Out There :: Celebrating Bookstores

Last Saturday was Independent Bookstore Day, and Out There was among those who said hooray. One of the joys of visiting an old-school, bricks-and-mortar bookstore is the opportunity to browse. OT uses the highly unscientific open-to-a-random-page, dip-in method to determine whether a book is for us. This week we attempt to replicate that experience for you, by presenting passages from some of the books that have recently crossed our desk. We'll tag on the bibliographical info, but otherwise get out of the way. Happy sampling!

1. "Say, for postcard - Richard Avedon six months ago took a really great photo of me and Peter [Orlovsky ] mellow naked (cropped around halfway down P's pecker and one fourth of mine) - one of the best classic photos he ever took, says Robert Frank - he was too chicken to put it in book he's making, he has one of me alone naked holding hand in front of my loins. But that suppressed one would be great card, except can't probably send it thru mail - or could one?? I dunno." - From "I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career - The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955-1997," edited by Bill Morgan (City Lights, pub. date: June 15).

2. "Fame like a drunkard consumes the house of the soul/ Exposing that you have worked for only this/ Ah, that I had never suffered this treacherous kiss/ And had been left in darkness forever to founder and fail." - Malcolm Lowry, "After Publication of Under the Volcano," from "City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology, 60th Anniversary Edition," edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (City Lights).

"For Bela Lugosi: A chance meeting with Morgan le Fay at the observation roof of the Empire State Building." - Philip Lamantia, "Time Traveler's Potlatch," from "City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology."

3. "None of the white girls ever disapproved of my dancing, whoever my partner might be, since they were frustrated at how hard it was to get the white boys to dance. White boys were reluctant to move like that in front of their peers. Indeed, once I became established as a willing dancer, both white and black girls kept me busy, and I hardly ever sat down during any of the dances that followed." - From "How I Shed My Skin - Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood," by Jim Grimsley (Algonquin Books).

4. "We are the Stonewall girls. We wear our hair in curls. We have no underwear. We show our public hairs." - "From Stonewall - Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights," by Ann Bausum (Viking Books for Young Readers).

5. "'Here. Sniff a little of this before we go in.'

"I took the vial from Greg and snorted, my head filling with a thick, hot jelly that slipped down my neck all the way to my tailbone. 'Oh, fuck. It feels amazing.' I could only imagine what high-end, designer drug I'd just taken. 'Sylvia , what is this?'

"Her eyes rolled down from her skull like venetian blinds. 'It's VCR head cleaner.'" - From "Bad Kid - A Memoir" by David Crabb (Harper Perennial, pub. date: May 19).

6. "At the same time that he was making these films, [Warren ] Sonbert wrote extensively about international opera performances, music recordings, and the Hollywood cinema; these articles were most frequently published by The Advocate, the Bay Area Reporter, and the San Francisco Sentinel. He would often write under the pseudonym of Scottie Ferguson, the character Jimmy Stewart plays in Hitchcock's Vertigo (U.S., 1958)." - From "Framework - The Journal of Cinema and Media" (Spring 2015): Warren Sonbert - Selected Writings, guest editor Jon Gartenberg (frameworknow.com).

7. "From saloons to tenement houses, to military barracks and fraternal clubs, and to truck stops and bathrooms, 'normal' (heterosexual) white men have long found ways to have hetero-masculine sex with one another."

"[Hunter S.] Thompson ultimately seemed to settle on the position that the Hell's Angels were simply too menacing to be homosexuals, a position suggesting that the link between homosexuality and effeminacy continued to function as a loophole for straight, masculine men well into the 1960s." - From "Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men," by Jane Ward (NYU Press, pub. date: Aug. 4).