Sold three copies of Aaron Lange’s “HUGE,” afterword by me, but sold none of my books; but I swapped a copy of “HUGE,” plus a copy of “Cheesesteak” to a museum-worthy photographer at the health club for the coffee-table sized artbook of his from the last exhibition of his work. Advantage Levin, though I have to admit he mainly wanted the comic.
However my on-line “publicist”‘s efforts have produced a second request for a review copy of “Cheesesteak.” The good news was this came from a blogger in Philadelphia. (Hey, I thought, that’s my market.) The bad news was this was “a lifestyle blog for young women dining, shopping, playing, and living” in Philadelphia. So I wrote the blogger that while I was not now and never had bee n a young woman dining, shopping, etc. in Philadelphia, some of my readership once had been and that if she and her readers didn’t find my book of relevance, her and their parents might. She replied, good naturedly, that she was looking forward to reading it.
In other news, I phone-interviewed Mike Diana for my essay-in-progress about him and his work (transcribing half done), and received an inquiry from an artist in Croatia if I would be receptive to looking at her new comic. (She thought to ask me because I had written previously about the Serbian artist Danilo Wostock.) Sure! I said — and thought, What’s next? Bosnia? Montenegro? Albania? (The first term paper I ever wrote — 4th grade — was about Albania. Everyone in the class was assigned a country. Mine was not a plum one.)
But I digress. These requests are a source of pride and pleasure and wonder to me. How did I become this guy whose attention is sought by extreme artists on two continents? (How, in fact did I come to comfortably, consistently find extreme art fine and worthy and exciting?)
“Your father would be proud,” my friend Budd said.
“Not if he saw the pictures,” I said.
“At your stature,” he said.