On our visit to San Francisco last week, we took a break one day to go check out a famous bookstore--City Lights. This place is well-known for publishing beatnik poets like Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsburg and is known for being pretty anti-establishment. I thought it was funny that they had two full shelves of Dostoevsky--or I guess that isn't funny. Maybe I'm losing track of who represents established society and who is against it any any particular moment in history. I guess good literature is just recognizable by everyone.
Browsing through the store was a surreal experience--I remember City Lights Publishers and reading Ginsburg's Howl in American Literature lecture when I was in college. The shop is actually a patchwork of add-ons, narrow passageways, and stairs, so unless you assertively claim your space directly in front of a section, inevitably someone would want you to move out of the way so they could squeeze past enroute to the Gay and Lesbian (wassup Google hits!?) department or the Poetry section upstairs. Trying to be polite, I was bounced around the whole store by the other customers for about 15 minutes until I found a lonely little corner of Faulkner that I could check out. And I found that my supposedly complete collection of Hemingway is not yet complete, but decided not to pay full price for lesser works.
There were all kinds of volumes that I hadn't seen before. And I forgot to mention that the whole store is filled with paperbacks--that was its claim to fame when it opened before it got into the business of political controversy. The place was complete disorganization--it was impossible to tell which shelf led to another and how things were categorized--they weren't really labeled. Mismatched bookshelves and old, unpadded chairs were scattered across the floor, and for some reason there were no lights on in the place. A thick group of clouds washed by overhead and the place went hazy grey with the letters on bookspines practically indiscerable.
No computers or indicies were placed to help cross-reference authors, titles, subjects, or locations within the store-In fact, now that I think of it, I don't believe there was a computer in the store at all--a protest?-this was definitely a place for random browsing.
I did end up buying a literature magazine with published short stories and poems--maybe I'll submit something some day...And a T.S. Eliot book.
Fran, who is usually the one who is typically the sentimental and historically-minded member of our family, was happy to look here and buy what she wants at Barnes & Noble. Yeah, man, she's just being part of the problem.
Wandering around with my finds firmly in hand, I came upon a table with some glossy-covered new paperbacks to graze on. Just then, a herd of tourists (damn them) passed through, brushing me back lest I make (gasp) contact. An familiar odor caught my attention--it reminded me of my days playing drums. I whirled around and spied rows of sheet music--I don't know where that particular smell comes from, but it's a certain musty odor (like rotting manilla paper) that they all seemed to have once the sheets get to a certain yellowed age. On the rack next to it was a reek of what appeared to be stage scripts.
I pulled up a rickety chair along a dark wall of the poetry section upstairs and read a little Ginsburg. I also checked out the in-house published "Haiku Dictionary", and read about 20 haikus about light and about 10 about lightning--I figured I could write my own book if I tried hard enough. Thought it might be kind of cool to buy a used book, but there wasn't anything that struck me as interesting--it was a little depressing that there were two identical books on breast cancer in the tiny section of used books.
Checking out, the one clerk in the store glanced up at me--"Bag?" I was hoping for something with the name of the store, but it was a plain, black bag. Behind the counter I could see two scraggly-looking guys rolling up colored-paper notices of some sort.
The whole thing reminded me a little of 84 Charing Cross Road--I think I need to go into more small bookstores in the future--it was a nice, relaxing break in our vacation, and as we stepped out and continued on our way to visit nearby Chinatown, I felt like I had been someplace significant.
Browsing through the store was a surreal experience--I remember City Lights Publishers and reading Ginsburg's Howl in American Literature lecture when I was in college. The shop is actually a patchwork of add-ons, narrow passageways, and stairs, so unless you assertively claim your space directly in front of a section, inevitably someone would want you to move out of the way so they could squeeze past enroute to the Gay and Lesbian (wassup Google hits!?) department or the Poetry section upstairs. Trying to be polite, I was bounced around the whole store by the other customers for about 15 minutes until I found a lonely little corner of Faulkner that I could check out. And I found that my supposedly complete collection of Hemingway is not yet complete, but decided not to pay full price for lesser works.
There were all kinds of volumes that I hadn't seen before. And I forgot to mention that the whole store is filled with paperbacks--that was its claim to fame when it opened before it got into the business of political controversy. The place was complete disorganization--it was impossible to tell which shelf led to another and how things were categorized--they weren't really labeled. Mismatched bookshelves and old, unpadded chairs were scattered across the floor, and for some reason there were no lights on in the place. A thick group of clouds washed by overhead and the place went hazy grey with the letters on bookspines practically indiscerable.
No computers or indicies were placed to help cross-reference authors, titles, subjects, or locations within the store-In fact, now that I think of it, I don't believe there was a computer in the store at all--a protest?-this was definitely a place for random browsing.
I did end up buying a literature magazine with published short stories and poems--maybe I'll submit something some day...And a T.S. Eliot book.
Fran, who is usually the one who is typically the sentimental and historically-minded member of our family, was happy to look here and buy what she wants at Barnes & Noble. Yeah, man, she's just being part of the problem.
Wandering around with my finds firmly in hand, I came upon a table with some glossy-covered new paperbacks to graze on. Just then, a herd of tourists (damn them) passed through, brushing me back lest I make (gasp) contact. An familiar odor caught my attention--it reminded me of my days playing drums. I whirled around and spied rows of sheet music--I don't know where that particular smell comes from, but it's a certain musty odor (like rotting manilla paper) that they all seemed to have once the sheets get to a certain yellowed age. On the rack next to it was a reek of what appeared to be stage scripts.
I pulled up a rickety chair along a dark wall of the poetry section upstairs and read a little Ginsburg. I also checked out the in-house published "Haiku Dictionary", and read about 20 haikus about light and about 10 about lightning--I figured I could write my own book if I tried hard enough. Thought it might be kind of cool to buy a used book, but there wasn't anything that struck me as interesting--it was a little depressing that there were two identical books on breast cancer in the tiny section of used books.
Checking out, the one clerk in the store glanced up at me--"Bag?" I was hoping for something with the name of the store, but it was a plain, black bag. Behind the counter I could see two scraggly-looking guys rolling up colored-paper notices of some sort.
The whole thing reminded me a little of 84 Charing Cross Road--I think I need to go into more small bookstores in the future--it was a nice, relaxing break in our vacation, and as we stepped out and continued on our way to visit nearby Chinatown, I felt like I had been someplace significant.
2 comments:
One of my American lecturers at University used to work in City Lights, she would regale us with tales of poets who had only really seemed fictional to us until she told us about them. She worked with Ferlinghetti and passed on anecdotes and stories that seemed like fairy tales.
Wow--that's very cool. I agree about how things sometimes seem fictional until there is a connection of some sort.
The store was chaos, but I guess that's better than being full of itself, which was also possible given its history.
Fran read this entry and shrugged and said "You've written better--you could have made this a lot edgier! The details were too hazy."
Huh!
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