I just finished…

…Joy Williams’s “The Quick & The Dead” (2000). I had read “Breaking and Entering” shortly after it hit paperback and liked it. A couple years ago, I read Q&D was Williams’s best. So when I saw an ex-library copy at Half-Price Books…

Williams writes about out-liers’ lives. Her sentences are rich. Her ideas swarm through her text. Her life view is not mine, but her world is engaging. Her characters are odd and, often, crazed; but her “plot” here is virtually non-existent. Sometimes it seemed like she began with one, then two, then three interesting characters and ran with them until they met up with some other odd someone, who intrigues Williams more, so she ran with him or her until they met another even more interesting oddball. From time to time, she would resume with characters where she’d dropped them but, except one fellow who was cut to pieces by a shattered mirror and another who was, as I recall, shot, no one seemed to get anywhere.

Marketing: Week Eight

Sold one “Cheesesteak” to a physician/acquaintance at the French, one to a physician/acquaintance at the Claremont, and one to a prior customer there, who wanted it as a gift for a friend. Sold a “Best Ride” to a painter/acquaintance at the French, who became the first buyer where I got to use the gizmo that allows me to take credit cards on my iPhone. Boy, that was cool!

But my July Fourth Weekend Sale (“Buy One; Get One Free”) produced zilch. The closest was a woman who engaged me in conversation as she carried her latte and muffin from the French’s counter. “My hands are already full,” she concluded, resisting my charms. When she finished, she exited through the door where she would not have to pass me.

As for feedback, a professor emeritus of molecular and developmental biology, another former resident of Powelton Village (See p. 82), who had lost a best friend to heroin and considered himself another ’60s “survivor,” was impressed by my evocation of the times. And “Max Garden”‘s widow thanked me for writing the book — and cried. (Between tears, she noted mine was the only record of their wedding (p. 86) that existed. She did recall a dog, also in attendance, which had failed to impress itself upon me.)

Though not directly on point, I also received a note from the 24-year-old Serbia-born woman I mentioned a blog or two ago. She wrote that “Outlaws, Rebels” had “deepened (her) understanding and appreciation of the beauty and struggle of truly free-thinking creators” and influenced her present work. “Your fan,” she signed it.

When I ask myself why I keep doing this, that will be good to remember.

And Bob’s Your Uncle

My latest is up at http://bit.ly/29fofFx.

The new editor belatedly informed me there was an 850-word limit, not 1000, so she cut 150 without asking, and I am afraid to look at the result.

Anyway, here is how it begins — or used to begin.

On July 10, Bob Dylan, the most significant American artist of our lifetime, will play the Borgala Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City and, July 13, Philadelphia’s Mann Center, as part of a 30-concerts-in-43-days cross-country tour, which shows good energy for anyone, let alone a 75-year-old grandfather of nine and survivor of near-fatal heart disease. Opening will be Mavis Staples, who, Dylan scholars will recall, rejected his marriage proposal in the early ‘60s; and, no, his mended heart does not guarantee Joan Baez’s being aboard the next time he sails into town. For those who will attend either show but have not been following the old song-and-dance man since the days you worried about Frank Rizzo seizing your stash, consider the following a public service announcement designed to steer your expectations onto safely appreciative ground.

Marketing: Week Seven

Sold a “Fully Armed” to a satisfied reader of “Cheesesteak” at the health club and a “Cheesesteak” to a fellow self-publisher-in-retirement (a former architect) at Berkeley Espresso.

This 80% fall-off was discouraging, which did not speak well of the development of my inner sense of self-worth. (Nor did my thinking, when informed by a fellow who’d received a freebie that his brother, who’d read it, intended to buy copies for friends, “What about you? Don’t you have friends?) I may have to re-think my approach.

Other reactions have been mixed. Two fellows, who’d bought “Cheesesteak,” announced they’d begun reading it, s if I should be pleased that had followed. (One said he’d learned more about me from it than from our having worked in the same building for years, as if that would be news t me too. The other, a restaurant owner, was most interested by what “inside-out” had meant at Pat’s.)

A 60ish psychologist at the French said “Cheesecake” was “the funniest book I’ve read in years.” (She was up to “As Mildred.”) When finished, she planned to send her copy to an octogenarian former English professor who co-hosted a podcast on books in Minnesota. (I gave her one for him.) A middle-aged man with a backpack looked at my display and said, “My wife will kill me if I bring home more books.” A woman walked by me at the club, while I, adhering to the “No Soliciting” rule sat silently with “Cheesesteak” propped upon my lap, and asked the 10-year-old next to me what he was reading. (“The Shadow Throne,” if you want to know.)

Maybe, I thought, I should hire a 10-year-old to read “Cheesesteak.” Maybe a slew of them. Maybe from Bangladesh. I hear they work cheap there.

I just finished…

…two collections of non-fiction by Renata Adler, “Canaries in the Mineshaft” (2001) and “After the Tall Timber” (2015), which is a career-spanning retrospective. I have now read seven of her eight books, omitting a collection of her film criticism from the year she spent doing that for the NY Times.

Boy, is Adler something! I admire the clarity and power of her thinking, analyses and arguments, her courage, humor and quality of her prose. Sometimes she may be vague (or beyond the limits of my comprehension). Sometime she may weld herself to positions that have not been supported by subsequent evaluations or others over time or commit herself to causes that have failed to endure. But I can not fault her guts or style in propounding her beliefs.

Adler reports from civil rights marches across the South, from Biafra during its war of secession. from Israel during its fate-in-the-balance Six Days. She can be take-no-prisoners scathing, as she is toward Robert Bork, Pauline Kael, Kenneth Starr, the Rehnquist Supreme Court, and the Times and New Yorker, burning bridges to those with whom she had formerly worked. She can also be surprisingly kind to G. Gordon Liddy.

I ought to write about her.

Marketing: Week Six

I sold eight “Cheesesteaks, four to a friend who intended them as gifts, a “Fully Armed,” and a “Pirates/Mouse.” (The last reduced my stock-on-hand to a bare minimum, requiring me pick up a few more from Alibris, which I shall market as “Pre-owned.”)

Three sales went to two strangers buying from my website on the same day, which was itself notable since that about equaled my total web site sales in its years of existence. (I am, by the way, now Google’s third most popular Bob Levin, trailing the investigative journalist/ex-whistle blower/former FBI agent, and the Bob Levin, who is the head of something or other at some movie studio, but ahead of the Bob Levin who advises cat owners and the former Number One Bob Levin, the ex-Yale fullback who’d dated Meryl Streep.) One of my web site shoppers was a retired folklore professor and the other was a 24-year-old, Yugoslavian-born punk musician/cartoonist, which constitutes a pretty impressive demographic spread, if I do say so myself.

One non-purchaser recognized The Checkered Demon on my sign. Another said she’d taught at Swarthmore in the ’80s. One 84-year-old reader revealed that, as an aspiring Beatnik, hanging out in North Beach while attending Cal, he’d been at the first public reading of “Howl.” A poet, disappointed by his own sales record, complimented my originality and “balls,” A professor dropped into his remarks that “Annie Had a Baby” (p. 32) was a follow-up to “Work With Me, Annie.” (I was sure he had it backwards, but, nope, he knew his stuff.) I e-mailed an on line site devoted to current news of West Philadelphia, announcing my book’s availability. It ignored me. Oh well, I thought, probably no one lives there now who lived there when I did.

I decided to work on my attitude for when no one looks or talks or buys. I am not begging; I am offering a rich experience.

Marketing: Week Five

Sold ten “Cheesesteak”‘s, (plus a “Best Ride” and an “Outrageous.”) Have now paid for the fellow who formatted me and am working on the printer. One sale was to a middle-aged stranger, who came up to my table at the French, looked at my display, and said, “I admire your guts.” Further conversation revealed he was an attorney from upstate New York, who’d once lost “a bundle” operating a no-alcohol club for beginner rock bands to show them they could make a go of it without a recording contract. He also’d been involved in the formation of a town of primarily Yiddish speaking Hasidic Jews, which has the youngest median age — and highest poverty rate– of any municipality in the country. The first fact had made me want to hear more from him, the second not-so-much.

One acquaintance rebuffed my pitch, saying he only read books about Nazis, preferably with swastikas on the cover. One purchaser said she would read “Cheesesteak” as soon as she finished all seven volumes of “In Search of Lost Time, which, Kindle informed her, she was 54% through. (Well, I thought, our works are similar, except Proust began with a madeleine.) One came up to my table and said, “Where’s the refund window? I thought it said ‘Cheesecake.’ I was expecting racy pictures. Like a trim ankle, at least.” One freebie-recipient revealed her first affair had been with Jim Kweskin (p. 69) and that she’d once utilized the services (unrelated to Mr. K.) of the abortionist mentioned on p. 79. Neither of these revelations had occurred in any of our every-few-years conversations of the past five decades.

All in all, I am consolidating my self-possession around what I am doing. I sit up in my chair, take in the world, and think, This is who I am. It feels more rewarding than occupying myself with thoughts of Donald Trump or the Warriors.

The Message (rev’d)

A revised version of my blog from a couple weeks ago, “The Message” has gone up at http://www.firstofthemonth.org/the-message/
Readers will find I have restored the identities of all but one of the previously-concealed-behind-letters-of-the-alphabet, which makes it more reader friendly, and I have punched up the style, especially the final paragraph, which, alone, makes it worth the price of admission.

Marketing: Moral Implications (b)

Robert also wondered if, by directly selling my book, I was “perhaps messing with your own head, your relationship with others, and… your experience of having written it.” While appreciative of my “boldness and eccentricity,” he counseled I let-go and move-on.

This was an interesting observation. I certainly remained more involved with “Cheesesteak” than if I did not share my café table with my stack of copies and my “Buy Bob’s Books!” sign. I did take in if people eyed or ignored my display. And I measured the responses of those who’d read me. The presence of my books seemed to dissuade some people from asking to join me. But others, who had read or begun the book, would sit down to share their comments, which often revealed aspects of them of which I had been unaware. This felt good.

Of course, the sign and the books were more than an effort to make back my nut. Of course, it was a some-would-say uncharacteristic, exhibitionist effort to call attention to myself. And, in fact, I was redefining who I was to others at the café. “So that’s what you’ve been doing,” more than one person remarked, referring to my daily efforts at my yellow pads, as though my association with an actual bound-and-printed object had elevated me beyond the random madman one offered encountered in town, hunched over a notebook, his pen obsessively firing.

I was also redefining myself. (Any alteration of experience, I suppose, does that if you maintain awareness of it.) The books and sign positioned me differently. They changed how I looked upon the passing world. They brought to the forefront the sense of self-as-writer — the sense of self as eccentric— (in a nice way) writer — within me. I began to think of myself as a performance artist, in the line of Marina Abromovic, without the self-stabbings or setting portions of myself on fire, exploring the relationship between creator and audience.

Gulag Casual

My latest is up at http://www.tcj.com/reviews/gulag-casual/

It begins:

Hmmm.
Hemmm.
Well, well, well.
Of course, I think, dreams.
I smile.