Standing On The Right Side Of History: Lawrence Ferlingetti And City Lights Books
A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (image, above, 1959) has written poetry, translations, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. An accomplished painter, his paintings have been shown at galleries around the world.
Founded in San Francisco in 1953 by Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (who left two years later), City Lights, named after the 1931 Charlie Chaplain film, is one of the truly great independent bookstores in the United States. Originally a little one-room, pie-shaped bookstore. Martin and Ferlinghetti began by selling new quality paperbacks and early alternative newspapers and magazines. Out front on the sidewalk there were used books in Parisian-style book-racks with lids that could be closed at night (like quayside kiosks in Paris). They had started the store with $500 each, and never dreamed they would take in as much as $50 a day selling paperbacks
Although it has been more than fifty years since tour buses with passengers eager to sight “beatniks” began pulling up in front of City Lights, the Beats’ legacy of anti-authoritarian politics and insurgent thinking continues to be a strong influence in the store, most evident in the selection of titles.
The nation’s first all-paperback bookstore, City Lights Booksellers has expanded several times. The store features an extensive and in-depth selection of poetry, fiction, translations, politics, history, philosophy, music and spirituality along with other titles and a staff whose special book interests in many fields contribute to the hand-picked quality on the shelves. The bookstore has served for half a century as a meeting place for writers, artists, and intellectuals.
Two years after its founding, Ferlinghetti started City Lights Publishers. With nearly 200 books in print, it is renown for cutting-edge fiction, poetry, memoirs, literary translations and books on vital social and political issues.
City Lights Publishers began with the Pocket Poets Series, through which Ferlinghetti aimed to create an “international, dissident ferment.” His publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl And Other Poems in 1956 led to his arrest on obscenity charges; the trial that followed drew national attention to the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement writers. (He was overwhelmingly supported by prestigious literary and academic figures, and was acquitted.) This landmark First Amendment case established a legal precedent for the publication of controversial work with redeeming social importance.
San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown appointed him Poet laureate in 1998. ”In Plato’s republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic,” Ferlinghetti said, standing beside the Mayor. ”I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use as a soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsessions.” In 2003 he was awarded the Robert Frost Memorial Medal, the Author’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Among the titles City Lights has issued recently are I Must Resist and Robert Duncan in San Francisco. Published on the centennial of his birth, and in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington, I Must Resist was edited by Michael G Long.
Here is Rustin in his own words in a collection of over 150 of his letters; his correspondents include the major progressives of his day — for example, Eleanor Holmes Norton, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Ella Baker, and of course, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Bayard Rustin, called the “lost prophet” of the civil rights movement, is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. He brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the American civil rights movement and played a deeply influential role in the life of Martin Luther King. He was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era.
READ: Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Gay Strategist, Deserves Better
A newly expanded edition of the classic, Robert Duncan in San Francisco by Michael Rumaker is both a portrait of the premier poet of the SF Renaissance and a fascinating account of gay life in late 1950s America:
Following his graduation from Black Mountain College, Rumaker made his way to the post-Howl, pre-Stonewall gay literary milieu of San Francisco. It was an era of police persecution of a largely clandestine gay community struggling to survive in the otherwise “open city” of San Francisco.
And just released, The End of San Francisco, according to City Lights’ website, “breaks apart the conventions of memoir to reveal the passions and perils of a life that refuses to conform to the rules of straight or gay normalcy. A budding queer activist escapes to San Francisco, in search of a world more politically charged, sexually saturated, and ethically consistent—this is the person who evolves into the author, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, infamous radical queer troublemaker, organizer and agitator, community builder, and anti-assimilationist commentator. Part memoir, part social history, and part elegy, The End of San Francisco explores and explodes the dream of a radical queer community and the mythical city that was supposed to nurture it.”
READ: ‘The End of San Francisco’ Author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore In Seattle Tonight
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s reads from her book in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, Olympia and Seattle in April, May and June.
City Lights continues to be a mecca for intellectuals in San Francisco. The ongoing series of readings and events, usually at least one or two each week, are almost always free.
In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark – a singular honor for a business.
With this bookstore-publisher combination, “it is as if,” says Ferlinghetti, “the public were being invited, in person and in books, to participate in that ‘great conversation’ between authors of all ages, ancient and modern.” City Lights has become world-famous, but it has retained an intimate, casual charm. It’s a completely unique San Francisco experience, and a must for anyone who appreciates good books.
City Lights Bookstore celebrates its 60th anniversary on Sunday, June 23rd, 2013 with a birthday party open house at the bookstore — mark your calendars now, and start planning your trip to San Francisco!
In addition to the Anniversary Open House in June, in July, they’ll partner with the Contemporary Jewish Museum — host to a traveling exhibit of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs — for an event about the continued struggle against forces of conservatism and censorship, focusing on Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s successful defense of Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL And Other Poems.
Also in July, San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguia will host a gathering of writers in Jack Kerouac Alley, next to the bookstore. In August, some of the fine contemporary poets in the new City Lights Spotlight Series come together for a group reading to celebrate the series, while in September the current and past poet laureates of San Francisco read and celebrate City Lights’ Poet Laureate Series at the new SF Jazz Center.
November will be the time to focus on Surrealism with an evening that will include surrealist games and activities. In addition, they are sponsoring a series of Sunday afternoon happenings all summer long, casual literary readings and musical entertainment outdoors in Jack Kerouac Alley, next to the bookstore.
If you can’t make it in person, you can join in the celebration online. Throughout the year they’’ll be featuring historical photos, stories, reminiscences and more on on the City Lights Blog. Follow them on Facebook, Pinterest, and check out their Twitter feed, for up-to-the-minute news on events and postings.
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Front of City Lights, 2013
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights standing firmly on the Right Side of History since 1953.
All images courtesy of City Lights
City Lights Bookstore is located at 261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway, San Francisco, CA 94133
phone: (415) 362-8193Â Open daily 10 am to midnight.
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Stuart Wilber believes that living life openly as a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Allied person is the most powerful kind of activism. Shortly after meeting his husband in Chicago in 1977, he opened a gallery named In a Plain Brown Wrapper, where he exhibited cutting edge work by leading artists; art that dealt with sexuality and gender identification. (Photo by Mathew Ryan Williams)
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Republican Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a top potential Trump vice presidential running mate pick, revealed in a forthcoming book she “hated” her 14-month old puppy and shot it to death. Massive online outrage ensued, including accusations of “animal cruelty” and “cold-blooded murder,” but the pro-life former member of Congress is defending her actions and bragging she had the media “gasping.”
“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” Noem writes in her soon-to-be released book, according to The Guardian which reports “the dog, a female, had an ‘aggressive personality’ and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.”
“By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going ‘out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life’.”
“Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, ‘grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another’.”
READ MORE: President Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off
“Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like ‘a trained assassin’.”
Except Cricket wasn’t trained. Online several people with experience training dogs have said Noem did everything wrong.
“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, calling the young girl pup “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with,” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”
“At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.”
“It was not a pleasant job,” she added, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
The Guardian reports Noem went on that day to slaughter a goat that “smelled ‘disgusting, musky, rancid’ and ‘loved to chase’ Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.”
She dragged both animals separately into a gravel pit and shot them one at a time. The puppy died after one shell, but the goat took two.
On social media Noem expressed no regret, no sadness, no empathy for the animals others say did not need to die, and certainly did not need to die so cruelly.
READ MORE: ‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’
But she did use the opportunity to promote her book.
We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.
If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping,… pic.twitter.com/bKhpUkchHV
— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) April 26, 2024
Attorney and legal analyst Jeffrey Evan Gold says Governor Noem’s actions might have violated state law.
“You slaughtered a 14-month-old puppy because it wasn’t good at the ‘job’ you chose for it?” he asked. “SD § 40-1-2.3. ‘No person owning or responsible for the care of an animal may neglect, abandon, or mistreat the animal.'”
The Democratic National Committee released a statement saying, “Kristi Noem’s extreme record goes beyond bizarre rants about killing her pets – she also previously said a 10-year-old rape victim should be forced to carry out her pregnancy, does not support exceptions for rape or incest, and has threatened to throw pharmacists in jail for providing medication abortions.”
Former Trump White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah Griffin, now a co-host on “The View” wrote, “There are countless organizations that re-home dogs from owners who are incapable of properly training and caring for them.”
The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson blasted the South Dakota governor.
“Kristi Noem is trash,” he began. “Decades with hunting- and bird-dogs, and the number I’ve killed because they were chicken-sharp or had too much prey drive is ZERO. Puppies need slow exposure to birds, and bird-scent.”
“She killed a puppy because she was lazy at training bird dogs, not because it was a bad dog,” he added. “Not every dog is for the field, but 99.9% of them are trainable or re-homeable. We have one now who was never going in the field, but I didn’t kill her. She’s sleeping on the couch. You down old dogs, hurt dogs, and sick dogs humanely, not by shooting them and tossing them in a gravel pit. Unsporting and deliberately cruel…but she wrote this to prove the cruelty is the point.”
Melissa Jo Peltier, a writer and producer of the “Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan” series, also heaped strong criticism on Noem.
“After 10+ years working with Cesar Millan & other highly specialized trainers, I believe NO dog should be put down just because they can’t or won’t do what we decide WE want them to,” Peltier said in a lengthy statement. “Dogs MUST be who they are. Sadly, that’s often who WE teach them to be. And our species is a hot mess. I would have happily taken Kristi Noem’s puppy & rehomed it. What she did is animal cruelty & cold blooded murder in my book.”
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President Joe Biden gave an nearly-unannounced, last-minute, live exclusive interview Friday morning to Howard Stern, the SiriusXM radio host who for decades, from the mid-1990s to about 2015, was a top Trump friend, fan, and aficionado. But the impetus behind the President’s move appears to be a rare and unsigned statement from the The New York Times Company, defending the “paper of record” after months of anger from the public over what some say is its biased negative coverage of the Biden presidency and, especially, a Thursday report by Politico claiming Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger is furious the President has refused to give the “Grey Lady” an in-person interview.
“The Times’ desire for a sit-down interview with Biden by the newspaper’s White House team is no secret around the West Wing or within the D.C. bureau,” Politico reported. “Getting the president on the record with the paper of record is a top priority for publisher A.G. Sulzberger. So much so that last May, when Vice President Kamala Harris arrived at the newspaper’s midtown headquarters for an off-the-record meeting with around 40 Times journalists, Sulzberger devoted several minutes to asking her why Biden was still refusing to grant the paper — or any major newspaper — an interview.”
“In Sulzberger’s view,” Politico explained, “only an interview with a paper like the Times can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency.”
But it was this statement that made Politico’s scoop go viral.
READ MORE: Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’
“’All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day,’ one Times journalist said. ‘It’s A.G. He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.'”
Popular Information founder Judd Legum in March documented The New York Times’ (and other top papers’) obsession with Biden’s age after the Hur Report.
1. The media turned Robert Hur’s amateur assessment of Biden’s memory into a political crisis.
Collectively, the @washingtonpost, @nytimes, and @WSJ have run 66 articles quoting Hur: a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”
But when the transcript of the Biden interview… pic.twitter.com/cExzjuKeYz
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) March 14, 2024
Thursday evening the Times put out a “scorching” statement, as Politico later reported, not on the newspaper’s website but on the company’s corporate website, not addressing the Politico piece directly but calling it “troubling” that President Biden “has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term.”
Media watchers and critics pushed back on the Times’ statement.
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“NYT issues an unprecedented statement slamming Biden for ‘actively and effectively avoid[ing] questions from independent journalists during his term’ and claiming it’s their ‘independence’ that Biden dislikes, when it’s actually that they’re dying to trip him up,” wrote media critic Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch.
Froomkin also pointed to a 2017 report from Poynter, a top journalism site published by The Poynter Institute, that pointed out the poor job the Times did of interviewing then-President Trump.
Incidentally, when the NYT got a chance to interview Trump, they went belly up. https://t.co/fW5kx5868d pic.twitter.com/LbrhfYMtqf
— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) April 25, 2024
Others, including former Biden Deputy Secretary of State Brian McKeon, debunked the Times’ claim President Biden hasn’t given interviews to independent journalists by pointing to Biden’s interviews with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and a 20-minute sit-down interview with veteran journalist John Harwood for ProPublica.
Former Chicago Sun-Times editor Mark Jacob, now a media critic who publishes Stop the Presses, offered a more colorful take of Biden’s decision to go on Howard Stern.
This is the equivalent of putting a bag of dog poop on the New York Times’ doorstep and setting it on fire. https://t.co/RhGbHH9pU2
— Mark Jacob (@MarkJacob16) April 26, 2024
The Times itself just last month reported on a “wide-ranging interview” President Biden gave to The New Yorker.
Watch the video and read the social media posts above or at this link.
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Donald Trump’s Friday morning claim Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building is “heavily guarded” so his supporters cannot attend his trial was torched by a top CNN anchor. The ex-president, facing 34 felony charges in New York, had been urging his followers to show up and protest on the courthouse steps, but few have.
“I’m at the heavily guarded Courthouse. Security is that of Fort Knox, all so that MAGA will not be able to attend this trial, presided over by a highly conflicted pawn of the Democrat Party. It is a sight to behold! Getting ready to do my Courthouse presser. Two minutes!” Trump wrote Friday morning on his Truth Social account.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins supplied a different view.
“Again, the courthouse is open the public. The park outside, where a handful of his supporters have gathered on trials days, is easily accessible,” she wrote minutes after his post.
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Trump has tried to rile up his followers to come out and make a strong showing.
On Monday Trump urged his supporters to “rally behind MAGA” and “go out and peacefully protest” at courthouses across the country, while complaining that “people who truly LOVE our Country, and want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, are not allowed to ‘Peacefully Protest,’ and are rudely and systematically shut down and ushered off to far away ‘holding areas,’ essentially denying them their Constitutional Rights.”
On Wednesday Trump claimed, “The Courthouse area in Lower Manhattan is in a COMPLETE LOCKDOWN mode, not for reasons of safety, but because they don’t want any of the thousands of MAGA supporters to be present. If they did the same thing at Columbia, and other locations, there would be no problem with the protesters!”
After detailing several of his false claims about security measures prohibiting his followers from being able to show their support and protest, CNN published a fact-check on Wednesday:
“Trump’s claims are all false. The police have not turned away ‘thousands of people’ from the courthouse during his trial; only a handful of Trump supporters have shown up to demonstrate near the building,” CNN reported.
“And while there are various security measures in place in the area, including some street closures enforced by police officers and barricades, it’s not true that ‘for blocks you can’t get near this courthouse.’ In reality, the designated protest zone for the trial is at a park directly across the street from the courthouse – and, in addition, people are permitted to drive right up to the front of the courthouse and walk into the building, which remains open to the public. If people show up early enough in the morning, they can even get into the trial courtroom itself or the overflow room that shows near-live video of the proceedings.”
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President Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off
CNN Smacks Down Trump Rant Courthouse So ‘Heavily Guarded’ MAGA Cannot Attend His Trial
Noem Defends Shooting Her 14-Month Old Puppy to Death, Brags She Has Media ‘Gasping’
Noem Defends Shooting Her 14-Month Old Puppy to Death, Brags She Has Media ‘Gasping’
President Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off
CNN Smacks Down Trump Rant Courthouse So ‘Heavily Guarded’ MAGA Cannot Attend His Trial
‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’
Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’
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