Sold a Lollipop to “Lyle,” a fireman/EMT, around 40, in a Conquering Lion Tribe of Judea t-shirt. Originally from Chicago, he lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, making him, as far as I know, my first reader in that entire state.
Lyle was in town for three nights of sold-out concerts by the “jam band” (a term I just learned) Phish at the Greek Theater. The cafes were packed with Phish-heads, and I met two more, Michael, the son of a Holocaust survivor, and his pal, whose name I did not catch. Both were from Toronto. Michael is a college drop-out-become-tech-entrepreneur in “automation systems,” with which I am completely unfamiliar, and his traveling partner a genius programmer, which I know about from watching three seasons of Silicon Valley.
We connected when I let out that I was writing about the first computer-generated graphic novel. They assured me that AI would not replace everyone, only the mediocre and below. The elite would always have a place. Then the conversation devolved into the bad old days when you were limited to only several hundred thousand megabytes of badoodle-doodle, which, while whizzing by me, did lead me to recall a recent conversation with my friend Budd about the earlier Dark Age when we had only three TV channels in Philadelphia.
Neither of them bought a book, but the pal recommended I read Walter Russell’s The Universal One (1926), a treatise on “the mind-centered electromagnetic universe.”
In (semi-) other news:
I gave a café journal to a woman who had written most of her recently published memoir in its back room. When we were soliciting contributions, she had nothing for us; but she is a good soul who seemed interested in the contents, so, when she did not offer to buy one… When I mentioned this to a friend of limited means in NYC with whom I am in daily correspondence, she asked if I might “donate” an IWKYA to her, which she promised to recommend to her friends if she liked it. So, despite the condition attached… Then, on a roll, I gave “James” (See “Adventures” 365-366), who has now identified himself to me as a “psyche-medicinal distributor,” his route currently circumscribed by a dead battery in and lack of gas for his truck, a Best Ride. He liked it so much he twice returned to my table to read portions of it aloud.
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.