…
and I am perpetually awaiting /
a rebirth of wonder.
Ibid.

Loved this as much as I love the asterisk.

Made me ponder the obscuring obscenity asterisk and where it falls into these groups.

Nothing could be more of a wink and nod to a true meaning than the censored word hidden in plain sight.

I don’t ask a lot from y’all in exchange for spending thousands of dollars a year to give the public free court records.

Please share this piece far and wide.

Cover for City Lights. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore. Lawrence Ferlinghetti standing at open window wearing bohemian garb looking out from a window on the upper level of City Lights.

Table of contents page for City Lights. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore.

Recently published biography of City Lights Bookstore framing it in its role as a center for literary activism. As an academic text it is richly sourced from interviews and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s / the bookstore’s epistolary records. Chock full of interesting and fun tidbits. Highly recommended.

A text of one semi colon, followed by picture a star fish, followed by a semi colon, followed by a period and asterisk.

You were correct.

It was fantastic and wonderful

It was also an absolutely captivating text.

To borrow your words “We think we know the animal world, but strange language renders it wonder-full again, or leaves life open to that.”

And to bookend the stack with some of the excluded till later poetry it felt appropriate to include Alina’s new poetry collection My Heresies

& my favorite of Alina’s recommendations from the last year:

Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Disintegration Made Plain & Easy

Also, the two I am looking forward to reading, but they have not yet arrived.

Pierre Guyotat, Idiocy trans. by Peter Behrman de Sinéty (NYRB Classics)

Amit Chauhari, Incompleteness: New and Selected Essays, 1999 - 2023 (NYRB)

Dan Elkind, Dr Chizhevsky’s Chandelier: The Decline of the USSR and Other Heresies of the Twentieth Century (Repeater Books)

Katrine Øgaard Jensen, Ancient Algorithms (Sarabande

In stack form, echoing the ones that I been able to read and was happier for it. (Thread)

Aaron Schuster, How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science (MIT Press)

Alvin Lu, Daydreamers (FC2)

Every book that I have gotten from Malarkey has been great to the point I signed up as a Book club member next year. They put out great stuff. Please consider supporting them.

Get some books or even some PDF/ electronic versions. Only 4 bucks. Great to procrastinate at work before the holiday.

Intriguingly the hole started filled, then became unfilled. What originally caused the hole? Who filled it? Who unfilled a filled hole? With discovery maybe more about this hole will be revealed. People should subscribe so y’all can pay all the Pacer fees to get to the bottom of this hole situation.

Somehow it’s worse.

The “Facts” state “The Longstanding Hole” hasn’t been filled since at least 2015, 10 years.

But it was covered with an orange cone.

But then 4 years ago, the unfilled hole also became uncovered.

They haven’t been able to even cover it with an orange cone warning for 4 years.

🚜 TODAY 10/27 7pm PT, @willpotter.bsky.social joins us in the bookstore to celebrate the publication of his new City Lights title,
LITTLE RED BARNS: Hiding the Truth, from Farm to Fable

Join us! Or register for the livestream here:
citylights.com/events/will-...

Victor Hugo (1917) by Auguste Rodin. Marble bust of Victor Hugo, poet and novelist, intentionally roughed out aesthetic meaning the bust is not fully carved out of the stone, in background. Six foot tall breaking wave white floral arrangement in foreground.

A marble bust by Rodin of Victor Hugo carved in a roughed out way to pay homage simultaneously to Hugo and Michelangelo behind a floral arrangement created for the Bouquet of Arts Exhibition Day at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor synthesizing two artists work into one display.

I’ll take you up on this deal. But I don’t know how to facilitate this exactly i.e. how to send you the 5. Let me know.

Cover page, a poem in three lithographs. Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Out of Chaos

Surges Forth

The Human

A unique poem from the special exhibit on Lawrence Ferlinghetti currently on display at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Out of Chaos
Surges Forth
The Human

The dog trots freely in the street and sees reality and the things he sees are bigger than himself and the things he sees are his reality Drunks in doorways Moons on trees The dog trots freely thru the street and the things he sees are smaller than himself Fish on newsprint Ants in holes Chickens in Chinatown windows their heads a block away The dog trots freely in the street and the things he smells smell something like himself The dog trots freely in the street past puddles and babies cats and cigars poolrooms and policemen He doesn’t hate cops He merely has no use for them and he goes past them and past the dead cows hung up whole in front of the San Francisco Meat Market He would rather eat a tender cow than a tough policeman though either might do And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory and past Coit’s Tower and past Congressman Doyle He’s afraid of Coit’s Tower but he’s not afraid of Congressman Doyle although what he hears is very discouraging very depressing very absurd to a sad young dog like himself to a serious dog like himself

But he has his own free world to live in His own fleas to eat He will not be muzzled Congressman Doyle is just another fire hydrant to him The dog trots freely in the street and has his own dog’s life to live and to think about and to reflect upon touching and tasting and testing everything investigating everything without benefit of perjury a real realist with a real tale to tell and a real tail to tell it with a real live barking democratic dog engaged in real free enterprise with something to say about ontology something to say about reality and how to see it and how to hear it with his head cocked sideways at streetcorners as if he is just about to have his picture taken for Victor Records listening for His Master’s Voice and looking like a living questionmark into the great gramaphone of puzzling existence with its wondrous hollow horn which always seems just about to spout forth some Victorious answer to everything

“looking like a living question mark into the great gramophone of puzzling existence”

Dog - Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Also very much appreciate that the dance forms into a spiral, the more natural form of movement.

AGAINST MARCHES: AN ARGUMENT FOR THE DANCE OF HISTORY

Derrida’s reading of Marx as theorizing a responsibility to honor the Other across time puts friendship at the center of the cosmos… Marches are remorseless and mechanized; dances constellate and make use of the field in spirals and repetitions.

Cover of biography of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution

Since the union's founding in 1905, radicals in the IWW had crafted their own phrases, symbols, and historical lineages to separate capitalism from democracy and express their program of revolutionary unionism as a quintessentially American endeavor. In the call for recruits to the Missoula free speech fight, quotation marks around the word American in the phrase "free born American," suggested an inclusive vision of American identity that was open to anyone who embraced freedom, regardless of race, ethnicity, or place of birth. In this vision immigrants, whether they had naturalized, were Americans too. By implication, tyrannical, oppressive police, who had made a crime of speaking in the street, were for- eign and un-American. This rhetorical tactic would become increasingly important in radical campaigns for free speech.

quotation marks around the word American in the phrase "free born American," suggested an inclusive vision of American identity that was open to anyone who embraced freedom, regardless of race, ethnicity, or place of birth. In this vision immigrants, whether they had naturalized, were Americans too

"I am seeing almost all of this for the first time,” says Paul Yamazaki, longtime head buyer at City Lights, of the new Legion of Honor museum’s exhibition "Ferlinghetti for San Francisco." It's open now through March 22, 2026!

Read the interview in ALTA Magazine
www.altaonline.com/culture/art/...

Danny DeVito has beef with leaf blowers #shorts YouTube video by Lovett or Leave It

Bless the hearts of any fool thinking their leaf blowers are helping make things look nicer when I can see and feel the chaos it causes fill the air with dirt, pollution, suffering, and pain as it moves towards me like a category 5 hurricane.

Jackasses.

youtu.be/pVMgBGL8T5g?...

City Lights LIVE events!

📢 TODAY 7/28 6pm Mary Anne Trasciatti & Naomi R Williams
@rutgersupress.bsky.social
💥 Tues 7/29 6pm @rebeccagrant.bsky.social & Nina Martin
@avidreaderpress.bsky.social
🌲 Thurs 7/31 7pm A Celebration of Lew Welch
w/ @altajournal.bsky.social

Register: citylights.com/events/

HUNGER Maybe a tomcat passes by late at night, maybe an acacia meows under the rubble, and it isn't from cold the houses shiver, while hunger howls, it howls in the North. A day passes, and a day and a night, and the neighbors' son doesn't wake up, a day passes, and a day and a night, and dust continues sleeping on the clotheslines. But where did the shell take my neighbors? And I'd be lying when I say: friends, it's alright. Every death is bearable, every thing is bearable, every absence passes, except the hunger of my friends in the North. March 18, 2024

This is a poem by Nasser Rabah from his collection published By City Lights Booksellers, Gaza: The Poem Said It’s Piece.

Sharing to share the voice.

Hoping the world can open the pathways to feed people and end this hunger.

People are talking about genocide as if it is a rhetorical or moral debate. It is a legal term–a crime defined under international law. South Africa and nine other countries have charged Israel with the crime of genocide at the International Court of Justice. 🧵

Israel’s Endgame Is Obliterating Palestine Gaza is being deliberately starved. The West Bank is next.

It is abominable that the response to a deliberate campaign of starvation in Gaza has been so muted. @ryanlcooper.com calls it out today, and connects the dots: ethnic cleansing is clearly the future for the West Bank, which the Israeli Knesset this week voted to annex.
prospect.org/world/2025-0...

Court Watch does tremendous and important work.

Court dockets are a treasure trove and they are good at finding important things.

And sometimes it’s just funny, e.g. the dumb luck crank heads who stole a trailer from the FBI equipment yard only to get caught while in the back of it smoking meth.

Once again, a tapestry of art and literature by a master weaver, as expected.

“This is the work of the poem: to ruin reified boundaries by luring us—formally, linguistically, etymologically, surreally, recklessly, inappropriately, endlessly—towards the possibilities of unboundedness. Poetry never stops imagining. The poem does not take “no” for an answer: it jumps the fence.”

“They nudge us to think, to imagine, to forsake the given scripts and safety associated with conforming to received beliefs and conventions.”