Vesuvio was recently mentioned in the New York Times. Here is our part, and if you’d like to read the whole article:
A Book Lover's San Francisco
Travel
December 1, 2010
A Book Lover’s San Francisco
....Rather than sit there, I bought the book and went across the lane (Jack Kerouac Lane, to be precise) to the Vesuvio Cafe, a bar that was once a Beat hangout. Vesuvio is a cozy space of dark wood, tiled floors and stained glass, with framed photos of the neighborhood greats — Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti — covering the walls. I ordered a shot and a beer, which seemed an apt Beat lunch, and went upstairs to the narrow mezzanine to read.
“Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!”
I paused for a sip of whiskey and looked out the window, down onto Jack Kerouac Lane, where a steady stream of well-scrubbed tourists stopped to pose next to a mural and read some of the more innocuous Beat verse that had been inlaid in the sidewalk.
A couple at a table behind me were discussing Neal Cassady’s role as connective tissue between the Beats and the Merry Pranksters. At a small table in the corner, light streaming in the open window next to him, a bearded, bespectacled man sat hunched over a book with the intensity of a monk, an empty glass and a stack of new books beside him.
Looking up, he announced that he was reading Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” in a single sitting. “I’m reading my way out of a breakup,” he explained. “I read books in cafes, then leave them behind when I’m done.”
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
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