A letter from San Francisco C........City Lights Bookstore

City Lights Books, founded, I think in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. What a fantastic name that is, Ferlinghetti, part Italian racecar part ice cream flavour. He was San Francisco’s first poet laureate, and is still as active and critical as he was when he opened his bookshop and helped create the beat generation in the North Beach, Italian area of the city.The first person to be arrested for reading a poem was arrested in this shop, Jack Kerouac was here, Dylan had his photo taken in the alley out back. Today out back a Chinese lady was systematically stamping flat every one of the aluminum cans she had collected so they would better fit in the multitude of plastic bags that she was carrying. You see City Lights Books stands on the frontier of China Town, the biggest outside of Asia, and here too you find the plastic bag people, streetfolk or homeless, that are beginning to shame this city (because they are not looking after them enough). Each one pushing a shopping trolley, each one obsessively hoarding plastic bags. Maybe they will save the planet if not themselves. Ferlenghetti himself is worried about the city. I bought a signed copy of his poetry collection, discretely on sale at the front desk, and inside he talks of the destruction of the city he found back then, fifty years ago; the destruction of radical non-corporate ideas. But for now his shop remains, poetry readings take place throughout July and August. You can still pick up a book and sit at a table and read, or write. The attitude is relaxed, the wooden floor invites calm and solitude, and you feel like a sailor at sea and; the doors don’t close till midnight. Like all bookshops in this town, at least the second hand ones of which there are many, you have to leave your bag at the front desk and they give you something as a reminder that they have it. In City Lights I was given a playing card / the four of clubs. The second hand bookshops are so much better than Borders in Union square, shopping heart of the city. There you might find everything, but there is too much, it becomes like Mc Donald’s and there is no joy in finding something unexpected or long looked for. It becomes predictable. The second hand shops, with their imaginative names like Dog-eared or Forever After, Bound Together offer choice, surprise, frustration and an unexpected treasure. I am reading Abbie Hoffman’s account of his radical activism between 1960 and. 70. But City lights has something extra. The unlikely - and a lady trampling empty cans in the back alley, though next time it might be Dylan himself. City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue San Francisco. Mythical? Yes. Magnificent, most certainly. Should it be letter from America M then? No because that’s................................................