Caught the bus up to North Beach and China Town area, to seek out the churches of Beatitude, places like the City Lights Bookstore and the relatively recent Beat Museum. People like Ginsberg and Patchen are some of my most treasured poets and being able to wander up and down the streets and the alleys where they used to scratch out their words and hallucinate their lives was incredible. Managed to pick up a couple of obscure magazines and pamphlets as well.
It is wierd to see a gift shop in the museum selling gifts and presents based around the Beats though, wierd and painfully ironic. The counter-culture icons being reduced to collectable posters or place mats seems somehow wrong, and probably not something they would have approved of- or maybe they would have. At least it's keeping their memory alive and helping a new generation of people discover a School of Poetry and an outlook on life which changed everything, well it did for me at least.
So I've stuck to buying the poetry instead. 'Reality Sandwiches' by Allen Ginsberg to go with my battered copies of 'Howl' and 'Kaddish' my dad gave me. It's in the writing that the spirit of the Beats is truly preserved:
' as she walks the universe
with all life gone
and cities disappeared
only the God of love
left smiling '
I'm jealous of you wandering around those sacred places...Beat Gift shop, eh ? Hope you picked up something tacky!
ReplyDelete