Teresa Conboy - stories and sketches

03/23/2023

Sometimes, I forget to promote myself (that's not me pictured). Last summer - when my essay "How Musing on a Jazz Giant Can Help Unlock Our Stories" won in the Expository category of the Long Beach City College (LBCC) Jacaranda Essay Contest.

The English Department of Long Beach City College held its joint Jacaranda and Donald Drury Awards on Thursday at the Liberal Arts Campus P Building. For the Jacaranda Awards, each student had subm…

02/17/2023

Our founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti envisioned City Lights as an international project and published authors from all over the world.

Here he is in Paris, in front of our sister store Shakespeare and Company. At City Lights, Lawrence published works by a number of French writers, including Jacques Prévert, Charles Baudelaire, André Breton and René Daumal.

07/20/2022

People come in and out of our lives and some make lasting impressions, such as DJ, fellow Beat lover, DJ Nik Beat.

04/20/2021

"I can't breathe," George Floyd said 25 times.

GUILTY...FINALLY.

03/27/2021

Late night writing requires appropriate late night listening.

11/24/2020

President Obama's reading list included Jack Kerouac's On The Road.

During an interview with The Washington Post, Obama revealed the books that shaped his public service and leadership.

11/24/2019

"The Kerouacs have no telephone. Ted Berrigan had contacted Kerouac some months earlier and had persuaded him to do the interview. When he felt the time had come for their meeting to take place, he simply showed up at the Kerouacs’s house. Two friends, poets Aram Saroyan and Duncan McNaughton, accompanied him" -- from the Jack Kerouac interview in the Paris Review, Issue #43, Summer 1968.

Jack Kerouac, ca. 1956. Photograph by Tom Palumbo   The Kerouacs have no telephone. Ted Berrigan had contacted Kerouac some months earlier and had persuaded him to do the interview. When he felt the time had come for their meeting to take place, he simply showed up at the Kerouacs’s hou.....

11/04/2019

Fifty years ago, Allen Ginsberg recorded his thoughts about the death of his friend Jack Kerouac, and began writing a new poem.

Allen Ginsberg’s journal entries in the days immediately following Jack Kerouac’s death, fifty years ago.

11/03/2019

A place I've always wanted to see, and part of the film Beat Angel was filmed there - Desolation Peak.

In Whatcom County, literary history and local history converge on Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder’s time as North Cascades firewatchers.

10/25/2019

"In those days, New York was still a city best photographed in black and white. There were pawnshops and cut-rate barbers and the Variety Theater, where bums went to snooze through double features. Two years earlier, the Third Avenue El had been torn down, but the Franks’ neighborhood was not yet free of the shadows cast by its brooding iron structure. It was underneath the El that Jack, in his wanderings on the Bowery in 1951, had developed the spontaneous writing technique he called “sketching,” that he would put to use in some of the books he wrote after On the Road." -- Joyce Johnson

Robert's black-and-white prints immediately reminded me of Jack’s word pictures in On the Road. Here was the reality beyond the sidewalks of New York that I hoped to see one day with my own eyes, if only Jack would take me along on one of his cross-country road trips. I didn’t know that he was b...

10/16/2019

Great interview with Kerouac biographer/scholar Gerald Nicosia who will also be at Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, October 20th reading/discussing his book Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century, joined by Kerouac's closest living relative Paul Blake III.

Guest Host: Richard Modiano Guest: Gerald Nicosia Gerald Nicosia, who wrote the ultimate Jack Kerouac biography, “Memory Babe” (1994), has just completed an insightful book, Kerouac: The Last Quarter

09/18/2019

Meeting Jack Kerouac...
. .a miscellany of first encounters with the Beat legend.

(...) Jack Kerouac was among the guests. Gore [Vidal] and I went with him to an apartment in the Village. During the evening Jack grew expansive on beer. As we went out he handed me a paperback copy of The Subterraneans, in which he had written: "To Paul — a man completely devoid of bu****it." Lat...