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.

Swapped one book and sold three – a package deal.
For a few months, an elderly couple, emigres from Panama, have been living in the hotel of which the café is part. Her grandfather had come from Denmark in the 18th century to help drill for drinking water. Her husband was in the US military in the Canal Zone after two tours in Vietnam. When the current dictatorship took over their home, they left to join a daughter and grandchild here.
Her book about their experiences, “Gringo Cabron,” sold well in Panama. The English translation, “Deported Colonel,” is available at Amazon. I traded an “I Will Keep You Alive” for it, and since she wanted the others I had on display too (“The Schiz,” “Lollipop,” “Cheesesteak”), I gave her a bulk-purchase discount.

In other news…
1.) As expected, my article on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” drew more comments than my usual at tcj.com. They ran from “great review of an incredible book” and “it’s always a pleasure to read your work” to “masturbatory writing… it’s like, dude, you can write for OTHER WRITERS or you can write for a GENERAL AUDIENCE, always go with pick #2, jeez.” (All capitalizations of INDIGNATION in the original.)
I think the lesson here is clear.
2.) A few weeks ago, my S. Clay Wilson “Buy Bob’s Books” sign caught the eye of a lanky, long-haired fellow, late 30s/early 40s. He didn’t buy but the couple times he’s been in the café since, he’s given me a “How’s it going, man?” He’s usually with an older, balding man, and they seem to bounce back and forth between Berkeley and L.A. The other morning, we talked.
The older man knew Terry Zwigoff through The Cheap Suit Serenaders so we opened with the Crumbs and old record collecting – having to explain to the younger fellow what .78s were. I didn’t learn more about him, but the younger guy is a surfer/graffiti artist/fine artist (or as he put it, “mantlepiece” artist). He seems most serious about graffiti art, about which he has significant thoughts, but which he has given up because of the danger. (One practitioner was shot by an aggrieved property owner.) He circulates around the Pacific, spending what money he has, living “wild.” (The one painting he showed me a photo of – a mix of psychedelia and Javanese batik patterns was splendid.)
We talked graffiti artists I didn’t know and Banksy, whom I did, and whom he reveres. I offered Vaughn Bode, which gained me no traction. Big Daddy Roth came along, whom I grabbed hold off, but I was in real danger of falling out of the conversation entirely when I tossed out Rick Griffin. “The G!!!” he exclaimed. We connected on Robert Williams too.
Then they were off on a six-hour drive south.
I am hoping to resume.

https://www.firstofthemonth.org/bruce-dern-loves-last-ride/

Above is the link to my most recently published article. Actually it was published in 1983 as “Me and Hollywood” (or was it “Hollywood and Me”?) in a mag a printer-friend put out in Eugene, but it’s been long enough — and its circulation small enough — that I — and, fortunately, FOM’s editor, the esteemed Benj DeMott — thought it deserved a second look. It begins:

There are three things to understand first. My red phone. My second cousin Irving Sussman. My position in American letters.

Sold a “Cheesesteak.”
The buyer wore a dark baseball cap, bill to the front. His couple days black-grey stubble made him eligible for slotting anywhere on the café’s socio-economic spectrum. He asked about each of my books and remarked on my jacket quotes from Crumb and Ram Dass, which narrowed nothing.
Turned out he had been born in Alameda, attended UC, lives in Berkeley, and has two kids at Berkeley High. Said he worked in “software,” “website design,” “product management.”
Successfully, was my impression.
He said he had been coming to the café for 30 years, but I had never seen him before. Leonard who comes nearly every day said he had never seen him either.
FBI? CIA? Operative for a state too deep below the surface to be known?
A sale is a sale.

In other news…
1.) Neither of my pieces that were about to come out have come out and the one that has come out is in a volume that has not yet reached me, though presumably it was mailed a month ago. (Meanwhile I am putting final tweaks on two more pieces – one a “poem” – and accepted a request from a collector/connoisseur of weird cartoonists to look at/review a graphic novel by someone he knows – and I don’t.
2.) As for our anthology, we have (1) figured out how to number its pages, which means (2) we can finalize our Table of Contents; but (3) our first attempt (a) omitted one piece entirely and (b) transitioned an “Alan” into an “Ann.” We still don’t know how to format; our printer is up in the air; and we are (good-spiritedly) squabbling about back cover content, the masthead, attrributions of the previously published, word limits on contributors’ notes, and distribution through Amazon.
It occasionally causes lost sleep.

Sold a “Cheesesteak”; gave away a “Cheesesteak,” “Lollipop,” “Schiz,” and “Most Outrageous.”
The sale was to a 40ish couple – husband and wife, I presume – from Mexico City but 25-years in the US. They operate a commercial cleaning company.
The gift – a package deal – went to my brother’s visiting twins, whom Adele and I last saw at their bar mitzvah about 20-years ago. One lives in Bed-Stuy and consults with hedge funds on where and how to invest. The other lives in Morgantown, having recently completed a tour of duty with an ultra-elite Navy SEAL unit. It would be difficult to say with whom we felt we had less in common going in.
But we had a nice visit. (It was, I remarked to Adele, the most time we had spent with people their age since… Well, when we were that age.) We sat in and outside the café. We drove up and down the North Berkeley hills, into Tilden Park. We walked across campus, down Telegraph, through People’s Park, lunched at Bateau Ivre, and walked back. (8000 steps). They asked questions it was fun to answer and provided answer to questions we asked that were fun to hear.

In other news…
1.) It looks like FOM will run a story of mine soon. When I pitched it, the editor recalled having seen it three-years ago. He had lost it, and I had forgotten I had submitted it. So I sent it again.
2.) It looks like TCJ will be running a piece of mine too. It had asked my opinion of a controversial book and I submitted it. “Fantastic, Bob” I was told. “You’ve still got it.” That registered well – until I envisioned an editorial meeting with “Has Levin lost it?” on the agenda.
3.) Our anthology rolls along: (a) we have figured out how to pay the printer. (All Board members will chip in); (b) contributors have been asked to submit 30-word descriptions of themselves. (A limit determined by how many I needed); and (c) unasked – and with some chutzpah – I line-edited four submissions. Three authors expressed thanks and accepted all or many of my suggestions, (including a woman who first “lost” them). The fourth called me a “jackass.” He told me that people on two continents (Australia and North America) had loved his story without finding a single nit to pick. When I suggested he dump, oh, two-dozen metaphors as quickly – speaking metaphorically – as Friday’s fish on Wednesday, he pronounced them examples of the “lyrical/poetic infusion” he brought to his work.
. An infusion, alas, he had arrived at after abandoning Raymond Chandler’s stylistic influence for Mickey Spillane’s – which strikes me – Australians not withstanding – as a classic inversion of the Buddhist maxim that from garbage comes the rose.

No sales. No swaps. But I received a gift.
The flip-flop-shod, maximalist poet/assemblage artist/Merry Prankster associate (See “Adventures… 332″), who had purchased “Best Ride,” re-appeared. “A book for a book,” he said. I thought it would be a chapbook of his but no. It was a 57-year-old ($1.95) paperback anthology: “The Philosophy of Time.” What in “Best Ride” had led him to conclude this would be of interest to me was a mystery.
But on the other hand, at the very moment he had bestowed it, I was in the midst of an e-mail to my philosopny professor emeritus neighbor (See “Adventures…” I forget) reporting my thoughts on a book he had loaned me where I had been particularly intrigued by the question of how we know something is a dog. Is there something within both “Dahlia,” the Habanese, and “Fido,” the Alsatian, that when either or both of them enters the cafe, owner-in-tow, we think “Dog,” or does something within us that occasion this conclusion? (Philosophers have been pondering this question for centuries.)

In other news…
1.) A pleasant woman in a blue suit and short gray hair stopped at my table. She said she was visiting from the east.
“What part?” I said, hoping to place a “Cheesesteak” with her.
“North Carolina,” she said.
“That’s the south,” I said.
“Right,” she said. She picked up “Fully Armed.” “I’m not familiar with you… Or Jimmy Don Polk.”
“No reason you should be,” I said.
She worked in the therapeutic court system, so I should have pushed that one. But I wasn’t thinking quick enough. I gave her my card instead.
2.) A young woman in glittery blouse, pedal pushers, and chunk-heeled sandals stopped. “Dragana.” I identified her accent as Middle-European but she said “Minnesota.” She was in “J” School and had come to the café to interview someone about People’s Park. “Harvey Smith. Do you know him?”
“I knew a Harvey Smith. He pitched for West Philly in 1959. I doubt it’s the same fellow.”
When her Harvey Smith arrived, he was skinny with a long, grey pony tail, so “No.”
As she turned to sit down with him, I said, “Wanna buy a book?”
“I’m a broke grad student,” she said. “But I support your efforts.”
I gave her a card too.
That’s 4,721 distributed in vain – or thereabouts.