Gave a BEST DRESSED to a friend as a gift for his 85th birthday. (He hosted a private dinner at which an eight-course Sicilian dinner was served so my gesture may have struck some as being out of balance.) Sold a copy to a lawyer/novelist pal who wrote me, not remembering what happened to the cat, “My curiosity is piqued.” Swapped a copy for the forthcoming novel of a fellow I met when his wife came down from Benecia to read poetry at one of the soirees I used to host at the café.
In related news, a comic book store worker, who hopes to write a book about Vaughn Bode, came across my article (“the best and most well-researched bit of writing I’ve seen about (him)” e-mailed to arrange a chat with me. Coincidentally, just the week before, the fellow who’d been hoping to make a film about Vaughn expressed his desire to get together to bring me up to date on the “stops and (re)starts” that have occurred since I’d last heard from him a year or two ago. And CONVERSATIONS WITH TRINA ROBBINS, in which my interview of her is included, can now be pre-ordered from University Press of Mississippi. [Both the Bode and Robbins pieces are in MESSIAHS, MESHUGGANAHS…, which (I just checked) is available in 44 libraries, in case you don’t want to buy it.
In a less salubrious vein, the 35 copies of DRESSED I had sent to the incorrect address in Brooklyn are still sitting where they landed, waiting to be picked up by their intended recipient. Does anyone know someone in the area who does pick-ups and deliveries? I may be willing to intervene to speed up their entry into the stream of commerce.
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.