No café sales – but four checks arrived for “Bob on Bob.”
One was from a pal from my old pick-up basketball game. One was from a college friend. One was from a former secretary/poet and one was from a FB “friend” I don’t know personally but seems to have connected to me through the comix world. So various aspects of my life were represented, which feels nice.
In other news…
1.) Regular readers may recall my observation that visitors my table to whom I give my card, no matter how pleasant or interested they appear, never contact me again. They may also recall the young woman from China studying at Cal who came to the café one Sunday because the library was closed but never came again, so far as I know. We’d had a memorable chat, in which I’d mentioned “beatniks” and “hippies” and she had written both words down for further study because she had never heard of either. Anyway, out of the blue – and from China – arrived an email, saying how much she had enjoyed Berkeley and meeting me and that she hoped to return to UCB, her “dream school, for graduate work. (She also thanked me for telling her “story” in my blog, so I have a reader in China! A previously untapped market for my work.)
2.) My table had other visitors of interest. First was a Canadian woman of Iraqui-Jewish heritage (on her mother’s side), with floppy black hair, who arrivedevery morning in the same full-length, black, shiny, plastic raincoat, looking like she had stepped in off Carnaby Street in 1965. She is in town while working on AI, via “diagramatology,” which is Greek to me but mother’s milk to “Stan” (see previous “Adventures”), who leant her books on the subject. He mentioned my article about an AI-created book and she requested the link. I sent it, and that has been the end of that.
Then there was a couple from Utah. (He had been born here, but while they love Berkeley, have decided Utah needs their politics more.) He had shoulder length curly and wore an SF Giants cap, red zipper jacket and grey slacks. His seemingly much younger fiancee wore a knit hat, rust-colored sweater, and polka dotted pants. He edit/publishes a cycling magazine and she is a chemist. We discussed the challenges of publishing, and they fingered my books but bought none. (They were in a hurry to search out his mother’s favorite stuffing for Thanksgiving.) She took my card and asked if my books were available at my website. Hopeful, I allowed myself to imagine.
ALL BOB’S BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT www.theboblevin.com.
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.