Free Republic

Do you ever wish that you could just snap your fingers and change the culture overnight?

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an acclaimed poet and longtime proprietor of City Lights, the San Francisco bookstore and avant-garde publishing house that catapulted the Beat Generation to fame and helped establish the city as a center of literary and cultural revolution, died Feb. 22 at his home in San Francisco. He was 101. The cause was interstitial lung disease, said his son, Lorenzo. Intensely private and fiercely political, Mr. Ferlinghetti became a household name in the 1950s when he stood trial on obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s hallucinatory anti-establishment manifesto “Howl.”

Philip Adam, a visitor from England, was walking down Columbus Avenue shortly after 1 p.m. Sunday, March 24, when he fell into a line of people that jammed the entrance to City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. “Are they giving something away?” he inquired. They were. At that moment, renowned North Beach poet Jack Hirschman was standing on the floor of the famous bookstore, giving away his reading of the Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem “At Sea.” It was a rare occasion that drew crowds of people who were pressed into the shelves, down the stairs to the cash registers and out the...

The next two days are busy around here so I’m leaving you to your own devices: don’t make me regret it.If you need a little something to get started let me direct you to Gerard’s eclectic collection of facts, fads and fun at American Digest. There’s tons of new stuff every day. Take yesterday for example: there’s the 1941 Billie Holliday recording of God Bless the Child along with the interesting back story on it’s inspiration.Then, from the endless archives of Gerard’s fertile mind, there’s a reposting of PART II of GROWL -  DEMOCRAT! by Gerard Allen Van der Ginsberg, ...

Borders , language and culture !

It can be easy to be jaded about the Beat writers in San Francisco, but even the most indifferent literary snob would be hard-pressed to walk away from "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg" at the Contemporary Jewish Museum without feeling fuzzy inside. Organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and running through September, "Beat Memories" is a collection of about 80 photos taken by Ginsberg and his friends in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s. Nearly every image is notated with the wobbly handwriting of Ginsberg, who added paragraph-length captions to the images in the 1980s...

Peter Orlovsky, longtime partner of Allen Ginsberg and a poet in his own right, died May 30 in Vermont of lung cancer. He was 76.

BE HERE, OR BE NOWHERE!

BE HERE, OR BE NOWHERE!