The store is a burrow of unmeasured twisting passageways, its shelves curated and tended to by the shuffling, old, keen-eyed staff who tediously take down special orders on slips of paper and are as likely as not to screw up the requests. I did not come seeking a book on Beat writers, although from the earliest age at which I was exposed to quality literature output I had felt warmth toward their movement, even gratitude. Today I saw it on a top shelf: The Portable Beat Reader, splat and obstinate, a finger in the eyes of the authors who filled the store with stacks and stacks of cellulite romances and mystery novels peeking timidly from their assigned places—solace, solace!—and the candy-colored anime stirring kids’ subconscious discontent with the world in which they’re growing up, a discontent that had to be suppressed at least until SATs were done and personal essays run through grammar checkers. Youth, can you outflank the dissolute depths that entrapped 50s and 60s artists?
This suburban feast, this bookstore, is a draw for white retired time-burdened patriarchs and matriarchs, who lived and were sentient at the time covered by this book, who were beat in their own day, maybe hippies, explorers of exotic climes, counterculturalists wandering naked through decaying Victorians, fighters.
The Portable Beat Reader: Ah, to be able to clasp an entire generation of ferment to my side! Saga of a fevered burst-out era!—dehydrated into 600 pages with a recessive form factor, the editor having adroitly grappled selected passages from the famous expressions of Ginsburg, Kerouac, di Prima, and others, archaic topical, words that fly at you like the aftershock of an atomic bomb. The book cost only six and a half dollars and I had a credit at the Book Rack, so I took it to the counter where the purse-lipped sentry of the cash register informed me that credit can be applied only to half the cost of a book. So I shelled out three dollars and a quarter in cash and headed outside with my small, rare prize into the bus-grimed streets of Arlington, spaceship-high on anticipation, blitz-brained with the sheer heft of the treasure, soaring on crisp air where the ideals of those who felt they had been inducted into a cadre of ethicists were swirling together with the impulse to climb the ladder of power. I flooded home to absorb this concept-erupting volume, hoping to relive a past that no one wanted to live through at the time it was happening. I wanted to party in that forgotten corner of my soul.
Andy Oram
April 24, 2026