City Lights Bookstore
It’s a famous bookstore, most notable for a couple of the poets published in the early 1950’s – at least that’s where its fame started.
Sunday afternoon, foot loose and fancy free in downtown San Francisco got us to the cable car which then lead us Columbus Avenue, and that lead to City Lights bookstore. For me, it’s some sort of a pilgrimage, each time I get a chance. The last few trips haven’t included a trip to the bookstore, and this last trip was painfully short, between trinkets in China Town, chocolate and sushi, but I hit one of those turning points, a briefest spark when a single point in times makes all the difference.
A girl, a Virgo, was standing there, looking at the shelf labeled “Staff Recommendations,” and a book, about halfway down the shelf, caught my eye, after the Virgo’s figure. You Can’t Win by Jack Black. Follow the blond streaks to the curve of the hip, connect the dots, and there’s the book.
This reprint has a William S. Burroughs introduction, a preface about the publishing company itself, and the original text, from the 1925 version of the book. For its time, that must’ve been an amazing book. Part autobiography, part fiction, part travelogue, maybe a little bit of everything. For my fine, literate sensibilities, and from a strict “slice of life” history, it’s engaging enough. What makes it better, though, is the prose itself, making this possibly one of the first of the precursors to modern literature.
Just for stopping in a bookstore.
