Sold a Bob on Bob.
The buyer was jolly, India-born engineer in is 40s, who arrives every morning with his wife, a former librarian, and dog, and, following a brief soccer discussion with the barrista, takes their order “To go.” I spotted a “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tour t-shirt on him, and things took off from there. He said he’d arrived here when the Never-Ending Tour began and has been following Dylan since. He said he’d read every book about Dyan, and when I asked about Seeing the Real You At Last, he hadn’t so I leant it to him.
In other news…
1.) The Brooklyn-based distributor of Best Dressed has promised payment (low three figures) for his order but requests advance notification before I cash the check, so he can insure he has enough money in his account to cover it.
2.) A new hoagy place, Hoagey’s World of Hoagies, has opened on the other side of campus and has taken some Cheeseseaks to sell on consignment. (It is, by the way, the best hoagie place I’ve been to in he 60 years I’ve been here. Tell them West Philly Bob sent you.)
3.) Received an e-mail from Bangkok from an it-turns-out retired academic/author whose radical activism goes bact to being the last American arrested for opposing the Vietnamese war. Having read Most Outrageous, he wanted me to urge Fantagraphics to publish a complete collection of Chester the Molester cartoons. What a good idea, I thought. Maybe they could get a federal grant. The FBI would certainly be interested in anyone who bought a copy.
Then I thought, he is perfectly correct. I happened to be reading Fanta’s near coffee table sized tribute to The Evergreen Review. While Hustler’s prose and poetry were not up to that level, its politics became, perhaps, even more radical, and Chester never laid a hand on any of his objects, whereas Phoebe Zeit-Geist was ravaged by, among other things, a Komodo dragon.
After Fanta still passed, my correspondent laid out his case for me. He was, he said, an anarchist who believes in turning off all traffic lights “just to see what happens.” And his stance on censorship was “that there should be everything, the family mutt included.”
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.