“These shoes are sentimental to me in that I wore them for my first poetry reading in North Beach and whenever I collected pay in City Lights for my books of poetry they sold. To me, they seemed reminiscent of fin de siècle Montmartre and symbolized the last of bohemian San Francisco, a time when a sordid collective of impassioned eccentrics, outcasts, deviants, lovers, criminals, lovelorn fatalists, the hopelessly sentimental, urban gypsies, and homeless dandies came together to immortalize and celebrate this otherness, exhilarated and consumed, in the shadows of the dank pubs where literary legends once preached the gospel of iconoclasts. This underworld of language that lived in our skin, on our tired tongues and aching fingertips, that which possessed us, could only be exorcised through pen and paper and in books. Only within the now antiquated book can the entirety of these experiences and senses be recalled; a book’s smell, the sensuous feel of the pages, the weight of it pressed against our hands and body, the imperfections of the type. Books are the repositories of our souls like the transient bodies of paramours waiting to be embraced after a lengthy absence. To me, used clothing, especially shoes, act much like the book. When worn they contain a story and history that carries with them the thoughts, dreams, desires, tragedies, remnants of experiences and the very soul of those who wore them last.”
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