Bob Levin

Prelude to the Bright and Warm

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A woman, who had been abused by her father, husband and brother-in-law, tries to starve herself to death while confined to a mental hospital. A college instructor, scarred from eye-to-throat and going blind, meets a poet who has lost the ability to speak. Political protesters, who have been arrested, find themselves starved, waterboarded, beaten with rifle butts, hung from ceilings, left for ants to nibble on their genitals, reduced to pus, piss, saliva, blood, snot, shit, “lumps of rotten meat,” and rendered unable to be touched or feel affection or achieve intimacy.

These people are balding, overweight, insomniac, nightmare-afflicted, worried about the size of their penis. They are “jaundiced” and “sickly looking.” They have been shattered. When they look into mirrors, death hovers behind their face. Marriages have been brief. Children have been lost. They walk until so exhausted they can sleep without recalling their dreams. And when they dream they find themselves alone in cold, dark woods in a barn full of “great blood-red gashes of meat, blood still dripping down,” or with black-red blistered lips bursting with blood and pus, or digging into frozen ground by hand until their nails splinter and their fingers bleed, or on scorched islands surrounded by tens of thousands of dying fish, the tattered sails of wrecked ships, the scattered bones of whales and sharks.

They live in cities once pulverized into dust. They live alone in small rooms, furnished and curtained in black. Through “pitch-black windows,” they look upon “pitch-black” darkness into which they consider throwing themselves. They experience rain and woods as black. They fear being sucked into a wound’s “pitch-black maw.” They have been swallowed by darkness. They feel each moment of life is a step off a cliff. They feel like giant, invisible knives are suspended above them as they lie immobile below. They ask if going on is worth it.

They are bodies “from which all desire had been eliminated.” They are “revolted” by life.” They believe it is man’s fate “to be degraded, damaged, slaughtered.” They wonder “why it is such a bad thing to die.” They believe humans to be “fundamentally cruel,” with “brutality” “imprinted in our genetic code.” They believe that, like sleet, the earth will vanish and take “comfort” in the “impossibility of forever.”

These people populate the novels of Han Kang, a winner of  the International Booker Prize (2016) and Noble Prize for Literature (2024). Five have been translated into English:  The Vegetarian (published in Korean in 2007 and English in 2016); Greek Lessons (2011/2023) Human Acts (2014/2016); White Book (2016/2019); We Do Not Part (2021/2025).

I read them all, periodically interrupting my reading to gasp.

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Fore!

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Golf had been his father’s game, so Goshkin never played it. Adolescent rebellion, he supposed. In 1950s Philadelphia, football, baseball, basketball were the only honorable sports.

In recent years, though – 70-some and 3000 miles later – he had come to enjoy golf on TV, while his interest had faded from football, baseball, everything athletic in fact, except the Warriors, who continued to drive his blood pressure up 20-points, and the exercise he deemed necessary to keep his own surgically-enhanced heart pumping.

“What do you think your dad would say,” asked Ruth, his wife, a former therapist, “about your seeing the light?”

Goshkin snorted. Not his story. Left behind with the Liberty Bell.

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Death Facing

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Recently I was preparing a talk about my experiences as a former heart-surgery patient, who visits people in the hospital who’ve just undergone one. For my talk, I was asked to detail my heart history, its impact on my life, and how it influenced my visiting.

When I am writing or, in this case, preparing a talk, occurrences in my daily life may walk on like a horn player joining an improvisation. In Muriel Spark’s Momento Mori I read, “I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life.” And then in Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, I found the observation that one who faces death at every turn is best able to think about life. Both Kang and Spark were 40-ish when they wrote their sentences. I don’t know that either’d had a health crisis. Imagine, I thought, what an 83-year-old who’s had several could contribute.

He could say, “I don’t recommend open heart surgery, but you can get a lot out of it.”

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Perception

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The first-floor windows of the Life Sciences building sit one step above sidewalk level, flush to the floor. They are recessed far enough in from the outside edge of the building to allow an elderly woman in a heavy, hooded blue coat, a black “I (Heart) SF” sweatshirt, and a patterned dress over jeans to sleep there.

The woman sleeps surrounded by her possessions, which, so far as Goshkin can catalog from his seat in the café across the street, consist of a shopping cart, several stuffed large plastic bags, a yellow blanket, a rug depicting a horse on hind legs, an umbrella, two tubes of glittering steel pipe, and a crooked, leafless tree branch as tall as she is. Once she has awakened, the woman begins to move her belongings to the sidewalk.

She arranges them as if assembling a train. What connects the cars of the train is unclear. So is how it will move forward. She takes her time, sometimes removing an item from a shopping bag and adding it to the exterior, sometimes shifting items she has placed in one position to another.

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Bob Dylan: the Man; the Moment; the Italian Meats Sandwich[1]

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Chickie Pomerantz was lit.

Opening night of the 1963 Brandeis Folk Festival had been lame.  All those green bookbags and black turtlenecks.  All those skanks and pears.  Then this skinny guy with this scratchy voice came on singing about some farmer starving to death in South Dakota.  Chickie and Kevin Cahill and Frannie St. Exupery and a couple other jocks tossed beer cans at the stage.[2]  “You shoulda seen the assholes run,” he said, coming back to the dorm.

I went the second night.

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Staying Alive

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art is a track around which one pursues one’s best self.

The author in the process of awakening the morning after speaking with Eileen Ramos.

In September, a friend, the artist/electrician/musician Fran Holland showed me a work by Ramos, a Filipina-American from Piscataway, New Jersey, which he had purchased at the just-concluded San Francisco Zine Fest. After he did, I ordered an assortment of ten ($50, including postage) from her web site [https://eileenramos.com]. They arrived in a 6″ X 9.25″ bubble mailer. On both sides, black magic marker instructed the USPO not to bend.

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The Morning Crowd

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(an homage to/adaptation of/improvisation upon Lydia Davis’s “Old Men Around Town”)

The customer who had been coming to Espresso Bongo the longest had been a magician. He had white hair and blue eyes which were alert and bright. He arrived when the café opened and sat at a corner table opposite the rest room and told people if it was occupied and, if they had never known or had but had forgotten the lock’s combination, he clicked the remote he palmed and opened it. If a small child arrived, he bowed, introduced himself to its parent and, with their permission, pulled a quarter from the child’s ear.

Each rainy season, he left for San Miguel de Allende. This spring he did not return. He has an ex-wife and adult son but no one at the café knew how to reach them. His usual seat has been taken by a 95-year-old, former Pilates instructor, who can still raise one foot above her head while standing on the other foot but can not keep from offering books she has brought from home to people who declined them the previous day or, sometimes, the previous hour.

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Every Picture Tells a Story

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“The artist is someone who makes something called art.”

                                                                               Marcel Duchamp[1]

Not too long ago, I delivered a Zoom talk in which I detailed how I came to find myself  frequently writing about transgressive cartoonists. My friend Malcolm, a visual artist of impeccable credentials but sometimes stodgy mien, commented that he found himself enlightened as to my “fascination with the obscene, the perverse, and the tasteless,” adjectives I would not have come to on my own.

At this time, I was also preparing for a podcast on which I would be discussing the Air Pirates, a band of underground cartoonists who, in 1970, took it upon themselves to further the revolution by creating comic books in which Disney characters conducted themselves in an unDisney-like manner, and which, in the ensuing litigation, Disney’s lawyers termed “perverted,” “obscene,” “cancerous,” and “grotesque.” I was struck not only by the similarities of language between Malcolm and Disney’s counsel but how it seemed to say as much about the beholder as the beheld.

In my Zoom talk, I had mentioned a book which I had known about for 50-years but had never had an inclination to acquire. I decided to pick one up.
.

There was a time when pornography pushed as many buttons as uni-sex bathrooms do today.[2]

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Thinking Ahead

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Hate to be a Gloomy Gus, but it seems fair to say, Trump will not be tried on federal charges before the election.

Bur let’s say he gets convicted in New York or Georgia for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels or screwing with the electorate.

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“…and Cleveland’s Cold”

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Townes Van Zandt. “Pancho and Lefty”

I became aware of Cleveland when Lou Boudreau played shortstop and my Aunt Sylvia, who, to my six-year-old eyes, was really neat, perversely rooted for the Indians against her hometown Braves. I liked Marion Motley and Mac Speedie (good names!), when they came along a couple years later too, but I hadn’t thought much about Cleveland since. I certainly hadn’t registered it as a petri dish for disintegration and despair, capable of occasioning both vicious protest and futile resignation, from which would arise a musician capable of pinning lunch meat to his chest, blowing his nose in a slice, and eating it.

Then Aaron Lange’s Ain’t It Fun: Peter Laughner & Proto-Punk in the Secret City landed.

SPLAT![1]

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The Most Interesting

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After Marilyn told Adele that she and Grif were packing winter clothes for the Buddhist retreat in New Mexico, Adele asked me if New Mexico wasn’t hot.

“They have mountains,” I said, “and mountains have snow.”
“Do all mountains have snow?”
“Come to think of it, why should any mountains have snow? Aren’t they closer to the sun? Shouldn’t deserts have the snow?”
“When you’re at the café, ask Fran.”

Besides being an licensed electrician, free jazz musician on instruments of his own creation, reader of the most daunting Oulipo works, and maker of art postcards based on mathematical calculations that he sends family, friends, waitresses, and people he meets in cafes. (I have three), Fran is the kind of guy you can ask about mountains and snow. He was answering my question through improvisations on planetary rotation, wind direction, reflection of light, absorption of heat, when I noticed a dark-haired, 60ish woman at the next table, who had been making notes in a spiral bound pad, turn more and more toward us.

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Meetings With Remarkable Men

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In 1965 my parents bought a house in Longport, on the opposite end of Absecon Island from Atlantic City. Longport, which was then still called “The Irish Riviera,” was across a causeway from Ocean City, another (Gentile) family-oriented South Jersey vacation spot. Ocean City was dry, but next to it was Somer’s Point, a veritable Bourbon Street to its Riyadh. My favorite Somer’s Point joint was Tony Mart’s because a highschool classmate of Max Garden’s tended bar there and let us drink for free.

Tony Mart’s booked rock’n’roll bands, and I knew from the subsequent literature that The Hawks played there before they became The Band, and I wondered if I’d heard them. Robbie Robertson’s passing triggered a lot of FB postings, and I learned that The Hawks were at Tony Mart’s the entire summer of ‘65. In fact, Robertson took Bob Dylan’s phone call inviting the group to New York in its kitchen. So I heard them once? twice? three times?

And they made absolutely no impression on me.

Talk about an eye (or ear) for talent.

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Brief Encounter

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Twenty, twenty-five-years ago, a Berkeley City College student started coming to the café where I took morning breaks. She was Mexican American, with pouty lips, a low-back tattoo, and a glorious torrent of black hair falling across and below her shoulders. She was a cousin of a barista, and soon was working part time behind the counter. When she returned a bracelet, I had lost, I offered to reward her, but she declined, so I left $20 in the tip jar.

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Denise

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a writer is [someone] for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others.
Thomas Mann

…..Inside the café, from left to right, 8:20 AM.  Caucasian male, red hair, red beard, green sweater, in his 20s, working on a lap top. Asian woman, about 50, wide black-framed glasses, red quilted jacket, underlining in red a book about “Power.” Young Asian man, charcoal grey sweater, ear buds, working on his lap top. Indian/Pakistani male, 30-ish, horn-rimmed glasses, heavy white sweater, laptop. Caucasian man, 50-ish, grey hoodie over black racing cap, on his laptop too.

…..All silent.

…..All alone.

…..Working toward what they could not know.

…..

I am often interested in why people write and what it is they choose to write about.

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The War on Drugs: The Early Years

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(Based upon actual events,)

In the spring of 1964, even a BrandX University senior as hip as me, who had been one of six students not to walk out on Cecil Taylor’s first set in Grubb Hall, did not know anyone who smoked marijuana. So it was a shock when several undergraduates, – primarily Fine and Theater Arts majors, to be sure – were swept up in raids which extended to Cambridge.

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