Beat Museum

I'd be interested in going to this museum next time I'm in the area.

Chicago Tribune | He's got the Beats

A devotee of Kerouac and Ginsberg revives their literary and cultural legacy at a new museum in San Francisco's North Beach
[The Beat Museum
1345 Grant, San Francisco
Ca, 94133]
In a modest one-room space sublet from the Live Worms art gallery on upper Grant Street, the museum uses letters, videos, books and photographs to tell the story of the writers known as the Beats.

Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others sought to break from the conformity of the 1950s by writing about spiritual emptiness and longing, often using loose, stream-of-consciousness prose and poetry.

“Beat generation authors wrote enduring works of literature,” said Ann Charters, an English professor at the University of Connecticut and the editor of several books about the Beats. “These are poems and books written more than a half a century ago that are still selling like hot cakes.”

The free museum, which opened last month, is the project of Jerry Cimino, a retired IBM computer salesman in his 50s who, as he began his career nearly 30 years ago, developed a passion for the style and message of the Beats.

...
A 1965 black-and-white photograph shows Bob Dylan, Ginsberg and writer Michael McClure in a North Beach alley near City Lights, the bookstore that played a key role in the Beat movement. The bookstore, co-founded by Ferlinghetti, published Ginsberg's “Howl and Other Poems” in 1956.

A year later, U.S. Customs seized the second printing of “Howl” and charged that it was obscene. In a landmark censorship ruling, federal Judge Clayton Horn ruled the book was not obscene and said that part of it “seems to be a declamation that everything in the world is holy, including parts of the body by name.”

The museum has drawn a stream of the curious and the devout. Coincidentally, it opened at the same time the San Francisco Public Library is exhibiting a portion of the original manuscript of “On The Road,” which was written on unusually long reams of paper.

The photographer Thomas Hawk visited the Kerouac exhibition recently and snuck a few photos (read his open letter to Myra Borshoff Cook re copyright and museums):