Sold TEN books, eight in one order, smashing my PB.

But first…
“Goshkin” went to a high school teacher from the Bronx in for Thanksgiving at his daughter’s. He has lived in Boston, Peru, Israel, West Chester – and we connected over basketball. He knew the SPHAs, Willie Somerset, Guy Rodgers, and the Eastern League, where a friend, “the one honest guy among Clair Bee’s boys at LIU” had played. “Zai gezunt,” he wished me when he left.
“IWKYA” went to a fellow whose part in the Berkeley scene pre-dates mine by years. His usual routine is to arrive at the café looking for a friend who has already left, fail to recognize me, and, when I identify myself, recall a sedar he had attended with my wife and Ram Dass which, Adele says, never happened.
This time I invited him to sit. It was an entertaining half-hour. I heard about old girl friends, acid trips, Merry Pranksters, Gershon Sholem, Saul Bellow, learning French kissing from a nine-year-old cousin, visiting pre-Castro Cuba with a business mogul relative who predicted the revolution, a second marriage, at 72, to the 27-year-old daughter of a noted scholar of Judaica (“Seven, two,”he said, “Two, seven. Kabbalahistically significant”), and his plan to return to Stanford, at 82, to complete his PhD. (My role as a line editor came under discussion.)

As for the bonanza…
Faithful readers will recall the law school classmate who had gone on to a distinguished career in journalism with whom I’d breakfasted recently after not seeing each other in 50 years. I had given him a “Lollipop” and he already had a “Cheesesteak” and he sent a more-than-enough wad of cash to complete his collection of Bob Levins. So I packed up “Best Ride,” “Fully Armed,” “Pirates & Mouse,” “Outlaws, Rebels…,” “Schiz,” and “IWKYA” and sent them off. “I pride myself on owning and reading all books written by… Gay Talese, Walter Isaacson, and Bill Cohan,” he wrote. “I want to add Bob Levin to my list.”
Boy, did I feel good.

In other news…
1.) “I took 15-pages of notes on your book,” a recent reader of “Lollipop” told me. “But I’ve compressed it into one sentence: ‘A snide look at do-gooders by an insider who knows the score.’ What do you think?”
“I don’t care for ‘snide.’” I said.
“I didn’t think you would. But you’ll remember it.”
2.) On the other hand, another fellow e-mailed: “At 12 MN, I decided to look again at ‘Cheesesteak.’ Read it cover to cover. Cannot remember when I read a book all in one sitting. What a book!”
So there.
[ALL OF BOB’S BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE FROM: www.theboblevin.com., The “snide” to the “What a…!” Judge for yourself.

Just after e-mailing one of my most reliable “Adventure” fans that, unless something happened quick, this would be a week without one, I sold a “Schiz” – and a “Goshkin.”
The former was purchased by a cafe-friend, who had read it and wanted a second copy as a gift for a neighbor who had given him cat food. (Exactly how much a signed, first edition “Bob Levin” is worth in cat food was not revealed.) The friend, who stood by as the transaction took place, was a nice fellow. He was casually dressed, with grey hair in a short pony tail. He described himself as “a dinosaur,” a general practice attorney, everything from civil litigation to criminal appeals. He also teaches “How-To” courses at a law school in SF.
The other buyer was an exuberant woman (tousled grey hair, grey wooly sweater, big, black-rimmed glasses, many rings), down from Placerville for the Big Game. (She and her husband’s two daughters are Golden Bears.)
“Poetry?” she asked.
“Prose,” I said.
“Even better.”
She clearly enjoyed the idea that she was having a Berkeley experience – which is how I subliminally pitch my books to out-of-towners too. (To her credit, she recognized Edward Gorey on the cover. Joe Gould stumped her, but when I said, “Bob Dylan,” she said, “Far out. We saw him on a bill with Willie Nelson.”) She promised to e-mail me her comments and questions. “I’m going to start your book immediately. I brought a reading light for the ride home.”

In other news…
1.) My link to my newly re-ssued Dylan article at FOM drew ZERO response at FB. Which has had a depressing effect on my interest in publishing my contemplated “Bob-on-Bob” collection.
2.) However, I had sent a copy of my mock epic poem about the 1959 Overbrook-West Philly game, which is slated for publication in the soon-to-appear “Journal of the French Hotel,” to an author/correspondent who had actually played in it. He loved it, which, as I told him, made me feel as Homer must have when he heard from a combatant at Troy. (Oh yes, the mag in question has a projected print date of Dec. 12.)

It’s been called “the best thing ever written about Bob Dylan.” Okay, it was I who called it that, but since it first appeared in “Karamu” (1996), it’s been reprinted in “Montague Street (2012) and now here.

https://www.firstofthemonth.org/bob-dylan-the-man-the-moment-the-italian-meats-sandwich1/

It begins:

Chickie Pomerantz was lit.
Opening night of the 1963 Brandeis Folk Festival had been lame. All those green bookbags and black turtlenecks. All those skanks and pears. Then this skinny guy with this scratchy voice came on singing about some farmer starving to death in South Dakota. Chickie and Kevin Cahill and Frannie St. Exupery and a couple other jocks tossed beer cans at the stage. “You shoulda seen the assholes run,” he said, coming back to the dorm.

Sold a “Lollipop.”
The buyer was a fellow from the café. I’d known since the ‘90s, but he hadn’t bought a book from me until six-months ago. He’d asked what I’d recommend and I’d said “Cheesesteak.” (He’s an LA hippie-turned-tradesman, 15 or 20-years my junior.) He liked it so much he asked what I’d recommend next.
And I’ve been giving out cards – and not receiving any follow-ups – hand over fist. One went to the phlebotomist who took my annual pre-physical blood sample; three went to lawyers who asked how my writing was going at a judge’s retirement dinner in Oakland; one went to a woman who used to “mix” sound for Santana; one went to a Hindi-named musician; one went to young man studied jazz piano; one went to a Russian-born “aspiring entrepraneur” (These three the same morning); and one to a self-described “iconoclastic” Social Studies teacher from Long Island, who repeatedly dropped old Woody Allen lines into our conversation. (Actually, I didn’t give him one. I knew that conversation was going nowhere.)

In other news…
1.) The file(s) for the journal has/have reached the printer. The printer has returned the proofs. The proofs have been reviewed, corrected, and returned to the printer.
2.) I had agreed to review a comic, but, while I was waiting for it to arrive, I began to write something else, and when it still didn’t arrive, the editor asked if I would review this forthcoming book instead, and I said, “Fine,” and then the comic arrived. So I am going to be a busy boy.
(Plus I have these letters to send to Georgia to get Sen. Warnock re-elected, I did such a good job in Pennsylvania.)

http://www.firstofthemonth.org/the-war-on-drugs-the-early-years/

My latest piece went up today. It begins like this:

(Based upon actual events)
In the spring of 1964, even a BrandX University senior as hip as me, who had been one of six students not to walk out on Cecil Taylor’s first set in Grubb Hall, did not know anyone who smoked marijuana. So it was a shock when several undergraduates, – primarily Fine and Theater Arts majors, to be sure – were swept up in raids which extended to Cambridge.

Gave away an I WILL KEEP YOU ALIVE.
It happened like this.

Faithful readers will know that I am a Mended Hearts volunteer, a program in which people who have had heart surgery visit hospital patients, who have just had or are about to have similar surgeries. We answer their questions and address their concerns as someone who has beenthere; done that. We are, we say, “Vertical role models.”
The last patient I saw was an 80-year-old with white hair and a red scar showing, mid-chest, through which his aortic valve had been removed. His cardiologist was Dr. E.
“My cardiologist’s in the same office,” I said.
“Who’s your cardiologist?” he said.
“Dr. M,” I said.
“I know her,” he said. “I love her.”
“We love her too,” I said.
“She saved my life,” he said.
“She saved my life too,” I said. “What kind of work did you do?”
“I was a lawyer. Civil litigation.”
“I was a lawyer too. Workers’ comp.”
“We should be friends,” he said.
So I sent him my (and Adele’s) book.

In other news…
1.) Received my contributor’s copy of SPEAKING OF ATLANTIC CITY (Bodoff and Toscano, eds.), in which my story “A Palace of Wisdom” appears. I will be writing more about it in a few days, so I will leave it there for now.
2.) Our café anthology is only moments from the printer. (My check is already en route.) Our last board-of-directors meeting resolved ISBN (No), TOC and page numbers (Yes), and hiring a self-publishing “guru” to guide us further for $80/hour (NO, NO, NO). We withdrew our offer to sell discounted copies to contributors (Each will receive one free one), agreed to split all costs, divide all remaining books, and allow each of us to do what we want with our copies. Everyone is still talking to everyone else.
Fingers crossed the files we send the printer are files the printer can work with.

Gave away a “Lollipop.”
The donee had introduced himself to me our first day of law school. His father and my father had been in the same law school class too, and he knew I wanted to be a writer, and he wanted to be newspaperman, and neither of us wanted to be lawyers. We did not socialize much – he was already married –but since the last time we had seen each other, 1970 or ‘71, when he came to Berkeley from having just interviewed Alexander Jodorowsky in Mexico City, there had been 10 books for me and stints at the NYT, WSJ, Forbes, Time, Inc., and LA Times for him, and enough interest in each other that when he invited me to breakfast in SF, where he was attending a conference, I hopped on BART for the first time in over a decade.
Late in law school, we had learned that we – scandalously for that time and place – both smoked dope. Now, both of us stood at 80, marveling at our presence on such a stage, learned we each, as part of our exercise regimens, boxed.

In other news…
1.) The acclaim – the sound of six hands clapping, anyway – with which “A Fig in Winter” was received, has led TCJ to request my take on another work. The creator’s name is “Uncle Willie,” which is enough of a recommendation for me.
2.) The café journal takes one step forward and… Just when we seemed set to contract with a printer whose bid had substantially reduced what we expected to pay, the Editor-in-Chief revisited the question of font-size and increased it, raising our page count and, presumably, price by two-thirds. And just when this increase had been agreed to and finances resolved, the questions of ISBN numbers and distribution at book stores and through Amazon resurfaced.
When I had joined this project, my vision had lain somewhere between a samizdat and Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland: “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show.” I thought we’d print a book; sell it; throw a party with any money we made. Now I was getting the idea others imagined Best Seller Lists and Oprah invitations. Instead of sugar plums, visions of Fictitious Business Names, sales tax, partnership agreements, and ensuing litigation dance in my head.

Not only that.
Faithful readers may recall the submission, which bothered no one else but led me to editorial suggestions which caused the author to call me a “Jackass.” Now another contributor’s complaints about his submission’s treatment, which bothered no one else, led me to call out his discourteouies, causing him to decry my “B.S.” and express the wish not to hear from me again. (I should have known he was touchy since he had stormed out of a pandemic-era café-regulars-only Zoom for some offense of mine, never to return.)
Alas and alack. The upshot to all this is I fear I am in for a down-grading when it comes to “Plays well with others.”

(In Order of Completion)

1. Simon Blackburn. THINK. A handy history of philosophy to which I was tipped by my philosopher emeritus neighbor.

2. Vladimir Sorokin. DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK. The fourth novel I have read by this guy. (I had forgotten I had already done two.) Now I am – I hope – finished with him. For a scabrous, offensive novelist, I prefer Houllebecq.

3. Marcus Aurelius. MEDITATIONS. About the only book I held onto from my Soc. Sci. I course. It impressed me then and I liked it now. Surprisingly similar to some Buddhist-think.

4. R.V. Jones. MOST SECRET WAR. Recommended by a friend. He said JFK liked it. A complete waste of time for me.

5. Thich Nhat Hanh. HOW TO CONNECT. It’s always good to have a little Buddhism around. This is a shirt-pocket size volume I found of the “Free Books” shelf of the café, where pickings have been slim recently.

6. Joshua Cohen. THE NETANYAHUS. I was impressed by how he began and ended and how he delivered the historical stuff fictionally, but much of the middle was weak tea. It must have been a weak year, fiction-wise, for the Pulitzer committee.

7. William Goldman. THE PRINCESS BRIDE. (Second time.) Previously discussed in this very space.

8 & 10. Ryszard Kapusinski. ANOTHER DAY OF LIFE and SHAH OF SHAWS. Kapusinski had been about my favorite political journalist but I had forgotten about him until I spotted the first of these, about the war in Angola, in Moe’s when I was looking for a Kawabata novel. I then ordered the second, about the fall of the Shah and one more, which completes my collection of all of his books translated into English. SHAW is brilliant, concise, powerful – and I wonder what K would think about what is happening in Iran now. Optimism is not his default position.

9. James Joyce. ULYSSES. (Second time.) A friend had sent me a link to a celebration of Bloomsday in Brattleboro, VT, led by a friend of his. I only watched a few minutes but his joy encouraged me to give the book a try. With the help of two guides, I may have understood ten-to-
twenty percent but I did get a kick out of Joyce’s mastery of language and literary form.