The Beat Hotel (Day 53 and a half)
Since I’ve been working so hard on the Ginsberg chapter (my model chapter) it was a real pleasure to go find the Beat Hotel while I was in Paris visiting Arte and my old friend Marcelino Truong (whose current book, Une Si Jolie Petite Guerre, is named after Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War). The hotel, where Ginsberg stayed and nearly picked up a drug habit thanks to Burroughs and Corso, is a literal stone’s throw from the Seine by Notre Dame and two blocks from Shakespeare & Co. whose owner, Sylvia Beech, is still on my radar (though a long shot) as a potential case study.
I saw the best minds of my generation run out of space
Ginsberg in the Beat Hotel in the Beat Hotel
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[…] The low yellow light in my office du jour and the perfect blue sky was a delight and I stayed as long as my scarf, gloves and hat allowed. I concluded with a read of Ginsberg’s major poem Kaddish which I also picked up at Shakespeare & Co. last weekend and started reading on the quay just below the Beat Hotel. […]
[…] deep research for the Ginsberg chapter. I picked up my copy at Shakespeare and Company in Paris on Day 53 and visited its location on Rue Git-le-Coeur the same afternoon, another enjoyable literary […]