Adventures in Marketing — Week 322

Adventures in Marketing – Week 322
Sold a “Schiz.”
The buyer was a post-doc in physics from Bangladesh, working on a project at UC. You might expect this would have presented me with a challenge small talk-wise; but, luckily, only the other day, Adele had sent me a link (“A New Wrinkle in Metaphysics”) about “entangled time” which I adeptly worked into the conversation. “Not my field,” he said, “but I expect they’ll have it untangled in 20 or 30 years.”

In other news…
1.) Perhaps to comfort me for the slight of my omission from that collection of “Best” comics criticism (See “Adventure 321″), a Serbian artist, whose comic I had reviewed five years ago, “Messaged” that he had translated my review into Serbian. He also wanted to let me know I was the favorite of a noted Slovenian cartoonist/art historian of his acquaintance.)
2.) A friend, who is extremely knowledgeable – and a fine writer – about basketball let me know he was re-reading “Best Ride,” praising my ability to describe the play and insights into “what big men see, feel, and do.” He had been a guard – and far better at his position than I at mine, so I expressed my thanks. I also pointed out, as I used to repeatedly tell Filipino nurses who commented on my height when helping me from my hospital bed, that I was just as tall as Steph Curry. “I used to be an uncoordinated center,” I’d say. “Now I’m a point guard.” )
3.) The most interesting café conversation of the week – easily worth the price of admission – was with a student of early Christian history. Over 15 years ago, he had written a 20-page pamphlet espousing a controversial theory about the religion’s origins, which, at the suggestion of a Berkeley publisher, he had developed into a book. The book became the subject as a documentary film and is now in development at HBO Max. We had a rollicking conversation, touching on Allende, Buddhism, Camus, Cuba, and Hemingway.
No money changed hands, but I gave him my card, and he said he’d be in touch.
That was a week ago.