, but I wasn't about to walk up and introduce myself to them, and I wasn't willing to wake up that early in the morning just to look at them. (Besides, mornings were reserved for working on my book.)
At least once a week, I'd go over to Berkeley to print out my latest revisions on the Math Department computers and look up whatever I needed to in the Math Library. At first, I tried attending some seminars as well, but none of the seminars that year were on topics that really interested me.
A lot of my most important experiences during this year in San Francisco have to be omitted for reasons of discretion. But I do want to mention that I went through the training for San Francisco Sex Information (SFSI) and also went through one more SAR (Sexual Attitude Restructuring) at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.