City Lights Bookstore Hearts Beats

I got off a jet years ago. Americans are tying up their shirts and showing off their tattoos.

It’s a bicentennial. So lots of flags. The boys are back from the southeast Asian war. America again defending, what? defending something yeah.

We’re good at fake defending.

I land in San Francisco and make a beeline for North Beach. I grab a room in fluorescent linoleum.

I’ve been here in my fever dreams. But it’s the first time in reality. Hazy reality.

I drop my bag in my room and head for City Lights.

I heard Ginsberg read Howl in Hyde Park, London.

It struck bone.

Now I’m here at the river head. City Lights Bookstore.

And the story. I’d heard the story.

It was epic. It was myth.

Once upon the proverbial time.

In March 1957, local Collector of Customs Chester MacPhee seized a shipment of the book Howl from England of the book's second printing on grounds of obscenity.

You know, gay sex. Queer quaint when you think of it in modern age terms.

McPhee got off but in June of that year, local police raided City Lights Bookstore and arrested store manager Shigeyoshi Murao on the charge of offering an obscene book for sale.

The offending queer love. Lock ‘em up.

Ferlinghetti turned himself in on his return to San Francisco they were off to the races.

I want to touch the planks of City Lights, on my first visit and every other.

I was there today. Out here for video games this round. But no matter. I always make time for a City Lights pilgrimage.

I book my bed a block away. Start my day and end my day at City Lights. . How many times since my first visit all those years ago. A hundred? A thousand?

Murao and Ferlinghetti face a possible $500 fine and a 6-month sentence.

Queer fines.

Ginsberg himself is in Tangiers.

The ACLU posts bail, assigns defense counsel Albert Bendich to the case, and secured the pro bono services of famous criminal defense lawyer J. W. Ehrlich.

All this for a poem. Poetry! Take on the world!

Yesterday, I was in City Lights and they were selling Howl merch. Holy shit. I kid you not.

One item: A baby onsie with Howl printed on it.

Oh well. A bookstore has to live.

The charges against Murao were dismissed since it couldn't be proved that he knew what was in the book.

The man lived for the book. The man had it memorized. But they couldn’t prove it.

Then, during the trial of Ferlinghetti, respected writers and professors testified for the defense.

Poetry is innocent! Well, maybe innocent isn’t the word. But you go back and read about all this and it’s clear. The courts were being played.

Judge Horn rendered his precedent-setting verdict, declaring that Howl was not obscene and that a book with "the slightest redeeming social importance" merits First Amendment protection.

Horn's decision established the precedent that paved the way for the publication of such hitherto banned books as D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

The media attention resulting from the trial stimulated national interest, and, by 1958, there were 20,000 copies in print. Today there are over a million.

Ferlinghetti died a couple of years ago age 104.

Poetry gives long life.