Since Levi's been reading Richard Hell and Johnny Temple's letting us all in on his punk indie publishing philosophy over at The Book Standard, it seems like a good time to let you know about another important punk literary event, the opening of CBGBs: A Place that Matters, a collection of statements and photographs of and by musicians.

I recently posted about possible plans in upstate New York for an "American Tragedy" reality tour of sorts, and we've also featured stories about other literary landmarks. Just like other types of "favorite sons" (or daughters, as the case may be), an author's hometown can bring a lot of attention (and tourism dollars) to even the smallest town.

If you're up for a field trip and you love taking tours that revolve around a century old murder, there's something in the works just for you! The residents of Herkimer County, NY are already planning centennial events to mark the county's most famous murder case. The story of Chester Gillette, the murder of Grace Brown and the subsequent trial became the basis for the classic American novel, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.

Developers plan to build a retail and residential complex on the seafront that inspired James Joyce's Ulysses. Historians, preservationists and Joyce fans are campaigning against the development -- which proposes shops, apartments, restaurants and even a concert venue to be constructed along Scotsman's Bay, Dun Laoghaire, outside Dublin.

Concord, a small country town about 15 miles northwest of Boston, was where the colonial American militia stockpiled their guns and ammunition in the months preceding the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. The British attempted a surprise attack on the weapon stores in Concord on the night of April 18, 1775.

When Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were creating the Beat sensation in the mid-to-late fifties, their friend and mentor William S. Burroughs was halfway across the world in Tangier, a seaport city on the North African coast on the Strait of Gibraltar.

The early-to-middle 1970's were good years for alternative culture in America. The antiwar movement of the 60's proved itself wiser and more resilient than the pro-war military establishment, and by 1974 America was fully out of Vietnam and President Nixon was hounded into resignation. This same year, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman created the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

6 POETS AT 6 GALLERY
--------------------

Philip Lamantia reading mss. of late John
Hoffman-- Mike McClure, Allen Ginsberg,
Gary Snyder & Phil Whalen--all sharp new
straightforward writing-- remarkable coll-
ection of angels on one stage reading
their poetry. No charge, small collection
for wine, and postcards. Charming event.

Kenneth Rexroth, M.C.

8 PM Friday Night October 7,1955

6 Gallery 3119 Fillmore St.
San Fran

I don't know much about Reed College, except that it is in Portland, Oregon and that it is notable in Beat history as the meeting place of three future writers, the nature-minded poet Gary Snyder, the buddha-minded poet Philip Whalen and the least-grounded and most unsettled of the threesome, the enigmatic but highly appealing Lew Welch.

Berkeley, on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, is an extremely cool town. It's not necessarily the University that makes it cool, or at least it's not the undergraduates, who don't look much different from undergraduates anywhere else. What it is is the mass of scraggly humanity that the town has built up over decades and decades of being an alternative-minded kind of place.