City Lights is a famous bookstore in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. It's particularly famous because when beat poet Alan Ginsburg wrote his famous poem "Howl," City Lights was the first--and for a while--only bookstore where the poem was available. They're very proud of this fact, and sell a postcard showing some military cadets reading the poem in a class. It's also (not surprisingly) next to Vesuvio's, the bar at which the beat poets drank as they worked out their poetry and novels in the 1950s and early 1960s.

We like City Lights because it is a funky independent bookstore, with nooks and corners and lots of stairs to climb (just like North Beach itself.) I personally love it because it has a really good poetry section. The last time we were there, Peter and I were stalked by student photographers who wanted to get shots of us in the Venetian masks we'd just bought at the North Beach Fair, and I picked up a book by one of my favorite poets, Lars Gustafsson, whose work I haven't seen in any bookstore outisde of Sweden since the 80s.

But City Lights also has a noticeable character, beyond its poetry collection. Peter summed it up by calling it "the socialist bookstore." This is not to be confused, by the way, with the anarchist bookstore (the Bound Together Collective in the Haight), the progressive bookstore (Modern Times on Valencia), or the disorganized Russian bookstore (Znaniye in the Richmond). Piled among City Lights' guidebooks and local novels are works by Noam Chomsky and books with titles like "Imperialist America," "Main Currents of Marxism," and "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower." An English friend of ours went in there and bought a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, hoping to get the American perspective on the matter. Well, it is an American perspective, but it probably wasn't considerably different from the English one.

However, recently someone visited the bookstore and apparently wasn't aware of this. As his friend, columnist Cathy Seipp reported, he asked for Oriana Fallaci's book "The Force of Reason." Oriana Fallaci is an Italian writer who's written several books worrying about the Islamification of Europe, due to the number of Middle Eastern immigrants who aren't assimilated. I haven't read the book, but I think that's the gist of it, plus European Islamists added her to their fatwa list (which is getting pretty long these days). In any case, socialists consider "Eurabia" concerns, at best, well, anti-socialist. And when asked for the Fallaci book the City Lights clerk, according to Seipp, snapped back, "We don't carry books by fascists."

Yeah, the clerk was snippy, but asking for even a somewhat conservative book in City Lights is outta line, too. Even if you think it's the kind of store that carries everything controversial, just because it was willing to go all out and carry "Howl" (which does have some R-rated description) it doesn't mean it's going to carry every book by everyone who pisses off a reactionary. Asking a City Lights clerk for a political title that doesn't have a socialist bent is like going into a kosher butcher store and telling them they have a poor meat selection because they don't carry pig's knuckles, or complaining that the Warped Tour lineup doesn't include Jennifer Lopez. You massively need a clue if you're doing such a thing.

It's nice to have a variety of unique bookstores in the Bay Area, but just as you don't go to your mechanic for a manicure, you need to keep them straight. If I want a Russian audiobook, I'll go to the Polish bookstore (no kidding); if I'm looking for the nearly-out-of-print first novel by science fiction novelist Tim Powers, I go to the science fiction bookstore; and if I want something mainstream, I go to Barnes and Noble. But I don't confuse one store for another.

If you go to City Lights, just buy yourself a copy of "Howl," and enjoy it while getting drunk at Vesuvio's. But if you want an Oriana Fallaci book, for heaven's sake, just order it off Amazon.