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One of the neat things about writing on-line is that you never know whom you are going to hear from or when. In the past, I’ve heard from two relatives (one brother, one son) of players on Temple University’s 1958 (NCAA semi-finalist) basketball team and three fans of a B-movie actress who had made a big impression upon me as a teenager in “The Wild One.” Then the other day I heard from a niece of an actress I’d written about several years ago in the Broad Street Review, Julia Anne Robinson, correcting a factual error of mine and providing some new information. [The actual COD was smoke inhalation from a fire in her condominium caused by faulty wiring, and she was planning on becoming a nurse.] I had called the article “Whatever Happened to Baby Jessica?” but BSR’s editor thought differently: http://www.broadstreetreview.com/film-tv/the_unfnished_business_of_marvin_gardens.

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‘Marvin Gardens’ and Woodstock’s lost innocence

In The King of Marvin Gardens I sensed Bob Rafelson flinging his seasoned assessment of Nixon’s America into America’s teeth. Perhaps tellingly, the adults involved in this dark and quirky film subsequently…

broadstreetreview.com

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Bob Levin

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Bob Levin

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okay, you swine, i’ve changed my passord. let’s see you screw with me now. (and thanks to ace backwards for the suggestion.)

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Bob Levin

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What did you study at University of Pennsylvania?

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Intro

Headin’ My Way

FOM put up the second half of “Bob Reads Two Books.” Here’s the link:

Bob Reads Two Books (Part Two)

It begins:

Thomas Farber is a 73-year-old, Berkeley/Honolulu-based, author/editor/teacher. Boston-bred to a physician-father and poet-mother. Harvard educated, with 10-days of Yale Law School, quit for a more sizable hit of outlaw/adventure/romance, abetted by a Guggenheim, a Fulbright, “Here and Now” (El Leon Literary Arts. 2015) is his 29th book (novels, short stories, non-fiction, epigrams and more), a collection of 16 pieces, the shortest three pages, the longest 21, a mean of five.
It opens in 2014, with Farber looking at a snapshot of his parents, taken when he was five, his father now dead 40 years, his mother nearly 30. They “do not know…,” he thinks, “how they will age, how they will die – all that their strength and love cannot spare them.” It closes with him – recently confronted by a street crazy bellowing, “Do you want to die right now/” – facing major heart surgery, hoping to survive to write another book.
Farber did. This is it. But that assault was the event which fixated his mind upon the fate that had not yet reached him – but inevitably would.
Which will reach us all.

Adventures in Marketing: Week 55

Sold one Schiz.

I’ve known the buyer, a recently retired tenants’ rights lawyer, since he ran a legal aid outpost office in Chicago’s infamous Robert Taylor Homes, and I was a VISTA on the South Side. He asked if I’d felt a loss of identity when I’d stopped practicing. I said my identity had never rested on my being a lawyer. “It was more a trans-sexual thing, like I was walking around inside the body of a lawyer, but actually…”

Also swapped two Schiz’s, one for a poetry collection, one for a classy zine — and shipped eight books to NYC for Logos, 4 Schiz, 2 Cheesesteak, 2 Best Rides. (And a BR has been spotted in Powell’s in Portland. They want $8.95 for it. You can get it here, signed, for less.)

In other news, the only one of the health organizations I’d sought a plug for Heart from to reply said it did not give endorsements. I told its rep I understood perfectly — and that would be one more charitable non-profit not to receive a sizeable bequest from my estate.

Bob Reads Two Books

My latest piece is up at First of the Month. You can read it here.

Bob Reads Two Books (Part One)


It begins:
If you are a Patti Smith fan, you probably know the events at the core of M Train (Knopf. 2015), her beautiful and brilliant memoir. In 1980, Smith married the MC 5 guitarist, Fred Sonic Smith. In the prior five years, she had released four albums and published three books. In the next 14, she released one album and published one book. She and Fred settled in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, had two children, settled into bohemian domesticity.

I recently read…

…”String Theory,” a collection of David Foster Wallace’s articles about tennis.

Besides having written one of the most (deservedly) acclaimed novels of the last 50 years, Wallace was a good regional (and so-so Div. IV) tennis player. His volume-concluding “Federer Both Flesh and Not” has been considered, with Updike’s “Kid Bids Hub Fans Adieu,” one of the great pieces of sports journalism, scaling (like Roger Federer and Ted Williams) beyond genre into genius, into art. The other efforts in this book — on Wallace’s “career” on mid-western courts, on Tracy Austin and the disappointments of athletes’ autobiographies, on the then-journeyman, now-coach Michael Joyce, and on a particular U.S. Open, esp. the economic aspects thereof — are rewarding, each in its own way, as well.

Wallace seems incapable of presenting sentences for print that are not eye-opening, smile-inducing, and/or mind-bending. His understanding of the game is deep and his insights into its play novel. His player portraits apply admiration (mostly) and malice (occasionally) as Sargeant applied pigment. The inventive curiosity of his mind leads Wallace away from the clichés, sentimentality, and sheer repetitiveness that burdens most sports writing into explorations that are fresh and dangerous both on and off the tournament grounds. It wasn’t until I finished the book that I realized he hadn’t reported (or I’d missed) how Federer’s match came out, and it hadn’t mattered.

Adventures in Marketing: Week 54

No sales again.

Not only that but the last two “customers” at the café have avoided eye contact entirely. This I could understand if “The Schiz” was the book in question, but “Cheesesteak”…

And my Manhattan-based efforts have constricted. Only partly from choice, Logos will have an exclusive east-of-Berkeley sales dealership on “Best Ride” and, until my actual distributor kicks in, a temporary one on “S” and “C.” I understand there are flyers and a display. This could be fun.

In other news, at the suggestion of my entrepreneurially-inclined friend Budd, I have e-mailed honchos at the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiologists hoping for an endorsement of “Heart” which will make it more attractive to agents and/or publishers. No responses yet, which will be kept in mind when it becomes time for charitable bequests.

Finally, I was interviewed by two fellows who hope to make a documentary film about Dan O’Neill and the Air Pirates. This seems an entirely DIY, low-budget operation, but of the half-dozen folks who’ve expressed similar interest, it’s the only one to actually get cameras rolling. Since they wouldn’t tell me the questions they’d be asking in advance, I’d prepped by skimming by book, which I hadn’t read since it came out. Boy, it was good! Maybe if the film is released, there’ll be a second edition. Maybe an NYRB Classic.

So a lot is going on. Still, there are moments just after wakening when I lie there thinking, Just what am I doing?

But they pass and I get up and do it some more.

I recently read…

…”Some Rain Must Fall,” volume five of Karl-Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle.” It picks up shortly after volume four ended, with Karl-Ove entering a writers’ program, and concludes several years later when, not without much intervening drunkenness, despair, and shattered relationships, he has one book out and, after a period of blockage, a second on the way.

The conception — and execution — of this work continues to be compelling. There are passages of stunning power. Unlike earlier volumes, there are no disconcerting time shifts but there continue to be the annoyances of frequent references to Norwegian writers unknown except to other Norwegians and the reappearance without identification to characters who have been encountered before but forgotten. I found it cool to have events that had been explored earlier, like the death of his father and its immediate aftermath to be re-explored from a different point in Karl-Ove’s life, and I liked encountering characters whom, in a traditional novel, you expect a lot more of than what happens here (or in life); but some might find this annoying.

If you’re looking for a 5-600 page novel to read, this would not be a good choice. But if you wanted to read five or six of them by the same guy, start with volume one and keep going.

I recently read…

…Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber.”

I had read a couple of reviews of a recently published biography of Carter, and the strangeness of her life had intrigued me. The New Yorker’s called this her best book, and Moe’s had a used copy.

TBC is a collection of fairy tales, reimagined by a wild feminist consciousness and retold in a fever-dreamed style. (For those tales I did not recognize or for which I required a refresher to recognize the changes, Wikipedia helped.) The tales feature humor and homicide, twisted endings and sex that will make any kid who shivered and chuckled at EC Comics’ “Grim Fairy Tales” nod with special pleasure at this goof’s ascension into High Art. But the writing, the word linkage, the thought processes that coined the sentences and motivated the actions’ movement… Well, this is something unfathomably beyond Al Feldstein — or just about any of the rest of us.

Here, for example, is one sentence, the book’s final one, in fact:

“Little by little, there appeared… like the image on photographic paper that emerges first, a formless web of tracery, like prey caught in its own fishing net, then a firmer yet still shadowed outline, until at last as vivid as real life itself, as if brought into being by her soft, moist, gentle tongue, finally, the face of the Duke.”

What an ability! What a triumph!

Adventures in Marketing: Week 53

Sold zero books. But…

…through the efforts of my semi-volunteer publicist, two of my books, maybe three, are now for sale in a Manhattan bookstore, and stores in Manayunk and Dobbs Ferry have said, “Well, maybe…” And the announcement of this surge has led one FB Friend to offer to swap his (unpublished) novel for one of my published ones. (He turns out not to have an actual copy of his book but will e-mail me a couple chapters.)

    Then while I was writing that very paragraph, M (not her actual initial), a heretofore unknown-to-me regular at the café, eyed my display and suggested I sell books at the Ashby Flea Market, where, she said, many writers did, including one who had spent 30 years wrongfully imprisoned because of evil perpetrated by the FBI. This led to a 20-to-30 minute conversation, in which I learned she was in her 60s, a free-lance tour guide (Bay Area locales and parks), and which touched upon such matters as holographic wills, her travels along the Silk Road, Plymouth-Whitemarsh, Simmons College, her unfair firing from her position at the UN 30 or 40-years ago, the commune she joined in Berkeley (sex, drugs, and one phone for eight people), and concluded, when she asked “So why did you come to Berkeley?” with my handing her a copy of “Cheesesteak” and saying “If you promise to read this…”

    In other news, our pitch of “Heart” to a mid-western publisher resulted in an a response two-hours later, which, tellingly perhaps, asked not to see sample chapters, but to hear our thoughts about our audience, organizational contacts, and sales program.

I recently read…

… “Fatal Shore” by Robert Hughes, which I picked off the Free Books shelf in the café and, for which, I left “Masters of Sex” in exchange. (It went quickly too.)

Hughes is a fine writer and a smart guy. He seems to have read everything written about and visited every place relevant to his history of Australia, which begins about 1787. with its colonization by England, and ends about 1868, when it stopped dumping its criminals there.

That was the original idea. (The French liked it so much, they followed suit with Devil’s Island.) Take a (to the beholder) desolate chunk of land in the middle of nowhere, with weird plants, weird birds, weird mammals, some beings that barely qualified as human, and ship your bad guys (and gals) there. (You didn’t even have to be that bad. Petty theft got you seven years. Political agitation got you 14.)

Send a few guards, (where could they escape too?); barely house or feed them; work then till they dropped; scrimp on medical treatment or any other amenities; beat them bloody when you wanted. (Insolence got you 50 lashes; something worse 150 — or 500.) It was cheaper than building prisons.

Do me a favor. Don’t let Jeff Sessions hear about this.