We are the same people / only further from home / on freeways fifty lanes wide / on a concrete continent / spaced with bland billboards / illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness

Gerald Nicosia is a Bay Area critic who has written extensively about the Beat writers. He says Ferlinghetti is notable for writing poetry in everyday language.
“His language and his humor, and the things he was saying were things that appeal to, could be understood by the average man on the street,” Nicosia says.
“A poet in the American voice. And that was one of the breakthroughs, of course, of the ’50s, was: taking poetry away from academia, away from this rarified aesthetic language that nobody could understand, and writing in the voice of ordinary people.”
Critics, however, didn’t consider Ferlinghetti on par with the other Beat writers he called his friends: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. Ferlinghetti doesn’t want to talk about his past now, but in 1994, he told me that even though he was raised in New York, he never met those East Coast writers until he moved to San Francisco and opened City Lights.
“A bookstore is a natural place for poets to hang out,” Ferlinghetti said. “And they started showing up there.”
City Lights became a magnet for West Coast intellectuals, and later, a tourist destination. Ferlinghetti also started the small press called City Lights Books. In the fall of 1956, he published a little 75-cent paperback: the first edition of “Howl,” by Allen Ginsberg.
“Howl” was a new type of poetry that became an anthem for the nascent counterculture. It begins: “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 …”
“‘Howl’ knocked the sides out of things,” Ferlinghetti said. “Just the way rock music in the ’60s knocked the sides out of the old music world.”
“Howl” includes passages of homosexual imagery, and Ferlinghetti was arrested in 1957 on charges of publishing obscene material. After a long federal trial, he was acquitted.

I really believe that art is capable of the total transformation of the world, and of life itself. And nothing less is really acceptable.

Ferlinghetti has always been an advocate for the underdog, in part because of his own life story — and it’s a tale right out of Dickens. His father died shortly before he was he was born, and his mother was committed to a mental hospital shortly after. He was raised by an aunt, and then by foster parents.
His new autobiographical novel, Little Boy, begins like this: “Little Boy was quite lost. He had no idea who he was or where he had come from.”
Ferlinghetti enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor. He served as an officer at Normandy on D-Day, and at Nagasaki after the atomic bomb. That experience turned him into a lifelong pacifist.
He began writing poetry at a revolutionary time in arts and music. And in 1994, at least, he still believed art could make a difference.
“I really believe that art is capable of the total transformation of the world, and of life itself,” Ferlinghetti said. “And nothing less is really acceptable. So if art is going to have any excuse … beyond being a leisure-class plaything, it has to transform life itself.”
That’s what Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been doing for most of a century. As for the secret to his longevity?
“Have a good laugh and you’ll live longer,” he says, laughing.

Article by NPR

Yet others will say, “But I love the feel/look/smell of a book in my hands, on the shelf and in a book store.”

Personally, I’ve been collecting books for years. When we bought our current home, it had both a family room and “formal” living room. I was excited because I knew immediately that my formal living room would be the library and it would house the hundreds of books that I own, in addition to almost 1,000 music CD’s. However, those shelves filled up so fast, they started to spread. There are books behind the books on the shelves, on top of books and in piles on surfaces everywhere. It takes forever to dust them and sometimes I can’t even find what I’m looking for because aside from keeping Sue Grafton’s Alphabet Series in order, and all of Stephen King’s books together, everything has to fit by shelf height.  I tried making a master list, but things get moved so often to make room for more, I gave up.

The Love of Digital

I got a Kindle for my birthday a few years ago. I hated it. It wasn’t a “book.” I had issues with the charger so I blamed it all on the fact it was a device. Then we got it worked out and someone sent me to this site where you could get FREE e-books. Gee, free is free and sometimes it’s awesome to have a couple of mindless romances while I’m at the pool with the kids without lugging a bunch of books. Except one or two free books turned into dozens of free books.
A book lover in Atlanta recently told me that she prefers print books, but free e-books are a great way to try out a new author, and she was completely right. I’ve discovered dozens of new authors that I never would have paid $7.99 for at Barnes & Noble. Which leads to the discussion of price. Although it may not apply to top authors like Janet Evanovich or James Patterson, for the most part, e-books are cheaper. There are no printing or shipping costs, and I’ve never paid sales tax either. It’s rare to pay more than $6.99 for a typical e-book and once you’ve been sucked in to a series by reading a free copy of Book One, there is no way you’re not going to pay $3.99 for Book Two if you liked it.
My physical library is stuffed to the gills. I will continue to buy a hard cover copy of all the Sue Grafton books until she’s done because it would look ridiculous if I stopped at “W,” plus I like my collection. I own the entire Mrs. Pollifax series, by Dorothy Gilman, and I read them from start to finish once a year or so. The same goes for Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum Series and every Stephen King book ever made. We’ve got the Harry Potter collection, a handful of books signed by their authors and lots of classics, but the mindless romances and the “read it once and never thought about it again” books are all gone now. The shelves are still overflowing but they are just my favorites and will now only be filled with special books and collector’s items.
Everything else (and now I have over 500) will live in digital utopia. My shelves are prettier, though they are still full and hard to dust, and since I continue to buy (just more slowly), I’m going to need more room eventually. But now I can take 500+ books on a two week vacation, instead of lugging two or three and praying I don’t finish them before the flight is over.
 

The Love of Print

For those who refuse to go digital, I get it. I really do. There is something about holding that book in your hands and smelling the print, wandering around book stores randomly taking things off the shelves to look at, and then leaving the store with a bag full of something tangible. E-books are, in some ways, not real. You push a button or two, and then it’s on your device. Easy? Yes. Fun? Not as much.
There’s something kind of depressing about giving someone a book they want in the form of a piece of paper with a code on it. Yes, it’s still the book, but it’s such a let-down from the excitement of ripping open the wrapping paper and having an item in your hands. There’s also something comforting about wandering into a book store and looking lovingly at every book on the shelf, even if you haven’t read it. Plus you can just grab one and flip through the pages.
There are so many books on my Kindle I have to scroll forever to see what’s there if I don’t remember the name, and I don’t always remember if I liked it or not. It’s not as easy to flip through pages on an e-reader as it is to flip through a regular book if I’m looking for a specific passage or scene. It’s just not the same, no matter how awesome it is to carry a thousand books in something that weighs 8 ounces.
 

And The Winner Is…

At the end of the day, what it boils down to is preference. There are no “winners” or “losers” in this debate. Although trends are leaning towards the digital age, print books are still out there for sale in stores, online and in libraries. However, the reality of how practical they are, as well as how economic, is becoming a bigger draw for e-books.
On the other hand, authors are finding that people often want both. An autographed copy of a printed book is something that will always be special, and cannot truly be replicated on an e-reader. No matter how you slice it, there is always a place for printed books, but it really depends on you. At the rate some people read, homes could quickly become an episode of “Hoarders” and, frankly, not everyone has the money or the space. So the options are simple: Read print books, read e-books, or read both. At some point, you’ll find yourself drawn more one way than the other and the answer will present itself. Or you’ll remain firmly in the middle. Either way, if you’re reading, it’s never a bad thing.
 

Original  source: Bookshop Blog

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What we’re reading:

BEARTOWN by Fredrik Backman

All the talk about the Varsity Blues admissions scandal and parents bribing college coaches to get their kids into the universities of their choice inspired me to go back and read BEARTOWN, by Fredrik Backman, the 2017 novel about the three H’s — hockey, high school and last, best hope — in a small Swedish town. Nominally a story about the transformative power of sports, it is, like many supposed sports novels (and films, for that matter, and TV shows), actually about friendship, morality and achievement. Whether you have any feelings at all about hockey (I don’t, really), it is impossible not to get swept up in these kids’ lives and what they learn on the ice.
At a time when a lot of cynicism is about to be attached to the whole concept of an athlete, there is a purity here, a sense of pain and joy, that has nothing to do with hackneyed metaphors and everything to do with compelling characters and a wrenching story, beautifully told. (Also: There is a great sequel.)

EDUCATED by Tara Westover

All the talk about the Varsity Blues admissions scandal and parents bribing college coaches to get their kids into the universities of their choice inspired me to go back and read EDUCATED, by Fredrik Backman, the 2017 novel about the three H’s — hockey, high school and last, best hope — in a small Swedish town. Nominally a story about the transformative power of sports, it is, like many supposed sports novels (and films, for that matter, and TV shows), actually about friendship, morality and achievement. Whether you have any feelings at all about hockey (I don’t, really), it is impossible not to get swept up in these kids’ lives and what they learn on the ice.
At a time when a lot of cynicism is about to be attached to the whole concept of an athlete, there is a purity here, a sense of pain and joy, that has nothing to do with hackneyed metaphors and everything to do with compelling characters and a wrenching story, beautifully told. (Also: There is a great sequel.)
 
 
 

WONDER by R. J. Palacio

All the talk about the Varsity Blues admissions scandal and parents bribing college coaches to get their kids into the universities of their choice inspired me to go back and read WONDER, by Fredrik Backman, the 2017 novel about the three H’s — hockey, high school and last, best hope — in a small Swedish town. Nominally a story about the transformative power of sports, it is, like many supposed sports novels (and films, for that matter, and TV shows), actually about friendship, morality and achievement. Whether you have any feelings at all about hockey (I don’t, really), it is impossible not to get swept up in these kids’ lives and what they learn on the ice.
At a time when a lot of cynicism is about to be attached to the whole concept of an athlete, there is a purity here, a sense of pain and joy, that has nothing to do with hackneyed metaphors and everything to do with compelling characters and a wrenching story, beautifully told. (Also: There is a great sequel.)