No café action, but…
I received an e-mail from a woman in Pennsylvania with whom I had been in occasional correspondence with since she had stumbled upon “Outlaws, Rebels…” in a museum bookstore. She’s an artist (and fan of UG comix), and reading it, she felt, had changed her life. Now, having read “every single word in ‘Messiahs, Meshugganahs…,’” she wanted to tell me what an extraordinary book it was and what a significant writer I was, in language so laudatory I wouldn’t even direct my way in fantasy or day dreams.
She also wanted a signed copy of every book I’d written, even those she already had.

My latest piece is up at https://www.firstofthemonth.org/the-semi-magnificent-bastards/. (That’s the July 17 issue. It begins: Once I heard the title Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Connor and the Rat Bastard Protective Association, (University of California Press. 2016), I hungered to lay my hands on a copy. Once I did, I wanted to throw it off the roof.

Adventures in Marketing: Weeks 536.5 – 546

I had stopped selling my books at the cafe even before my hospitalization. When I got back, another fellow was selling books he’d written, and a third was selling an anthology he had poems in and a fourth was selling pocket knives and belt buckles and mini-stoves for camping.  (Actually, I haven’t seen any of them sell anything.) But even without trying I have been getting my product out there.
1.) An ex-newspaper reporter/ex-lawyer, who had been a year behind me in college, bought a “Bob on Bob.” He had recently seen Dylan in concert and was one of those who expected him to play what and sound as he did in 1965. Don’t people check out set lists? Don’t they listen to albums from the last 60 years. He didn’t; he was bummed; apparently he wanted to know what I thought of the changes time has wrought.
2.) Faithful readers will recall Glory, the schizophrenic with a manic depressive overlay, who had been born in Philadelphia but came to San Francisco as a child. Glory’s illnesses prevent her from reading books, but she had sent a copy of “Cheesesteak” to her 90-year-old mother, who has dementia. Her mother loved it, especially the chapter on Puddles (p.10), which she reads over and over. Glory decided to send copies to six cousins of hers, all of whom live in Philadelphia. I gave her a discount for buying in bulk.
3.) After I got out of the hospital, I felt an urge to contact people from my past I hadn’t been in touch with for a while. Partly it was about time and partly it was to see who was still here. One was Lester, the jazz pianist, who towards the end of “Cheesesteak” (p. 95), replies when asked if he is going to college, “What, man, you mean be an everybody?” (This line had enough resonance for it to be recalled to my by the 20-something-year-old son of a friend from NYC who was visiting Berkeley the week before.) Anyway, Lester is fine, had, in fact, just played a gig with his trio at a restaurant on Chestnut Street and was so delighted at being quoted 60-years down the road, he asked for another copy, which I was delighted to send him.

ALL OF BOB’S BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT WWW.THEBOBLEVIN.COM

(In order of completion)

Introduction
Since my last entry, I underwent an operation which sent me into cardiac arrest, threw me into a two- or three- day coma, and left me hospitalized for weeks. I have been home two-and-a-half and am recovering.
While I was in the hospital, I asked a friend to bring me a novel from home which I thought I had been reading. He brought it, but said it had been shelved with books I seemed to have finished. I had forgotten that and, as you will see, other things as well.

1. George Saunders. “A Swan in the Pond in the Rain.” I recall enjoying the first two-thirds to three-quarters. It’s drawn from classes Saunders taught which, by focusing on short stories of Chekhov, illuminated how writers write and readers read and the relationships between the two.

2. Thomas Bernhardt. “Extinction.” I’ve read a number of Berhardt’s novels (See previous “Last Ten”s). In some ways they are indistinguishable, and while I can recall no specifics of this one, am sure I found it worthy.

3. Virginie Despante. “Vernon Subutex.” The first volume of a trilogy about dissolute, aging members of a post-punk Parisian bohemian scene.

4. Virginie Despante. “Vernon Subutex” (vol. 2). The story continues. Before I had finished, I realized these people’s lives and concerns were so different than mine, they might have belonged to a different galaxy. At which point, I tossed volume 3.

5. Kevin Burroughs. “The Most Dangerous Book.” An informative, entertaining account of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” including its struggles to pass through little magazines, into little publishing houses, and, finally, against legal opposition, the mainstream. Many fascinating people are encountered and many odd facts unearthed.

6. Eleanor Caton. “Luminaries.” The author, a young New Zealand woman as I recall, won the Booker Prize for this sprawling, often confusing, Victorian-novel like yarn. Gold, murder, sex – and muddled relationships are involved. Reasonably entertaining; challenging not so much.

7. Carol Tyler. “Ephemerata.” Tyler, a fine graphic novelist, addresses the loss of her parents, her husband, and, maybe, a sybling, and/or pet (I forget). It is well done – but it is like like immersing yourself in a couple hundred page bath of misery.

8. Henry Green. “Surviving Stories, Essays, Interviews.” I have valued several of Green’s novels. This stuff could have been left in his desk drawer as far as I am concerned though.

9. Florian Iler. “1913.” I remember nothing about this. Nothing about the author. Nothing about the book. (A novel). I think it was good though.

10. Thomas Bernhardt. “The Voice Imitator.” This is the book I had forgotten I had read. It was Bernhardt’s last, a collection of page or less “stories,” consistent with the voice and attitude of his novels, but a coda to them. Cocky and grim riffs on the frailties of man.

Afterword
On this memory thing, (1) yesterday I learned I’d had a phone conversation shortly before I went into the hospital with a cartoonist pal in Kentucky, which I had completely forgotten; and (2) Adele and I settled in to watch “Marty Supreme,” which seemed to have just been made available for free on TV. As soon as it started, I realized I had seen it before. (This held true the entire first half.) So it must have been there for several weeks. Again I had forgotten I had seen any of it.
But I can still tell you the starting line-up for the 1950 Phillies.

Sold a BEST Ride (via web site). The buyer was in LA. Aha! I thought. Movie option money. The time seemed right. NBA gamble-tainting and all.
But no. He was a writer of books about the Olympics and Para-Olympics and a friend (he didn’t recall who) had recommended my book. He was from New York and the glory days of the 1970s Knicks and Dr. J-led Nets. He liked the book. “A story well told.”

The next day, an e-mail with the “Subject” “Jimmy Don Polk” arrived. Aha! I thought, beginning to suspect I was not the pure artist I liked to pass myself off as, someone wants to make a movie out of FULLY ARMED.
But no. The e-mail was a college psychology professor, whose class Jimmy had taken. She had lost touch with him and feared the worst had happened. I told her what I knew, which was the worst had happened, but in far from any of the worst ways it might have. Jimmy went in peace and, in many ways, fulfilled.

In other news…
1.) I may have mentioned the chapbook/mini-comic I and a café pal have collaborated on. (Text by me; illustrations by him; cover by Adele. He showed me a dummy copy yesterday, and, with tweaks, it will be ready to go soon.
2.) An amusing story for those of you who have stuck around this far. A Danish fellow, who is writing/compiling an homage to/celebration of Vaughn Bode, with whom I opened MESSIAHS, MESHUGGANAHS, asked if I would look over his m.s. (A request quickly withdrawn after he found additional material to include.) Before he called me off, I got as far as where I was described as a jazz critic, as well as a writer about UG cartoonists. I had to tell him I was not a jazz critic. That was a different Bob Levin.
I first heard of that Bob Levin when I was looking for an agent to help me negotiate my contract for, circling back to where we began, BEST RIDE. The woman who took me on was/had been the agent for the jazz critic Bob Levin. That had worked out well enough she decided to try her luck at a second.
Wherever you go, there you are.

Leah, who was to pick up the copy of MESSIAHS I had set aside for Giselle (See previous “Adventure”) made it to the café. She was a no-nonsense, recently retired probation officer with short grey hair. We had an amicable chat in which she reminded me we had met at a reading I gave at Robin’s Books in Center City Philadelphia in the early ‘aughts to which she had come with Giselle. I did not remember her but I remember the friend who had come with Giselle had not bought a copy of my book. Nor did she buy one now.
But as we chatted, through the open front door my eye was caught by Alexander, an ill-clad fellow who lived in a nearby park. He was rolling a jam-packed shopping cart which was capped by a battered copy of FULLY ARMED. Now FA had recently become a focus of my attention, first, because a former roommate from law school with whom I had recently re-established contact (and to whom I’d sent a CHEESESTEAK two days earlier, explaining how I got from there to here) told me that he’d tried to interest a film producer in Miami in it only to be told filming FA would be impossible. (I tended to agree); and, second, because two friends had independently said they thought it my best book, implying either a decline in my talent over the past 25-years (and 10 books) or a calcification off of their own range of interest.
But what the hell, was Alexander doing with it? Fortunately, his brother Wilkes, a banjo player of local repute, is even more of a café fixture than I, so after Leah left, I asked if he had any idea where Alexander got my book.
“From me,” Wilkes said. “Last time he was over he grabbed it and has been walking around with it since.”
“Oh,” I said. “Still, it’s the first time I’ve seen anyone with one of my books in public.”
Slightly crestfallen not have added to my circle of readers, I resumed taking notes on the graphic novel with which I was engaged. “Excuse me,” said a rosy-cheeked woman heading toward a free table, a rolled up yoga mat under one arm. “Is that work yours?”
“No,” I said. “I’m writing about it is all.”
Her name was Mehitabel and her daughter, who aspired to a career in comics, worked at Berkeley’s leading comic book store where she was being mentored by the owner. “He knows everything there is to know about comics,” Mehitabel said.
I described my own arcane, niche, quirky relationship to comics and each of my comic-related books. She expressed particular interest in MOST OUTRAGEOUS because of its theme of abuse. “I’ll tell my daughter. Maybe her store will stock your books.”
“It has in the past.” I considered being invited for a reading but ruled that out. The place was about the size of a shoe box. Maybe a conversation with the owner, afficianado-to-curiosity would be in order.
Mehitabel had been googling me. “I’d like a signed copy,” she said.
“Here’s my card,” I said.

ALL OF BOB’S BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE (SIGNED) AT www.theboblevin.com.

Adventures in Marketing: Weeks 521 – 530
It’s been a long time.
I thought I’d have something to report when Giselle, a friend from Philadelphia in the wild-and-wooly ‘60s, who’d turned-on, tuned-in and dropped-out to Jamaica, said a friend of hers, who’d recently moved from Philly to Oakland, would be shipping her a package and could include a copy of “Messiahs,” which I’d promised Giselle as a gift, if she’d pay postage. The friend and I had arranged to meet at the café, but she cancelled at the last minute. “Car trouble.” It’s been two weeks. That car must be a mess.
But waiting for her to reschedule led me to pick up a call with a Philadelphia area code that I didn’t recognize. The caller was Mickey Kipper. Our friendship began in kindergarten and faded during high school, when he decided I wasn’t socially slick enough for him and I decided he didn’t have enough renegade edge for me. After I’d moved west, we’d exchanged occasional birthday cards and, 15 or 20 years ago, when Adele and I were visiting family, he took us on a tour of the old neighborhood, keeping us off streets it was unsafe to walk. Mickey was a retired junior high teacher and president of the local NRA chapter, and we didn’t have much in common.
Now he was calling from a rehab facility where he’d been since December, having fallen, shattering the bones in one leg and, it seemed to me, sustaining cognitive damage. Mickey’s news came shortly after that from another elementary school friend who was facing a second carotid artery surgery. A café pal with OHS in his past is due for a pacemaker and I’m up for an intervention to correct a leaky valve and a fellow I know from Mended Hearts with a history more extensive than my own, is looking at his own re-opening. (“We are all just walking each other home, brother” he tells me.)
I offered Mickey what support I could. I was touched he had called. But I wondered why he’d reached out to me.
“He’s been flat on his back for three months,” Xavier said. “You’re probably the last name in his address book.”

Then, “Bob on Bob” and “Lollipop” were picked up from my web site by a 48-year-old fellow who works for Fantagraphics, my sometime publisher. He said my book on the Air Pirates had made him “a reader of yours for life.” He’d already done “Best Ride” and “Fully Armed” and these were next.
Hence, this report.

In other news:
1.) The time to file for a share of the Anthropic settlement has passed. I don’t know if my original application for inclusion made it where it was supposed to, but it may not matter. The last time I looked, it didn’t seem any of my books were among those appropriated. How is AI to learn about S. Clay Wilson without me?
2.) On a more positive note, my pal Glory reports her Alzheimer-afflicted mother continues to re-read the “Puddles” chapter of “Cheesesteak” and is delighted every time. “He is so funny,” she tells Glory.

ALL OF BOB’S BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT www.theboblevin.com.

https://www.firstofthemonth.org/most-outrageous-the-sequel/

My latest has gone up here — and where else but FOM are you going to find Chester the Molester rubbing elbows with Jesse Jackson, Willie Colon, Wemby, and Meyer Schapiro? (In fact, in this Epstein-inundated time, where are you going to find Chester rubbing anything with anyone?)

In order of completion:

1. “Safe Area Gorazde.” Joe Sacco. A graphic journalistic account of Sacco’s experiences during the Bosnian war. I came upon it while writing about Sacco’s more recent book “Once and Future Riot” (See tcj.com. 1/27/26). It is compelling, if limited, view of a complexity.

2. “Jesus Son.” Denis Johnson. Had read it during the ‘90s. Was led to revisit it after (a) watching “Train Dreams” and (b) reading Johnson’s obit. He was a hellova writer and his life a hellova train wreck.

3. “The Last Samurai.” Helen DeWitt. Probably an excellent novel but seemed to require more time and attention than I was willing to commit to it.

4. “Secondhand Time.” Svetlana Alexievich. Superb. Shattering. Had been left on a free shelf in the café, which demonstrates the class and sensibilities of the clientel.

5. “West Philadelphia: From University City to 52nd Street.” Robert Morris Skaler. My neighborhood. Given to me by someone from there and I gave it to someone who lives there now. Mainly it’s building photos from the early part of the last century. I recognized a few and, architercturally, hardly cared for any

6. “Correction.” Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard’s novels are so obsessively similar, they can be differentiated only in the smallest ways. A middle-aged Austrian first-person narrator, who hates Austria and all things Austrian, goes on for a couple hundred pages without dialogue or chapters. If you develop a taste for them, they can be pleasurably addictive.

7. “Desperadoes.” Ron Hansen. Had read it before but could remember nothing about it. Hansen is a fine – and underappreciated – novelist. I’ve read a number of is books and this one – about the Dalton Brothers – and based on true, sometimes unbelievable events was super.

8. “Vernon Sublutex.” Virgenie Despantes. A friend recommended a novel by Despantes but when I looked her up, this, the first in a trilogy, seemed to be her most highly regarded. It’s set in a world of drugged out, burnt out, sexed out middle-aged French artists, musicians, and film makers, which is so unrelated to my own past or present, it was hard to be any more than curious. Still, I’ll see where vol. 2 goes.

9. “At Wit’s End.” St. Claire McKelway. A re-read of a collection of pieces by “The New Yorker” writer of the ‘40s and ‘50s. He specialized in affectionate profiles of colorful NYC characters – a counterfeiter, an imposter – but his lengthiest recounted of his own nervous breakdowns. In one, while working in the Pacific Theater during WW II, he fingered Admiral Nimitz for being in league with the Japanese. In another, while vacationing in Scotland, he came to believe he had become drawn into a plot to kidnap Eisenhower or Khruschev or both. “Humor,” McKelway wrote, “illuminates the truth.”

10. “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.” George Saunders. Recommended by another friend. Saunders uses seven 19th century Russian short stories to reflect upon writing and reading. (I got a lot more out of the stories than I did when I read them in college, At this point, I wasn’t going to learn much to benefit my own writing but it was rewarding to see how I’d worked things out and to reflect upon Saunders putting into words thoughts I may never have expressed. “Go forth and do what you please,” was his summative position. Find what it is you do; do it; and accept what it brings you.

My take on Joe Sacco’s “The Once and Future Riot” is now up at “The Comics Journal.”

https://www.tcj.com/a-scream-into-the-void/

It begins:

It was one war, one battle, one conflict after another, a state – Valuska gazed at the crushed terrain in front of him – where each event was self-evident, and it wasn’t as if there was anything surprising about this…
Laszlo Kraszynahockai. The Melancholy of Resistance

“I know you want peace on Earth,” Dave Edmunds sings. “But we got to kill the monster first.” Only later do you learn the monster is doctors and nurses and babies and little girls with flowers on their skirt, all of them, “underneath the rubble… crying for the dead.” For more than three decades, Joe Sacco has been writing and drawing about monsters. They have been killed by defenders of land they believed God gave them 4000 years ago, or to make up for what they believed the Turks cost them in 1390, or, in his most recent book about Hindus and Muslims in India, in defense of cows. To be fair, no one was actually killed in The Once and Future Riot (2025) for eating a Jumbo Mac, but, by book’s end, some states had made it illegal to possess one and, in a few, slaughtering Elsie could mean life behind bars.