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.

Attica

The other day I read Adam Gopnik’s piece in the 8/29 New Yorker about Heather Anne Thompson’s book on the Attica prison uprising, “Blood on the Water.” Gopnik writes with commanding self-assurance about a jaw-droppingly wide range of topics, always infused with several wish-I’d-written-that sentences and a couple which, after three or four passes, I give up on understanding; and this article was a good one.

Gopnik’s major point was that, tragic slaughter that it was, Attica stifled this country’s movement toward prison reform, burying us deeper in the shit that exists now. In liberal democracies, he says, violence scares people off faster that reformers can win them over. (He cites a study of public opinion polls from 1950 thru 1980 showing that a majority of Americans favored civil rights during periods of nonviolent protests and swung in favor of law-and-order when these protests turned violent. “Panicked people,” he concludes, “will almost always be the majority.”

Maybe so; maybe not. But if you’re planning on throwing any rocks through windows, maybe hold off until after the November elections.

Marketing: Week 16

Sold two “Cheesesteak”s. One went to a previous purchaser, a friend of friends (see: Week 14), who bought one for a friend of his who’d never left Philly, like we did. The other went to a lawyer who’d had an office in my former building. I ran into him in from of the BofA on Shattuck. “Still writing?” he said.

But before that I’d been scoreless for 12 days, so I’d decided to expand my marketing. I tried to get my book listed at Amazon, but that proved too daunting. I’d thought it would order copies to sell from its warehouse, but it seemed to want me to pay it as a platform to sell from. (Can this be right?) I must investigate further.

Meanwhile I put myself on Facebook. This wasn’t easy either. Adele had joined so we could see some wedding pictures and never used it again, but since we share an e-mail address, I couldn’t register too. I changed her name to “Levin Adele Bob” and began recruiting Friends. Then the invaluable Milo advised I could register “Bob Levin” under this separate Gmail address I had for some reason, so I did that. Only I can’t get all my previously signed up Friends to switch over, plus I can’t give Adele her name back for a couple months, so some kinks remain.

I recently read…

…Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize-winning “The Sense of an Ending.” It’s a slim (55,000 word) first person narrative, told in two parts, by Anthony (“Tony”) Webster, retired, divorced, a grandfather. “How often do we tell our life story?” he asks us. “How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life.” Well, that was right up my alley!

The first part of Tony’s life story involve his relationship with three friends in adolescence and his relationship in college with Veronica, his first girl friend. In the second part, set in Tony’s present, an unexpected event leads him to investigate and reconsider the experiences he had previously described, which leads to a surprise revelation and an even more surprising ending.

I did not quite understand the ending. Rather than look back through the book, I sought clarification on-line. “The ending of The Sense of an Ending,” I Googled. It turned out I was not alone. I found a couple well-reasoned, thoughtful pieces where reviewers explained what had happened. I found many well-reasoned thoughtful comments posted by readers in response to these explanations. I found three of four equally convincing, contradictory explanations of which characters had done what and why.

This made me think. Actually these characters DID nothing. They DO NOT exist. Their ACTIONS occur only to the extent Barnes puts words on a page. I believe it is true that an author may not know the full meaning of what he has written. But I am not sure characters of his creation can do things he did not enable them to do. Is this discussion, I wondered, a gimmick Barnes has pulled off, or is it a significant revelation about the relationship between writers and readers?

When you’ve finished the book, we can discuss it further. (And just as an aside, let me say that Adele, who is reading the book now, has discovered she read it a couple years ago and can’t remember a thing about it. Neither can the friend who leant it to her. What the hell does that say?)

Marketing: Week 15

Sold one “Cheesesteak” to a fellow at the health club who’d gone to high school with a guy in my college class. We were in the steam room, when he began asking me about Brandx. Well since you asked, I said.

I also gave a copy to a lawyer who once gave me a copy of his self-published book of his. And my friend Bud (not to be confused with my friend Budd) said, “Chris Matthews is a Philly guy. Maybe you should send him a copy.” So I did. (I’ll let you know how that works out.) And I asked Amazon again about stocking it.

In other-but-related news: 1) I finished the line edits of “The Schiz” and re-wrote the “Author’s Afterword.” A couple tweaks by Milo and it’s off to the printer. 2) Came to the end of my list of agents for “Heart” without one nibble. Now I’ve turned to publishers who accept unsolicited manuscripts. Most seem to want proposals, which I find writing a drag. (This could turn into a job.)

Finally, I received an e-mail from a woman at something called Open Road Media who, based on my review of “The Burglary” at BSR, thought me a good choice to review (even on my blog) an E-book re-issue of the true-life cold was spy story “The Falcon and the Snowman,” which I could get a free copy of, provided I signed up with something called Net Gallery.

I was flattered — and eager to expand my recognized areas of expertise beyond transgressive cartoonists, plus, as Adele said, this might draw traffic to my web site, which, God knows, could use it. I was also impressed this woman had found me, since the casting of my “Burglary” review had otherwise rippled few ponds.

Maybe Open Roads Media can help me, I thought. Now I am not so sure. It seems to cost several hundred bucks to be marketed by it. Plus Net Gallery may be mainly a place where amateurs — librarians, bloggers, self-published authors — review to semi-silence books by other self-published authors signed up at the same place.

I may have to check this further.

I recently read…

…”A Spool of Blue Thread” by Anne Tyler. (Disclosure: Back in the 1970’s Tyler gave a short story of mine an Honorable Mention in a contest she was judging and, 20 years later, when I gave a reading of “Fully Armed” at Barnes & Noble it gave me a tote bag with her picture on it, in which I carry my work out clothes still.)

Anyway, way back when, I read and enjoyed several of Tyler’s novels. (“Celestial Navigations” was, I think, my favorite, but that may have been because I read it first and they all had a certain similarity.) But for reasons I don’t recall, I stopped reading her, and Adele, who continued on after I stopped, soon stopped reading her too. But Tyler kept writing, adding another dozen or so novels to her credit.

I came across “Spool” on the free shelf at Berkeley Espresso (and left Michael Chabon’s “Telegraph Avenue,” a pick-up of Adele’s, in exchange). We both enjoyed it. Tyler is still in Baltimore and still writing about families, but no character is as whacky as the ones I recall her featuring in the past. These all seem normalish folks with normalish problems tripping them up. It is funny and serious and becomes inventive toward the end. It’s a fine way to pass several hours.

Marketing: Week 14

“My wife liked it,” my health club friend (Penn ’65) said, “and she didn’t know anything you were talking about.” “What about you?” I said. “I liked it. Good title,” he said. Well, that won’t make my list of quotable reviews. I thought.

Sold two “Cheesesteaks.” One to a fellow from the Philly suburbs (high school classmate of one friend/med school classmate of another). One to strangers. Regular customers at the French they had eyed my book once, then broke down and bought it. No responses as yet.

In other news, I received a pdf of the fully laid-out “Schiz” from Milo. For the first time I saw the illustrations in place I laughed out loud at three of the first four. The text impressed me too. I think we have a hit, I told him, and opted for the higher of the optional print runs we’d discussed. On the downside, my line editing has caught some troubles. The big one is that between conversions from Word Perfect to Word and formattings and divine intervention portions of multiple, multi-party conversations have been lumped into single paragraphs rather than standing apart speaker-by-speaker. Who-said-what is clear, but you must pay attention.

Clarity suffers. Readers are inconvenienced. On the other hand…

If I had been concerned about “inconvenienced” readers, I wouldn’t have written this book. Plus, Cormac McCarthy left out quotation marks entirely, and William Gaddis went with –s, so I can be said to be striking my own blow for avant guarde individualization. Plus it adds an improvisatory jazz feel, altering the reader’s rhythm. Plus it’s like a tip-of-the-hat to John Cage’s openness to randomness. Plus Milo says he found it Altmanesq.

That’s quite a pedigree, but I’m waiting to hear from Adele.

Marketing: Week 13

Sold a “Cheesesteak” to a woman at the health club who lived in Philadelphia in the late ’50s, early ’60s as a teenager. (Having come from California, she found it racist and uptight.) Sold a “Cheesesteak” and a “Pirates and Mouse” to a friend who is giving both as gifts. Sold a “Cheesesteak” to a woman at the French (from Ambler) who is giving it as a gift to a friend whose father was a chef at Bookbinder’s. (She says she will give more as gifts for Xmas — WHICH IS A REMINDER TO THE REST OF YOU.)

I am also taking note of the expanded world into which my writer persona has led me. This week I received an e-mail from the Serbian artist, who’d learned from his publisher I was writing about him, offering to provide any background information I needed. And a woman in Atlanta, who’d sought me out after reading my BSR piece about Peggy Manley of whom she was a fan, sent me a link to the Christian Domestic Discipline novel she’d written. And I’m nearly finished the senior citizen-porn novel by the retired architect whom I met at Berkeley Espresso.

Plus just the other day, this fellow wandered into the French, wearing an Eat Fruits and Vegetables baseball cap, and, attracted by my sign and display, announced he was assembling an anthology of writing by students of all ages from local school district, “Pieces for Peace.” I waited for his pitch, weighing what I would give him; but the bite never came. All he asked was for me to read and judge submissions. “Sure,” I said.

We exchanged cards.