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/...

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

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.”

“Sacredness makes profanation possible. Only the holy can be profaned. Heresy is an act that profanes the sacred text, which is to say, interprets this text in a way that’s threatening to clerics and religious institutions. Heresies are dreamy, to me.”

Truly an all around great Q&A.

A joy to read.

And packed with stellar insightful stuff.

“It starts with the eye and the ear: music, soundscapes, embodied experiences, paintings, sketches, images. Serendipity and coincidence are sources of continuous astonishment.”

Delightful.

Long Live Roi Radude.

I recall thinking to myself, “and there IT is, once again.” I would have expected nothing less. Reading your work can an odd version Where’s Waldo?

Cover of Indigenous Poetics

Introduction I believe every poem is ritual: there is a naming, a beginning, a knot or question, then possibly revelation, and then closure, which can be opening, setting the reader, speaker, or singer out and back on a journey. I can hear the tribal speaker in his voice, in whatever mode of performance. And when I trust my voice to go where it needs to be, to find home, it returns to where it belongs, back to the source of its longing. -Joy Harjo, Poet Warrior As poets ourselves, our curiosity is piqued by seeking why Native American writers are drawn to, take up, and embrace the genre of poetry specifically. Though style and form are important to the study of poetry, literary analysis is not what we are interested in performing in this book. What intrigues us is how the creative process, as a practice, has its own capacities, through the "ritual" of creation, to name the "knot or question," and to travel toward "revelation, and then closure, which can be opening." Like Harjo, we trust our voices and the voices of our contributors. We have journeyed with them, and together we are expressing home, in a way our poetic homes, where we see ourselves belonging. What does poetic process uniquely allow us to do? And does our poetic practice express its own type of Indigenous hermeneutics? We acknowledge, first, that the field of Native American poetry is far too much for any one book to take on. The sheer volume of poetry written by American Indians, First Nations, Native American, and Indigenous writers across the Americas is immense.

Words join breath-marks, fall into silence. Language stutters and searches. Poems build by an inquiry etched in text, in form, in absences.11 How delicate- dark material of dream. What we become in space: An etch- ing. Stilled vector- of holy. two dimensions A cut-out hunger. Sweet shadow-filled how we bargain against lurid possession. trace-

Silhouette our edges in L E T T E R S

Being bold and recommending after only one chapter because I have faith the rest will be as good. Intro, and a poem from the first chapter written by Kimberly Blaeser (chapter and poem)

Marvelous.

Wonderful. I enjoyed reading this immensely.

Several characteristics, beyond sheer size, distinguish the appearances of male and female buffalo. The base of a cow's horn, where it comes out of her head, is about the size of her eye socket; a bull's horn has a much greater circumference than his eye socket. Another thing is the penis sheath that extends downward at a forward angle from the bull's belly. The penis hangs in the bottom of the sheath like a roll of quarters in a Ziploc bag. The tip of the sheath is adorned with a long tuft of hair, which probably protects the tip of the bull's penis from freezing temperatures. The tufts are usually clumped into a single strand from frequent wettings by urine. When erect, the reddish pink penis extends out of the sheath like what happens when you turn the base of a lipstick tube.

During their peak breeding season, usually a span of two weeks in midsummer, they engage in vicious bouts of head-butting and pushing contests as they compete to breed with as many females as possible. In any given day during breeding season, there will be scores of fights among a herd, and 5-6 percent of the bulls will die each year from battle wounds sustained from horn goring. One in three mature bulls can expect to have at least one rib broken in fights during its lifetime. When a male buffalo ejaculates during intercourse, his abdominal muscles flex so violently that his back hooves lift off the ground and the entirety of his two thousand pounds comes to rest on the haunches of the one-thousand-pound female. Females carry their fetuses for approximately 285 days and give birth from mid-April to May. The calves are bright reddish tan.

I happen to have some knowledge of Bison because they are fascinating. From American Buffalo, Steven Rinella.

Majestic creatures.