Robert Rosen

 

Last week, in a post about "The Chaos of my Bookshelves," I wrote about Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller. I said I'd read it about 10 times and that Miller was a huge influence on my writing.

 

A couple of days later I found a box outside my door, from my brother, Jerry, who was vacationing in California. He'd gone to Big Sur, where Miller used to live, and visited the Henry Miller Memorial Library. The box contained T-shirts, a tote bag, and a photo of Miller, signed by Erica Jong, who wrote a book about him, The Devil at Large.

 

In the above photo I'm wearing one of those T-shirts, with a quote from Miller's book Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. It says: "It was here in Big Sur that I first learned to say 'AMEN.'"

 

Should I ever be called on the red carpet, this is what I'll wear. Then I can say, "I'm wearing Henry Miller."

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

 

In last week's post, "My Habitat," I said I might share a photo showing the chaos of my bookshelves. Well here it is. The two shelves in the photo are similar to my other bookshelves—a disorganized collection of books that have come to me randomly. Some of them I have no idea why they're there or where they came from. Others I've read and loved and will comment on a few of them below.

 

Before taking the photo, I removed the artwork and most of the tchotchkes on the bottom shelf so you could read the spines. The top shelf I left as is to give you the true flavor of my library.

 

I'll begin with some of the titles on the bottom shelf.

 

Lying horizontally in the second pile from the left is Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller. I've read it at least 10 times and it was a huge influence on my writing. I went through a phase where everything I wrote came out sounding like Miller—that's how taken I was by his voice. He taught me that it's possible to write a great book that's voice-driven rather than plot-driven.

 

On top of the horizontal pile on the far right is The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford. It's considered a classic, it's been lying around here since the dawn of time, and I finally picked it up about a year ago. It's boring.

 

Below The Good Soldier is On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. It's another book I've read multiple times, beginning in my late teens. Kerouac turned me into a hitchhiking fanatic. Between 1970, when I took my first serious hitchhiking trip, and 1978, when I quit hitchhiking because the vibes on the road had gotten too threatening, I put on about 25,000 miles by thumb, through the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Israel. This summer marks the 50th anniversary of my hitchhiking from New York to San Francisco, more or less following the route Kerouac took in 1947.

 

Among the books standing upright on the bottom shelf is An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser. I haven't read it, but it did remind me that in 1978 I read his earlier novel, Sister Carrie. I remember little about it other than in the early 1900s it was banned for its "sexual immorality," and I enjoyed reading it more than I thought I would.

 

In the middle of the shelf is Household Hints & Handy Tips, a Reader's Digest book. I mention it only because my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, did much of the research for it, which means if you're looking for some handy household hints you can trust this book. We do. (Perhaps we should consult it for the proper care of bookshelves.)

 

City on Fire, by Garth Risk Hallberg, is the fattest book on the shelf. Everybody was writing about this tale of New York City in the 1970s when it was published in 2015—because the author received a $2 million advance, the most ever paid for a debut novel. I read it and it was pretty good. But $2 million good? This guy must have some agent.

 

On the top shelf, where all the spines are partially obscured, I'll comment on the artwork, tchotchkes, and other items. 

 

Long before Nowhere Man was published, I was working on a fictional version of the story, which I called Rockjesus. One of my former coworkers, Rita Trieger, designed the dummy cover, and I used it as part of the package I was sending to agents.

 

Other items on the shelf include a toy Space Shuttle; two paintings of trout by my friend the late John Babbs, a fisherman who lived in Oregon and was on the Electric Kool-Aid Acid bus; an antique menorah with a candle holder missing; and a couple of impressions of my teeth.

 

Behind the fish painting on the left is Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, one of the very few 19th-century novels I enjoyed reading. 

 

Behind the menorah is The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 2. In college, one of my professors described it as "the crème de la crème" of English literature. It is, and I still refer to it on occasion.

 

Lying horizontally towards the right is a pile of videocassettes. The red one on top is a video of Jeopardy from December 26, 2003, the first time Nowhere Man was a question on the show. The second time was October 18, 2023. So, every 20 years. Cool.

 

Now, if I can only find that copy of Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt. I've been meaning to read it for years and it's rumored to be around here somewhere.

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All my books (the ones I wrote) are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

 

Shepherd, a new Website that helps people discover their next great read, asked me to put together a list of books that were important to me, and explain why. This was a way to make readers aware of my latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, which I describe as "darkly comic" and "an unsentimental journey through mid-century Flatbush, where Auschwitz survivors and WWII vets lived side by side and the war lingered like a mass hallucination."

 

I called the list "The best memoirs, essays, and fiction that inspired me to write." It's also a list of books that helped me find my own voice. The most difficult part of putting the list together was limiting it to five books. Those five classics, which you can see above, were written by giants of American literature: Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Joseph Heller, who was one of my creative writing instructors at City College.

 

If I could have added a sixth book, it would have been Miller's Black Spring, because A Brooklyn Memoir is, in part, an homage to Miller's journey out of the "damp grime of his Brooklyn youth."

 

Been there.

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A Brooklyn Memoir is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

Mike Nichols, best known as the director of such films as The Graduate, Catch-22, and Carnal Knowledge, died yesterday, at 83. Below, I give you the scene from Beaver Street, set in New York City's Hellfire Club during a Screw magazine Halloween party, in 1985, that references Nichols.

I wandered into a back room and saw Buck Henry, the frequent Saturday Night Live guest host, standing by himself and observing with clinical detachment a bleached-blond dominatrix walloping a naked man with a riding crop.

“Come here often?” I asked Henry.

“I’m Buck,” he said, shaking my hand in a firm, businesslike manner. “Yeah, I’ve been to Hellfire once before. But I was expecting a classier crowd tonight—since Al invited me.” He gestured towards the man writhing on the floor. “Is this the kind of stuff that usually goes on here?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve only been here once before myself, and very briefly at that. But I hear in the old days before AIDS, you could walk in any night and find a half-dozen piss drinking orgies—stuff like that. I can’t believe people are dying now for a little fun they had ten years ago.”

“The statute of limitation for these things should be five years,” Henry said, just as the dominatrix whacked her slave’s penis with a wicked shot that made us both wince.

“Absolutely,” I agreed, unable to take my eyes off the S&M show. “But you’ve got to admit, this is something you don’t see every day. It’s like a scene from Tropic of Cancer. ”

He nodded and said, “I met Henry Miller once at a Hollywood party. He was there with Mike Nichols. All he wanted to talk about was The Graduate. All I wanted to talk about was Quiet Days in Clichy.”

I knew that Henry had written the screenplay for The Graduate, which Nichols had directed, as well as creating with Mel Brooks the classic sitcom Get Smart. “What are you doing now?” I asked. “Writing for Screw?”

“I’m waiting for my mother to die first,” he said.

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After reading Neil A. Chesanow’s Beaver Street review, Skip Slavic, a reader in Ohio, posted the following “comment” on Facebook. One can only hope that others agree.

Thanks to Mr. Chesanow’s fine review, this is a good place to say a few words: Beaver Street is indeed “splendid: elegantly written; well researched”—a completely enjoyable book. It does for the porn industry what Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels did for biker gangs, and that’s meant as a high compliment: the best personal, behind-the-scenes expose I’ve read since Hell’s Angels. The parts of the book that dealt with the comings (pardon the pun) and goings of the day-to-day travails of a working pornographer remind me very favorably of Henry Miller’s portrayal of life at the “Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company” [in Tropic of Capricorn]—the kind of giddy despair that comes through is disturbing… and brilliant. The discussion centering on the Lockhart Commission, Ed Meese, and Traci Lords should be required reading for anyone concerned about the lengths to which government will go to interfere in the personal lives of its citizens. In a nutshell, a really fine book, a remarkable story and an essential piece of history as well. Read More 

I’d like to say a few more things about Jamie Maclean’s review of Beaver Street in the Erotic Review. For one thing, I love the way he tied together the critique with references to odor in my book—my description of the fetid smell of the Hellfire club, the Henry Miller quote I used at the beginning, and his description of the way the book “captures the aroma of pornography.” I remember coming upon the Miller quote—“Sex is not romantic, particularly when it is commercialized, but it does create an aroma, pungent and nostalgic”—and knowing immediately that it belonged in Beaver Street, though I hadn’t connected it with the Hellfire scene. It was unconscious, as these things often are.

I can already see the term papers: “Odor Imagery in Beaver Street.” Which raises the question: Can odor be an image? I’m not sure. It doesn’t necessarily create a picture in my brain. But it does create a smell.

I also think I should take Maclean’s advice: Bottle the aroma and sell it like perfume. I’ve got a great advertising slogan: Beaver Street, for that unmistakable stench of pornography. Read More 

No, I’ve not yet given my mother a copy of Beaver Street, though I intend to give her one when she’s in town later this month. She is, after all, referenced in the book, though she doesn’t know that yet. (I don’t think she reads this blog.) And she is aware that her name is in the acknowledgements. “Do you want your name in the acknowledgements?” I asked her as I was compiling the list.

She said yes.

“Are you sure? You know it’s a dirty book.”

She said yes.

“You realize it’s going to be like being Henry Miller’s mother.” It was the best example I could think of on the spur of the moment.

“I’d like to be Henry Miller’s mother,” she said.

Well, happy Mother’s Day, mom. Hope you still like being Robert Rosen's mother.

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