Super

In the movie "Educating Rita" Susan - a working class woman turned student - tells Frank - her drunken professor - of how tempted she was when accosted with a "Are you fond of Ferlinghetti?" by another professor while browsing through a book by Ferlinghetti at the library to answer "Only with parmasan and cheese." with a cockney accent.



I am reminded of the scene reading a New York Times article about the 50-year anniversary of the bookstore City Lights founded by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti who was part of the Beat generation in the fifties.



In an interview Ferlinghetti said: "It is really much more interesting today than in the 50's. There have been all this mythologizing of the 50's and the Beat generation in San Francisco and so forth, but it has been wildly overdone, because it was a really depressive period, I thought, on account of the general repressive atmosphere and the political climate." Insert reference to George Bush and John Ashcroft here."It is nost...