Robert Rosen

Seems like only yesterday that, armed with my Daily Beaver press pass, I was wandering the aisles of Bookexpo America 2012, stewing in the idea that book publishing was an industry without a soul. As I wrote on this blog last year, I felt as if "I were an invisible man exploring an exotic city in a forbidden country… I felt no connection to anything… Sometimes I wondered what I was doing there."

Well, the BEA apparently found some merit in my existential scribblings, and they've given me another press pass, so I'll be going back. The assignment I've given myself: Find out if book publishing has been able to reacquire from Amazon at least 70 percent of the electronic rights to their soul, and if so, what condition is it in?

That’s probably a joke. I don’t think Amazon has literally bought the soul of the publishing industry. And if they have, they’re most likely developing software that will allow them to resell “used” e-souls and keep all the profits for themselves.

That, too, is a joke. My attitude towards Amazon has improved considerably in the past year, ever since they “un-banned” Beaver Street on the eve of the 2012 BEA.

The highlight of last year’s BEA was Patti Smith, author of NBA-winning Just Kids, interviewing Neil Young, whose book Waging Heavy Peace was about to be published. Smith proved herself to be a first-rate journalist, and Young proved himself to be an intriguing storyteller. Which is what I told Smith when I bumped into her in the street a few days later. “You asked just the right questions,” I said.

“That’s what I was supposed to do,” she replied.

That was the best thing to come out of BEA 2012—a legitimate excuse to chat with Patti Smith.

So, I’ll soon head back to the Javits Center, holding my well-earned cynicism in check, and I’ll see if I can find a good story to tell, or a worthy customer to invite to Bloomsday on Beaver Street. Read More 

Now all we need is an album, and considering one of us is a musician--that would be Mary Lyn--I suppose an album is a possibility.

This photo, by Michael Paul (who will be the official Bloomsday on Beaver Street photographer), was shot late Sunday afternoon, as Mary Lyn and I walked past the Joe Strummer mural on East 7th Street, across the street from Tompkins Square Park. The dates on the mural, 1952-2002, always shock me when I see them--because Strummer, of The Clash, was 25 days younger than I was when he died, at 50, of a undiagnosed heart defect. So, for me, the mural has that extra-added jolt of poignancy.

What I like about the photo is its naturalness—we didn’t know that Paul was taking the picture, so we weren’t looking at the camera. And my and Mary Lyn’s slight blurriness brings to mind the cover of Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush.

But long gone are the days when people bought record albums as much for the covers as for the music. (Need I mention Cheap Thrills, Sgt. Pepper, and Volunteers?) So, Mary Lyn will just have to get by on her music, and you can hear some of it June 16, at the Killarney Rose on Beaver Street. And though I will be reading on Bloomsday, I will not be singing or playing an instrument—because I can’t. But I’ll still be happy to appear on the cover of Mary Lyn’s next album.

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You now have a choice of invites you can download for Bloomsday on Beaver Street II: Father's Day Edition, which will be held June 16, at the Killarney Rose on Beaver Street. Download this invite if you're a fan of either Lainie Speiser and her masterwork, Confessions of the Hundred Hottest Porn Stars, or Eric Danville, whose book The Complete Linda Lovelace is directly responsible for getting the movie Lovelace, starring Amanda Seyfreid, off the ground.

Or if you prefer a Rosen-centric invite, then please download this one.

Either invite will get you in the door.

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One of the things I'm going to do at Bloomsday on Beaver Street is read from Bobby in Naziland, the novel I'm in the process of fine-tuning. It's going to be a short reading, about 1600 words that will include the opening pages of the first chapter--just enough to give people a sense of the book's flavor and the voice I've used to portray "an adult consciousness channeling the thoughts and emotions of a seven year old," as I describe it in the prologue.

The book, I'm sure, will be of particular interest to anybody who's familiar with Flatbush, the Brooklyn neighborhood that Bobby in Naziland is set in, especially if they happened to have lived there in the 1950s and '60s, and think they might "know" some of the characters. And I'm sure that readers will derive a great deal of pleasure from my vision of a Brooklyn that no longer exists, a provincial burb filled with goyim and Jews, Auschwitz survivors and army veterans who fought the Nazis, a place where "World War II lingered like a mass hallucination on East 17th Street and large swaths of the surrounding borough."

What I’m not sure of is what I’m going to do with the book when I’m completely finished with it. The publishing industry, which never has functioned in a rational way, has changed so much in the past decade, that I don’t know if it makes sense to go with a traditional publisher (assuming I can find one) or to self-publish. The Internet is full of stories by and about authors, many of whom have successfully published with traditional publishers, who are now struggling with this same question. There are as many self-publishing success stories as there are stories of failure and unmitigated despair. For a writer like me, who’s had some success with traditional publishing but has not produced the blockbuster that publishers demand, there are no easy answers. The more I read, the more confused I get.

I can tell you this much: For the past two years I’ve worked as hard at promoting Beaver Street as I’ve ever worked at anything. I’ve gotten the consistently excellent reviews and the high profile mentions that theoretically sell books. But until I can get those Harry Potter-like sales, it’s unlikely that a traditional publisher will send a bushel (or even a cupful) of cash my way.

So, all I can do for now is spend this Memorial Day weekend putting the finishing touches on Bobby in Naziland, and banish from my mind all that other stuff. The correct answer to my question will present itself when it’s good and ready to do so. As it always does.

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Regular readers of this blog may get the sense that I'm so caught up in my own writing career, such as it is, that I'm unaware of anything that happens that doesn't directly impact it. That would be incorrect. I pay attention to what's going on in the world, and sometimes some of it slips into The Daily Beaver. It is, for example, hard to ignore what's been going on in my own neighborhood lately.

Late Saturday night, on a Greenwich Village street, eight blocks from where I live, a gay man, Mark Carson, was shot in the head, and killed, by a gunman shouting homophobic slurs. It was the worst of a series of so-called "bias incidents" that have happened in and around this supposedly tolerant neighborhood in May.

The Carson story has been covered to death by the media, and every time I walk out of my house to run some errand on 6th Avenue, I can’t help but be reminded of it. I’m sure it’s been contributing to the vague sense of nausea I’ve been feeling all week.

But I also think the story goes far beyond an anti-gay hate crime provoked by people feeling threatened by the legalization of same-sex marriage in a dozen states. It strikes me as a story about another crazy person with a gun who, before he shot Carson, was threatening a bartender on West 4th Street. But it primarily strikes me as a story about the economy, which, as far as I can see, isn’t getting any better.

When an economy goes bad and stays bad for an extended period of time; when it seems as if the government is incapable of doing anything about it or doesn’t want to do anything about it; when people cannot find decent jobs; when they lose their homes; when they can’t afford to pay for medical care; when they’re being crushed by debt; and when they see a tiny sliver of the population grow wealthier and wealthier, people look for convenient and vulnerable targets. The classic example, of course, is Nazi Germany and the Jews. And in Manhattan, where the economic disparity becomes more apparent every day, especially downtown, it appears as if gay people are providing a very convenient and visible target for anybody looking to express their frustration with the current state of the economy.

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I've often written about the wide assortment of problems concerning Amazon reviews, and how these problems had gotten so out of control, that Amazon reviews had lost virtually all credibility. Among these posts are:

· A story about how Amazon allowed Michael Jackson fans to use social media to destroy a Jackson biography with a flood of anonymous one-star reviews.

· A story about how Amazon was deleting reviews posted by authors because the company saw all authors as direct competitors with other authors, and they do not allow reviews of products from direct competitors.

· In a story about book promotion, I’d mentioned how Amazon had been flooded with bogus five-star reviews written by critics who don’t read the books they’re reviewing and which authors are paying for: one review for $99, 50 for $999.

· A story about how an Amazon computer was automatically deleting reviews of Beaver Street because they contained “sexually explicit” keywords.

Amazon has finally acknowledged that there is “some confusion around the guidelines Amazon uses to evaluate Customer Reviews,” and, in an e-mail to authors, they’ve made an effort to clarify matters. Here are some of the highlights of that e-mail:

· Authors are allowed to review another author’s book as long as the author doesn’t have a “personal relationship” with the author of the book being reviewed. (Amazon does not define “personal relationship” or explain how they determine if the authors have one.)

· Authors cannot review their own books.

· Authors’ family members and “close friends” may not post reviews. (Again, Amazon doesn’t explain how they determine this.)

· Authors may not pay someone with money or merchandise to write a review, though giving a reviewer a free copy of the book to be reviewed is permitted.

Though this is a belated step in the right direction from a company that has systematically ignored these problems in the past, it’s hardly a complete solution. Since Amazon now has an ever-tightening stranglehold on the book business, authors can only hope that they will continue to seek even better solutions. Because before they were utterly corrupted, Amazon reviews were a good thing.

The complete FAQ on Amazon book reviewing guidelines is available here. Read More 

We're now in the process of sending out invitations for Bloomsday on Beaver Street II, at the Killarney Rose, on June 16, to all our Facebook friends and everybody on our mailing list. But if you didn't receive one, and are interested in attending what’s become our annual literary/pornographic/musical/theatrical event, please feel free to click on the image to the right and download an invitation.

You don’t need an invitation to come to the event. But, in these chaotic days of overbooked lives, we think it will serve as a helpful reminder. And the invite looks good hanging on your wall, right next to your calendar, assuming you still hang a calendar on the wall.

Hope to see you on Beaver Street!

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Before I go into complete and obsessive Bloomsday on Beaver Street mode (as opposed to the quasi-obsessive mode I'm currently in), I want to get in a good word about a book that I just finished reading. It's one of those books that in a just world would be getting some high-profile media attention--because it's not only a work of genuine religious insanity, but it's funny as hell, which is where, according to a certain strain of thought, its author might end up.

The Reborn Bible 2.0: The 2nd Coming Gospel of the American Rapture, by David Comfort, is a pitch-perfect re-imagining of the Bible, Old and New Testaments, that takes us from the Garden of Eden, where George Bush Sr. and Barbara Bush are Adam and Eve, climaxes in a pay-per-view David (Geffen) and Goliath (Arnold Schwarzenegger) battle, and ends with Moses (Holy Joe Lieberman) returning to Jerusalem to reclaim the Promised Land.

Or something like that.

I can’t say that I understood everything I read (especially that one sentence in Arabic) or that I got all the Biblical references or even that I understood all the Yiddish expressions, which is a language I’m not unfamiliar with. But page after page, the book did leave me wondering: How did Comfort, who’s probably best known for The Rock And Roll Book Of The Dead, do it? I kept picturing him, confined to a monk-like cell, a 21st century prophet writing on papyrus, as he absorbed and transformed every word of the real Bible into his deranged contemporary vision of all the usual suspects who have so befouled our political discourse.

The crucifixion of Obama, which the “learned lawyer, Geraldo” is covering for Fox News, serves as a good example of Comfort’s sense of humor. “‘Does ObamaCare cover crucifixion?’” Geraldo asks, reporting from the scene. “‘Is being the messiah a pre-existing condition? Would righteous infliction of emotional distress warrant punitive damages?’”

Somehow, in an act of biblical fortitude, Comfort keeps this sort of thing up for 309 pages. Somebody had to do it.

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Bloomsday on Beaver Street II is one month from today, and as is always the case when you're coordinating a complex event with a wide array of independent-minded and highly creative people, there will be divergent opinions. In the interest of group harmony, these opinions must be addressed.

"The event is sounding too much like a celebration of pornography," is an opinion I heard expressed yesterday.

I respectfully disagree.

What we’re celebrating is literature that was once branded pornographic, not pornography itself. The main case in point, of course, is Ulysses, which was originally banned in the U.S. for its explicit sexual content. And some of that content will be read as an illustration of why certain misguided people chose to ban an extraordinary book.

Then there’s Beaver Street, which certainly explores the place of pornography in American culture, but is anything but a celebration of pornography. In fact, the critic Neil Chesanow, in describing Beaver Street, referred to my “deep ambivalence and frequent disgust” with porno. “Yes,” he writes, “the book mentions gangbangs and all manner of sexual acts, but none of these are lovingly described in salacious detail.”

And the other book that I’m going to be reading from, my almost completed novel Bobby in Naziland, has nothing at all to do with the pornography industry, and ties in directly with Bloomsday by paying tribute to James Joyce in the subtitle, A Portrait of the Author as a Young Jew.

The other two books we’re celebrating, The Complete Linda Lovelace, by Eric Danville, and Confessions of the Hundred Hottest Porn Stars, by Lainie Speiser, are about, and examples of, pornography as a mainstream cultural phenomenon. But they are not works of pornography.

Plus there’s the music. Some of it, like Mary Lyn Maiscott’s haunting new song, “Angel Tattooed Ballerina,” about a transsexual, simply touches on the theme of transgression.

And yes, it’s true, there will a porn star on hand, and she will be reading from a book. But if I understand correctly, it is required that every cutting-edge literary and art event in New York City have at least one porn star on hand. In fact, if the porn star is famous enough, and she’s sitting naked and ironically in a bathtub filled with money, she will be recognized as an object of beauty that has nothing to do with pornography.

So, if Bloomsday on Beaver Street II seems a little heavy on pornography, it’s only because we’re doing what we can to keep literature relevant in the 21st century. Read More 

Putting together the second annual Bloomsday on Beaver Street: Father's Day Edition, is the equivalent of putting together a complex theatrical event, and it has taken me well outside my creative comfort zone, which generally involves sitting alone in a room and doing little more than putting words on a blank page.

I'm working with actors, musicians, other authors, and at least one porn star, several of whom live outside the New York area. There are auditions. There are technical issues involving sound systems and recording devices. There are invitations to deal with and press releases to write. Plus, I have to prepare my own performance, something that has never come naturally to me, and which will involve reading in public for the first time an excerpt from a novel that I've been working on for five years.

Bloomsday is keeping me awake at night.

But I keep reminding myself that the reason there is a Bloomsday on Beaver Street II is because last year’s event went so well, and was so much fun, people are still talking about it. It was a combination book party and reading, concert, open mike, high school and junior high school reunion, co-op meeting, family gathering, and drunken bacchanal.

So, as I work with my multitude of collaborators and potential collaborators to finalize this year’s festivities, I just want to say that the first round of invitations will soon be going out via Facebook, and everybody on my mailing list will be receiving a personal invitation via e-mail. And if you happen to be in New York on June 16, feel free to drop by the Killarney Rose. If it’s anything like last year, chances are good you’ll still be talking about Bloomsday II when Bloomsday III rolls around in 2014.

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The following review, written by "Another Former Porn Worker," appeared on Amazon yesterday. It speaks for itself.

Your book was amazing! I downloaded it to my Kindle and could NOT put it down last night. You perfectly capture the atmosphere of the office, that slight paranoia, tinged with smarminess, with the forced insistence that everything around here is perfectly normal. I too worked in the industry, though far more recently, but it seems nothing has changed.

Your assessment of Carl Ruderman is priceless. I, too, have sat in front of that exquisite Victorian desk, surrounded by his priceless artifacts that invariably feature naked women or abstract genitalia, patiently waiting my turn for him to say, “...And Ms. XXXX, what good news do you have for me today?” From your description of him, I could hear his voice leap from the page. I could see him as I saw him in his office at 801 Second Avenue, a bit more shriveled version than the one you saw, but in that same beautifully cut, tasteful gray pinstripe suit, pocket square, and genteel sneer.

Also, in the short time I was there, I know the company was sued multiple times. Weirdly, it was never mentioned at the meetings. It was simply like it didn’t matter. Also, by the time I got there, the porn down on the lower floor was never mentioned. Ever. People on the 19th floor did NOT speak to any of the people down there. I only knew about them because I had skills he needed for both floors.

I loved the part about “the founder.” After he lost the lease on the 19th floor and we were moved to the far less glamorous 11th floor, that bust was placed directly outside my door, so it would stare at me day in, day out. It was rumored that there was a camera in it, but that was probably just conjecture.

He was elderly by the time I worked for him, yet he was insistent on never dying. He kept a personal chef with him at the office, a woman he paid far less than she was worth, peanuts really. She would prepare his daily vitamins and medications, dozens in all, and his breakfast and lunch in the office’s formal dining room. All upper management was expected to attend, but as a woman and a low-level techie I was fortunately denied that privilege.

I liked your Maria. It explains his current secretary while I was there. She was a mid-fiftyish battleaxe of a hag who would agree with him if he said the sky was green, and spent much of her time repeating back anything he said in different words as if she had just thought of that. She, and the other woman before her, trained themselves to expect and indulge his every whim. The woman before at least seemed to see the humor in the situation, as Maria seemed to. I would have been stoned all the time, too.

There was a whole host of crazy characters there who, like me, had no other options at the time, and those of us who got out sometimes get together and talk about it, because no one else would ever believe us. They are a crazy bunch, but those who survived, many are people I really like, cause as you and Maria were, we were witness to a legend being written. Like you, I walked out of that office with no job but that “incredible lightness of being.”

All in all, you reminded me that despite everything, Carl Ruderman has charisma. A sly, slithering sort of charisma, but charisma just the same. I can’t even say I dislike him. He is the sort of man who will do anything for money, and it seems that he did.

In the end, those of us that got tangled up in it have one hell of a story to tell at cocktail parties.

Marvelous work! Read More 

Amanda reads from A Clockwork Orange.

Genius is a word I use sparingly, but I would apply it to photographer Clayton Cubitt's Hysterical Literature, an erotic art project that transcends both literature and pornography.

The concept is deceptively simple: Film, in black and white, a series of sexy, articulate women--some are porn stars, some aren't--sitting at a table, reading a passage from their favorite book. As they read, somebody is underneath the table, out of sight, pleasuring them with a vibrator. All you see is the table, the fully clothed woman from the torso up, and the book she's reading, as she becomes more and more aroused until, no longer able to read, she gives herself over to orgasm.

Not surprisingly, the most popular video in the series, with more than six million views, is porn star Stoya reading from the anthology Necrophila Variations.

Can’t wait to see somebody do justice to Beaver Street.

Stoya reads from Necrophila Variations.

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Go to the 27:00 minute mark to hear Philip Proctor as Molly Bloom

One of the things we will be celebrating on Bloomsday on Beaver Street II: Father’s Day Edition, on June 16, at the Killarney Rose, is the concept of Ulysses as a pornographic book that was banned, in 1920, by The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Last year, Byron Nilsson, our MC, read the passage that was directly responsible for that banning: Leopold Bloom masturbates at the beach as he watches a young girl reveal her "beautifully shaped legs." James Joyce's description of Bloom's orgasm--"O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely! O so soft, sweet, soft!"--may be the most poetic description of masturbation in the English language.

This year, we’ve selected a 300-word erotic passage from the adulteress Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. It begins, “I had to get him to suck them they were so hard he said it was sweeter and thicker than cows then he wanted to milk me into the tea…”

We’ve been looking for the right actress to read this passage.

But it has come to my attention that we don’t necessarily need to limit our auditions to actresses. The Firesign Theatre’s comedy album, from 1969, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All, contains a surreal bit at the end of side one where Philip Proctor, playing car salesman Ralph Spoilsport, reads a close approximation of the final part of Molly’s soliloquy. You can hear it in the above video beginning around the 27:00-minute mark. This is the kind of thing that just might work on Beaver Street.

So, actors and actresses, if you’re in the New York area and you think you can do justice to the passage we’ve selected, as either comedy or erotica, please get in touch. We’d love to hear you read.

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Max Bialystock, Franz Liebkind, and Leo Bloom in a scene from The Producers.

Of all the Jews in all the books in all of literature, why did Mel Brooks steal the name Leo Bloom from the protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses for his nervous and corruptible accountant in The Producers?

Played by Gene Wilder in the 1968 film, and Matthew Broderick in the original cast of the 2001 Broadway musical, Leo Bloom, in the course of auditing scam-artist producer Max Bialystock’s books, realizes that more money can be made from producing a flop than producing a hit. And the super-flop that Bloom and Bialystock scheme to produce is a musical titled Springtime for Hitler, written by a deranged former-Nazi playwright, Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars).

“I don’t know what it meant to James Joyce,” said Mel Brooks, “but to me Leo Bloom always meant a vulnerable Jew with curly hair. Enter Gene Wilder.”

There’s more: Before taking on the role of Max Bialystock in the film, Zero Mostel played Leopold Bloom in a Broadway production of Ulysses in Nighttown. And the film is full of Ulysses references. In one scene, Bloom asks Bialystock, “When will it be Bloom’s Day?” A calendar on the wall shows that it is Bloomsday—June 16.

I bring this up now because, though Ulysses seems to contain references to everything in the world, it contains no references to Nazis—the book predated Nazism. And since everything that will happen this June 16, at Bloomsday on Beaver Street II, at the Killarney Rose, will, in one way or another, be tied into the Ulysses theme, I thought that a direct connection to the title of my book, Bobby in Naziland, which I’ll read from for the first time in public that night, was lacking.

True, the subtitle, A Portrait of the Author as a Young Jew, is a direct reference to Joyce, and I figured that that was good enough. But now I know that, thanks to The Producers and Mel Brooks, which are both referenced in Bobby in Naziland, I do have the Ulysses-Nazi connection that I longed for.

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Yes, yes, yes, I really have read, from beginning to end, Ulysses, by James Joyce, the book we will be using as an excuse to have a party, on June 16, the day known as Bloomsday, at the Killarney Rose, on Beaver Street.

It was 1977 when I took down the book from my shelf, where it had been gathering dust for many years. Having recently embarked on a writing career, I felt it was a novel that every "serious" writer should read, and I'd managed to avoid doing so throughout college and grad school.

Ulysses is the most difficult book I’ve ever read, and it took me the better part of a year to get through it. There were pages where I literally had to look up in the dictionary every other word. And there were huge swaths where I had no idea what was going on. But finish it I did, dipping into it every spare moment I could find, and reading it on the subway, where it served as a conversation piece. Late one night, as I was returning home to Washington Heights on the Broadway Local, the guy sitting across the aisle from me pointed to the book and said, “It’s a joke book. You’ve got to read it like a joke book.”

Maybe.

Taken more by the idea of Ulysses than the book itself, in 1986 I went to Dublin for Bloomsday, named for the book’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom. On the morning of June 16, I visited the Martello Tower, overlooking the Irish Sea, in Sandycove, outside Dublin. This is where the book opens with the words, “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”

In the afternoon, led by a local guide, I took a walking tour of Ulysses sites throughout the city. The guide, a knowledgeable fellow, probably in his late 60s, kept referring to the fact that Bloom was an Irish Jew. “You’ve got to pay your Jews if you want to sing the blues,” was the line that got the biggest laugh out of the tour group.

In the evening, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I listened to a reading of the final part of the book, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, the one that begins with “Yes” and ends with “yes I said yes I will Yes.” Then, in the finest tradition of Leopold Bloom and his good friend Stephen Dedalus, I went to the local pub and drank my fill of Guinness before stumbling back to my hotel for a good’s night’s sleep.

The next day, I embarked, via ferry, for Liverpool, where another pilgrimage awaited me.

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…direct from Cleveland, Ohio, where he's just completed a critically acclaimed run as James "Jimmy Tomorrow" Cameron in The Iceman Cometh, let's give it up for Paul Slimak!

Actually, it's not a stage, just an area on the floor at the upstairs bar of the Killarney Rose, at 80 Beaver Street, that we like to call a stage. But it is where all the Bloomsday on Beaver Street performances will be taking place, on Sunday, June 16, beginning at 7 P.M. And we have just received word that Slimak, whom you may know as degenerate Nazi fugitive Erich von Pauli from the Beaver Street videos (and whom I call "Henry Dorfman" in Beaver Street, the book) will be one of the performers.

Slimak and his wife, Agnes Herrmann, who plays Diana Clerkenwell in the Beaver Street videos (and whom you may have last seen in The Road, as Archer’s Woman), will perform a reading from Mr. Sensitivity, a play by our MC, Byron Nilsson, about a man who gives his wife a porn stud for her birthday. (Mr. Sensitivity was performed at the Fringe Festival in 2009.)

As a special bonus, Slimak, in the character of von Pauli, will introduce my first public reading of my novel, Bobby in Naziland: A Portrait of the Author as a Young Jew.

He has ways of making you listen.

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Dear Ted,
I read your piece in Salon, "The Future Is No Fun," about self-publishing your e-book, West of Babylon, and I wanted to let you know that it might be the most depressing story about the publishing industry I've ever read. I got about three quarters of the way through it before I had to stop and put it aside. It was just too bleak to go on. Too much "extreme cruelty." But I came back to it the next day, and skipped to the end, just to make sure it wasn't a suicide note. Then I kind of read it backwards, paragraph-by-paragraph, and felt a little better. I did appreciate your epiphany--if you can call it an epiphany--that you now understand how rough it is out there, and that from now on, you'll help anybody who asks you for help. I feel the same way.

You say that your working life now consists of sending out hundreds of e-mails to people in the media who might want to review your book. You say that you consider it a good day if someone gets back to you, even if they tell you, politely, to fuck off. What you don't seem to realize is that that's how it is now, even if your book isn't self-published. What you spend far too much time doing sounds disturbingly similar to what I've spent far too much time doing since a small, London-based indie published my latest book, Beaver Street, as a paperback and in all e-book formats, two years ago in the U.K., then last year in the U.S.

Still, I found your naïveté touching—calling the media “base hypocrites” because they run stories about authors turning to self-publishing but won’t acknowledge a self-published e-book unless it’s written by a celebrity who self-publishes by choice. You’re just learning now that the media is a viper’s nest of base hypocrites? Where’ve you been? You don’t get media attention by publishing books. You get media attention by committing a terrorist act or by assassinating a celebrity. Not PR gambits I’d recommend.

I should also mention that, though we’ve never met, I did know your father. He was one of my creative writing professors at City College, and as I found out, he could be a cruel bastard, as your sister, Erica, vividly recounts in her memoir, Yossarian Slept Here. But 40 years after the fact, I can sincerely thank him for helping to prepare me emotionally for what I’d have to face as I made my way in the book biz.

Your father, of course, had no illusions about the book-publishing industry. “You can’t live off royalties,” he told us the first day of class. “That’s why I’m teaching here.” (And he didn’t think too highly of agents, either, as I recall.)

All things considered, Ted, I think you’re doing OK. Do I really need to remind you that Salon is the media, and they are paying attention to you? Big time. I wish somebody at Salon would answer my e-mails.

Best,
Bob Rosen

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This weekend, as I've been doing most weekends lately, I'm going to concentrate on fine-tuning Bobby in Naziland, the novel I began writing five years ago, and had not shown to anybody until last week. As I explained in an earlier post, I plan to read the opening pages at Bloomsday on Beaver Street next month, so it was time to show at least those pages to my editor (who happens to be my wife).

I suppose most writers (as well as most readers) find it peculiar that a writer would work in total silence and secrecy for five years, especially these days, when it's become increasingly common for writers to share works-in-progress online with readers who provide instant feedback.

This is the height of literary absurdity and the best of all possible ways for a writer to achieve a state of confusion. Book writing should be a solitary activity that takes place in a room of one’s own with a lock on the door (to paraphrase Virginia Woolf). And I’ve been doing this long enough that I trust my own editorial judgment.

Which is not to say I wouldn’t prefer to be working with an editor at an actual book publishing company who’s given me an advance so substantial, I could concentrate, to the exclusion of all else, on finishing Bobby in Naziland. But I’m not the kind of writer who gets advances, substantial or otherwise, on unfinished books. On the contrary, when I finish the book and begin submitting it, I think publishers will tell me, “Great read, but there’s not enough interest in Jews, goyim, Nazis, the Holocaust, UFOs, the Rosenbergs, or Brooklyn to justify publishing this.”

This is the kind of thing that publishers say reflexively to most writers about most books. It can’t be taken seriously. When I was struggling to publish Nowhere Man—a book that would be translated into a half-dozen languages and become a bestseller in five countries—I was told time and again, for 18 years, “There’s not enough interest in John Lennon.”

Which is one reason I waited five years before showing Bobby in Naziland to anybody, especially publishers. There’s nothing more demoralizing for a writer than to hear from a so-called voice of authority that your work-in-progress is unpublishable.

I also trust the judgment of my editor, and when she reads Bobby in Naziland in its entirety, I want her to read it with a fresh eye. So, I will continue to work in secrecy and silence.

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"People become porn stars because they're good at it; because they have no other options; because they have nothing to lose; and because they're desperate, either economically or emotionally or both." --Robert Rosen, from Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography

"It made it harder for people to stay in that mindset of porn stars as people who don't have other options because they're too emotionally damaged or stupid to do something else." --Stoya, the porn star, telling the Village Voice why she prefers to post her thoughts directly on the Internet rather than talk to the press.

I’d never heard of Stoya until I read the cover story in last week’s Village Voice. The article, “Pop Star of Porn,” by Amanda Hess, tells how Stoya, 26-year-old star of such X-rated videos as Stoya: Web Whore, has become the toast of the New York art world, perhaps because of her “Snow White beauty,” the mathematical perfection of her face and body, and her even more famous boyfriend, porn star James Deen.

I find it interesting (though not especially surprising) that when I was looking the other way, the line between XXX celebrity and non-XXX celebrity seems to have vanished completely. But even more interesting, I thought, was how Stoya’s above quote echoed what I wrote in Beaver Street, and might have even been a response to it.

Stoya does not want you to think that people become porn stars because they have no other options or because they’re emotionally damaged. And she holds herself up as a shining example of a porn star who has options and is not emotionally damaged.

Fair enough. Stoya is the exception that proves the rule. Though I wonder what, exactly, she’s planning to do when she’s no longer under contract to Digital Playground and her celebrity is no longer based on how well she performs sex acts on video or in live shows. A handful of success stories come to mind: Danni Ashe (Internet millionaire), Jenna Jameson (best-selling author), Ginger Lynn and Christy Canyon (radio personalities).

And I’m sure there are a few more potential Stoyas out there—intelligent, beautiful, emotionally together women with a wide array of options who see hardcore porno as a good career move. But my quote, about economically and emotionally desperate people without options, is based on what I learned from conducting approximately 200 in-depth interviews with porn stars, erotic performers, and nude models, many of whom were intelligent, witty, and articulate.

Stories of sexual abuse, incest, and loss of virginity through rape were common. The porn stars I spoke with, over a 16-year period, were people scarred by emotional trauma, with little education, who were usually driven into porn by economic desperation. If they had options, it was a choice between a minimum wage job at McDonald’s, Burger King, or Wendy’s.

So yes, what Stoya has accomplished is remarkable. But, I think it would be best for the rest of the world to hold on to the mindset of “porn stars as people who don’t have other options because they’re too emotionally damaged.” Because it’s true, even if Stoya doesn’t want you to believe it.

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Readers of Beaver Street should be familiar with Sonja Wagner, whom I described in the book as my "dyslexic, spliff-smoking freelance art director," and whom I gave some of the best lines, such as the one on pages 123-124, when she asks our esteemed publisher, Chip Goodman, "Is something wrong, Chip, dear? Didn't Bobby and I put enough incest into your filthy little book?"

If you haven't read Beaver Street, then you can read about some of Wagner's erotic artwork on this blog.

Last night, over a couple of shots of vodka in her studio, Wagner got into talking about Ruby Leggs, a character she created more than 30 years ago, and in that time has produced dozens of Ruby paintings, mostly documenting her curious New York City life. Now Wagner has decided that she wants to publish the complete Ruby Leggs story in a book.

So she asked me to answer the following question: Who is Ruby Leggs?

I’ll give it a shot.

At her most basic, Ruby is three pairs: a pair of full, scarlet lips mounted on a pair of long, shapely legs, who’s always wearing a pair of high heels. Though lacking a head, arms, and a torso, she still manages to radiate erotic heat. This, then, makes Ruby a fetishist’s delight, a woman reduced to two body parts and a fashion accessory. In the above painting, Ruby is arousing a subway car full of men who ogle her through the peepholes they’ve cut in their newspapers. But the title of the painting, “No One Ever Looks at Me Anymore,” shows that Ruby is also a naïf on the loose in the big city, a creature unaware of her erotic power.

And New York is full of women like that, which makes Ruby Leggs somehow real, a recognizable character, somebody you’d like to meet, sit down with at a cafe, and over a couple of drinks ask her about herself. Because you know, behind those perfect red lips and white teeth, Ruby Leggs has a tongue, and she can do a lot of things with it, including tell you herself who she is, if she’s so inclined.

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On pages 37-38 of Beaver Street, I tell the story of the first time a porn magazine assigned me to go to the set of a XXX movie and write an article about it. High Society, where I was working as an editor, was the magazine that sent me. Adventure Studios, in Corona, Queens, was the location. The film--it was an actual film, not a video--was Succulence, starring Kelly Nichols, Rhonda Jo Petty, Little Oral Annie, and (of course) Ron Jeremy.

It was October 10, 1983. I know this because as I was interviewing porn stars in the Sewer Club, as the green room was called, Cardinal Cooke's funeral was being broadcast live on the TV playing there, and a quick Internet search just provided me with the date.

The article I wrote, “The Making of a Fuck Flick,” was published, uncredited, in the June 1984 issue of High Society, five months after the publisher, Carl Ruderman, fired me for calling HS a “porno mag” in the New York Post. (According to Ruderman, the only acceptable term for what we produced at his smut factory was “adult entertainment.”)

“The Making of a Fuck Flick” is an incredibly sleazy article where I describe such things as the mechanics of filming a “dogfuck,” and quote porn stars saying things like, “To sit with a camera up your twat all day—this is not normal.”

So, when Gene Gregorits, author of Dog Days, told me he was looking for “an essay, a story, an article, or an interview regarding the lowest of the low in NYC between 1975 and 1995” for the book he’s now putting together, Necropolis Now: New York Scum Culture, I sent him “The Making of a Fuck Flick.” “This seems to fit your criteria,” I said, and Gregorits agreed.

If all goes according to plan, the book should be out before the end of the year.

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I began working seriously on the novel I now call Bobby in Naziland in May 2008. I had little idea of what, exactly, I was writing. All I knew was that it was time to begin another book, and there was something about the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush, in the mid-20th century, that was worth exploring.

I'd touched on it in the opening pages of Beaver Street, the book I'd recently finished writing (though had not yet sold), describing the goings-on in my father's candy store, on Church Avenue, in 1961. Also, I'd just finished reading The Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem, a novel that takes place in an adjacent Brooklyn neighborhood, about ten years later. It gave me ideas.

So, I began the agonizing process of figuring out what my new book was going to be, and I saw it evolve from hundreds of pages of notes, fragments, anecdotes, and ideas, to a possible memoir, to the novel that it finally became, and that I think I’m now in the process of fine-tuning.

Over the past five years, I’ve shown what I’m working on to nobody, not even to my wife, the Mistress of Syntax, who’s also my editor. Because I read the book out loud as I’m working on it (I need to hear in my ear what it sounds like), and have spoken about it to people who’ve asked, my editor had some idea of the wide-ranging subject matter. But she’d never overheard more than a sentence or two at any one time, because I tend to work only when I’m alone.

With the second annual Bloomsday on Beaver Street looming, on June 16, I knew it was time to pick the selection I’m going to read that night, and to finally read it out loud to my editor. That’s what I did this weekend; I read to her the opening pages of chapter one, “The Goyim and the Jews.” I’m pleased to report that she laughed twice, and said, when I finished reading, “It’s good, but I thought it was going to be more solemn.”

Bobby in Naziland is not a solemn book. And if you think the Mistress of Syntax goes easy on me because I happen to be married to her, you’re sadly mistaken. Quite the opposite, actually. Her editing process is uncompromising, her demands for factual accuracy unrelenting, and the proof is in the quality of my previous two books. The Mistress of Syntax is not a title the wife wears lightly. Her “It’s good” is a five-star rave.

To say that Mary Lyn’s reaction filled me with a sense of profound relief would be a gross understatement. But if the pages passed muster with her, it gives me enough confidence to go forward and read Bobby in Naziland (along with a selction from Beaver Street) to a larger audience on Bloomsday.

I hope you’ll be there to listen.

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Having written a book about the history of pornography, set mostly in New York City between 1974-1987, I take an abiding interest in all things having to do with the history of porn in New York. Recently, I've discovered a site called The Rialto Report, run by a man with a British accent who calls himself Ashley West and occasionally Benson Hurst, and who shares my abiding interest in the Golden Age of New York's adult industry.

Named for the now-closed Rialto Theatre on 42nd Street, the site has posted a series of podcast interviews with porn people from New York's past. Last night I listened to the interview with Carter Stevens, an actor, director, and producer, probably best known for a film called Lickity-Split. Though I didn't write about him in Beaver Street, he's one of those pornographers whose name you heard time and again if you worked in X; he was everywhere in the 70s and 80s.

The interview is over an hour, and Stevens, with his tough-guy voice, goes into great detail about New York in the days of Plato’s Retreat, Bernard’s, Jamie Gillis, Bobby Astor, Sharon Mitchell, and his ex-wife, Baby Doe.

As I write this, I’m listening to the provocative interview with Annie Sprinkle—she talks about rape and feminism. Sprinkle was a unique (to say the least) New York character whom I worked with when I was managing editor of Stag in the 1980s, and whom I did write about in Beaver Street. (I discuss Annie and some of her freaky predilections in this video clip from my interview with Kendra Holliday.)

Also interviewed on The Rialto Report are porn stars Jennifer Welles, George Payne, and Jeffrey Hurst, filmmaker John Amero, and photographer Barbara Nitke.

This is a rapidly expanding site, and a great resource well worth checking out.

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As this cruelest month winds down, I find myself thinking seriously about what, exactly, is going to happen, on June 16, at the second annual Bloomsday on Beaver Street event, at the Killarney Rose, in downtown Manhattan. Last year was easy. My book had recently been published in the U.S., and Bloomsday was a book launch party celebrating not only Beaver Street, but other literary works, like James Joyce's Ulysses, that had once been branded pornographic and banned.

This year, I'm expanding the theme to include other authors whose works lend themselves to what is actually being celebrated on June 16, the day that Ulysses takes place. On that day, in 1904, Joyce had his first date with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, and to put it in the most explicit terms, she gave him an epic handjob.

This much is definite:

Eric Danville will be reading from his book The Complete Linda Lovelace, which he’s now revising, and will re-release in September to coincide with the release of Lovelace, starring Amanda Seyfried as the deep-throat artist. I suspect that Danville will read, among other things, a zombie story he’s working on titled “Dead Throat.”

Lainie Speiser, author of many books about sex, will read from her latest work, Confessions of the Hundred Hottest Porn Stars.

There will be porn stars present. Musicians will perform. Byron Nilsson will MC, read, and sing.

I will again be reading from Beaver Street, this time a historical (rather than a personal) passage. And I will also, for the first time in public, read from my novel-in-progress, Bobby in Naziland, for which I offer no apologies to James Joyce for the subtitle, “A Portrait of the Author as a Young Jew.” He would have understood.

Mark your calendars now, and stayed tuned for more news about additional performers.

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Because I rarely know what I'm going to write till the morning I write it, these blog posts can be less than perfect. And sometimes, as was the case yesterday, I can write something without fully understanding what I've written.

The idea for a post about Richie Havens came to me in the shower yesterday morning. I knew that the story of seeing him perform at a corporate Christmas party was interesting, and that it said something, possibly profound, about money and Manhattan in the late 20th century. So I banged it out, gave it the generic title of "A Richie Havens Story," which seemed fine at the time, and posted it.

But it wasn’t until later that afternoon that a Facebook exchange brought the story into complete focus. “It must have been a surreal kind of shock to witness the hero of Woodstock playing to that crowd,” said Skip Slavik, a regular reader.

“Yes, exactly,” I replied. “It was like, ‘Man, things have sure come a long way from Woodstock.’”

The correct title for the piece popped into my head several hours after that, as I was walking on Broadway, on my way to the liquor store to buy some wine for dinner. I knew that “Far from Woodstock” was the correct title because it came with a melody. Except I didn’t know a song called “Far from Woodstock.” I then realized that the melody I was hearing in my head was “Miles from Nowhere,” an old Cat Stevens song that contains the lyric, “Lord my body has been a good friend/But I won’t need it when I reach the end.”

That’s when I fully understood what I’d written: Richie Havens was dead, and my story about seeing him perform at that party was a tale of men in suits who wanted to own a piece of musical history, if only for 20 minutes. But primarily it was about the distance we’ve all traveled, spiritually and otherwise, since Havens sang “Freedom” at Woodstock.

I went home. I changed the title and the last line. And I felt that, poetically, everything had fallen into place, if only for an evening.

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If you went to rock concerts in the 1970s and '80s, especially if you lived in New York, then Richie Havens was a musician you had to have seen at least once. I saw him more times than I can remember--at those two-dollar Schaefer concerts they used to have in Central Park, at City College, and at any number of free concerts all over the city.

But when Havens died yesterday, at 72, from a heart attack, at his home in Jersey City, it brought to mind the time that I saw him perform, in the early '90s, when a photographer invited me to a Christmas party at a photo agency where she worked, and the entertainment was none other than Richie Havens.

The image that stays with me is Havens, a freak with a long scraggly beard, wearing a dashiki, standing on a platform in the corner, and playing to a corporate crowd of about 50 people in dark business attire, suits who were looking on not with the pleasure that comes from listening to live music, but with what struck me as pride of ownership—the emotion you feel when you can do something because you have enough money to do it.

Obviously, this was a company that wanted to look “hip,” and hiring Havens was a way to do that within budget. But you could tell that Havens didn’t want to be there, playing to these people. You could sense an undertone of resentment as he performed without joy, looking like a freelance worker doing no more than what his contract specified: play for 20 minutes, and play “Freedom.”

It was a sacrilege, I thought, and to me that Christmas party became a symbol of the day I knew for sure that, to the exclusion of all else, Manhattan had become a place about money, far from Woodstock.

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Face this: Anybody who begins a blog post, essay, or op-ed piece with "Let's face it" is a hack. Frankly, you have to look no further than the celebrity-infested Huffington Post, a money-making site where people blog for exposure rather than money. Honestly, I don't want to pick on Huff Po, as I agree with their politics for the most part. But, to tell you the truth, the quality of their writing is so dreary, I often can't read beyond the first three words of any given post before I'm overcome by boredom. But let's face it, a search of Huff Po for the phrase "let's face it" delivers 81,500 results. Speaking candidly, that's probably the number of new blog posts that appear on Huff Po on any given day.

In my opinion, the reason bad writing is epidemic on Huff Po is because celebrities, movie stars, and "beautiful people" of all stripes believe they are compelling writers because when they speak, the well-scrubbed masses gather around them and hang on their every word. But don't kid yourself: Publishing transcripts of what amounts to cocktail-party blather is a recipe for ridicule.

Truthfully, it was a post by Marlo Thomas (107 million Huff Po results) about the Boston bombings that I started reading the other day that provoked this post. I’m not going to lie, it began, “I love the New York Yankees, but I’ll be honest with you…”

I’ll be honest with you, Marlo: I think you’re a fine lady, but your blog posts really suck.

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The reaction to Antony Hitchin's poems, drawn from Beaver Street, using the cut-up technique William Burroughs popularized, has been so positive, I'm going to end the blogweek with one more.

"Meat Doll Misanthrope," like "Discharge," which I posted yesterday, is what Burroughs described as a "Third Mind" collaboration. Hitchen combined his own words with words cut from Beaver Street. But unlike "Discharge," which was mostly Beaver Street, "Meat Doll Misanthrope" is about half Beaver Street, half Hitchin.

And if you really want to know which half is which, you’ll just have to read the book.

Meat Doll Misanthrope

misanthrope pixel memoir
dinosaur Christ proxy body
mimicking skin
dialectical face mouth peers
through fuck fingers
the sound of god splitting
open ----------------------------------------------
flaming silhouettes
candy store messiah
mouth-fuck fetishes
the remnants of your space dead television flesh
your channel wired webwork tissue reek of wet pubics

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I said yesterday in my posting about "Bukkake Thatcher," one of the poems Antony Hitchen had sliced from the heart of Beaver Street using the cut-up technique popularized by William Burroughs, that he'd "compressed into a few sentences the emotions expressed in a large swath of the book." But I think it would be more accurate to explain the technique this way: Hitchin has pulled from Beaver Street the most provocative words and phrases, and by arranging them in a new way, he's captured the emotional tone of the entire book.

The title of the poem below, "Discharge," is cut from a legal document quoted in the Traci Lords chapter. Other words are taken from chapters titled "High Society" and "I Found My Job in The New York Times." Hitchen also includes some of his own words not found in the book, like "muzzle," "filter," "autonomy," and "flush," making this what he'd call a "Third Mind" collaboration, which is the title of a cut-up work by Burroughs and Brion Gysin.

Here, then, for your reading pleasure, I give you the latest and freshest filet of Beaver:

Discharge

DIY abortion vacuum / video boxes sizzling jailbait celebrity skin/ subscription hooker etiquette women masturbating mutilated bodies/ nymphomaniacs spread pussies – muzzle sloppy
she fills a paper cup of deep-pile pussy discharge
AIDs tuberculosis trickle-down
economics/ bubonic rejection glare of subway slug/
drifting overhead chrome /beyond sleep filter fringes – spurting flush autonomy nothing death

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The ignorance of the American media never ceases to dazzle, and it was on full display last week when Margaret Thatcher died. As soon as the news broke, the commentators on the cable show I was watching began describing Thatcher as a great prime minister loved by all, a veritable saint like her good friend Ronald Reagan.

This didn't exactly jive with what I remembered about the reign of the so-called Iron Lady. In her own country, she was at best divisive and at worst despised. There were riots in Liverpool, an unnecessary war in the Falklands, and an ongoing economic catastrophe that led to massive unemployment.

It’s this last point that I discuss in Beaver Street. Just as Ronald Reagan’s policies gave the world “free” phone sex, which transformed the porn industry from an underground phenomenon to a mainstream financial behemoth, Thatcher’s policies were instrumental in making D-Cup magazine a success.

It was soon after I began editing the magazine, in 1986, that, as I say in Beaver Street, I started making regular trips to London with fists full of cash to “persuade the nubile spawn of Margaret Thatcher’s economically ravaged England to reveal their fleshly charms.”

I explain how British photographers were placing ads in newspapers “inviting young women to come to London to audition as topless ‘Page 3’ girls,” and how Thatcher’s economic initiatives had driven “unemployed and underemployed students, nurses, housewives, and secretaries” to descend “locust-like upon the city because they believed that flashing their boobs in ‘respectable’ family newspapers was the first step on the road to becoming a big movie star or a famous lingerie model.”

On one trip, in late 1987, soon after the stock market crash, I witnessed hundreds of young women line up in a London warehouse that had been converted to a makeshift photography studio. One after another, they took off all or some of their clothes, as a photographer snapped test shots. And within weeks, thanks to Lady Thatcher, dozens of these women, having been told that they weren’t quite right for Page 3, had decided that “rather than go back to the night shift in a Liverpool fish-and-chips joint,” they’d make the leap to hardcore porn videos.

It’s this scenario that inspired “Bukkake Thatcher,” the latest poem Antony Hitchin has drawn from Beaver Street. (I’m running it today to commemorate Thatcher’s funeral, and I’ve kept the British spellings in her honor.) Using the cut-up technique, Hitchin has compressed into a few sentences the emotions expressed in a large swath of the book. And if you don’t know what bukkake means, go ask somebody who does.

Bukkake Thatcher

Penthouse Enron brain pictorial pulp lust bad writing on the wall for economically ravaged post-industrial America. Proficiently kink or fetish the young porn nymphos veritable antithesis.

Soulless ungloved stardom – cummer cyberspace mouse-click contraband epidemic of a vibrator cabal – whose picture appeared virus legislators syndicated war on drugs.

Weapon – she was FBI cold – a moneymaker sting exploitation violating possession. Nonstop traumatic gonzo bukkake ethical violations – anilingus handheld through Margaret Thatcher’s erections – Pentecostal Watergate conspirators’ congress fibre-optic aureoles of will.

Forevermore hairball – cherry pop Iran-contra – gold standard regurgitated anal sex two-headed monster naked in a bathtub representing French and Swedish markets. Cro-Magnon church savage mass-mailing academic paedophile backbone measured to Traci Lords Nixon search.

Warrant zealots anti-porn bible on TV – black on milk cartons hole of substance abuse grotesque – erotic – strictly mechanical – a vestigial camera insertion testimony to sleazy nubile spawn of fuck-and-suck-athon. Alzheimer's mouth shut manufacturing synchronicity god CIA Meese report.

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