My wife and I were in City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco when we got a text that my daughter was at the hospital about to give birth.
In honor of the occasion, I got a HOWL hat commemorating Allen Ginsberg's famous poem, that 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,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey, William Burroughs, and John Steinbeck, all frequented City Lights, and the bookstore continues to show fine curation with a complete set of John McPhee. In my opinion, McPhee is one of the finest American writers of the last 75 years.
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