That's right! Oakland photo time- here's a building in downtown, where Telegraph Ave. and Broadway Ave. converge.
"And above all, we read! We read everything that came into our hands. We got books from all the public libraries, and lent each other whatever we had been able to discover. But the coffeehouse was still the best place to keep up with everything new." Stefan Zweig World of Yesterday
Reading this reminded me of my last years of high school when I lived in Minnesota-I was able to get away with skipping classes, and would spend the whole day in the university library. There I discovered all sorts of poetry: the Imagists, Modernists, Polish experimentalists and the 60's underground. One of the anthologies I would read over and over again was The Living Underground ed. By Hugh Fox- you just can't find this anymore. One of the poets included, d.a.levy, captured my attention with his unique writing style and radical, tragic life. It may have the beginnings of my obsessions with lives of strange people. I was inspired by reading his poetry, but he was dead and therefore inaccessible. I chose then to write to the editor, Mr. Fox, whose address I was able to find in a Michigan phonebook from the library (I had developed good investigative skills being in the library so much). Mr. Fox wrote back to me and asked that I call him instead, which I did, surreptitiously, late at night (my parents never seem to have noticed a late call to Michigan on the phone bill). I was incredibly excited to talk to Mr. Fox, and he was quite gracious with his information- I still have the scribbled notes taken during that phone conversation. D.a. levy was pretty much an unknown in the late 80's, but recently there had been an belated anthology of his work- and a website here. I did not have any friends to share the excitement of my discoveries, but I can definitely relate to Zweig's youthful zeal for such exploration.
