SAN FRANCISCO: THE LEGENDARY CITY LIGHTS BOOSTORE / THE BEATS

I GUIDE YOU THROUGHT THE LEGENDARY CITY LIGHTS BOOSTORE and THE BEAT GENERATION!!

I AM THE BEATEN GENEARATION!! BEATEN BY MONEY....

I am standing in front of the famous, still independent bookstore City Lights in San Francisco, in North Beach.  This is the one of the founder of City Lights Bookstore and press City Lights Books. Founded 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin.

City Lights is an important landmark of Beat generation history. Several of the surrounding streets have been renamed after Beat poets as well, commemorating their important contribution to the cultural landscape of San Francisco.

Me and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Café Trieste. 

I met Mr. Ferlinghetti and we had a very nice conversation, about our talk you can read in another part of this BLOG. here: http://milenaoda.blogspot.com/2012/08/san-francisco-meeting-lawrence.html

Here you can see My and Topalantes VIDEO-GUIDE through the City Lights:

Jack Kerouac in Chinese. The small, narrow Jack Kerouac Alley connects the North Beach with the Chinatown, so far his name in Chinese, well, now he / it is absolut modern, everything is going to be in Chinese translated!

"Poetry Room" for Readings with other Authors and for reading poetry...

DAY & NIGHT (open till the Midnight!) direct from the highway, from my ROAD on the U.S. Freeways& Highways I went to the Bookstore, my destination (besides my other FAVORITE bookstore - ADOBE Bookstore in the MISSION District/ 16th St. see my Link to my performance in ADOBE bookstore.

A Brief Guide to the Beat Poets
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical      naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry      dynamo in the machinery of night . . .      --Allen Ginsberg, "Howl" I heard this poem directly from Allen Ginsberg, who visited many times Czechoslowakia / the Czech Republic. I was fortnunate to hear him twice!! It was an amazing performance!!

http://www.wussu.com/poems/agh.htm - here is the whole HOWL from Allen Ginsberg, book banned for its obscenity, 1956 by reading in San Francisco in a Art Gallery.  
Allen Ginsberg's first book, Howl and Other Poems, is often considered representative of the Beat poets. In 1956 Lawrence Ferlinghetti's press City Lights published Howl and Ferlinghetti was brought to trial the next year on charges of obscenity. In a hugely publicized case, the judge ruled that Howl was not obscene and brought national attention to Ginsberg and the Beat poets.

Beat poetry evolved during the 1940s in both New York City and on the west coast, although San Francisco became the heart of the movement in the early 1950s. The end of World War II left poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso questioning mainstream politics and culture. These poets would become known as the Beat generation, a group of writers interested in changing consciousness and defying conventional writing. The Beats were also closely intertwined with poets of the San Francisco Renaissance movement, such as Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan.
The battle against social conformity and literary tradition was central to the work of the Beats. Among this group of poets, hallucinogenic drugs were used to achieve higher consciousness, as was meditation and Eastern religion. Buddhism especially was important to many of the Beat poets; Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg both intensely studied this religion and it figured into much of their work.
Other Beat poets included Diane di Prima, Neal Cassady, Anne Waldman and Michael McClure. Although William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac are often best remembered for works of fiction such as Naked Lunch and On the Road, respectively, they also wrote poetry and were very much part of the Beats as well; Kerouac is said to have coined the term "Beat generation," describing the down-and-out status of himself and his peers during the post-war years. / This comment I copied from: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5646

 

And these are some of the many books about the Beat Generation.