It's been almost six months since Bloomsday on Beaver Street, and even now when I run into people who were there, they still want to tell me stories about one particular guest at the event: Subway Vigilante Bernhard Goetz. It was only recently that I heard that "Bernie" was hanging out at the bar at the Killarney Rose, describing in detail to an enraptured audience how, on December 22, 1984, he'd shot four teenagers who'd accosted him on the subway. And it wasn't until long after the party that I heard about a lot of other things Goetz did that night, most of which are best not repeated here.
Goetz had come to the Killarney Rose because he's a porno fan and he's good friends with one of the main characters in Beaver Street, Pam Katz, whose real name is Joyce Snyder. Goetz had asked Snyder if he could read from the book at the launch event, and when Snyder passed along his request to me, I said, "Sounds crazy. Why not?"
In retrospect, I can think of a lot of good reasons why not. But Goetz showed up, took to the stage, and delivered a surreal non-reading. Here, at last, is the long-awaited video clip of his “performance.” That’s Byron Nilsson introducing Goetz and that’s Joyce Snyder calling out from the audience, “Read the book! Just read the book!” Read More
The Weekly Blague
A Blast from the Past
I'm Losing You
Mary Lyn Maiscott and HooP's Blue Lights Christmas show, tonight at Ella Lounge, is dedicated to the memory of John Lennon. Tomorrow, December 8, marks the 32nd anniversary of his murder, an event that I explore in my book Nowhere Man. To commemorate Lennon, here's a clip of Mary Lyn and HooP performing I'm Losing You at Bloomsday on Beaver Street.
Also tomorrow, December 8, at 11 AM Eastern Time, this link from Indies Unlimited will go live and take you to an excerpt from Nowhere Man.
Blue Lights Show
I heard it on the radio yesterday for the first time this year. Louie Free, host of the Louie Free Radio Show: Brainfood from the Heartland, closed out his broadcast with Mary Lyn Maiscott's Blue Lights, my wife’s Christmas song from her album of the same name. Louie, determined to make the song a holiday tradition, has been playing it every year at Christmas since 2007, when she released the CD, which you can download at CD Baby.
This year, in New York City, Mary Lyn, along with ace guitarist HooP, will be performing in the first annual Blue Lights Christmas Show, on Friday, Dec. 7, 8:30, at Ella Lounge, 9 Avenue A. This intimate holiday concert, dedicated to the memory of John Lennon, will feature such Maiscott originals as Crucified, Things I Lost, and Blue Lights (of course), as well as covers, including a mashup of the Beatles’ You Never Give Me Your Money and You Can't Do That, and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, which she's never before performed in public.
Tickets are $10 at the door or $5 online (listed under HooP). Hope to see you at Ella Lounge. If you can’t make it, please listen to Mary Lyn on the Louie Free Show, streaming live on your computer or on WYCL, 1540 AM, in Youngstown, Ohio, weekdays 8 AM-Noon.
Amazon Absurd
Here are the main points of the piece:
· Amazon has changed its customer reviews guidelines.
· According to customers who posted reviews for a book by Michelle Gagnon, either the reviews never appeared or they were deleted.
· When these customers complained, Amazon told them that they “do not allow reviews on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product. This includes authors, artists, publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product,” and they “will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on this matter.”
· When one of the customers told Amazon that they had no “relationship or financial interest in the book,” Amazon then told Gagnon, the author of the book in question, that they’d remove her book from the site if the customer complained again.
· Another author, Steve Weddle, received a similar e-mail from Amazon when he attempted to post a review for a book by Chad Rohrbacher, whom he knows personally.
· This is apparently happening on a wide scale.
· Bottom line: Amazon now appears to be forbidding authors from posting reviews because it sees all authors as direct competitors with other authors. In the meantime, Amazon has done nothing about fake reviews, written by reviewers for hire, that have flooded the site.
One can only hope that Amazon recognizes the absurdity of their review policy and corrects it promptly. Read More
A Gallery of Banned Books Week Performers
Though I do my best to keep tabs on anything that pops up in the media having to do with Beaver Street or Nowhere Man, occasionally something slips by me. The photo to the right is one such example. Taken two months ago at the Banned Books Week event at the 2A Bar, in New York City, this shot of me sitting next to the Beaver Street character I call Pam Katz (real name Joyce Snyder), was posted on the Adult Video News website. But Google, apparently, finds the AVN site objectionable, and has deemed this major media organ unworthy of searching.
The photo, along with a gallery of the people who read from forbidden books having to do with sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, was finally brought to my attention. So, if you click here, you can see such performers as porn star Lisa Ann, Penthouse editor Lainie Speiser, Linda Lovelace expert Eric Danville, and Lez Zeppelin vocalist Shannon Conley reading from books that you might not necessarily find in a routine Google search.
I, incidentally, read from J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
The Official Bloomsday on Beaver Street Video: Part 1
It has been almost six months since the Bloomsday on Beaver Street launch party at the Killarney Rose for my investigative memoir, Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography. This celebration of banned books, James Joyce, Ulysses, and all literature that has been branded pornographic, featured readings, rock 'n' roll, opera, and a surreal non-performance by a man who once ran for mayor of New York City.
Though I've posted a few truncated video clips of some of the performances, it's only recently that I've come into possession of the official Bloomsday on Beaver Street video--a complete documentation of every moment of the event. Here's the first excerpt: MC Byron Nilsson's masterful introductory monologue.
Stay tuned to relive the entire night, clip by clip.
Advertisements for My Wife
With Hanukkah just over a week away and only 24 shopping days till Christmas, I imagine it's in the realm of possibility that some of you are planning to buy things this weekend. And if you're looking for the ideal Christmas/Hanukkah gift, allow me to suggest you go to CD Baby and download Mary Lyn Maiscott's Blue Lights. The album contains two classic Christmas songs, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin, and Mary Lyn's own Blue Lights. Nine other Maiscott originals and covers, like You Can't Do That and Be-Bop-A-Lula, are included as well.
I'll go out on a limb here and say that Mary Lyn's touching take on Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas rivals Judy Garland's 1944 version, recorded for the film Meet Me in St. Louis. And though Blue Lights hasn't yet achieved universal status as a Christmas classic, for years Louie Free has been playing the song on his radio show, now broadcasting weekdays 8:00-noon on the Internet and on WYCL, 1540 AM, in Youngstown, Ohio.
If you’re in the New York area, you can hear Mary Lyn live on December 7, at Ella Lounge. I’ll be writing more next week about this special Christmas/Hanukkah show.
Is There Work After Porn?
In the Beaver Street Prologue, I talk about how, after working in adult entertainment for 16 years, I was "totally burnt out on smut" but felt trapped in my job because "I'd become a professional pornographer and my career options were limited."
Fortunately, I was saved by a book deal, which coincided with my being fired. For the past 13 years, I've been able to stitch together something resembling a living through a combination of book writing, freelance writing and editorial work, and a number of odd jobs that have nothing to do with writing or publishing.
Most of my former colleagues, the majority of whom have been laid off or cut back to nothing as the magazine business collapsed in the face of free Internet porn, have not been so lucky. They've been forced into unwilling retirement because--as if it's not hard enough for members of the Baby Boom Generation (and older) to find any kind of work that pays a living wage in this economy--nobody, apparently, is willing to hire somebody who once worked in hardcore pornography. (I left the business in 1999, just before most magazines switched from a softcore to hardcore format.)
I’ve been thinking about this dilemma since an article from the Detroit Free Press was brought to my attention. A district attorney in upstate New York, Mark Suben, denied during a reelection campaign they he’d ever worked in pornography. Videos posted on Youtube then came to light, indicating that Suben, using the pseudonym Gus Thomas, had acted, in the early 1970s, in such X-rated films as Deep Throat Part II, Doctor’s Teenage Dilemma, and The Love Witch. Suben, however, has refused to resign, saying that the films were made over 40 years ago, they weren’t illegal, he wasn’t married at the time, he wasn’t practicing law, he wasn’t even a law student, and his studwork is irrelevant to his current job and law practice.
Suben’s opponent, of course, is saying that the issue is that Suben lied, not that he was once a porn stud. But would Suben have been elected if he’d admitted that he was once Gus Thomas? Well, considering that none of my former colleagues who are now seeking work outside the porn industry can get so much as the time of day from potential employers, I think the answer is self evident: If you’ve ever had any association with XXX, you are forevermore unqualified to make any contribution to society. This is, after all, America.
Next Stop: Naziland
![Brooklyn Museum: A collection of photographs and plates from books.](https://go.authorsguild.orghttp://cdn2.brooklynmuseum.org/images/opencollection/archives/size3/NA202_C68_box2_Flatbush_Avenue.jpg")
The streets of Naziland.
Now that all turkey carcasses have been stripped bare and there's no more stuffing leftover to stuff myself with, it's time to get back to blogging. But before I return to the final phase of the Beaver Street Autumn Offensive, I'd like to say a few words about what I've been working on between meals for the past week: Bobby in Naziland.
If you're a regular reader of this blog, then you already know that I've described Bobby in Naziland as a combination of historical fiction and black humor about a Jewish kid growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 60s where, to quote from the book, "World War II lingered like a mass hallucination on East 17th Street and large swaths of the surrounding borough." And if you know me personally, then you might think that that sounds an awful lot like a memoir. You would be correct.
When I finished Beaver Street, the question before me was: What next? And it occurred to me that there was some very rich material in the Beaver Street Prologue that needed to be more fully explored—mainly the opening scene in my father’s candy store.
I spent the next two years writing down everything I could remember about that particular time and place: Flatbush in the 1950s and 60s. And I found myself with 400 pages of notes, fragments, anecdotes, character sketches, bits of dialogue, etc. I read through it, searching for common themes, and what jumped out at me was Nazis, Nazis, and more Nazis. I grew up surrounded by Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans, and for them, the war had never ended. This became the heart of the book.
Yes, Bobby in Naziland began as a memoir, but for reasons both practical and personal, it turned into a novel. And now, as I appear to be coming down the home stretch, I’m reminded every day of the William Faulkner quote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And Faulkner didn’t even have Facebook.
Times to Google: "You're a Prude!"
Before I flee New York this afternoon for my Thanksgiving break, I'd like to bring to your attention an article that ran in The New York Times yesterday.
But let me begin with an article that ran in the the Times in 2002, “A Demimonde in Twilight,” that was in part drawn from an embryonic Beaver Street manuscript. The "newspaper of record," having no taste for double entendres, refused to print the title Beaver Street. So yesterday, when the Times called Internet monoliths like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon "prudish," they were really saying something.
The gist of the article, “You Can’t Say That on the Internet,” by Evgeny Motozov, is that Silicon Valley, supposedly a countercultural bastion of openness and tolerance, is actually a deeply conservative place that imposes its "outdated norms" on billions of people. Facebook and Apple do it though outright censorship. The former recently blocked The New Yorker's page after they posted an Adam and Eve cartoon that showed Eve's nipples, and the latter, until recently, wouldn't post in its iBooks store the title of Naomi Wolf's new book, Vagina: A New Biography.
But Google and Amazon are arguably the worst culprits, using their “dour” algorithms to insure that the autocomplete function does not lead us to morally impure sites or books that contain such words as “penis,” “vagina,” “bisexual,” “Lolita,” and “pornography.” (The potentially malignant nature of autocomplete popped up again last night on The Good Wife.)
As readers of this blog know, I’ve had my issues with these two Internet monoplies, and I’ve written about them at length. Though the Amazon problem appears to be settled for now, the Google issue has only gotten worse. To recap: Once Google sent a lot of traffic to this site. Then, a couple of weeks ago, they cut me off. Since the Google algorithms is as sacred to Google as it is secret, it’s impossible to say why. Though after reading this article I can only assume the magical algorithm has decreed my site morally unfit for public consumption.
A New York Shopping Story
One reason I've lived in New York City virtually my entire life, and in Manhattan since I graduated from college--the last 22 years downtown, in Soho--is because of the incredible convenience of not having to own a car. Everything I want or need, be it freshly made, hand-cut buckwheat pappardelle or an obscure book that's been out of print for a decade, can be found at a store, like Raffetto's or The Strand, that's within walking distance of my house. At least that's the way it used to be.
Manhattan in particular has been undergoing dramatic changes for some time. The quirky specialty shops and dusty book and magazine stores that used to line so many streets have given way to upscale boutiques, chain stores, and nail salons. Thanks to our mayor, Michael Bloomberg, New York has been transformed into a generic megacity—a gilded ghetto stripped of all funkiness, and designed to cater to tourists. A lot has been lost and very little had been gained.
This was driven home to me the other day when I went out to look for what I thought wouldn’t be especially hard to find: the latest issue of Little Shoppe of Horrors, “the journal of classic British horror films,” as publisher Richard Klemensen calls it. The magazine has been around for 40 years, and in that time I’d seen it in numerous stores, like Kim’s, which used to be the place to go for offbeat publications of all kinds. (Kim’s still exists, but in a different location and has been reduced to a shadow of its former self.)
LSoH had run a rave review of Beaver Street, and though I had a scan of the review, I’m a completist when it comes to my own stuff, and I wanted a printed copy for my files. Thus began a shopping odyssey that included trips to more than a dozen stores, all within walking distance of my house: McNally Jackson, Bluestockings, St. Marks Books, Kim’s, Bleecker Bob’s, Barnes & Noble (ha!), Dashwood Books, Generation Records, Forbidden Planet, a comic book store on St. Mark’s Place, and I don’t know how many well-stocked magazine shops that seemed to carry everything but LSoH.
The result: Nada, nada, and nada.
So I ordered it online, directly from Richard Klemensen, who I imagined sitting in his house in Iowa, stuffing magazines into envelopes, addressing them by hand, and licking and sealing the flaps—an image that Richard confirmed is not far from the truth. “On the shipping end of things,” he said, “I am, indeed, a one-man-band!”
I anxiously await delivery.
Izzy Singer on the Radio
If you've read Beaver Street, then you're familiar with a character I call "Izzy Singer," a magazine editor and "porno intellectual" who took me under his wing when I went to work for Swank Publications. Izzy, as I explained in the book, showed me that pornography could be "a form of high art that required specialized knowledge and talent to produce."
Last year, I wrote about how Izzy, writing under the pseudonym "Irv O. Neil," had begun publishing on Kindle his short stories about female domination. And I said that one story in particular, "Learning to Be Cruel," had shocked me because Irv/Izzy was clearly writing from the heart, and the story gave me the feeling that he may personally enjoy having sexy young women treat him in the degrading manner that he so graphically and realistically described.
Over the past year, Irv/Izzy has published a number of other such stories on Kindle and has begun to attract some well-deserved attention. This week, along with three other fetish writers, he appeared on a Blog Talk Radio show, In Bed with Dr. Sue. For nearly two hours, they discussed their craft, the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, and took calls from listeners. It’s an interesting look into one of the darker corners of the publishing biz and a rare opportunity to hear a Beaver Street character speak. You can listen here. Read More
Little Shoppe of Beaver
It's interesting that a number of sites primarily devoted to horror, like The Bloodsprayer and Shu-Izmz, have taken such a liking to Beaver Street. Now you can add Little Shoppe of Horrors to that group. The venerable film mag--they've been around for 40 years--has run a delightful review of my investigative memoir in their latest issue, #29. It almost sounds as if it could be yet another rebuke to the hatchet job posted on Review 31 last month. That rather unpleasant critique put forth the opinion that, though Beaver Street was basically an anti-feminist piece of shit, certain low-minded individuals might find it "titillating."
Since the LSoH review is not available online, I'll take the liberty of quoting the last paragraph in full:
“If you are looking for some titillation, this isn’t the book for you. If you want to read about people, situations, a time and place in an industry that was looked down upon by many people (while many secretly gobbled up the magazines), this is a gem of a read. You won’t find yourself embarrassed reading it. You will find yourself fascinated by the cast of characters. This is a book both men and women would enjoy (even if the women were only trying to find out why men would even have been interested in that crap!)”
Well said, LSoH! Now I’ve got to go out and track down a copy.
Sick Day
I'm sitting here coping with what feels like a mild stomach virus, which is most definitely interfering with my ability to concentrate. So allow me, if you will, to take a sick day. It's the first time I've called in sick in the nearly three years that I've been doing this blog. Hope to be back tomorrow.
Read MoreA Well-Targeted Review
If you happen to run a sex shop or "intimate apparel" store, then you're probably familiar with the trade magazine StorErotica. This is a serious publication that gets into nuts-and-bolts retailing issues like maximizing profits, store security, and hot new products. Well, I'm tickled pink to report that in the magazine's Hot Products section, among the James Deen endorsed dildos, they've listed Beaver Street, describing it as "an interesting and witty look at pornography from the early '70s through late '90s."
Considering chains like Barnes & Nobel have been less than eager to stock Beaver Street in their remaining brick-and-mortar stores, I couldn't think of a better place for my "intriguing" (as StorErotica calls it) investigative memoir to be sold. I mean why should Fifty Shades of Grey, which I noticed is in the window of my local Pleasure Chest, have all the fun? Isn't it possible that people who buy Doc Johnson vibrators are also interested in quality, thought-provoking literature?
So, I’d encourage all erotic products entrepreneurs to take StorErotica’s advice and order Beaver Street today. It’s the book that carries both the Vanity Fair and Erotic Review seal of approval. How can you go wrong?
Blackout Memories
Forty-seven years ago tonight, I witnessed my first major blackout. As the New York Metropolitan area continues to struggle with the aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy and the ensuing power failure--some places are still without electricity--I will commemorate this anniversary with my blackout memories.
November 9, 1965: My family had recently moved to a new apartment on East 8th Street near Caton Avenue on the edge of Flatbush, in Brooklyn. My bar mitzvah was three days earlier, and our refrigerator was jammed to the bursting point with leftover food from the reception. I don't recall exactly how we found out that major portions of the Northeast and Canada had experienced a power failure, but I suspect that somewhere in the house a radio or TV was playing, and around 5:30 that evening the broadcast turned to static. Yet, the lights remained on. What I do remember most distinctly about that night was going up to the roof with my cousin Ellen, who lived in the building, and looking out at an ocean of darkness as far as the eye could see—except for our building and the ten or so surrounding blocks. We were in the middle of a little island of light, unaffected by the blackout. But I was sad because I didn’t get to experience a historic event. My mother, however, was thrilled because the food in the refrigerator was not going to spoil.
July 13, 1977: It was the middle of a sweltering summer and I was living in an unair-conditioned apartment on Riverside Drive, in Washington Heights, with a roommate and a dog. Having recently finished graduate school and embarked on a career as a writer, I’d spent the day working on a book. The lights went out only in New York City around 9:30 that night, and I recall sitting on the couch in the candlelit foyer, listening to reports of nearby looting and arson on a portable radio. But we couldn’t see any looting out the window; Riverside Drive was quiet. However, we prudently remained inside until the lights came on the next day. Thirty-five years later, I somehow associate this blackout with the death of Elvis Presley, but that didn’t happen till a month later, on August 16.
August 14, 2003: When the lights went out across the Northeast, Midwest, and Canada around 4:00 that afternoon, I was in my current apartment, in downtown Manhattan. It was hot, and the air conditioner suddenly died. I called Mary Lyn, who was working in Midtown—regular landlines remained in service—and asked her if she knew what was going on. There was a major power failure, she said, and she was going have to walk down 21 flights of stairs to get out of her office building. She got home about an hour later, just as Dee, a friend of ours who lived in the neighborhood, called. She wanted to join us to search for something to eat, so we went downstairs to meet her a few blocks away. New York was filled with people wandering around, asking each other, “What’s going on? Is it a terrorist attack?” Some people were listening to portable radios and many were trying to call—unsuccessfully—people on their cell phones.
As the sun went down, Mary Lyn, Dee, and I walked through Greenwich Village, feeling disoriented on familiar streets now shrouded in inky blackness. We found an open pizza place on Christopher Street and ate a couple of slices by candlelight. When we got home, our friend Laura, who was unable to get back home to Queens, was waiting for us at the top of the stairs. One of our neighbors has given her a little flashlight and somebody had bought her a glass of wine at a restaurant across the street. We went up to the roof and looked down at 6th Avenue, where a party at the restaurant had spilled onto the street. Laura slept on our couch. The power came on 27 hours later. Having kept the refrigerator closed the entire time, no food had spoiled.
Back to Business
Before Hurricane Sandy plunged me into 104 hours of pre-industrial living, and a certain election restored the tiniest glimmer of hope in American democracy's ability to function, I was, as I recall, writing about the vagaries of the book business.
On the British site Review 31, a critic that one of my more eloquent defenders described as "a tyro reviewer with a political ax to grind" had subjected Beaver Street to its first hatchet job. What I never got around to talking about is the upside of having your book trashed in an inaccurate and inherently dishonest manner: It sparked an online debate that ended up bringing more attention to Beaver Street than another rave review would have. It's the kind of debate that you just don’t see often enough these days--one that demonstrates the passion for books that still exists in this age of social media.
Also, the day the power came back on, a far more friendly British site, Morgen Bailey’s Writing Blog, posted an essay I wrote a few months ago titled “My Book Promotion Philosophy.” The gist of that philosophy can be boiled down to one sentence: “Talk to anybody who wants to talk to you about your book for as long as they want to talk about it, and go anywhere people are interested in your work.”
In other words, I’m happy to report that the Beaver Street Autumn Offensive, though suspended for a week due to inclement weather, remains an ongoing operation.
My Fellow Americans
If anybody's under the impression that I felt a surge of ecstasy last night when Obama was declared the winner of this presidential election, they'd be sadly mistaken. What I felt was a sense of relief--relief that things will perhaps get worse a little more slowly than if Romney had won. Relief that in the coming years my health insurance might be a little more affordable, a little more accessible, and that maybe I won't have to waste hours of my life arguing with people on the phone about incorrect billing every time I go to a doctor. And relief that at least a slim majority of my fellow Americans weren't so fucking stupid as to believe one word that came out of Romney’s mouth or so fucking racist as to vote for him because he's white.
In other election news, it comes as no surprise that Scott Garrett, the Tea Party congressman who takes money from pornographers, was reelected by a comfortable margin in his New Jersey district. It would be nice to say that Garrett, who has one of the most ultraconservative voting records in congress, is New Jersey’s problem. But Garrett, who is vicious, intelligent, and articulate, promises to do all he can to stop Obama from accomplishing anything in his second term. He belongs to us all.
And finally, I’d like to thank New York State for making voting more complicated, confusing, and stressful. In order to cast my ballot yesterday, I had to wait on four lines: a line to find out which table to get my ballot, a line to get the ballot, a line to use a “privacy booth” to fill out the ballot, and a line to scan the ballot, which, incidentally, provided something less than total secrecy. I really do miss the old machines, where you waited on one line, went into a booth, closed the curtain, and pulled a lever. It felt like you were casting a vote. The new way feels more like you’re taking an SAT, which perhaps partially accounts for the increase in stress.
The Mindless Nattering of Pundits and Pollsters
It's election day--or "erection day" as John Lennon preferred to call it--and as the island of Manhattan continues its incremental crawl back to total normalcy from Sandy and its aftermath (and other parts of the greater metropolitan area struggle with epochal devastation) I can now look back on the darkest days of the hurricane and be thankful for the many blessings that a lack of electricity had bestowed upon me. The street was quiet. The phone was not constantly ringing with computers trying to sell me things. But first and foremost, for the 104 hours that I was without power, I didn't have to listen to the mindless nattering of pundits and pollsters.
Picture the Maiscott-Rosen household on any night of the blackout: In a candle-lit living room, with the cat curled up between us, Mary Lyn sat next to me on the couch reading Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye by flashlight as I listened to hurricane reports on our one working portable radio, a Sony Walkman that we hadn’t used in years. Kind of a combination of 19th century, pre-TV 20th century, and pre-iPod 21st century.
I can’t say those candle-lit nights were exactly fun, but this morning, as I was eating breakfast and listening to MSNBC, I felt a twinge of nostalgia for the good old days of last week. Broadcasting from so called “Democracy Plaza”—a name that brings to mind a central square in a totalitarian country—the usual suspects were jabbering about the polls and the electoral map imprinted on the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink. If I heard correctly, a “journalist” is going to skate around, coloring each state red or blue as the results are announced, and a scoreboard-type contraption on the side of the GE building is going to count off the electoral votes until somebody gets the 270 needed to win.
A wave of revulsion practically ruined my breakfast as I realized that a major television network had turned an election with so much riding on it into a moronic game show. Which goes a long way towards explaining why I often find MSNBC only marginally less depressing than Fox News, and why 42 percent of eligible voters in the U.S. don’t vote.
I’ve heard reports that lines at New York City polling places are long and chaotic. But I refuse to be deterred.
Semi-Normal
Life in downtown Manhattan continues to return to semi-normal in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. By "semi-normal," I mean subway service and mail delivery have not been fully restored, PATH trains are still completely out, supermarkets have not been fully restocked, some people still don't have heat and hot water, and further downtown, by the Battery, where damage was heavy, as this picture shows, water is still being pumped out of basements.
But lower Manhattan's problems don't amount to "a hill of beans" compared to what's happening in parts of Long Island, Staten Island, New Jersey, and especially the Rockaways, where 20,000-40,000 people have been left homeless, and there appears to be a Katrina-like humanitarian crisis brewing. And, as you may have heard, there's an election tomorrow. All of which is to say, it seems inappropriate to get back to book business as usual.
As longtime readers of this blog are aware, I’ve never shied away from discussing politics, though I tend to limit those discussions to issues that relate directly to Beaver Street. I have, for example, written at length about the fact that my former porn publisher, Lou Perretta, has donated money to Tea Party icon Scott Garrett, a New Jersey congressman who’s up for reelection tomorrow, and—as Jersey residents should note—has voted to drastically cut funding for FEMA’s disaster relief.
As for the presidential race, I mean really, what can I say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times? Of course I support Obama, and the less said about Romney, the better. I don’t think anything I say here could possibly change anybody’s mind as far as who to vote for. But I do urge you to get out and vote, no matter where you are and who you support. Because if you think there’s no difference between the candidates, then you’re a fool.
104 Hours
I know there are a handful of you who read this blog every day. My usual excuse for not posting is that I'm on the road and there's too much going on for me to concentrate on writing anything more substantial than a tweet. Well, I've got a better excuse for not posting for the past four days: Hurricane Sandy.
I live in downtown Manhattan, and though there was no flooding or visible damage to my neighborhood, power was out for 104 hours, from 8:30 Monday night until 4:50 this morning, when the sound of burglar alarms woke us up. We looked out the window and the lights were back on. Many thanks to all of you who expressed concern and offered us shelter from the aftermath of the storm.
For the past four days, my life has revolved around walking to the “electricity zone” in Midtown Manhattan, finding a place to take a hot shower, check my e-mail, recharge my phone, and then lugging a couple of bags of ice two miles back to Soho. I’ll be writing more about Sandy and its aftermath in the coming days, but for now, let me just say that it’s a joy to be able to walk into a room, flip a switch, and see the light.
Report from Flood Zone C
There's a hurricane bearing down on New York City, but from where I am, on the edge of Manhattan's Flood Zone C, five blocks from the Hudson River, all is calm. Yes, the wind does appear to be picking up, but it's not raining now and inside it's warm and cozy.
Yesterday, braving the longest line I've ever seen in the supermarket--longer than it was last year for Irene--I stocked up on provisions, though it was impossible to find flashlight batteries. (I'm also a little low on wine, should anybody nearby be reading this.) And even if Manhattan gets the full brunt of Sandy and the waters reach my building, I'm on the top floor, 70 feet above street level. So, for me, this hurricane will at worst be an inconvenience, even if the power goes out. And it's a perfectly good excuse to write about something other than the insanity of the book business.
My thoughts are, of course, with the people in the low-lying areas of the city, on Long Island, and in New Jersey. Be safe, read a book, and try to enjoy a day off from work.
Word and Image 2
Here's another shot from my East Village photography session with Michael Paul. This picture, taken in front of Anthony Aiden Opticians on St. Mark's Place, is a reference to my John Lennon biography, Nowhere Man. The art installation in the window is, of course, an homage to Andy Warhol and Lennon.
The four images of Lennon are similar to Warhol's well-known Lennon silkscreen, and the Campbell's Tomato Soup cans refer to the Warhol silkscreen that launched the pop art movement in 1962.
Lennon, who was once friendly with Warhol, seemed to have become irritated with him (and a lot of other people) during his “househusband” years—because while he was holed up in the Dakota, scribbling in his journal, Warhol was hanging around Studio 54, and his name was routinely appearing in gossip columns. Referring to Warhol’s early career as a commercial illustrator, Lennon had noted: I was an artist while he was still drawing fucking shoes!
Whatever the case, this is my favorite Lennon reference shot since the one taken in Mexico City on October 9, 2005, in which I’m wearing the same sunglasses. They’d both work well as Warholian-style silkscreens, I think.
Word and Image 1
The idea that a writer's image is as important, if not more important, than his words is as old as the writing biz itself. One of the most famous examples of this is the picture that Harold Halma took of Truman Capote for the dust jacket of his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. People talked about this sultry shot of the 24-year-old Capote reclining on a sofa more than they talked about his prose. It's the image that made the author a star.
I’ve always tried to portray myself as somewhat less scruffy than I am in real life. In general, if I’m posing for publicity shots, I wear a nice sport jacket, a good pair of jeans, and shoes rather than sneakers. And I’ve gotten some good results with this costume, notably the shot taken by Marcia Resnick that’s on the back cover of Beaver Street.
This week, Michael Paul, a photographer I’d recently met, offered to shoot me in Tompkins Square Park and around the East Village. So, I decided to try something different—a more natural semi-grunge look. I wore a jean jacket, a faded pair of blue jeans, an old pair of sneakers, and T-shirt. You can see one result above. I don’t know if it’s going to help me sell more books, but it is an accurate representation of how I’d look if you ran into me on the street. I’ll post another shot tomorrow.
On the Responsibility of the Critic
The other day I responded to a review of Beaver Street, by Kate Gould, posted on a British site, Review 31. I took Gould to task for what was essentially a dishonest review, but limited my criticism to the review's most blatant and verifiable misstatement: "Rosen excluded female pornographers entirely from his history." Female pornographers, I said, are one of the book's main subjects.
Another critic, Neil Chesanow, has now taken this one step further, posting on the Review 31 site a detailed deconstruction of the review's inherent dishonesty. Chesanow's critique, in my opinion, is far more interesting and informative than the review itself. In fact, it does what Gould's review should have done in the first place: It provides an accurate picture of what Beaver Street is about.
Since Chesanow's piece might get lost among the other comments, I'm posting it here in its entirety.
By Neil Chesanow
It is a pity that a tyro reviewer with a political ax to grind saw fit to trash a funny, witty, engaging, informative history/memoir of the modern pornography industry because it wasn’t the feminist screed she had absolutely no right to hope it would be. As a result, her review is much more about her than it is about the book: a mark of rank amateurism.
Ms. Gould announces her misgivings about the porno industry early on. That alone should have disqualified her from reviewing the book; she lacks the objectivity necessary to write a bona fide review. She writes, for example, that she had hoped “Rosen’s account of the industry might engage intelligently with such issues” as “consent and the way in which porn teaches boys to view and treat women.”
If Ms. Gould knew a little bit more about feminist history, however, she would know that such a book—in fact, a whole flock of them—has already been written, primarily by feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, by women (and some men) who were mainly members of the radical feminist group Women Against Pornography. They included Susan Brownmiller, Adrienne Rich, Grace Paley, Gloria Steinham, Shere Hite, Lois Gould, Robin Morgan, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and the incomparable Andrea Dworkin, who maintained, among other bizarre notions, that all sex is rape.
There is no need for yet another of these books, and Mr. Rosen’s publisher, Headpress, would surely have rejected a manuscript along the lines that Ms. Gould would have liked to see because it has been done (and done, and done), and the desire for such a book today, even among the pathetically small number of women left who still consider themselves card-carrying feminists, is next to nil.
The subtitle of Mr. Rosen’s book, A History of Modern Pornography, Ms. Gould insists on taking literally in order to score her own points. In fact, Beaver Street is a memoir through which history is interwoven, and this is evident on the very first page. Ms. Gould writes that Mr. Rosen is “heavily biased” and “unable or unwilling to consider the existence or validity of any opinion other than his own.” Well, yes, because, you see, that is what a memoir is. Ironically, the same could be said of Ms. Gould’s review.
Ms. Gould unfairly takes Mr. Rosen to task for asserting that porn actress Traci Lords transformed “the ‘young girl’ into an object of such intense fascination, it’s now the single most profitable sector of the porno-industrial complex.” Mr. Rosen has scapegoated Ms. Lords, Ms. Gould contends, because “paedophilia is as old as time.” Yes, yes, but the porno-industrial complex, about which Mr. Rosen writes, is not as old as time, it is a recent invention, and its emergence roughly coincides with Mr. Rosen’s entry into it, which is precisely what makes his perspective on that industry valuable. It would be lovely to have a reviewer who could get such basic facts straight.
Ms. Gould snarkily sums up that “if you're looking for a dude’s take on smut mags, Beaver Street might be quite titillating.” Unfortunately, though, it seems she does not understand what the word titillating means: pleasantly stimulating, exciting, and erotic. Beaver Street is none of these things. Mr. Rosen’s deep ambivalence and frequent disgust with what he was doing during his porno years precludes that. Yes, the book mentions gangbangs and all manner of sexual acts, but none of these are lovingly described in salacious detail, not even Mr. Rosen’s account of his brief romantic relationship with a porno actress, which is tender and tawdry all at once—fascinating, yes, but erotic, no.
Ms. Gould is free to dislike Mr. Rosen’s book, but when one reviews a book for a public audience, one has a responsibility to review the work fairly on its own terms, not on a completely different set of purely solipsistic and irrelevant terms idiosyncratic to the reviewer. Ms. Gould fails to live up to this responsibility. Instead of serving us, the readers, she uses her review as opportunity to serve herself. Her review is titled “Masturbation Fodder.” And that is exactly what it is: not the book, the review. Read More
The Google Myth
Last week I posted two pieces about recent problems I’ve been having with Google and their page-ranking system. In response, I received a number of comments from people familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as it’s called. One of those comments, from Ladyjean, a website designer and SEO expert who runs a John Lennon site, Absolute Elsewhere, was especially interesting and deserves wider attention. So today, I’m running it as a guest post.
By Ladyjean
I have a couple of other things to say about the effectiveness of Google in general.
1) It’s very unlikely that anyone will be personally “picked out” by Google for punishment, unless they are breaking all the rules that Google has set up about how people should construct and code their websites. But in regard to that, I have to ask, who died and made them the ruler of what everybody can or cannot do on the internet?
If you do break their rules, you may not get a good ranking, and yet, no one in the SEO business is actually 100% sure if that’s really the case, because spammers get away with doing that all the time. That’s the problem: Nobody really knows how Google determines anything. In that regard, Google has behaved like a tyrant who is determined to control how people design and use their websites (or blogs, etc.), and they have succeeded in periodically tormenting and abusing anyone who wishes to do anything of value on the internet, and even worse, they have decided who the winners and losers are going to be based on their rankings.
2) The initial idea that Google was (and is) this great, amazing search engine is a myth. They have been completely fooling the world about this since they achieved their major takeover of internet search, which was quite a few years ago. You DO NOT get the best results on any Google search you do, but no other search engine is providing that outcome either, because it’s impossible to achieve that result. The internet is too massive. When you do a search, Google says it has found, say, 653,000 results for your query. But you will be lucky if they actually provide you with even a thousand of those links.
Because of my profession and personal interests, I have done a lot of “deep” searching on the internet, sometimes as far as it is possible to go (dozens of pages) and the end result is disturbing to say the least: You get a handful of what is actually on the internet, and the truth is, you can’t get to the rest of those links, at least not with a search engine. Google is one of the biggest shams in modern high tech history.
There, I said it and I feel better.
Intellectual Masturbation Fodder
It was inevitable. After 18 months of positive reviews, including some of the best reviews I’ve ever received for anything I’ve ever written, a critic has come along and trashed Beaver Street.
As a rule, I don’t argue with critics, because there’s no winning. Everybody is entitled to his or her opinion. However, in my opinion, if you’re going to trash a book, then stick to the facts. Do not make up shit that’s demonstrably false, and then base your opinion on these misrepresentations. Because, inevitably, somebody’s going to call you on it. And when your misrepresentations or “lies,” as some might describe them, are brought to light, it’s going to undercut the credibility of the review, the publication it ran in, and you, the critic. This is especially true if you’re writing for a publication that’s generally perceived as “credible.”
The review in question, “Masturbation Fodder,” was posted this weekend on a British site called Review 31, which describes itself as a provider of “intelligent, nuanced reviews of the most interesting new books,” and describes its contributors as “a diverse mix of accomplished intellectuals.”
The intellectual in question, Kate Gould, of Edinburgh, Scotland, is the author of a book on flashers. This is what she said about Beaver Street: “Rosen excluded female pornographers entirely from his history. I suspect he was too caught up in his own juvenile dabbling to notice their existence.”
That’s quite a blurb! But anybody who has read Beaver Street in its entirety (rather than, say, select portions of two or three chapters) is aware that “female pornographers” are one of the book’s main subjects. I pointed this out on the Review 31 site, where another critic, Rich Flannagan, agreed that Gould “could have gotten her facts right” and suggested that she should have read the book thoroughly. But he also said that, in his opinion, the subtitle, A History of Modern Pornography, was “a little misleading.” He thought Beaver Street was more of a memoir.
“That’s why I called it ‘A History’ rather than ‘The History,’” I told Flannagan.
This was Gould’s response to the above comments: “I did read the book thoroughly. A very small number of female pornographers were listed in the index and a few made brief appearances in the book. That doesn’t come close to a representation of the work done by female pornographers even for ‘A’ history.”
To which I said: “Kate, you wrote that ‘Rosen excluded female pornographers entirely.’ Now you’re saying ‘a very small number of female pornographers were listed in the index.’ There are approximately a dozen female pornographers listed in the index, both by real name and pseudonym. In the High Society chapters, I describe in detail both Gloria Leonard’s and ‘Maria Belanari’s’ work. In the Swank chapters I talk about Dian Hanson and describe in detail the work of ‘Pam Katz’ (real name Joyce Snyder), who wrote and produced 4 classic X-rated films, and ‘Georgina Kelly.’ I could go on, but my point is that in your review you misrepresented an important aspect of the book.”
And that is where the first international Beaver Street literary dustup stands as of this morning. May I encourage you to go to Review 31, and weigh in with your opinion. In my opinion, the critic in question is crying out for attention.
Heck of a Job, Google
I knew there had to be somebody out there who knows more than I do about Google’s mysterious ways, and I’m happy to report that two readers well versed in the matter did, in fact, weigh in with their thoughts and suggestions on “search engine optimization” (SEO) and how it affects Google’s page rankings.
Debra Wheels had some good tips about content, links, and “submitting” this site to Google. But Ladyjean, a website designer and SEO expert who runs an excellent John Lennon site, Absolute Elsewhere, had some far darker things to say about the company that’s come to monopolize the internet. Referring to her dealings with “evil Googleness,” she said, “If for some reason you’re not getting good rankings (i.e. traffic) from Google, there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”
Whatever the case, I’m always glad to hear from readers, and even if there is nothing I can do, there is some comfort in knowing I’m not alone.
But I would like to offer a theory that you can chew on over the weekend: In addition to this site, I also have two Blogspot sites, courtesy of Google. Chapter 27 is dedicated to my John Lennon bio, Nowhere Man, and Maiscott & Rosen is a site that my wife and I use to post reviews when we get the urge. Both these sites carry Google ads, which generate pocket change for me—50 cents on a great day—and probably about a hundred times that amount for Google, which for them is probably the equivalent of finding a penny on the sidewalk.
Perhaps my sudden and mysterious Google problem stems from the fact that this site, robertrosennyc.com, which used to get far more traffic than the two Blogspot sites combined, carries no advertising. And Google is in a petty and vengeful mood because they’ve had to lower their advertising rates for the fourth consecutive quarter, and their stock took a jaw-dropping eight percent dive yesterday.
Is Google punishing me for not carrying their ads?
If that sounds like a conspiracy theory, I’d like to point out that this scenario is similar to the main subplot of a recent episode of The Good Wife. In “Two Girls, One Code,” a Google-like company consigns to page-ranking oblivion another company that refused to buy their ads. And they punish the lawyer handling the case by suggesting “disbarred lawyer” when somebody types his name into their search engine.
When a storyline like that becomes fodder for a hit TV show, you can safely assume that Google dissatisfaction is widespread and reaching a tipping point. And I better assume that if I don’t watch my mouth, the first thing you’re going find when you search for me is pirated editions of my books.
Google Is God
The problem with monopolies is they just don’t give a shit if you’re unhappy with the way they do business. You can try to find a way to complain to them, of course, but what good does it do? A computer-generated form letter or even a phone call from an “associate” who’s well trained in the art of telling you nothing is less than satisfying.
Say, for example, you prefer not to deal with a certain online book-selling mega-conglomerate. Can you can take your business to the independent bookstore that’s been downtown for 30 years, and vote with your wallet. No, you can’t. Because the independent bookstore is gone, driven into bankruptcy by the mega-conglomerate. So, you shrug your shoulders and buy your book from the mega-conglomerate. It’s so convenient, after all, and their prices are… insane. Just ask the guy who used to own the independent bookstore.
This, however, is not an essay about how a book-selling mega-conglomerate has transformed the publishing industry from one kind of terrible to a completely new kind of terrible. Instead, I’m going to say a few words about a search engine monopoly.
For the two years that I’ve been running this site, about a third of its visitors have arrived via a Google search. But if you’re reading this blog today, chances are you didn’t come here via Google. For reasons I can’t explain, one week ago, Google virtually stopped directing traffic to robertrosennyc.com. Obviously, they’ve rejiggered their magic algorithm, and Google now thinks there are nine sites that know more about Beaver Street than I do.
Yes, I’ve done my research, and I know this is hardly the only website that Google has suddenly and mysteriously stopped sending traffic to. But all the reasons that Google gives for doing such a thing—deceptive practices, spam, blah, blah, blah—don’t apply here. Robertrosennyc.com is comprised of good, original material that’s frequently updated, and that you won’t find elsewhere. If you’re interested in me, my books, the pornography industry, John Lennon, or surviving as an author in 21st century America, then this is where you want to be. Just look at the tags in the left-hand column.
If Google were an ordinary company, I’d write to them and say, “What’s up? Why are you doing this?” But Google is an omniscient God, and a mere mortal such as myself cannot ask God Why? So, I will turn to you, my readers, who have arrived here by means other than Google. Some of you, I’m sure, know far more than I do about Google’s mysterious ways. And I ask you: What’s going on and is there anything I can do about it? Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
Allow me to end this post with an experiment. Below are some of the keywords that, up to a week ago, brought a lot of people here. Let’s see what happens if I put them all into the same post. I hope Google doesn’t get mad at me.
Christy Canyon, Ginger Lynn, Missy Manners, Carl Ruderman, Robert Rosen.
Learning from a Master
Like most writers, Stephen King does what he can to get the media to pay attention to his books, and he does it very well. The above video, from August 6, 2012, is King’s impressive appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and it should serve as an instructional video for any author out there doing promotion. Comfortable, articulate, and clearly into it, King shows us all how it’s done as he discusses the writing process, the contrast between what an author says in his books and his real-world personality, the afterlife, Jung, and the collective unconscious.
Ironically, at the 14:10 point in my interview on ReW and WhO? last week, Rew brings up Holocaust denial, and I mention my Holocaust-denying “personal conspiracy theorist” who also thinks I’m the CIA spymaster who ordered the hit on John Lennon.
“I heard someone else did it,” Rew says.
“Yeah, it was Stephen King,” I jokingly reply.
I am, of course, referring to the fact that King, too, has his own personal conspiracy theorist who believes he killed John Lennon. (Other conspiracy theorists believe Mark David Chapman received the order to kill Lennon through The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger.)
Ferguson, however, chose not to go there with King, though King’s take on the twisted psyche of conspiracy theorists, Holocaust-denying and otherwise, would be fascinating. Perhaps it’s a job for Rew.