January 9, 2013

From Al's Sex Journal:

Alain de Botton has released a new series of books which remind me of my journals, although he hides behind the Expert's Mask and reveals little about himself. Nor does he write all the books in his new series, which were brought to my attention by a well-written book review in The New York Times January 4th, by Dwight Garner.How To Think More About Sex is the third Botton bottom.

     Ah, ha! This crude pun on Alain's last name–not the first I'll bet anything –reminds me of an Ezra Pound anecdote I heard exact;y 60 years ago from my friend George Penty. And. thinking of George Penty, the first Southerner I ever knew, reminds me of still another hilarious incident for the Sex Journal.
     First, the Pound Pun. George was being picked up by some friends in Paris, this was in the 1930s sometime, and he was standing on a street corner awaiting their vehicle. It came, and he was directed into the back seat, where Ezra Pound was sitting. As he stepped into the car, the driver introduced him to E. P. George quipped, "Pound? I bet that's a name that's often punned."
     It turned out Ezra Pound hated puns, and he told the driver either George Penty left the car or he would. Of course, it was George who was evicted.
     I met George in Book Land, where I worked from atge 17-19, on Times Square, my first bookshop job. Turnover was high in such a joint, and George left, but we had become friends. His next part-time pick-up job was editor of what were called in those dark ages, "Girlie Magazines." A truly awful thing. George was much older than I, and he liked to tease me about what a prude I was. So he placed in the Girlie Magazine he edited, under "Letters to the Editor" a fake letter, purporting to be from me!
     Dear Editor, Liked those shots of Tiffany Tyler naked. Let's see some more!!! Thanking you in advance, Alan Brilliant.
     And he put my address too. And it appeared in his magazine!

 

January 4, 2012

from Al's Childhood & Old Age Journal (today's entry):

A brand-new website arrives on the internet, and I email the woman, Heather O'Donnell responsible: company name, HoneyandWax.com. She had posted an announcement on a special collections librarians' listserve I'm attached to . . . her first catalogue is available. It's the most creative website I've ever found in the world of books. Miss Heather is an antiquarian bookseller, offering things like a first edition of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary (1755).

Here's a recent edition–there have been hundreds--two volumes. 2,500 pages. Turns out Ms. O'Donnell wants a Unicorn Press book, Apollinaire's Calligrams, which I published in French and English in 1969. There is suddenly a lot of interest in this book, almost 50 years after I published it, because the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) has decided it's important in the history of the development of Abstract Art, and they are displaying a first edition of it this month in Manhattan.

     The main reason I mention Miss Heather and her new enterprise is that she's located in Brooklyn. This morning I emailed her the book is on its way, and I told her the three times I had lived in Brooklyn.

     My mother, Sara Birnbaum, was born in Vienna, in the 19th Century–in those days in a European city like Vienna, Jews had to live in a ghetto just for Jews, and it was locked up, locked in, at night. Her father was a rabbi there. But in 1900, he moved his synagogue and his family to the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

     Consequently, my mother went to Washington Irving High School. Her 1917 graduating class was probably the brightest in the history of education, giving us all the good guys and the bad guys that are responsible for the good and the bad in our american world today. Mom was the Valedictorian. But her Orthodox Jewish father, wouldn't let any of his eight daughters go to college. Men, he felt, were ordained by G-d for study, women for drudgery to free men for study.

     Sara's sisters all went into the Garment Industry (today it's called The Fashion Industry in a wealthier america). Tilly was some kind of clothing broker, and Gussie was a tailor, and Vivy was a seamstress, as was the oldest, Anna. The one son, Moe–well, I was there the day The Pope (that's what my father called Mom's rabbinic Cohanite father) threw him out of the family–Moe became a plumber, and paid off enough of the corrupt Brooklyn politicians to land several plump plumping jobs and became a rich man. What goes around comes around. His eldest daughter Gloria married a fellow, Gene Levy, and when my brother, David, killed himself, Gene, whose wife had died from cancer, married Dave's widow. Yes, mine was an enormous, incestuous family. All those wonderful aunts . . . I had 53 first cousins.

     Mom was too bright to be a mere tailor, she became a secretary! Meanwhile, Dad had run away to New York from the farm on which he was "incarcerated" (to hear him tell it) for 18 years.

     In those days, in The Russian Empire, Jewish men had to serve 24 years in the Russian Army, so my grandfather, Dad's father, Jakov brought his family to Ellis Island. They were all Russian peasants, so the JNF (Jewish National Fund) bought them a farm in Connecticut, from which, as we have seen, when he was 18, Matthew Brilliant, my father, Jakov's son, ran away to work in the Garment Industry in New York.

     Dad needed a secretary. He had been born in Russia, in the Ukraine. In fact, his mother was born a slave, because when she was born, Russian serfs were still slaves; they were freed by Czar Alexander in 1962. Dad, too, was a 19th Century Jew, from a little village, Tiraspol, that you know all about if you ever saw it portrayed in Scholem Aleichem's short story, "Tevye and His Daughters," which became the movie, Fiddler on the Roof. The author, you see, was also born in the little village of Tiraspol, 20 miles west of Odessa, on the Black Sea, a village of 12,000 souls.

     

     Dad needed a secretary, because he owned five factories. A "factory" on 7th Avenue in those days (right after WW I, which Dad claims he missed being conscripted into by one day) wasn't what you think of when you hear "factory." It had a dress designer, and a model who came in occasionally, a pattern-maker (usually the designer), a cutter, a presser–all male professions–and a few sewers, usually women. Dad's brother, my Uncle Jesse, was a cutter all his life. His son went to Harvard, but Dad's son only to Columbia. Dad's sister's boys also went to Harvard. Aunt Cecelia married a dress salesman, probably the richest member of the family, my proud Uncle Terry. Jack, the oldest of Dad's siblings, also owned dress factories, but he held on to his when The Depression hit.

     "Macky," as my father was known, was quite a lady's man, but Sara was strictly brought up–she was really a religious addict–and she wouldn't sleep with him, even if she was his secretary. So he had to marry her.

     I was born, 1936, in St. Louis. Dad had lost his little factories and was one of the 25% unemployed in this country where the streets were paved with gold.

There was a rumor of a job in St. Louis, but when that didn't pan out, Sara found succor in Bensonhurst, where her father and mother and all her sisters now lived. No more Lower East Side. Brooklyn now. So I spent ages 1 and 2 in Brooklyn.

     Still no job. So, in 1939, the Brilliant Family bought Dad a car (a '39 Pontiac) and a farm. And I got brought up in Franklin Township, New Jersey, a two-hour drive from Bensonhurst through the Holland Tunnel. It was "back-and-forth" even though gasoline was soon rationed.

     I think had the Depression not come, had I been a typical bright Jewish boy from the Lower East Side, had there been no farm, I'd be a boring college professor today, like my oldest friend, Herr Professor Goldstein, whom I've known since he was a freshman in Brooklyn College. But I had a garden at age three, and learned from Brownie my cow and Spotty, my Beagle dog, from the farming families on Davidson Road, an 8-acre family farm, two miles from Bound Brook, in Central Jersey, on the Raritan River and its Canal, ten miles from New Brunswick where our farming co-op was. Mom saw to it the shochet came regularly (for ritual slaughter of the animals)–chickens and eggs were the cash crop, a smart move when World War II came along.

     And when WW II ended, they sold the farm, alas, and I was moved back to Brooklyn, where the family bought an apartment house in Boro Park. That only lasted two years, for Dad finally got a job, in (ugh) Camden, New Jersey. So I got to go to the worst high school in the history of education–and in the worst city in america. Later, I'll tell you all about that. And how a hoodlum like me became a poet and a printer and a publisher, just like Camden's Walt Whitman.

January 3, 2013

From my Out Journal today:

JOURNAL OUT: January 3, 2013

I'll begin four full days out starting tomorrow! Mo wants some relief from my living here in Glenwood Coffee & Books–and she needs space, time, room in her head to figure out all her plans and layouts for the New Year. She also needs some relief from worrying about me all the time. She worries a bad 'un will break into this retail store, little dreaming someone lives herein, and she will arrivetop find me dead on the floor, my head bashed in. She looks me over and owrries I'm tired and worn out. That the punk rock music she brings in is driving me crazy . . .

     "Mo," I tell her, "I'm fine. I'm happy. I;m content. All is well. Don't worry!"

     She worries.

     "Mo, what can I do?"

     "You can go away," she says, in years. And she asks me to leave, just for a few days, so she can "get on with it."

     Of course I say, "Fine," although I'm a little shocked. She loves me, she worries about me, so she wants me to get lost?

     What will I tell my friends? Of course they'll all assume Mo can't stand me, maybe I grabbed her ass, and she made me go away!

     "The landlord is doing some rennovations," I tell my friends, "I have to move out for several days."

     "What will become of Glenwood the Cat?" they want to know.

     "Uh? Well, uh, Mo is taking care of Glenwood," I say inspired.

     My fellow Unitarian congregants, The Minkoffs, Craig and Lyn, are nice enough to take me for four days and four nights, January 4-5-6-7.

     I'll miss banging away on my computer in all these journals I'm in the midst of. Fortunately, I only yesterday completed printing another one, Occupy Journal so I can take that with me and begin sewing it. One hundred copies, first printing. It will take half a week of solid sewing.

     And I have a book I want to read, Feminist Politics and Human Nature by Alison M. Jaggar, a forgotten book written after the fabulous 1970s decade, when intellectual women were still activists, revolutionaries, artists, in there! Now, of course, all those Second Wavers are conservative as hell, making hay in Academia–behaving just like palominos instead of mules.*

     Alison M. Jaggar–I wonder what became of her?–was a professor of philosophy, and the Political Science gurus wouldn't let her teach a course in "political theory," telling the Dean of Arts & Sciences she must stick to Philosophy and leave "Theory" to The Political Science Department. So she published her "course," and it's a good one, in which she codifies the first decade of feminist theory into four ideologies: liberal feminism; traditional Marxism; radical feminism; and socialist feminism. She quite properly decides that socialist feminism was the best option, but of course by now we know that feminists and Feminism opted for the worst, "liberal feminism." Probably Dr. Jagger did, too!!!

_________________________

* "At first the two burros had tried to find the mule who had told them, back on the farm, about the benefits due them, thinking that there was something they had not understood, or, perhaps, some further effort they might make in order to achieve them. But they did not find the mule and one of their neighbors told them that he had been made Minister of Education. And one evening, on his way from his daytime to his night-time job, the father had seen the mule coming down the steps of some government building, carrying a calfskin briefcase and dressed in a silk suit–looking, in fact, just like a palomino."

Teo Savory, "Little Brown Burros," from A Clutch of Fables (Greensboro: Unicorn Press, 1977), page 26

 Say, here's a handmade Christmas Card, my friend and fellow Occupier, Kate, sent me last week. Pretty neat, just like Kate herself!

December 30, 2012

     It was 1957 I was manager of Eighth Street Bookshop. I was 20, a senior at Columbia, living in Spanish Harlem. I'd take the # 5 Fifth Avenue Bus; it had a serpentine route, began at Washington Square in Greenwich Village and went to Columbia on 116th Street & Broadway. So it passed by where I lived, and it took me a long ways to college,then it took me all the way downtown to the Village, where I'd sit in coffeeshops and browse at Eighth Street Bookshop. I was sure lucky to get the job there. The year before I had become manager of Gotham Book Mart, so the Wilentz Brothers, who owned Eighth Street (it had a lending library in those days), were impressed with me. Especially as I got along really well with Frances Steloff, whom everyone adored . . . but3 from afar, because she was such a harradan. Mellowed out as she approached 100, but in '56, '57, she was still the tough old Frances.

     I was getting pretty fed up with Columbia. But I had a fascinating course at Barnard called "The Art of India Asia." And The Bollingen Series had just brought out a two-volume boxed set, edited by Heinrich Zimmer, called "Art of India Asia." I've never coveted a book so bad. But it cost $100, a fortune in those pre-Vietnam War non-inflationary days. The Wilentz Brothers were nice enough to set it aside for me, and I'd pay ten bucks on it every week. So we got to know each other. And when I finally quit Columbia (with two months to go to graduate), they hired me as manager of the most popular bookshop in New York! Boy I learned a lot (which wasn't happening in college). After all, the year before Miss Steloff had enticed me into G.B.M. by saying, "You'll learn more in this bookshop in 6 months then you'd learn in Columbia in 6 years." True.

     Oh, I was a serious young fellow in those days. Today I'm a happy-go-lucky 77 year-old. In those days, my nickname was "Red Head," because my face was always red in anger and effort. I was so ambitious. Should I be the greatest artist who ever lived or the greatest poet? I had already been publishing since '53, my freshman year in college. And my best friend was in high school, Robert Smithson, who would become the most influential artist in American history in a very short time (Spiral Jetty, etc.). In '56 I had brought out another "little mag" with Smithson, and we published Leonard Cohen's first poems (he was a freshman at McGill) and Daryl Hine and James Wright and the first poems Samuel Menashe ever had in print, and Tim Reynolds and Michael Benedikt, a huge anthology of contemporary Canadian Poetry. Smithson and I also began a Park Avenue Art Gallery, and I gave Bob his first one-man show. I was still a teenager! Bob was a junior in high school (Clifton, N.J.), coming into the city to go to The Art Students League twice a week. So, although 20, I was really like a man twice that age. Twelve months later, I married a woman who was 50.

     This morning, the covenant fellowship to which I belong (I'm on the Board of Directors), we're Unitarian Universalists, is providing a free breakfast for the Glenwood neighborhood. We used to do this at the day care center for people who are homeless, but the city closed them down on the weekends. So we began offering our free breakfast–it's no big deal, only once a month–here at Glenwood Coffee & Books. Because we hold our Worship Service here, do you see. Attendance at the breakfast has been growing slowly, as this poor neighborhood learns to trust us. Individuals have begun bringing their families. We're up to about 40 breakfasts served. The United Methodist Church on the corner used to serve one breakfast a week, but they stopped last year. I asked Rev. Jolly, their minister about that. He said the Methodists were hoping some of the free breakfasteers would join their church, but no one ever did–one meal a week for four years. So they stopped serving. Well, that ain't the Unitarian spirit; we're not looking for people to join necessarily. It's hard times as we all know, depression going on for five years now. Greensboro, I read, is the fourth worse off city in the U. S. We lost all our denim and cotton mills in the 1990s and, this decade came the banking Wall Street deep recession (for everyone except bankers and stock brokers). Yeah, how about that? Those buggers caused this whole thing, and they're the only ones still employed and makin' hay! As the Occupiers like to chant, "They got bailed out, we got sold out."

     It's 7 a.m., and my fellow congregants will start arriving at 9:30 or 10:00. Breakfast is at 10:30 a.m. in case you're hungry. Pancakes and I make the turkey sausage–that's my job–and coffee and fruit cocktail, corn syrup, butter. All you can eat. Yummy. I'm on food stamps, so the Unitarians usually leave the leftover pancakes and sausage and butter and stuff . . . for me!!!

December 26, 2012

Today's entry from: JOURNAL OUT: December 26, 2012

It is eleven o'clock, Wednesday, the day after Christmas. I've been up since 6:00, sewed my five (5) books as I do every day. Worked two hours on the Joyce/Pound section of this Out Journal, ending with inserting a photograph of William Butler Yeats (previous page). Right now, I'm printing the third signature of the Occupy Journal. And having a breakfast of a cup of coffee and a piece of "Tea Cake." Families have interesting traditions, rituals, mostly to do with food, around this time of year. Last night, I went out to Lauren Goans' family for Christmas Dinner (spiral ham, sweet potatoes, green beans, an unusual and interesting salad beautifully served as was all these delights, wine, dessert with decaf coffee. Opening presents; even I was included. Daniel and Lauren had previously presented me with one of the few small 4-song albums of Christmas Music they created as gifts: exciting arrangements of familiar songs. The "Tea Cake" I mention I'm having for breakfast is a precious gift from Lauren's mother, whose own mother invented this very beautiful pastry for Christmas. That makes this treat extra special! It was really nice to be included in such a healthy, warm family gathering. Lauren's cousin was there with her husband; they recently moved to Raleigh from the Midwest, so the cousin can devote her accounting skills to the Caterpillar Corporation. Glenwood the Cat is crazy about this "Tea Cake." He's stolen it twice already, and is now trying to literally pull it out of my mouth. Well, it is delicious.

     How nice to see a father and mother so fine and so warm toward sweet

Lauren. Daniel's parents are just the same. There are so many good people! At the dining table, Daniel asked all of us to share our favorite Christmas moment or just a story from our personal Christmastimes. I shared my experience, in the Bay Area (1995–1999), as a Department Store Santa Claus. Complete with elf to take pictures of children on my lap. This led dear Lauren to go into her mother's room and return with a dozen annual photographs of her, age 1–9, sitting on Santa's lap, mostly in High Point and other places they've lived (Boise, Idaho for example). Lauren's been fortunate enough to have lived in the same house we were in from 3rd grade until now, or until she went to college. For all her new profession of singing in clubs and bars and homes and everywhere with Daniel, Lauren is an introvert personality; she seems to have led a rather lonely life up until now. She always has a sweet wide on her face, seems to love to have fun, is a very seriously ethical and spiritual young woman (24), and an extremely talented creative personality. If you met her, you wouldn't have any idea how

deeply and independently she thinks, because she is a Southern belle, which means smiles and quiet, let others talk, never disagree or be disagreeable. Nevertheless, when you get to know her, she will suddenly almost shock you by sharing a very strong opinion about large issues. For example, she has her own ideas about the jimcracks surrounding Christmas, the mishegas, the chotzskas. And, if you're lucky, you might hear what she has to say about college education itself. It is always a surprise when one of these beautiful, dainty Southern people voices a strong opinion. I'd love to hear what Lauren really thinks about our political system for example, but I doubt I ever shall, no matter how close we become. I am very fortunate that my crush on Lauren and Daniel seems to be returned. Lauren invited me to Thanksgiving Dinner with her folks, and now Christmas Dinner. (I spent Thanksgiving Dinner with Dr. Rita Laqyson's family–and also Christmas Eve Dinner with them and with my good friends, Craig and Lyn Mankoff.)

     Well, Glenwood's finally settled down. He's lying down, with his paws tucked in, on top of the futon beside which I type on my old desktop computer, right into Microsoft Publisher. The 100 copies I'm printing of Occupy Journal has completed its current run (I print four pages at one time). As soon as I complete this page of Out Journal, I will probably import it to my Blog (www.bookshopjournal.blogspot.com), then sew a few more books, then glue some other books, then back to the computer for more journaling. I haven't typed anything into Gardening Journal for over a month–few people garden this time of year . . . I don't.

     I suppose technically we're open today at Glenwood Coffee & Books? You never know. We seem to be closed more than we're open. The loss of income's become a bit of a stressful problem. I suppose I should make some coffee. We're low on coffee, but I think Mo ordered 25 lbs or so from Larry's Beans. UPS should be delivering today. And the Post Office–I have orders for 50 different books that a local school library ordered through Mrs. Reed, Dave's mother and a librarian; about 40 of the books have already arrived via AbeBooks.Com. Purchasing these books has swelled my credit card debt; so has the Larry Beans $150 order. But in a few months, we should receive $500 or so from their sale, and I can pay off most of the credit card debt and stop this usurious loan sharp interest rate charge from (ugh) Chase Bank. But I have $750 in debt from publishers' invoices, too, and I have no idea how those are to be paid. We just aren't bringing in enough money. Mo is hoping this huge reorganization, when completed, will bring in some cash. But I expect things to get worse before they get better. Fortunately, there's my social security pension that exactly matches the Glenwood rent. Then there's $300 or so monthly to (ugh ugh) Duke (ugh) Energy (ugh). Hate them. Now it's 11:30, and I'm

hungry. Raining, so I can't get to the market.

 

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