Sold a café journal. The buyer was a hotel guest, a white-bearded gent with horn-rimmed glasses. He picked up “Outlaws, Rebels…” but when I asked if he was interested in comics, he only smiled. I described the journal as containing poetry, and he went for that. He said he was a poet, and Googled revealed a poet with his name, the author of an E-book in 2012, with work “written from (the)… heart” but said nothing else allowing for confirmation.
Then I sold a “Best Ride” to a septuagenarian PhD candidate in nuclear physicist. A café semi-regular, she comes dressed in scarves and shawls and earrings the size and shape of dreidels. She has looked over my books in the past, sometimes taking one or more to her table for perusal without every effecting a purchase, tempting to channel the inner drug store owner of my comic book reading youth and exclaim, “I am not a fucking library.” She has also developed a progressively deteriorating condition impairing her brain’s ability to express her thoughts. Even when she writes down what she is trying to say, coherence can elude her. Words repeat; pronouns do not suit; sentences do not appear. But the next morning, she looked up from my book to compliment the clarity of my style, and I gave her a “Cheesesteak” so she might see from where and how it derived.
In other news…
The big event was my Zoom at the NY Comics and Picture Story Symposium.
I had hoped to outdraw “Hollywood Squares” and succeeded. About a dozen people tuned in, and while a majority may have been there at my invitation, the rest were not. It lasted over an hour and, even though I forgot some good lines I had planned to deliver and failed to answer some questions as well as I would have liked, I had a wonderful time. (The You Tube link – “Adults Only” – available upon request – has had 62 views, with 7 “Thumbs-up.”)
My two favorite post-event exchanges have been with friends. One asked if it was true I had been a C+/B- student in college, as if I had falsely claimed that to give me some non-egghead cred. The other e-mailed “After all these years it helped me understand you better.” When I asked what veils had been lifted, he said from my “fascination with the obscene, perverse and tasteless.”
Which is not how I would have put it.
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.