12 ms·

Lawrence Ferlinghetti has died

142 points by thedday 6y ago

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
I admit to occasionally looking at Ferlinghetti's Wikipedia article to see if he was still hanging on, because I knew that with his passing we would be losing one of the last men connected to the whole fascinating world of the Beats. Now there is only Gary Snyder left, long may he live.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  Bob Dylan's still around. Also Stan Bevington [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Bevington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Bevington] They may be a generation removed, but undeniably culturally intwined. I used to have a few beers with Stan on occasion when I was a flailing college student—you could usually find him for a pint at a couple of spots around the Annex in Toronto. He had stories. edit: I had included "So is David McFadden [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McFadden_(poet) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McFadden_(poet)]" but as soon as I actually looked at the page I'd discovered he's passed as well. I feel fortunate for having the chance to see him read at a small pub across from the AGO a decade ago or so.
  - zabzonk 6y ago
    Ferlinghetti and company pre-dated Dylan by at least 10 years. I would never consider Dylan a Beat.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      Pedantically speaking he isn't, but most would. He was definitely inspired by the beats thematically and stylistically, and has said so in numerous interviews, also touching upon many of the same things as Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc.
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/r8yWX https://archive.is/r8yWX
dang 6y ago
If curious, small past threads: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Enduring San Francisco - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19360165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19360165 - March 2019 (19 comments) Salton Sea Notes: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s California Travel Journals (1961) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10240296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10240296 - Sept 2015 (3 comments) Lawrence Ferlinghetti Recounts More Than Six Decades of Life in San Francisco - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9184856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9184856 - March 2015 (5 comments) There's also these obits from today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/lawrence-ferlinghetti-dead/2021/02/23/37b2a134-edd5-11df-abf5-a1622994c5f5_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/lawrence-fer... https://www.npr.org/2021/02/23/375206219/lawrence-ferlinghetti-beat-poet-and-small-press-publisher-dies-at-101 https://www.npr.org/2021/02/23/375206219/lawrence-ferlinghet... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26241243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26241243 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26243128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26243128, but no comments there)
- justinboogaard 6y ago
  Hi Dang, I hope you're well and always appreciate the context you bring to articles like this. Is there a way to turn this into a feature where similar submissions are linked?
  - dang 6y ago
    Yes, that's what we're inching towards. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26158300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26158300 (but I've since written more code). Edit: By the way, if anyone has a bright idea about how a community-driven past-thread-references feature should work (which, note btw, includes duplicate detection), I'd be interested to hear them. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is probably best.
dluan 6y ago
Just yesterday, I was listening to a youtube video of Ginsberg doing a read of Howl. It really does seem like a chapter has closed on San Francisco, and its future seems really uncertain and open ended.
- microtherion 6y ago
  Here's Ferlinghetti reading "Dog": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk8cMyCUnoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk8cMyCUnoo It really evokes San Francisco to me.
- sammalloy 6y ago
  You haven't felt the (light) weight of San Francisco history until you've trod upon the creaky steps of City Lights and caught a glimpse of the "Books Not Bombs" sign caught in a dusty sunbeam in a high corner of the store next to a black and white photo of Lawrence in one of his many hats. His influence and reach echoes through the years calling all of us to account and measure up.
- aabhay 6y ago
  As painful, shameful, and beautiful as it is, the baton has been handed to a generation of tech entrepreneurs and their entourages. And as much as I hate to say it, the city will emerge as something completely new and infinitely different.
- Lammy 6y ago
  That chapter ended when the world lost Lew, imo https://cucurbite.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/courses-by-lew-welch/ https://cucurbite.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/courses-by-lew-we...
jdkee 6y ago
"Pity the nation whose people are sheep, and whose shepherds mislead them. Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves. Pity the nation that raises not its voice, except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero and aims to rule the world with force and by torture. Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own and no other culture but its own. Pity the nation whose breath is money and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed. Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode and their freedoms to be washed away. My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.” --- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  From an outsider's perspective, I am saddened by the fact that so many intellectuals decide to balance out generic nationalism of the masses by a mix of pity and resentment towards their own nation. This is not just American feature, it is the same in all cultures whose language I understand (Czech, Polish, German). An unfortunate consequence is anti-intellectualism. It is easy to slip into anti-intellectualism if intellectuals cultivate an anti-(American, British, French, German) image. I wish this did not happen as often as it does now. There is no intrinsic reason for learned people to be antagonistic towards the country/nation they live in. It is a weird fashion.
abecode 6y ago
I had a little bit of intimate but impersonal contact with Lawrence Ferlinghetti: the USC special collections library has the notes of his doctoral dissertation, which if I remember correctly was about the theme of the city in poetry/literature. I think he wrote it in Paris, but it was mostly in English. It was on small note cards in pencil and I remember that I had to read it in the presence of the librarian. That was way before I was interested in computers but it's interesting as a contrast. There's a lot of amazing writing online and the ease of putting stuff online makes it possible to see rough thoughts (e.g. tweets), but there's a lot of noise online too and reading lovingly preserved tweets from a fancy library with lots of leather and mahogany might improve the user experience.
W-Stool 6y ago
As a kid who grew up around the Great Lakes and lived for many adult years there, a later in life move out to the West gave me an opportunity to simply drive a couple of hours to San Francisco and explore this amazing city. My first stop was City Lights bookstore, and I was thrilled (and still am) to say I've set foot in the place. Think of it this way - this bookstore predates almost the entire computer industry that most of us here are a part of and take for granted. Amazing.
- _jal 6y ago
  It is a great bookstore. I live here, and pre-plague used to go maybe every other month or so. One of the (many) awful casualties of our real estate costs is the infinite bookstore. They just can't afford to stock a book that sells on alternate years. And no, Amazon doesn't substitute. I don't go to City Lights to buy a book, even though I usually end up also doing that.
- rmason 6y ago
  Sometimes I feel as if I'm from the last generation that loves bookstores. A lot of them are starting to disappear. I used to spend my Sunday afternoons visiting three different bookstores. Two of the three are long gone. I've visited most of the famous ones around the world. I rarely visit SF without a stop at City Lights, the place has a soul.
  - loosetypes 6y ago
    If you haven't been, Green Apple Books on Clement street is also great.
    - blululu 6y ago
      Green Apple’s Inner Sunset location on 9th is also great. Their staff book recommendations are solid. I feel like I usually enjoy their recommendations, even for books I would not buy/read otherwise (bursts the filter bubble).
  - cafard 6y ago
davidwf 6y ago
Great article overall but I wanted to add in a recommendation for _Her_ -- I've read it many times and still don't know what happens, but there's something about the act of reading it that transports me to a different, more youthful place every time, and not just in the way that reading other books from my youth does. Highly recommend, and very sad to hear this news.
Lammy 6y ago
> As the Chronicle reports, Ferlinghetti "will be buried in the family plot in the Druid section of the Bolinas Cemetery, beside his late ex-wife, Selby Kirden-Smith."
zzzbra 6y ago
I guess Snyder is all the remains of the Beats before they are, properly speaking, history...
dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
A really nice thread from the Beinecke Library at Yale with photos of some of his correspondence: https://twitter.com/BeineckeLibrary/status/1364359980862869506 https://twitter.com/BeineckeLibrary/status/13643599808628695...
dhosek 6y ago
One thing I've learned just in the past few months is that the “Beat” in Beat Poets wasn’t the musical beat, but beat as in “beat down by life.” Maynard G. Krebs did a lot to distort the reality of what the Beat Poets were about.
50 6y ago
Is not beauty still beauty / And truth still truth / [...] / Are there not still stars at night / Can we not still see them / in the bowl of night / signaling to us / some far-out / beatific destiny?
habosa 6y ago
City Lights is such a special place. A bookstore that really makes you want to read, and somewhere you can find a book you'd never find otherwise. I love that they stayed open late at night too, every time I got dinner in North Beach or Chinatown I'd make a stop at City Lights after and invariably leave with 2-3 books. His legacy goes far beyond the store, of course, but I'll always be thankful for that place.
totetsu 6y ago
This guys look reminds me of the NZ street poet David Merrit. Many years ago he was my gateway to Linux, giving me my first knoppix and warty Worthog CDs. https://vimeo.com/146031069 https://vimeo.com/146031069 https://rediscover.co.nz/nice-things-david-merritt/?doing_wp_cron=1613409219.5890960693359375000000 https://rediscover.co.nz/nice-things-david-merritt/?doing_wp...

142 points by thedday 6y ago

I admit to occasionally looking at Ferlinghetti's Wikipedia article to see if he was still hanging on, because I knew that with his passing we would be losing one of the last men connected to the whole fascinating world of the Beats. Now there is only Gary Snyder left, long may he live.

52-6F-62 6y ago
Bob Dylan's still around. Also Stan Bevington [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Bevington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Bevington] They may be a generation removed, but undeniably culturally intwined. I used to have a few beers with Stan on occasion when I was a flailing college student—you could usually find him for a pint at a couple of spots around the Annex in Toronto. He had stories. edit: I had included "So is David McFadden [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McFadden_(poet) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McFadden_(poet)]" but as soon as I actually looked at the page I'd discovered he's passed as well. I feel fortunate for having the chance to see him read at a small pub across from the AGO a decade ago or so.
- zabzonk 6y ago
  Ferlinghetti and company pre-dated Dylan by at least 10 years. I would never consider Dylan a Beat.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Pedantically speaking he isn't, but most would. He was definitely inspired by the beats thematically and stylistically, and has said so in numerous interviews, also touching upon many of the same things as Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc.

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/r8yWX https://archive.is/r8yWX

dang 6y ago

If curious, small past threads: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Enduring San Francisco - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19360165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19360165 - March 2019 (19 comments) Salton Sea Notes: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s California Travel Journals (1961) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10240296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10240296 - Sept 2015 (3 comments) Lawrence Ferlinghetti Recounts More Than Six Decades of Life in San Francisco - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9184856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9184856 - March 2015 (5 comments) There's also these obits from today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/lawrence-ferlinghetti-dead/2021/02/23/37b2a134-edd5-11df-abf5-a1622994c5f5_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/lawrence-fer... https://www.npr.org/2021/02/23/375206219/lawrence-ferlinghetti-beat-poet-and-small-press-publisher-dies-at-101 https://www.npr.org/2021/02/23/375206219/lawrence-ferlinghet... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26241243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26241243 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26243128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26243128, but no comments there)

justinboogaard 6y ago
Hi Dang, I hope you're well and always appreciate the context you bring to articles like this. Is there a way to turn this into a feature where similar submissions are linked?
- dang 6y ago
  Yes, that's what we're inching towards. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26158300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26158300 (but I've since written more code). Edit: By the way, if anyone has a bright idea about how a community-driven past-thread-references feature should work (which, note btw, includes duplicate detection), I'd be interested to hear them. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is probably best.

dluan 6y ago

Just yesterday, I was listening to a youtube video of Ginsberg doing a read of Howl. It really does seem like a chapter has closed on San Francisco, and its future seems really uncertain and open ended.

microtherion 6y ago
Here's Ferlinghetti reading "Dog": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk8cMyCUnoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk8cMyCUnoo It really evokes San Francisco to me.
sammalloy 6y ago
You haven't felt the (light) weight of San Francisco history until you've trod upon the creaky steps of City Lights and caught a glimpse of the "Books Not Bombs" sign caught in a dusty sunbeam in a high corner of the store next to a black and white photo of Lawrence in one of his many hats. His influence and reach echoes through the years calling all of us to account and measure up.
aabhay 6y ago
As painful, shameful, and beautiful as it is, the baton has been handed to a generation of tech entrepreneurs and their entourages. And as much as I hate to say it, the city will emerge as something completely new and infinitely different.
Lammy 6y ago
That chapter ended when the world lost Lew, imo https://cucurbite.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/courses-by-lew-welch/ https://cucurbite.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/courses-by-lew-we...

jdkee 6y ago

"Pity the nation whose people are sheep, and whose shepherds mislead them. Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves. Pity the nation that raises not its voice, except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero and aims to rule the world with force and by torture. Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own and no other culture but its own. Pity the nation whose breath is money and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed. Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode and their freedoms to be washed away. My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.” --- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

inglor_cz 6y ago
From an outsider's perspective, I am saddened by the fact that so many intellectuals decide to balance out generic nationalism of the masses by a mix of pity and resentment towards their own nation. This is not just American feature, it is the same in all cultures whose language I understand (Czech, Polish, German). An unfortunate consequence is anti-intellectualism. It is easy to slip into anti-intellectualism if intellectuals cultivate an anti-(American, British, French, German) image. I wish this did not happen as often as it does now. There is no intrinsic reason for learned people to be antagonistic towards the country/nation they live in. It is a weird fashion.

abecode 6y ago

I had a little bit of intimate but impersonal contact with Lawrence Ferlinghetti: the USC special collections library has the notes of his doctoral dissertation, which if I remember correctly was about the theme of the city in poetry/literature. I think he wrote it in Paris, but it was mostly in English. It was on small note cards in pencil and I remember that I had to read it in the presence of the librarian. That was way before I was interested in computers but it's interesting as a contrast. There's a lot of amazing writing online and the ease of putting stuff online makes it possible to see rough thoughts (e.g. tweets), but there's a lot of noise online too and reading lovingly preserved tweets from a fancy library with lots of leather and mahogany might improve the user experience.

W-Stool 6y ago

As a kid who grew up around the Great Lakes and lived for many adult years there, a later in life move out to the West gave me an opportunity to simply drive a couple of hours to San Francisco and explore this amazing city. My first stop was City Lights bookstore, and I was thrilled (and still am) to say I've set foot in the place. Think of it this way - this bookstore predates almost the entire computer industry that most of us here are a part of and take for granted. Amazing.

_jal 6y ago
It is a great bookstore. I live here, and pre-plague used to go maybe every other month or so. One of the (many) awful casualties of our real estate costs is the infinite bookstore. They just can't afford to stock a book that sells on alternate years. And no, Amazon doesn't substitute. I don't go to City Lights to buy a book, even though I usually end up also doing that.
rmason 6y ago
Sometimes I feel as if I'm from the last generation that loves bookstores. A lot of them are starting to disappear. I used to spend my Sunday afternoons visiting three different bookstores. Two of the three are long gone. I've visited most of the famous ones around the world. I rarely visit SF without a stop at City Lights, the place has a soul.
- loosetypes 6y ago
  If you haven't been, Green Apple Books on Clement street is also great.
  - blululu 6y ago
    Green Apple’s Inner Sunset location on 9th is also great. Their staff book recommendations are solid. I feel like I usually enjoy their recommendations, even for books I would not buy/read otherwise (bursts the filter bubble).
- cafard 6y ago

davidwf 6y ago

Great article overall but I wanted to add in a recommendation for _Her_ -- I've read it many times and still don't know what happens, but there's something about the act of reading it that transports me to a different, more youthful place every time, and not just in the way that reading other books from my youth does. Highly recommend, and very sad to hear this news.

Lammy 6y ago

> As the Chronicle reports, Ferlinghetti "will be buried in the family plot in the Druid section of the Bolinas Cemetery, beside his late ex-wife, Selby Kirden-Smith."

zzzbra 6y ago

I guess Snyder is all the remains of the Beats before they are, properly speaking, history...

dmitryminkovsky 6y ago

A really nice thread from the Beinecke Library at Yale with photos of some of his correspondence: https://twitter.com/BeineckeLibrary/status/1364359980862869506 https://twitter.com/BeineckeLibrary/status/13643599808628695...

dhosek 6y ago

One thing I've learned just in the past few months is that the “Beat” in Beat Poets wasn’t the musical beat, but beat as in “beat down by life.” Maynard G. Krebs did a lot to distort the reality of what the Beat Poets were about.

50 6y ago

Is not beauty still beauty / And truth still truth / [...] / Are there not still stars at night / Can we not still see them / in the bowl of night / signaling to us / some far-out / beatific destiny?

habosa 6y ago

City Lights is such a special place. A bookstore that really makes you want to read, and somewhere you can find a book you'd never find otherwise. I love that they stayed open late at night too, every time I got dinner in North Beach or Chinatown I'd make a stop at City Lights after and invariably leave with 2-3 books. His legacy goes far beyond the store, of course, but I'll always be thankful for that place.

totetsu 6y ago

This guys look reminds me of the NZ street poet David Merrit. Many years ago he was my gateway to Linux, giving me my first knoppix and warty Worthog CDs. https://vimeo.com/146031069 https://vimeo.com/146031069 https://rediscover.co.nz/nice-things-david-merritt/?doing_wp_cron=1613409219.5890960693359375000000 https://rediscover.co.nz/nice-things-david-merritt/?doing_wp...