EUREKA! Robert Levin is pleased to announce the first direct purchase of books (2) from this very web site. The discriminating buyer is a resident of Toronto, Ontario, where, incidentally, lives another writing, basketball playing Bob Levin, who even more weirdly graduated 10 years after me from my very own 70-classmember high school, leading to some confusion when my first novel, about a basketball player, appeared; but let’s not get into that now. Instead we’ll pass along the tip to aspiring web site merchandisers that, when setting your item prices be sure tyo consider the implications of non-domestic postage. I didn’t, but if the Mounties at the border seize my wares, whose illustrations certainly raise the possibility, the resulting word of mouth may make it worthwhile.
This blogging life
Visitors to this very web site increased from 5.4/day in November to 6.7/day in December. I even sold a book to a fellow from the wrench cafe. But he thought I wanted too much money, so he bought it from Amazon.
On the down side, the average time someone spent at my site decreased from 34 to 21 seconds. I considered that I might have been a better (i.e. speedier) class of readers, but further analysis led me to a different conclusion.
If I understand Google Analytics, one of my most viewed blogs was “Sex and the Single 11-Year-Old,” a rebroadcasting of an article I wrote for THE COMICS JOURNAL in 1997, reflecting upon my fascination with a comic book story, “50 Girls 50,” which I read in 1953. Combined with the fact that two of my most fertile sources for visitors were domain names that it is likely the FBI is keeping an eye on led me to suspect that once these visitors had familiarized themselves with what I was about they had opted for more gratifying climes.
Seasons Greetings
My latest piece is up at http://broadstreetreview.com/cross-cultural/on-the-sending-of-christmas-cards
It begins
I began sending Xmas cards when I was an attorney. Every current client received one. I hoped the gesture would prevent their yelling at me for at least a week. If I received a card from a client, I sent that client a card the following year, even if their case had ended. I sent cards to friends who lived outside the Bay Area too. I kept a record in my address book, allowing each to go three years without sending me a card before I dropped them. Some friends I kept on the list longer, like I was dropping messages in bottles into the ocean of time, hoping for an answer. Some friends returned cards forever and ever… then stopped. Some resumed, but others were left to my imagination to account for.
I just finished…
…”Ways of Seeing,” by John Berger, and “Human Smoke,” by Nicholson Baker. (Robert the K recommended the first and I chose the second in my efforts to form a world policy for myself.)
“Seeing,” a Marxist approach to art, was written over 40 years ago, so some of its points may have already entered the culture and lost their power by becoming familiar. (Also Berger does not value clarity in his prose style, and, being a Brit, his language choice does not always connote to an American as it might to his domestic audience.) Finally, Marxism is a narrow way to look at art, though the concentration may add potency to his remarks. I liked best his final remarks about “publicity,” which I took to mean “advertising.” There I found much with which to agree.
“Smoke” is an apple cart-turner. It is pro-pacifism. All wars, it implies, are part of one war; and no war achieves naught but evil. So far, so good; but the war which Baker selects to make his point, through an assemblage of selected events leading up to it, is “The Good War,” World War II. Most historians (but not everyone) trashed it, but the book will not leave my head alone.
Cheese Steak
Okay, gang, back to my adolescence. This one is where these pieces all began. It appeared April 5, 2009, at www.thebroadstreetreview.com, under the title “Steak Sandwiches, B.C.,” and, after reflection, I will concede that was an improvement over what I had submitted it as.
CHEESE STEAK
Let’s get one thing straight. The whole idea is a corruption. The Philly cheese steak is about as traditional as an aluminum Xmas tree.
When I had my first, fifty years ago, it was “Y’wanna getta steak?” Period. It meant meat, an Italian roll, onions – grease. Salt, pepper, hot sauce – and for the brave — chopped cherry peppers optional. The cheese – out of a can, by the way – came later.
They weren’t everywhere either. You needed a car to get them. And you just didn’t pick one up for lunch or after school or dinner. They were best ritualized. Usually, it went like this. You had nothing to do, so you went to Dewey’s – 48th & Spruce – and hung out – 15 cent cherry coke – “Poinciana” on the juke box – or, nice weather, you stood outside, and, maybe, Marty Yudoff came by in his ‘50 Studebaker and knew a party in Oxford Circle, so you and Max Garden and Gino DiPieta and Sam Blank chipped in $2.00 for gas and, only after the party, when no one had scored, no one had gotten lucky – which was out of the question really, anyway – no one even getting a date or a phone number – you went for steaks.
The place we went was Jim’s, 62nd & Noble. Jim’s was a classic steak place. Narrow as a cigar box. The grill along the north wall spattering with the meat and onions. The salt, pepper, hot sauce, napkins on the wall behind you. (A sign offering $75 if you could prove the what you ate came off any three-letter animal not spelled “cow.”) You stood in line. You paid your fifty cents. And no place to sit. Very important, no place to sit.
The great places all had one name – Jim’s, Lou’s (for meat ball subs), Nick’s (for roast beef), and Pat’s. (The exception was The White House, in Atlantic City, for hoagies. I knew guys drove the entire 120 miles for an Italian Meats Special.) Pat’s, on 9th, where Wharton crosses Passyunk, deserves a few words of its own.
Not only did Pat’s have no place to sit. You couldn’t even get inside. You stood on the sidewalk, under an overhang plastered with black-and-white photos of Pat with notable Philadelphians: Bobby Rydell; Gus Zernial; Pat with Gil Turner; with three of the Four Jays; and you ordered through a window. And ordering at Pat’s was really cool. You said, depending on your feelings about onions, “One with” or “One without.” And if you were really, really cool, you knew to say, “One with, inside out,” which meant “Scrape-the-bread-outta-the-roll.”
Cheese was not even in the conversation.
My latest…
…can be found at http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2014/12/ol_blue_eyes.html
I can’t resist saying that when the editor showed it to a woman friend, she told him that when she was in college, she would have slept with whoever wrote it. (She went on to say that, regrettably, while now in her fifties that is still her highest praise for a boy author.
I thought, now why didn’t anyone react like this when it would have done me some good. Then Adele reminded me that, aside from how I looked in jeans, my writing was what first attracted her to me.
Anyway, it begins…
To get the preliminaries out of the way, at Bob Dylan’s third of three concerts at the Oakland Paramount, first, the band – Bob (piano and harmonica), Tony Garnier (bass), Donnie Herron (banjo, viola, violin, mandolin, pedal and lap steel), Stu Kimball (rhythm guitar), and especially, given the way the sound mix reached these ears, George Reville (drums) and Charley Sexton (lead guitar) – was terrific; but if you understood more than one-third of the lyrics, you beat the over-under. Second, they did nineteen songs, of which one was from the sixties and five from “Tempest,” Bob’s latest release of new material. (Last year, at Mountain View, they did fifteen songs, of which four were from the sixties and two from “Tempest.” The year before, in Berkeley, eight of fifteen songs from the sixties and none from “Tempest, even though it had just been released and could have used the promotion.) Third, as for ingratiating stage presence, Bob no longer even introduces the musicians. (If he said anything, it was “Thank you. We’ll be right back.” At least, immediately after something undistinguishable uttered from his microphone, everyone walked off stage and returned, fifteen minutes later, to resume playing, without any buzzings or dimming lights to alert those in line in the rest rooms, of whom, given the number of graying pony tails in the audience, male as well as female, there were likely to be plenty. (Of further demographic note, it being the night after the World Series, the audience sported about as many t-shirts saluting the Giants as it did saluting Bob.) And finally, when he’d played Mountain View, Bob was still varying his shows by a couple songs, night to night; but on most of this tour, he has been sticking with the same songs, in the same order, every night, regardless of whether he is moving on or sticking around.
My latest…
…is up at http://broadstreetreview.com/books-movies/s.-clay-wilsons-abc
(Again I apologize for not being able to post a link that can be directly clicked on.)
Anyway, it begins…
The perfect gift for the man who has everything, provided his possessions include an X-rated sense of humor, has arrived: Wilson’s ABC, “an audacious, illustrated alphabet,” from Wordplay, edited and annotated by Malcolm Whyte.
S. Clay Wilson, along with Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin, was one of the original cartoonists invited by Robert Crumb to join him in ZAP. ZAP, which is generally credited with transforming comics into a vehicle for adult artistic expression, and thereby liberating all of graphic art, was one of the most influential publications of the second half of the 20th century; and Wilson, whose uncensored id-to-ink renderings of laugh-out-loud sex-and-violence blew what restraints remained upon his already freewheeling colleagues, was among its most influential artists.
I just finished…
…Haruki Murakami’s “The Strange Library.” Adele (and her friend Marilyn), who read things psychoanalytically, had interesting things about it, interpreting it as a dream which followed the event with which Murakami actually concludes his book. I, who does not, didn’t.
This was the third Murakami novel I had read. It came to me that his process entails grouping together letters into arrangements that, say, spell “sheep” or “moon” or “girl,” which cast up responses within readers’ minds, but are used by him more like cut-outs of colored paper, which he slides around within the confines of his book’s covers, governed by the laws of a universe which, while offering some restraints, were not the laws of my own and that, then, what happens to your mind, happens to your mind.
Of course, this could be said of any writer. But it was with Murakami that I first saw it, so he gets the credit.
And I join Adele and Marily in wishing that, now that he’s got this out of the way, he’ll get back
to “IQ84.”
More good news
According to the news scroll across the bottom of my cardi- machine at the gym yesterday — despite AIDs, Ebola, wars (religious and otherwise), drones, the NRA, global warming, coal and tobacco and asbestos, starvation, over-zealous police, and increasing wealth disparity — between 1990 and now the life expectancy of human beings worldwide has increased by six years.
So let’s hear it for us.
Way to go, human beings.
I just finished…
…”The End of the Story,” by Lydia Davis, and “The Chess Game,” by Stefan Zweig. I liked both. Zweig did a masterful job imagining (I think) himself into the mind of a man locked alone into an enduring solitary confinement. As for Davis, some novelists plot everything out in advance. Some say their characters take over and drive the action themselves. Davis seems to compose a sentence, and then that sentence drives her next one. That’s my major insight, and it was fun to see this play out across the pages.