Author’s Note: This list is a bit bastardized since two of the books on it are minis – each well under 100 pages – and one, while absolutely a book, has no words. (On the other hand, I’ve omitted volumes one-through-four of “The Arab of the Future,” a graphic autobio by Riad Sattouf, because my intent was/is to write about it.]
Except for the Keegans, which are lumped together for my convenience, the books here appear in the reverse order of completion.
Okay, here we go.

1 – 3. Let’s start with Claire Keegan, whose “Foster” was recommended by my friend Bud (not to be confused with my friend Budd). I liked it; Adele liked it; her sister liked it; our friend Marilyn liked it. So I ordered more Keegan. First was “Antarctica,” which turned out to be a short story collection, and I don’t read short stories; but the title story was so terrific I thought I would re-evaluate my position, only beginning a short story collection with your best makes the others pale in comparison, so I didn’t. Next came “The Forester’s Daughter,” which has been printed as a stand alone book, rather than as the short story it truly is; but it is excellent too.

4. Kate Atkinson’s “Shrines of Gaiety.” A lightweight mediocrity. That’s it. I’m done with Atkinson until she brings Jackson Brodie back.

5. Warren Hinckle’s “Saving Pagan Babies.” A woman in the café gave me this as a birthday present – and because I think she had it lying around the house. The piece about Selma was good. So was the one on Hunter Thompson. The rest seemed shallow, over-romanticized, and/or re-cycled Jimmy Breslin. Hinckle may have been a good editor and brilliant publicist but as a prose writer I can take or leave him.

6. James A. White. “Ransoms Are for Amateurs.” A crime novel swapped me by a fellow at the café whose wife had read her poetry at one of the “salons” I’d hosted. It had a fine beginning and a pretty good ending and is worth a look.

7. Kenzaburo Oe. “A Personal Matter.” Found on the cafe’s “Free” shelf. Emotionally powerful. Surprisingly (to me) different than the last Japanese novelist (Kawabata) I came across on that shelf. I may read more by him.

8. Jim Blanchard. “Brothers and Mothers,” a collection of portraits of (primarily) celebrities rendered in life-like similitude, often based on photographs by eminent photographers, leading me to wonder what impact the Supreme Court’s recent decision on Andy Warhol’s appropriations will have on Blanchard.

9. Sarah Bakewell. “At the Existentialist Café.” Some of it was too difficult. More of if was great fun. The history of post-WW II philosophy with focus on the personalities involved. But if you can understand Heidegger, let me know.

10. Louis Menand. “The Free World.” (Recommended by my friend Budd, not to be confused with my friend Bud.) Terrific cultural history of America, from “containment” to Vietnam., esp. if you grew up through these years. Not only has Menand read and understood people I’ve barely heard of, he’s read and understood commentators on them, and can point out who is wrong why. Everyone from Levi-Strauss to Elvis is here.

No sales.
Not even a nibble.
A fellow offered to swap the recitation of a poem of his authorship. I passed.
However, a few conversations to record before I fall too far behind.

1.) Young woman with light brown hair in neat bun sees my display and “Meet the Author” sign. “You must be the author.”
“Want to meet me?” I say. “Want to buy a book?”
“Oh, I don’t read. I mean, I read, but…”
“You must be one of those STEM students I’ve heard about.”
“That’s me.”
Her coffee is to-go, but she turns and comes back.
She has not changed her mind.

2.) Young man with matted, shoulder length dark hair, baggy white t-shirt, baggy purple shorts, belly like a slow-pitch softball slugger eyes my price stickers and says, “Too rich for my blood, man.”
On his way out, he recommends Alex Graham’s comic, “The Devil’s Gun.”

3.) James II asks about self-publishing for a book he is writing in which, if I have this right, Marx, Freud and Buddha meet, and the “soul” is discussed. It does not go well.
James II has close-cropped grey hair, a “Revolution” tattoo on his left forearm, and the skin of someone who has been spending time outdoors. He is up from San Diego for a spell before heading to Mexico. His t-shirt says “ Van’s Off-the-Wall,” which has outlets in L.A., S.F., and N.Y.C.
Present day Berkeley displeases him. The counter-culture has disappeared. Peet’s and Starbuck’s have blocked their electrical outlets so he can not plug in his iPad. The public library will not provided advice to aspiring writers. “The times aren’t right for what I bring to the table,” he says. “I have no idea any more where the table even is.”

My latest piece is up at “First of the Month.”

https://www.firstofthemonth.org/the-return-of-schocksuspens/

Here’s a portion:

Goshkin mentioned that the horrors catalogued in Eric Foner’s review of Margaret Burnham’s By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, (W.W. Norton. 2022) had traveled down his arm, his spoon and re-chilled his breakfast yogurt, the editor asked if he wanted to review it himself. Goshkin doubted he could add to the discussion. He feared his fall back attitude – “Cheeky,” a fan in Edinburgh once called it – would ill suit the conversation. “Sure,” he said.

Sold one book – but it wasn’t mine.
The café has a shelf, situated above the table at which I usually sit, on which authors can display their works. (The owner thinks it provides the place a classy, literary swagger.) Only half-a-dozen take advantage of this. I have “Best Ride” up there. Some people have three or four. At least three languages are represented. No one seems to look at any of them.
The other day, a woman with a Hispanic accent, asked if I was a writer. I said I was and asked the same of hers. She said she had owned a nearby hair salon for 18 years and that her daughter was urging her to write a memoir. I told her of Left Margin Lit, across the street, and its classes. Then I pointed out a book on the shelf in Spanish: “Gringo Cabron.” She loved the title and since the author had authorized me to act on her behalf I sold it.

I also engaged in a bit of barter.
Faithful readers will recall “James,” the distributor of psychedelic medicines I met a few weeks ago. He had taken out a series of loans to be repaid on the first when his check came, but the first had come and gone with no repayments occurring. (Truck problems, he excplained.) So James gifted me with a small, glasseine envelope containing a white powdery substance which he described as “an analgesic psychedelic. Keep in a cool, dry, dark, place.”
“My sock drawer,” I said, “with the Ecstasy I was given last century.”
“I’ve learned the hard way Ex breaks down quickly, regardless of where you put it,” he said.
Touched by his spontaneous generosity, and since James had recently said he wanted to hear my “stories,” and with the best of them from my first 25 years in “Cheesesteak,” I gave him a copy.
But he is off on the “Transformational Festival” circuit, so I don’t know how much time he will have for reading. This weekend its Joshua Tree.

In other news…
I have signed a contract with F.U. (Fantagraphics Underground) Press for the publication of my new collection “True Tales of Comics, Conflict and Creativity: Messiahs, Meshgganahs, Misanthropes and Mysteries.”
Since my last contract, royalties and free copies have decreased which was explained to me by the publisher as the only way they could publish idiosyncratic books (like mine) in small runs (no problem) “and not lose our shirts.”
It does great stuff I am proud to stand among.

“Everybody likes a seedy Hollywood story. Gritty sex. Tarnished glamour. Strangled dreams. But walking a graphic novel down mean streets already occupied by Miss Lonleyhearts, The Little Sister, Play it as it Lays, and Ed Wood is like the new kid calling “Winners” on a playground’s courts. Sammy Harkham struts Blood of the Virgin out with swagger, style, and a chip on his shoulder.”

So begins my take on Sammy Harkham’s graphic novel “Blood of the Vampire,” now available on-line at:

https://www.tcj.com/the-big-blighted-orange/

Sold a café journal to a woman with short grey hair and tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, who is a professor of anthropology emeritus at Cal. (She is the second emeritus professor of anthropology to frequent the café, the other being from B.U. I had lived 70-years without meeting an emeritus professor of anthropology, and now I’ve met two. What’re the odds?)
“You’re losing your library,” I said, having read the article in the “Times.”
“A tragedy!” she said – and filled me in on the sit-in, the depth of the depravity, and the chances for a reversal of fortune.
“Why is the university doing this?” said a woman to whom I had said, “Mind her own business” the last time she had butted into a conversation of mine. (See earlier “Adventure” where I am called “Old Geezer.”)
“Because they need to pay the football coach more money,” I said.
“Exactly,” the professor said.
She didn’t have enough cash but I let her take it anyway. She promised to bring me the rest before she and her husband left the country, but she didn’t.

In other news…
1.) My display drew the attention of a very thin sixty-something fellow, dressed in – from top to bottom – baseball cap, unbuttoned camo-shirt over Mount Tam Bikes t-shirt, cut-off jeans above leggings, multi-colored wool socks within paratrooper-length canvas lace-up boots and accessorized with multiple rings and bracelets. He had been born in Marin but not, he made clear, to affluence and, four years ago, had decamped for Mexico because the US had become unbearable. He is a journalist, specializing in politics and the environment, with 30-years of credits with “The Progressive” and was in town for Wavy Gravy’s 87th birthday celebration. In the course of a lengthy rap, which included no questions of me, he dropped the names of, among others, Joan Baez, Peter Coyote, Barbara Dane, Daniel Ellsberg (“Very ill”), Allen Ginsberg, Mountain Girl, Ken Kesey, Pete Seeger, Gary Snyder, (“Not seeing anyone”), and Ron Turner (“Recently lost his wife.”). I can’t say to whom else he would have gotten if he had not been joined by a well-known local political and environmental activist with whom he moved outside to continue conversing for another half-hour.
2.) The Introduction to – but not the contract for – my new collection arrived. It is about 1500-words of nice things said about my work from the perspective of someone looking down on one solid block assembled over 20-years, rather than as separate fragments laid one-at-a-time upon the table. It was also cool to have an outsider evaluate who this was and where it came from and how it fit into what I may not have known was there.

Preliminary Note: After prefacing my last “Adventure” with the complaint that they were netting me only two-to-four “Like”s apiece, I received about a dozen for my last one. To all, my thanks. But then, a couple days later, I linked to my “poem” at FOM and got one “Like” and one e-mail. Everyone’s a critic.
Anyway, Adele liked it.

Sold a “Lollipop” to the retired radiologist from Chicago who had settled for a “Goshkin” last week when I hadn’t had one with me.
And I sent a “Cheesesteak” to the fellow who’s writing the “introduction” I mentioned. He had asked me several interesting questions to answer as background, and, since the book went into some of them more deeply, I thought he would get a kick out of it – and might even find it useful.
One thing I couldn’t get a handle on was that while, like any kid, I wanted to fit in, as early as elementary school I was attracted to the deviant – EC Comics, Bob and Ray, Ernie Kovacs – and, certainly, by adolescence, when I became aware of the dangers of “conformity,” I knew I didn’t want to be easily pigeon-holed. But where this came from, I couldn’t say.
Adele said, “Parents are the usual suspects”; but we didn’t get much beyond that.

In other news…
The week brought several conversations, one of which with an elderly woman who shied away from books as soon as she heard the words “Half a dozen murders” (“The Schiz”) and “True crime” (“Most Outrageous”) but offered to retrieve from her car one I could add to my wares. I had to explain I was not only the seller but the author of those I displayed.
Then, in a single morning, I spoke with (1) a comics world pal, who was reading – and recommended – a work of 18th century science-fiction of which I had never heard (and in which I had no interest); (2) a used book dealer of middle-eastern heritage, who had no interest in mine, but was reading – and recommended – the works of a Russian Orthodox priest, a “spiritual father,” who had spent most of his life imprisoned in the Gulag – and, subsequent research revealed, may or may not have actually existed; and (3) a 60-year-old woman in a Phillies sweatshirt. Oh good, I thought. I can sell her a “Cheesesteak.”
She turned out to be a journalist, in town for a conference. She had recently, to her delight, moved back to Philly and the Inquirer from Miami, where she had worked for the Herald. She told me her name and said she too had written a book and I could Google her.
Which I did.
Julie K. Brown.

In the 1970s I wrote a — for me — non-traditional short story, which I called “The 1000 pp. Novel: 1960 – 70.” After about a dozen rejections, I put it away. (Maybe I published the first part of it as a short-short somewhere.) Recently, I started thinking of the whole thing as a poem, so I broke up the lines, removed the punctuation and… Bob’s your mother. I sent the entire work to FOM and it excised a portion for public consumption. It begins:

It was a far out bar, Max’s Drop Dead Inn
You know who drank there?

Curious readers can find out at

http://www.firstofthemonth.org/far-gone-a-levin-compaction/

I. Sales
Sold a Goshkin to John, a recently retired radiologist. (A San Franciscan, he is from Chicago and would have preferred a Lollipop, but I had none with me.) John writes short-short stories, three of which he gave me. My favorite was about encounters his first-person narrator, a fellow not unlike himself, has with people in a café.
He may, at this very moment, be writing about me writing about him.
II. Barter
Swapped a café journal to Ed, a retired tech writer, for his most recent self-published novel, which I will read as soon as I am done with Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter. Ed was in town for an overnight from Antioch with his wife, a poet who had read at the series I ran at the café, pre-Covid. I invited them to join me for a writer-to-writer-to-writer chat.
Nice.

The next day I swapped another journal to Berne in exchange for an artistically enhanced, postcard-sized reproduction of a photograph he had taken of the inside of an acoustic guitar. Berne has been in the area as long as I have been coming to the café and used to be a regular; but, in recent years, he has been spending more time sitting on he steps of a nearby Quaker meeting house. This was the first time we had talked.
He is in his 60s, my height or taller and 20 or 30 pounds heavier. He wore a motorcycle jacket and was without his upper, left-side molars. I learned he had been a professional photographer and, when he couldn’t make a living at that, had started a tree-trimming company, which, any workers’ compensation attorney can tell you, is as dangerous a profession as you can choose. I heard about the time a worker had pulled a knife on him and, just last week, when, having been jumped in North Oakland and on the ground, was about to stab his assailant in the neck, a 300-pound Black woman stepped on his wrist and said, “Fight’s over.”
It had been a while since I’d run into two knife fights in the same conversation.
III. Balance Sheet
The Ethiopian engineer paid for the journal I’d given him a few weeks ago. (His favorite story was David’s “A Place of Refuge,” because the experience of the immigrants to this country paralleled his own.) And my friend Budd – not to be confused with my friend Bud – gave me cash for the gift IWKYAs I’d sent at his request.
The only deadbeat remains my niece. Boy, is her place in my will skating on thin ice.

In other news…
Had a nice conversation with the fellow who’s writing the Intro to my new book. He wanted background on me, and, as I told him, “I’ve been sitting around for 30 years, thinking somebody ought to want to write about this workers’ comp lawyer who writes about these weird cartoonists.” So I had my stories ready.

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.