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The Weekly Blague

A Masterpiece of Propaganda

We All Shine On: John, Yoko, & Me

By Elliot Mintz

Dutton

293 pages

$32

 

If you were to pull all the sycophantic lines out of We All Shine On, Elliot Mintz's memoir about his relationship with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, you'd have enough material to fill a small, stand-alone volume. The full effect of his obsequiousness doesn't hit you until you're well into the book. For me it reached a breaking point on page 262, when Lennon asks Mintz if there's anything he doesn't like about Double Fantasy, Lennon's final album, a collaboration with Ono. "I can't think of anything I don't love about it," Mintz says, not daring to utter a single word that might convey the slightest hint of negativity about Ono's questionable contributions, which make up half an LP that Lennon, in his own journals, called "mediocre." 


The harshest thing Mintz can bring himself to say about Ono is that it seemed risky "that she put so much faith in the occult." But he also notes that when he was working as a radio journalist she ruined his interview with Baba Ram Das, the psychologist, when she insulted him, saying that he sounded "a little phony," and she (and Lennon) constantly interrupted his interview with Salvador Dalí. (He took Lennon and Ono to the interviews because, he says, they wanted to go and "there was no way I could say no.") Otherwise he showers Ono with praise, saying that she is "a complicated woman, gaming out her future like a chess master thinking five moves ahead"; writes music that's "inspiring," "sweet," "poetic," and "comforting"; and manipulates John "with the cool precision of a doctor preparing for an amputation." Mintz also seems to agree with Lennon's assessment of Ono that she's "always right." 


Mintz does not treat Lennon with the same unflagging respect. Though he never criticized John to his face, the ex-Beatle's repeated verbal abuse seems to have left Mintz with a certain amount of resentment. And it comes across in his descriptions of Lennon's egregious and well-documented character flaws. But if he'd ignored them, the book's lack of credibility would be even more obvious. 


Lennon's alcohol-fueled ugliness casts a shadow over We All Shine On. Mintz is often "all but carrying" a drunken Lennon somewhere. A typical incident takes place in Tokyo in 1977. Mintz and Lennon are drinking in a sake bar. The crowd recognizes John and goes nuts. Mintz and Lennon flee into the street, but Lennon wants to drink more. Mintz insists they return to the hotel. Lennon grabs him by the lapels, slams him against a wall, and says, "If I want to have a fucking drink, you're not standing in my way." (On another occasion, a completely sober Lennon says to Mintz, "I'm gonna ask you to do anything I fucking feel like asking you. Don't ever tell me what I can or can't say to you.")


The worst episode occurs in 1973 after Lennon and Ono separate and he moves to LA with May Pang, his assistant who became his lover. Ono has instructed Mintz, based in LA, to look after John because, he says, he was "functionally a child when it came to taking care of himself." One night, while living at record producer Lou Adler's house, Lennon, in a drunken rage after a difficult recording session with Phil Spector, smashes Adler's gold records with a walking stick until security guards subdue him and tie him to a chair. Mintz arrives to find Lennon still raging and demanding to be untied. "Then," he writes, "John spat out an epithet so hurtful and offensive… I can't bring myself to repeat it." (Lennon, I'd imagine, used a more vicious variation of the "queer Jew" remark he said to Brian Epstein when Epstein asked him to suggest a title for his memoir—he called it A Cellar Full of Noise.)


Mintz's treatment of May Pang underscores the book's lack of credibility.


Where Pang was during this incident is unclear, and it's Mintz's treatment of her that underscores the book's lack of credibility. After he picked up John and May at the airport, he says, he seldom saw her again in LA and can't recall a single conversation, in LA or New York, in which John mentioned her name. He writes her out of the story, challenging Pang's perceptions of her relationship with Lennon and implying that she's delusional if she thinks Lennon had deep feelings for her. He says that her account of what happened in LA gives you the impression that "she was the red hot center of John's universe" when, in fact, her only job "was to make sure John was properly fed and cared for." The furthest Mintz goes is to admit that John had some "genuine affection for her." May, according to Mintz, was nothing, and Yoko was his only true love. 


If it's true that Mintz rarely saw John and May together in LA, it's because Lennon didn't want him to see them together and have Mintz report back to Yoko. And if John never spoke to Mintz about May, it's because John continued seeing her after he returned to Yoko. According to Lennon's own journals, he saw May anytime he could get away from Yoko and carried a flame for her until the end. John wanted them both but Yoko wouldn't allow it.


Yet We All Shine On, despite its credibility issues, is an entertaining book, and Mintz, who doesn't credit a ghostwriter, shows flashes of writing talent. Though there's the occasional cliché ("after what felt like an eternity"); the intermittent slip into PR-speak ("No one can capture the way Lennon talks in writing"); and a handful of overdone similes (in the same paragraph Mintz is "like a tragic character in an Edgar Allan Poe story" and a moment in the Dakota is "like a scene from a classic film noir thriller"), he knows how to tell a story. And there are a few stories that even the most avid Lennon fanatics probably haven't heard. For example, Lennon and Mintz, on their way to the airport in LA, stop, on John's command, at a seedy strip club, the Losers, and even as the dancers gyrate inches from Lennon's face, they don't recognize him—he's too out of context. And Mintz's melancholy recollection of Lennon and Paul McCartney's awkward Christmas reunion at the Dakota nicely illustrates how the ex-Beatles had grown apart and had little to talk about.


There are also some charming descriptions of Laurel Canyon in the early 1970s, when Mintz lived there, and of Karuizawa, Japan, in 1977, where he spent time with Lennon and Ono. 


Mintz does manage to make himself seem sympathetic with a relatable backstory. He grew up in Washington Heights, in upper Manhattan, at the time a working-class Jewish neighborhood. His father, a Polish immigrant, worked in the garment business. Mintz was shy, awkward, and smaller than his classmates. He also stuttered, which led to his being bullied. Wanting to work in radio, he studied broadcasting at Los Angeles City College and overcame his stutter. His big break came while still in college, in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. One of his classmates was in the marines with JFK's killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. Mintz interviewed him, and by the end of the day the interview had been broadcast all over the city. Soon he had a job interviewing rock stars and beat poets on late-night radio. Impressed by Ono's experimental LP Fly, he interviewed her, it went well, and she started calling him all the time. Sometimes they talked for as long as seven hours. Then he interviewed Lennon and soon had a hotline installed in his house exclusively for Lennon and Ono, as well as a red light over his bed that flashed when they called in the middle of the night. (Mintz claims he has a photographic memory and can "reconstruct complete conversations" he had with Lennon and Ono a half-century ago. He most likely recorded them, a common practice among the Lenono company employees.) "I had come to accept that being at John and Yoko's beck and call was becoming my mission in life," he writes. "Why I accepted that mission, I couldn't tell you. I just did." 


Maybe Mintz's personal life was empty and the Lenono connection filled him with the identity he craved.


To venture a guess: Maybe his personal life was empty and the Lenono connection filled him with the identity he craved.


One of the book's oddities is Mintz's irrelevant and distracting emphasis on his girlfriends, which, to venture another guess, nobody really cares about. But he wants you to know that he did, indeed, have girlfriends. He refers a number of times to his impossibly demanding relationship with John and Yoko and their endless phone calls as the reason he never married and had children. "If only I'd had the strength to resist the undefinable magnetic pull [of John and Yoko], I might have ended up having a more balanced, traditional existence," he writes. Instead, he says, he was married to John and Yoko.


The girlfriend dynamic plays out in a story he tells about a "stunningly beautiful" woman he met at the Troubadour club, in LA, in 1971. He of the photographic memory can't remember her name but says she might have been his "soulmate." He's in bed with her when Ono calls at four a.m. Maybe, he thinks, he shouldn't take the call. But he takes it, and he's on the phone for more than an hour talking with her about losing weight. His girlfriend wakes up and wants to know what's going on. He can't tell her. John and Yoko are a secret, and divulging the friendship would be breaking their "unspoken code of trust" (which becomes spoken when Ono orders him, "Just keep us your secret"). Mintz's potential soulmate leaves and he never sees her again.


Another peculiarity is Mintz's take on his multitude of celebrity friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. The name-dropping is intense: Sal Mineo, Mickey Dolenz, David Cassidy, Donovan, Brian Wilson, Beau and Jeff Bridges, Alice Cooper, Paris Hilton, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, David Crosby, Stephen Stills. He says he doesn't know exactly why celebrities are attracted to him. "I never sought out relationships with famous people; they just somehow gravitated towards me…. It's the story of my life, being befriended by the fabled and adored." His best guess is that he's done so many celebrity interviews, he's not starstruck, and I'm sure that's part of it. But Mintz is also small (Ono size), unthreatening, discreet, takes abuse well, and follows orders. Most importantly, he had popular radio and TV shows that provided a safe space, devoid of uncomfortable questions, where celebrities could promote their work.


Mintz obliterates his last shreds of credibility when he tells the story of Fred Seaman, John and Yoko's personal assistant.


In the final part of the book, which covers the aftermath of Lennon's murder, Mintz obliterates his last shreds of credibility when he tells the story of Fred Seaman, John and Yoko's personal assistant and Lennon's paid companion—essentially one of Mintz's New York counterparts. I'm intimately familiar with this particular lie because it involves me. For a detailed account of what happened, I'd direct you to my own book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, especially a chapter titled "An Open Letter to G. Barry Golson." Golson was the Playboy magazine editor who, in 1984, shepherded into print a more elaborate version of the tale that Mintz has been peddling for more than 40 years and that he dictated to David and Victoria Sheff who are credited with writing the story. 


In We All Shine On, Mintz says that after Lennon's murder Seaman, portraying himself as "Lennon's true disciple," smuggled out of the Dakota five of John's personal journals, gave them to me, and instructed me to write a "tell-all book." 


One part of this is true: Seaman did give me Lennon's journals. As I describe in Nowhere Man, he told me that in the summer of 1980, when Lennon was in Bermuda working on Double Fantasy, he had a premonition of his death—listen to "Borrowed Time," recorded in Bermuda—and if anything should happen to him, it was Seaman's job to tell the true story of his life and use any research material he needed.


As I later testified under oath, at Seaman's 2002 copyright infringement trial: Yes, I believed him. I had no reason not to. Seaman, a close and trusted friend, had always been supportive of my writing career and wanted me to help him write John's biography. The journals alone were proof enough that he was telling the truth. It didn't seem possible that he could just walk out of the Dakota with John's diaries unless he'd been authorized to do so.


The project blew up in my face in 1983 when Seaman ransacked my apartment while I was out of town, taking everything I'd been working on. I then came forward and told Ono what happened. She asked to see my diaries beginning from the day she hired Seaman. Mintz was one of the people she gave them to: 500,000 words, written in the heat of the moment, most of them on teletype paper run through an IBM Selectric typewriter—a Kerouac-inspired literary experiment. Mintz and the Playboy team combed through those pages searching for anything they could use in their article that would damage me and Seaman. From those half-million words they cherry-picked about 200, and distorted them with their own commentary.


One sentence pilfered from my diary originally described Ono's unparalleled ability to exploit the Lennon name only months after his death: "Dead Lennons equal big $" (as Mintz slightly misquotes it). Forty years ago in Playboy and now in his book, Mintz turns the line around to say it's a description of my own and Seaman's attitude toward Lennon's murder. Except Mintz now says that Seaman "scrawled" the line in his own diaries. Why he attributes it to Seaman and says it was scrawled rather than typewritten appears to be a gratuitous lie intended to do nothing more than further damage Seaman. 


Another probable (though harmless) lie is Mintz's account of how he found out Lennon had been murdered. He says his mother called him because she heard on the radio somebody had been shot "at that building on Seventy-Second Street you're always visiting." He tries calling the Dakota but can't get anyone on the phone. He turns on the TV. Nothing. (It doesn't occur to him to turn on KNX, LA's all-news radio station.) In a panic he decides to fly to New York and drives to the airport, but the radio in his Jaguar isn't working. Walking through the airport, he sees nothing, hears nothing. On the plane, a crying flight attendant emerges from the cockpit. He asks her what's wrong and she tells him John Lennon is dead. The story simply does not have the ring of truth, and it's a reminder that little in this book can be taken at face value and every word, especially about Lennon and Ono, should be regarded with extreme skepticism. 


More lies: When Albert Goldman's 1988 biography, The Lives of John Lennon, is published, Mintz asks Ono to do a radio interview to dispel "rumors" that "John's 'househusband' image was a public relations fraud" and that he was a devotee of prostitutes. It's more or less true that Lennon was kind of a quasi-househusband at times, but he did have a masseuse regularly come to the Dakota to manually pleasure him (Ringo walked in one such session) and he did visit prostitutes in South Africa when he went there in April 1980. He wrote about it in his journals.


Another one of Mintz's New York counterparts, Michael "Mike Tree" Medeiros, Lennon's gardner, personal assistant, and friend (Ono's attorneys have blocked the publication of his memoir), disputes a number of Mintz's claims about what happened when he arrived at the Dakota after John's murder. Mintz says he saw Lennon's blood on the pavement as he entered the building. Medeiros says the blood was cleaned up long before Mintz arrived. Mintz says he spent a lot of time with Ono's employees "fielding a never-ending barrage of phone calls." According to Medeiros, one of the people fielding those calls, Mintz never fielded any phone calls.


Yes, these are minor threads in a tapestry of lies, and to point out more would be redundant. But they do show that the essential problem with the book is how to discern truth from Mintz's skillfully spun PR fantasies. Perhaps it's best to keep in mind that the author of We All Shine On gave up a journalism career to lie on command for Lennon and Ono, to be their G. Gordon Liddy—a man who would walk over his own grandmother for John and Yoko (as Liddy said he'd do for Richard Nixon).


We All Shine On is both a fairy tale and a masterpiece of propaganda. It's the flip side of Seaman's book, The Last Days of John Lennon, also a well-crafted, entertaining read with serious credibility issues but that has nothing good to say about Ono (and that Ono's attorneys were able to force out of print). 


In the case of both books, truth seekers would be well advised to look elsewhere.

 

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An Open Letter to G. Barry Golson: Take 3

It's been almost six years since anybody has used the absurd distortions, half-truths, and outright lies in a story published by Playboy magazine, in 1984, as irrefutable proof that I'm a very bad person. I thought that posting the open letter, below, on two other Websites, had taken care of this matter once and for all. But apparently it hasn't. Like a cancer that can be controlled but not cured, the Playboy article has flared up again. Sadly, it's time for another round of treatment. So, for the third time, here's the letter, originally written in May 2009.

Dear Barry,

I’m sorry to interrupt your Mexican retirement, but we need to discuss a bit of unfinished business—something I’ve wanted to get off my chest for 25 years. I know that’s a long time, but there’s no past in cyberspace. There’s only what’s out there now. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the Internet, it’s that if you put out information people want, they’ll find it. Take my word for it. Internet killed the magazine star.

Imagine if there were a blogosphere in 1984.

The funny thing is, over the past nine years, as I traveled around the U.S., Europe, and Latin America promoting my John Lennon biography, Nowhere Man, conducting some 300 no-holds-barred interviews and press conferences, nobody has ever asked me about the Playboy article. It’s almost as if it’s ceased to exist.

But the story is still out there, buried in the dark crevices of cyberspace, like an unexploded bomb left over from an ancient war. And it’s accessible to those who want to find it—like the Zionist-conspiracy theorists who’ve embraced it as irrefutable proof that the Jews murdered Lennon (with a little help from the CIA).

I can no longer pretend that the article doesn’t exist, especially now that every day another story from that long-gone era seems to resurrect itself online, and especially now that the exhibition on Lennon’s New York City years at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex has put the past so prominently back in the news. Yes, Barry, I think it’s time to drag the article out into the open and expose it to a bit of sunlight.

The story, as you may recall, was no small matter. It was about 6,000 words and written by a journalist of some repute, David Sheff. It received a great deal of media attention when it was published. But what really gets me is that Playboy still had a reputation for journalistic integrity at the time and at least some people really did buy it for the articles. I was one of them. I believed in Playboy’s journalism. That’s why I sent you my manuscript—the manuscript that would become Nowhere Man. You were the executive editor in charge of interviews and articles.

I remember very well the day we met in your New York office: July 27, 1982—my 30th birthday. You had some nice things to say about my writing; you especially liked my chapter about Lennon’s relationship with Paul McCartney (“His Finest Hour” in Nowhere Man).

We spoke for quite some time, and I told you how after Lennon was murdered, his personal assistant, Fred Seaman, said it was time for us to begin work on the Lennon biography John had asked him to write in the event of his death, using any source material he needed to complete the project. I told you how Seaman gave me Lennon’s diaries, how I transcribed and edited them, and how Seaman then sent me out of town, ransacked my apartment, and took everything I’d been working on. I told you how I had re-created from memory portions of Lennon’s diaries. In short, I told you the entire Nowhere Man backstory—a story that I thought was the equivalent of a rock ’n’ roll Watergate. I also told you that I was in dire financial straits and needed a break.

You then strung me along for the rest of the summer, assuring me that you hadn’t forgotten about the story and that my name was in your Rolodex. But you never gave me an assignment.

So I sent the manuscript to Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, and met with him, too. At least he was up-front with me. He told me that he couldn’t publish the story and that the only way I could “save” my “karma” was to tell Yoko Ono herself what had happened. I met with her in the Dakota in September and told her the story. She then asked to read my personal diaries, and I gave them to her—16 volumes covering more than three years.

You finally called me in April 1983 to say that you’d assigned the Lennon diaries story to Sheff, and you asked me to cooperate with him—neglecting to mention something I didn’t find out until I saw the article in print: Ono had given you and Sheff (who was collaborating with his wife at the time, Victoria Sheff) access to my diaries. Because I thought that this was the only way I’d be able to tell the story, I allowed David Sheff to come to my house and interview me for two hours.

You had my trust, my cooperation, my manuscript, and my diaries, the intimate details of my life. And what did you do? You ran a story in the March 1984 Playboy, “The Betrayal of John Lennon,” that had one purpose only: to silence me by destroying my credibility, my reputation, my career, and my life. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that of the countless articles and reviews that have since been written about Nowhere Man—most of which, I might add, are positive—none of them, not even those written by anonymous character assassins, comes close to the sustained maliciousness and contempt of the Playboy story. It is indeed in a class by itself.

And now, 25 years later, I think it’s time for you to answer a couple of questions.

Let’s begin with my diaries. You had at your disposal approximately 500,000 words that I’d written in the heat of the moment. From them, you extracted about 200 words, including 5 that seem to be the only thing most people remember about the story—the takeaway, so to speak, the line the conspiracy theorists quote over and over. I can assure you that I’d prefer not to repeat my comment about what I saw as Ono’s skillful exploitation of the Lennon legacy: “Dead Lennons=BIG $$$$$.” But I’m not the one who made it public. And it certainly wasn’t my idea to depict the comment as an indictment of my own behavior, portraying myself as a criminal conspirator drooling over Lennon’s corpse.

That was quite an image, Barry. But don’t you think it would have been appropriate to help yourselves to a few more of the remaining 499,800 words and give your readers a more accurate picture? For example, you could have quoted—as I did in the first chapter of the paperback edition of Nowhere Man—from the passage that describes my state of mind the night Lennon was murdered, words about shedding tears in front of the Dakota and thanking John for touching my life. Or you could have quoted the part in which Seaman tells me, two days later, that he’s quitting his job at the end of the week to begin writing a book: “‘It’s what John wants,’ he said. ‘He knew he was going to die and he poured his heart out to me. He knew I was working on a book.’”

I suppose it’s possible that you excerpted only 200 words because you didn’t want to infringe my copyright any more than necessary to tell the version of the story that Ono had dictated to you through her spokesman, Elliot Mintz. But couldn’t you have avoided any additional infringement by using more than 22 words from my two-hour conversation with Sheff—the only direct quote that you allowed me in the story because those were the only 22 words that fit your story line?

Or couldn’t you have simply described my diaries? Nowhere in the article did you mention that the portion of my diaries from which you took most of your quotes was typed on teletype paper—hundreds of attached sheets, like a Kerouacian scroll. But apparently any images of serious literary endeavor were to be avoided at all costs. That would have interfered with the real conspiracy—the one you, Ono, and the Manhattan district attorney had cooked up.

I trust you remember what happened the day the article was published: First I was fired from my job at High Society magazine, where I was an editor. They didn’t want a “criminal” on the premises. Then the DA’s office told me I’d be arrested on criminal conspiracy charges if I didn’t sign a document forfeiting my First Amendment rights to tell the story of John Lennon’s diaries. Ono, as I’m sure you know, had by this time given my diaries to the DA—to use as “evidence” against me.

The DA, however, didn’t know that I’d managed to retain a top-notch criminal attorney, willing to defend me pro bono. His name was David Lewis and, as crazy as this must sound to you, he believed that the Constitution applied equally to everybody.

So, there I was, sitting in Lewis’s office, listening to him talk to an assistant DA, Steven Gutstein, on the speakerphone about my diaries, which had apparently provided Gutstein with hours of reading pleasure: His opening parry was a series of one-liners about how often I masturbated—a preview, I presume, of the evidence he was planning to present to the jury. Then Gutstein started talking about the “charges” against me, and I can still recall Lewis’s exact words: “You’re in gross violation of my client’s constitutional rights.”

And you know what? That was the end of it. Lewis called the DA’s bluff and it was shocking how fast he folded. I didn’t sign the document and nobody arrested me. In fact I never heard from the DA again. The case was a total fabrication that would never have stood up to scrutiny in open court. The whole thing was dependent on my not having competent legal counsel. What were you telling people at editorial meetings? “Rosen’s going to be arrested the day the article comes out. What’s he going to do, sue us?”

Not a bad idea, actually. But, as I understand it, your story elevated me to limited-purpose-public-figure status, meaning that if I’d wanted to sue the powerful Playboy corporation, I’d have had to prove that you not only libeled me, but that you did so knowingly and maliciously. Which, of course, you did. But proving it in a court of law was not really feasible on a pro-bono budget.

And it also appeared that the story wasn’t exactly having its intended effect. My friends and neighbors, for example, saw it for the textbook hatchet job that it was. Everybody in my building was wondering why Playboy was going to such extraordinary lengths to destroy the unassuming guy on the fifth floor. That story made me the talk of Washington Heights—a real International Man of Mystery.

And then there was the job offer. I assume you knew, or knew of, Chip Goodman. He was Martin Goodman’s son, and Martin Goodman, as I’m sure you know, is credited with inventing the modern men’s mag, or men’s adventure mags, as they were called at the time. You must have heard the story about how Hugh Hefner wanted to call Playboy “Stag Party,” but Martin Goodman was already publishing Stag magazine, so Hefner couldn’t use the title.

I can’t say that Chip hired me as managing editor of Stag because of the Playboy article. But Chip was no fan of Yoko Ono’s, and he did say that he’d read the article. Our conversation, in fact, left me with the distinct impression that the article was a contributing factor in his hiring decision—the cherry on top of my considerable editorial experience. And yes, I know, Playboy’s a much classier porn rag than Stag could ever dream of being, but at least Stag didn’t pretend to have journalistic integrity. We were an honest stroke book. And it was a pretty good gig for 16 years.

But you weren’t finished with me yet, were you? You had to go ahead and run that letter to the editor—the one suggesting that reading a man’s diaries was a crime as heinous as murder. Do you think John Lennon would have agreed with that analysis? Or maybe you think such notions only apply when “little people” read the diaries of the wealthy and powerful, not when members of the media elite read and publish without authorization the diaries of little people. Yes, that must be it—the Playboy Philosophy in the Age of Ronald Reagan.

Now I ask you, 25 years after the fact: Do you believe that the story has any journalistic merit whatsoever? I.e.: Is it something more than a press release Ono might have written herself if she hadn’t had you and the Sheffs to do it for her? I hope she at least thanked you for a job well done. And what did you hope to get out of it other than the grim satisfaction of currying favor with a rich and powerful woman? Was the article designed to do anything more than repress the story that Lennon told in his diaries and that I told in Nowhere Man? Is there something I’m missing here?

I will offer you a bit of friendly advice: Next time you try to whack somebody, make sure they’re dead before you walk away.

So, Barry, I do hope you’re enjoying your Mexican retirement. It’s a wonderful country you’ve chosen to live in—such warm and gracious people, in my experience. But I must admit, I am wondering if you ever read Proceso, the Mexican newsweekly, though I’d guess the answer is no. It’s not exactly a magazine for “gringo retirees”, is it? The Proceso editors and writers are into speaking truth to power, a concept that doesn’t appear to sit well with you at all. And they did give Nowhere Man the most amazing coverage when it was published there. As you probably noticed, they were hardly the only ones—even Playboy’s Mexican edition gave the book a good review. Jesus, with all those articles and the stuff on TV, you must have thought you were in Bizarro World and that I’d written Harry Potter or something. Too bad I didn’t know 25 years ago how receptive the Mexican media would be to Nowhere Man. I wouldn’t have bothered you with my query letter.

Anyway, that’s my side of the story.

Maybe we’ll talk again someday, perhaps the next time I’m in Mexico on a book tour.

Sincerely,
Robert Rosen Read More 

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