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Sunday, February 28, 2021

Lawrence Ferlinghetti dead: San Francisco poet, bookseller was 101 - Los Angeles Times.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti dead: San Francisco poet, bookseller was 101 - Los Angeles Times.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and titan of the Beat era, dies at 101

Lawrence Ferlinghetti outside City Lights Bookstore in 2013.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti outside City Lights Bookstore in 2013. 
(Stacey Lewis)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the opposite of the flamboyant literary bad boys drawn to the bohemian haven he nurtured in 1950s San Francisco.

Unlike Beat novelist Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg, he was known for neither public drunkenness nor public nudity. Tall and lean, he swam daily and biked to work at City Lights, the San Francisco bookshop that became a landmark of intellectual freedom not long after he co-founded it seven decades ago.


LIFE IS ODD: A CONVERSATION WITH DINTY W. MOORE

BY 

I first met Dinty W. Moore at the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference back in 2016. I’d been an avid reader of Brevity for some time, and so by the time I was face-to-face with the man (whom I thought of as The Editor-in-Chief, all caps) I was a sprawling mess who tried to make a self-deprecating joke about New Coke and ended up saying something dumb like, Oh yes, I used to do cocaine. Fortunately for me, Moore’s sense of humor and grace extends beyond the page.

Moore has authored several books, including Between Panic and Desire, Crafting the Personal Essay, The Accidental Buddhist, and Dear Mr. Essay Writer Guy, and his writing has also been widely anthologized. He is the editor-in-chief of Brevity, which is now in its second decade of publication, and has a very nice garden. Moore’s forthcoming essay collection, To Hell with It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno, comes out on March 1 from University of Nebraska Press. To Hell with It moves between being tongue-in-cheek and deeply sincere as we travel through the narrator’s personal hells. The collection is structured around Dante’s Inferno, and each essay takes a slightly different shape, weaving together research and personal narrative and interspersed with images. It is an absolute delight (a reader’s Paradiso).


NYT Opinion: “The short film above allows you to experience the brutality of the pandemic from the perspective of nursesinside a Covid-19 intensive care unit. Opinion Video producer Alexander Stockton spent several days reporting at the Valleywise Medical Center in Phoenix. Two I.C.U. nurses wore cameras to show what it’s like to care for the sickest Covid patients a year into the pandemic. So many Americans have died in hospitals without family by their side, but they were not alone. Nurses brush patients’ teeth, change their catheters and hold their hands in their final moments. In just a year, we’ve lost half a million Americans to Covid-19. Vaccinations may be offering some relief, but inside I.C.U.s, nurses continue to contend with the trauma and grief of America’s carousel of death.”