Due to publishing and publicity timeline adjustments, the Surmountable book launch date has been adjusted to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday on January 18 and President’s Day on February 15. Pre-order on Amazon and other online book retailers will be available in early January.
Stay tuned for more details on the launch and early reviews.
Mark Phinney’s epic weeklong Koh Phangan Man event, the second in a series, concluded this week. One of the joys of living on the island is the presence of numerous artists, entrepreneurs, and idealists innovating new modes of living, entertaining, and transforming.
With the talented Gabrielle Leon providing the background tunes, Liz Griffin and I performed the entire 3,000 word poem Howl as part of a playful sunset poetry happening we organized, “Filthy Sunset.” I also read Love’s Victim from Ovid’s “Amores.”
Earlier this year, I visited City Lights Bookstore, the scene of the legal battle to publish Howl six decades ago, and talked to the store’s manager Elaine Katzenberger about that unique fight for First Amendment free speech protections. Here are excerpts from that interview, parts of which will be used in my upcoming book on the art and alchemy of successful political protests.
There is a museum at the intersection of Broadway and Columbus in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborh0od dedicated to the beats. It’s worth visiting but for my money the sacred epicenter of the social movements that shook the youth of a nation for decades is across at the street at City Lights bookstore. Any bookstore is magic, the holder of promised secrets and a slice of the grand history of human knowledge. City Lights, with its mythic origins and tumultuous past is one of a tiny subset of literary shops that holds something more, something sacred. I walk in and a mother stands at a respectful distance while her pre-teen boy engages the cashier in a line of questioning. Do you have this book, where can I find books on that subject, mom knowing some of the answers but choosing to allow the experience of discovery.
I met the manager of City Lights bookstore (and publishing house) some years back when I video recorded and livestreamed some of their author events for FORA.tv. Elaine Katzenberger is, as you might imagine, a thoughtful and interesting woman, two attributes required to choreograph the visitor experience and keep it relevant as one of America’s important bookstores. On this weekday morning, the place was packed buzzing with visitors, the out-of-town tourists, the loyal locals, and no doubt one or two devotees of the faith, the never-ending pursuit of that one new book that will crack open the universe in some new way.
Gruber: Why is City Lights such a quintessential part of San Francisco’s civic life?
Katzenberger: Well, I don’t really think of it as belonging to San Francisco because people who don’t live here come for the same reasons that you do and that I was originally drawn here. San Francisco was the place Lawrence birthed City Lights, but it has transcended that, it’s more of a world location and it holds something that people need. It also may sound a bit abstract or metaphysically corny…
Gruber: Keep it coming.
Katzenberger: It has to do with ideals, feelings of integrity; there are a lot of interpretations that have been layered over the founding stories. Some visitors are just tourists, and some are clearly making a pilgrimage, but everybody is looking for the same thing on some level.
Gruber: And what is that?
Katzenberger: People would use different words – it’s a large stew – but it’s that creativity trumps capitalism, and that the human spirit is somehow communicating with other human spirits in this way that is authentic, and not subject to the rules that the rest of the economy is playing by. Maybe that’s why San Franciscans who have lived here a long time want to claim it, because the city used to talk about itself that way, it was an illusion, but a lot of people came to San Francisco for the same reason that people come now to City Lights.
Gruber: Lawrence is about to have a big (100th) birthday. Can you articulate what was the ethos at that time, the ethos of the beats that motivated Lawrence to publish Howlin 1956? What was happening then, particularly in the context of how that might be relevant now?
Katzenberger: Lawrence always talks about how, first and foremost, he wanted to publish it because he identified it as groundbreaking poetry, he thought that Ginsberg was doing something that no one had done, and that had to do with poetics as (much as) anything else. And then, in terms of the content, the way in which the poem decries capitalism and militarism, that is what the counterculture in the 1960s was trying to talk about, rebellion against conformism, against the celebration of what capitalism was supposed to bring to quote, unquote average Americans. It meant reaching for freedom outside of that, somehow captured in this poem, which was especially exciting to him (Ferlinghetti). It was also the shared declamatory nature of it, very much talking about making poetry some form of actual communication, and that was part of what the beats were about, poetry as speech, poetry as a way of actually getting the message across.
Gruber: A key focus for the store is books on progressive politics. What does it mean to be progressive?
Katzenberger: Another big question. Something to do with putting the social contract with other human beings and other life forms on the planet before profit and power.
Gruber: One of the premises of the ’56 trial was that Ginsberg and, by extension, Ferlinghetti, were subversive. Do you think that the acts of protests of Ferlinghetti and the beat poets and the kind of literary explorations that City Lights does are patriotic, are aligned with what the founders had in mind in terms of how citizens need to be engaged politically?
Katzenberger: Obviously. If you want to be able to participate in a democracy, you need to be able to not only be informed, but to form opinions based on critical thinking, all of those things are part of civic life and a healthy democracy.
Gruber: When a visitor walks out of your store, what do you hope they leave with, in addition to a large handful of books? What’s the experience?
Katzenberger: I hope they feel validated in being part of a community of interesting, thoughtful, sensitive human beings. That’s what books have always given me. That’s what I hope that books give other people too.
In my visits to scenes of historic protests for the Surmountable book project, there are certain themes that are near universal when political and media institutions resistant to change seek to affect public opinion.
The activists are tools of outside agitators.
They have ulterior motives.
They have personal flaws to be exposed and attacked.
There is a problem (racism, pollution, social injustice) but be patient, now is not the time to act.
Protests such as strikes or missing school days are rude and disruptive, thus unacceptable.
These objections are, in most, cases, nonsense, and attempt to obfuscate important messages and block action on public issues.
The ‘discovery’ phase of Surmountable, a two month jaunt through scenes of historic protests plus interviews with activists, academics, journalists, people on the street, thinkers, trouble makers, and witnesses is done. I arrived in Bangkok 2am from South Korea, after the final international leg of the trip that took me to Berlin, Kiev, Paris, Tunis, and Seoul.
The final itinerary traveled, four continents, 20 destinations, two months.
Now for the writing.
We have a wealth of raw material. Public thinkers like AEI’s Norm Ornstein, C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, Adbusters/ Occupy Wall Street’s Kalle Lasn, Columbia University’s Todd Gitlin, historian Stephen Schlesinger. Journalists and authors. Front line activists who put their bodies on the line like Standing Rock’s LaDonna Brave Bull Allard who gave her land and was a leading figure in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, Kiev ‘squad’ veterans like Anna Kovalenko who led an all-woman group to physically resist attacks by secret police and militia, Tasnim of Tunis who shed the veil to take to the streets and launch the end of long-time dictator Ben Ali and the beginning of the Arab Spring.
It’s a privilege to gather these stories and be in the process of remarkable women and men, sometimes via choreographed interviews, sometimes via odd moments of serendipity as when I wandered into a Tunisian protest from the front door of my hotel into a weekly communist rally honoring the death of a martyred civil society activist.
Adam Edwards and I go into projects like this with certain foundational ideas and the outline of an editorial structure, but with open minds and a fierce desire to explore what is true, what is just, and how citizens might live the American founders’ vision of an active engaged public.
We intend to publish this year. I will be publishing photos and interview excerpts in the coming weeks. Here are a few memorable images from the trip.
LaDonna Brave Bull Allard after picking me up at the Bismarck, North Dakota airport and driving me 90 minutes to the Standing Rock reservation. I had asked how to get to her and where to stay, to which she responded, “Brian, you just don’t get it, do you, we’re in the middle of nowhere.” So she came and got me and put me up next door to her at the Water Protectors House. After two hours of conversation, and a home cooked meal by activists living in the house, she came by at 11pm with her new great granddaughter. “Direct descendent of Sitting Bull.” We toured the tribal council, the pipeline and protest sites, the local college and Sitting Bull museum, the tribal casino, and her ancestors’ burial grounds.
I told Pastor Leon Ross of the Weeping Willow Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama that I had beers with four white fellows at the base of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma the night before, and they said things were fine with race relations relations back in the day. He scoffed, “Sure for them they were. We were sick and tired and of being sick and tired.” He worked in the Montgomery Improvement Association along with Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., pivotal in the bus boycott started by Rosa Parks.
The Alley of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes, in the square where Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution took place. Over 100 protestors were killed as the protests grew in scope and intensity. I walked the scenes of the clashes and the moving, detailed exhibits on the streets honoring the dead and commemorating the events.
Tasnm and the Martyr. She walked me to the train like the mother of three she is, insisting on carrying my backpack, and warning me not to talk to strangers. We attended two protests that day, a second in front of the Central Bank as it was anti-imperialism day and students marched through the streets pushing past heavily armed police trying to stop them.
The palace at the far end of Gwanghwamun Square in central Seoul where Koreans gathered every Saturday, first in the hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands until the president was impeached, turned out of office, and imprisoned with a 26 year term.
As so it begins. I begin my interviews of practitioners of the art of protest from Selma to Seoul tomorrow for the Surmountable book project. Thanks to my co-writer Adam Edwards and to our 80+ Kickstarter funders for supporting my travel to 4 continents over the next two months. My first interview will be at the iconic City Lights bookstore in North Beach, San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s shop on the corner of Broadway and Columbus which shocked the literary world with its publication of Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl.” I will talk to the shop’s executive director and publisher Elaine Katzenberger then on to tech writers and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. What would you ask her??
The “Surmountable” Kickstarter project is funded as of March 1 at $15,011 with over 80 backers. The trip to scenes of historic protests around the United States and around the world begins immediately. Thanks to all of our backers for supporting this adventurous and ambitious project. I will be blogging from each destination throughout March and April, starting in San Francisco. USA destinations will include Seattle/ Vancouver, Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, Charleston, West Virginia, Washington, D.C., the Alice Paul Institute in Mount Laurel New Jersey and New York City.
Here is a first look at the March and April Travel Itinerary for the “Surmountable” book project. I leave 2 March at 2:10am and will arrive in San Francisco with the Kickstarter campaign completed. I will be blogging throughout the project, sharing interviews and observations throughout.
OK, time’s here for Kickstarter campaign fans who like to torment Creators by funding at the 11th hour. We are a few thousand away from hitting our goal and the campaign ends in a day. As you know, if you don’t hit your goal, no moneys are drawn and the campaign fails. YIKES!
Surmountable was nominated last week by Kickstarter as one of their “Projects We Love.”
I hit the Bangkok airport tonight to start my travel around the USA and the world to scenes of historical political protests to gather stories for a playbook on citizen engagement. We have great Rewards for funders from signed books to events to a week of creative writing on a Thai island. My backpack is groaning from the extra gear and I’m all in. How about you???? America and the world need you. Big hugs from The Road. Hit this link or click on any of the images to find out more about the campaign.
“Surmountable” is Kickstarter’s top Print Journalism and featured Publishing project.
Brian Gruber is an author, writing coach, and marketing consultant living on the Thai island of Koh Phangan. He has spent 40 years studying, leading, and founding new media companies and projects.