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Marketing Report: Week 18

Sold a “Cheesesteak” to a lawyer-pal in the locker room of the health club — and have committed to buy his forthcoming book of poems. And had my first Facebook-related sale (“Best Ride”) so that venture has more than paid for itself, not counting the time it’s devoured.

Response-wise, the wife of the couple at the café who bought “Cheesesteak” four weeks ago stopped by my table to say she and her husband “both loved it.” They wished I had written more. “Sorry,” I said, “but that’s all my first 25 years gave me.” Then another café guy, a couple years younger than me, an engineer, I think, into computer stuff, told me it had taken him a while to get into it because our lives were so different, but then he thoroughly enjoyed it. (This was unusual. People are more apt to say how much we had in common despite our different backgrounds.) He is Berkeley born-and-bred, so I’m guessing his parents were academics — and back then Berkeley was a quiet Republican-voting town.

In other news, “Schiz”‘s cover is done — a knock-out — and all but off to the printer. Now I have to decide if I want 750 or 1000 copies. On the one hand, when I had a commercial publisher, my last two books didn’t break into four digits. On the other, the cost difference isn’t much, and 1000 is a cooler number.

A couple articles should be going up on-line soon.

Finally: “Cheesesteak”: Send $20 to Spruce Hill Press, POB 9492, Berkeley 94709

I recently finished…

…”Away Game” by Bob Levin (Burnstown. 2016).

That’s one of four writing “Bob Levin”s I’m aware of — but the only one, myself excluded, with whom I have a relationship.

This relationship began we he submitted a piece to “The Broad Street Review,” where I already contributed, and the editor asked us to work out who would be called what. It turned out Bob the Younger had graduated from the same high school as me, ten years later. He was a good basketball player, and when my novel “The Best Ride to New York,” which was about a basketball player, (still available from this very web site) came out, some of its steamier passages caused faculty eyebrows to be raised in his direction when he returned for a reunion.

He’s a newspaperman in Toronto, and this is his first novel. It’s about fathers, sons and baseball. The 1964 Phillies are here (I still have the scars), the 1955 Dodgers (I remember where I was when…), Cool Papa Bell. There is loss, romance, a murder to solve (or prevent) — and time travel. It all cohere’s. There is not a misplayed word or ill-timed step to trip you. All bases are tagged. In the clutch, Levin delivers. It’s sweet and sad and the plot carries you smoothly along.

Pick it up.

I recently finished…

…Elaine Dundy”s “The Dud Avacado.”

I’d first heard of her a few years ago from my expatriate writer friend, R, who no longer speaks to me because of political differences. He had actually recommended “My Old Man and Me,” but I could never find that. I picked “Avacado” off a book store shelf a couple times but never got past the first page. Then I read a review of a memoir by her daughter from her marriage to Kenneth Tynan, Tracy, which got me interested again.

Dundy, I learned, was the sister of Shirley Clark, the director of the film of “The Cool World,” which had been one of my favorite novels when I was in high school. And Dundy’s marriage to Tynan was rife with alcohol, drugs, affairs, and violence, consensual and non-.

“Avacado,” Dundy’s first book, a comic autobiographical novel, published in 1958, about a young American girl, Sally Ann Gorse, on the loose in France, is not nearly as exciting. (One of the problems with “Bad Boy” — or “Girl” — novels before Henry Miller got legal is that they just couldn’t be that incorrigible.) The first half, set in Paris, barely held my attention. Things improved when Gorse fell in with a film crew in the south of France, and as it moved toward its conclusion, it was fine.

Mainly though I found the boo of sociological interest. Gorse reminded me of Sally Bowles or Holly Golightly, but she was written by another woman, not a gay male. I couldn’t recall any other women of the time creating a similar character but there probably were some. Jane Bowles? Diane DiPrima? I suppose that’s why “Avacado” became the “cult novel” it’s cover proclaims. It was a guide for young women who wanted to be an “adventuress.”

And I bet Eve Babitz, whose books of the early ’70s I really liked, read it a couple times.

Writing News

Layman Poupard Publishing has acquired the right to reuse my piece “The Anti-War of Harvey Kurtzman,” which originally appeared at tcj.com on 9/4/13, and later at firstofthemonth.org on 4/19/14. It will now be included in a volume to be released by Gale/Cengage Learning, a “literary reference publisher. This volume will be about 350 pages long, cost $300, and have a print run of 325. The “Academic Advisor” for this operation is M. Thomas Inge, the popular culture anc comic arts scholar.

That’s all I can tell you. But I’m happy to be included.

Also Layman Poupard pays more than the Journal did for the original.

Mind

My mind did this neat thing.

I was reading a “Talk of the Town” in “The New Yorker” which began “the sculptor John Ahearn.”
“(S)culptor” caught its interest more than, say, “meter reader” or “celebrity chef” would have, but “John Ahearn” registered absolutely zero, until, a few lines later it came across “studio in the South Bronx,” at which point I found myself asking, Is that the guy who did those statue of the fellow with the boom-box and the one with the pit bull?

In the early ’90s, Jane Kramer had written an article in “The New Yorker” about such a guy and the Public Art issues raised by those statues, which was published as a book, “Whose Art Is It?” in 1994 (highly recommended), both of which I’d read. But in the over-20-years since, I don’t think I’ve read or thought of “John Ahearn.” I remembered the issue, but I couldn’t’ve told you his name or, other than NYC, where his studio was.

But my mind had known this and held onto it and, triggered by those few words, had brought it out of the freezer. It even patted itself on its back for this achievement.

Pretty cool, huh?

I just finished…

…”Killing a King,” Dan Epron’s account of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

Ephron was a reporter and bureau chief of “Newsweek” in Israel. His book is good, solid, garden variety journalism. It is a clear, concise, directly presented report of the events leading up to and following the murder. He does away with one or two conspiracy theories (always a point-scorer with me), but he does not allow himself much high-soaring flights of thinking or creative analysis. So the book is more steady than exciting. Maybe that is good.

Ephron believes that had Rabin not have been killed, he would have implemented the Oslo II Accords. (A full 13-page final agreement had been drafted two days before the murder, establishing full Palestinian sovreignity.) (How that would have worked out, the $64,000,000 Question, is of course anyone’s guess.) Ephron also believes that, if Shimon Peres had not lost the 30-point lead he held in polls over Benjamin Netanyahu before the election to determine Rabin’s successor, the same would have happened. But Peres lost by a half-point, and Israel was on its way to moving from, what Ephron terms “a secular… modern” state to an “ethnically chauvinistic… often messianic” one; and the Palestinians fell into worse straits.

It was interesting to me, in light of what I wrote last week about Attica and how “fear” works in liberal democracies to consider the effects of the Hezbollah shelling of Israel from Lebanon and the three Hamas suicide bombings, which killed 59 Israelis, on the election. Half-a-percentage point. It makes me wonder what effect a terrorist attack here before November will have on us.

Marketing Report: Week 17

Sold NO books.

Gave three “Cheesesteak”s away. One I swapped to Chris Rodell, a journalist/pal from the defunct writers’ forum Red Room, where he was someone I read eagerly, for his self-published “The Last Baby Boomer.” (Check out his blog at eightdaystoamish.blogspot.com.) The second went to the cartoonist Chester Brown, whose work I’ve admired since I profiled him in “The Comics Journal” in 1993. We’d recently re-connected and he’d sent me his mini- “Daphnis & Chloe,” which is about Romantic Love. The third went to Meredith Tax, whose article on the Kurdish women’s movement and revolution recently went up at firstofthemonth.org, to which I also contribute. (See her forthcoming “A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State.” She and I were in the same college class, though in vastly different crowds. (I recall speaking to her during Orientation Week and again at graduation. She does not remember me at all.) But junior year, when the idea I might be a writer hit me out of nowhere, she and I were the only underclassfolk to have short stories in the university literary magazine, an association that was good for my cred and self-belief.

I don’t think of myself as being part of a literary world, and I don’t know whether the range of these connections supports or contradicts this belief.

Anyway, “Cheesesteak: The West Philadelphia Years.” Send $20 to Spruce Hill Press, POB 9492, Berkeley, CA 94709.

I recently read…

…”Coming of Age in South Bank” (Pickleworks Press (2016) by Gene Clements. Clements, whom I met in my back-up café, is a retired architect. I may not have this exactly right, but a couple years ago, a niece or daughter of friends — anyway a woman a generation or so younger — told him she was making a living writing sex novels for Young Adults. I can’t do that, he thought, but I can do Senior Citizens.

Thus began the Tilly and Elmer stories. They were originally given away — then sold for $1 each (resulting in a significant market share drop-off) to e-readers and, later, collected into “The Sexy Seniors of South Branch.” “Coming” flashes back to the early ’60s, when the couple begin dating, while at a small town mid-western high school, and follows their sexual adventures through their departure for college. The text is explicit — and X-rated — though the tone is humorous, affectionate, and well-balanced in its handling of both sexes. The spot-illustrations, also by Clements. don’t depict much beyond what you’d get in a Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie.

I enjoyed the read, though. It was. at minimum, of socio-anthropological interest, though, I must admit, it didn’t, shall we say, get much of a rise out of me. In contemporary jargon, only the most tissue-papered sensibilities will need trigger warnings.

Stylin’ (2)

Not so long ago, I decided what I really needed was a summer weight leather jacket — for under $150. Well, if I had been willing to pay eight times that…

Since I wasn’t, I ended up pondering a black, lamb’s hide, short-sleeved shirt jacket at jamminleather.com, a South Carolina emporium devoted to satisfying all your inner outlaw biker’s sartorial needs.

The big problem was sizing. I am tall and thin and all my shirts and sweaters and jackets are Large, but, according to jammin’s chest-centric chart I barely qualified as Small. The customer service re=, considering my quandary, begrudgingly awarded me “Medium.”

I ordered it and “Large.” My wife took one look at me in each and snapped, “Send back the ‘Medium.'” Paying return postage myself, still left me under my ceiling.

I walked into the café, accented with a black straw cowboy hat, feeling slick and cool. The first thing Hap said was, “You look like a Donald Trump supporter.”

Stylin’

My go-to place for clothes on-line is Sierra Trading Post. Then I filter by “Discount: High-to-Low.” The other day I spotted this “baseball” jacket, navy sleeves, orange snap-buttoned body. There were a couple drawbacks: I didn’t really need another jacket; the pockets were insufficient: there was this unsightly, irrelevant “M” at its breast. (The manufacturer was a company named Barbour, so it wasn’t its.0 But the jacket was 90% off. So…

The other day I walk into the café and Ernie says, “What’s the ‘M’ for, Bob?”

Further research was in order. And when I got home I checked the fine print on the label and saw it was part of Barbour’s “Steve McQueen Collection.”

Well, that confirmed that greater powers were controlling the universe. People have been confusing me and Steve for ages.