Robert Roth

The Genius of 10th St.

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About twenty years ago Michael Kranish who was a manager at a public housing project in NYC one night saw a security guard recently here from Puerto Rico sitting in his security booth reading my uncle Sandor Voros's book American Commissar. The book is about my uncle fighting in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. It was published in the mid 1950s. There might be only 10 copies of the books left in the world. Somehow he got hold of one of them. And there he was 60 years later reading my long dead uncle's long out of print book. And on top of that meeting a good friend of the author's nephew.

To have just one person stumble onto something I wrote and get absorbed in it, argue with it, spin out with it, do whatever they will do with it, is beyond thrilling. Maybe they'll search for other things I have written, or use it as a key to a universe way in the past. Embark on an effort to discover something about the world I inhabited and people I knew. What if they follow the clues or information or evidence to wherever they lead. What might they find?

There are Many of Us

There are so many people with the same name as me. People whose politics, whose sensibilities at least from afar or maybe even up close are very similar to mine. All in fact have done impressive things in their lives.

The subtle distinctions I make, the choosing of words to express my deepest thoughts/feelings/political perspectives seem totally useless in distinguishing me from the others.

Still there are things I sometimes seriously disagree with, sometimes there are things I know nothing about. And often enough things are said in ways I wish I was the one who had said them. Particularly if sometime way in the future I am going to get credit for it.

How will those differences be reconciled? He said one thing here. Another thing there. He doesn't even acknowledge that he is doing it.

Robert Roth author
As a working-class queer nerd and author, Roth uses his writing to challenge the status quo and question the capitalist patriarchy.

Robert Roth (artist) paints idyllic visions of landscapes seen from a distance. Roth's atmospheric works, influenced by Modern luminaries ranging from...

Robert Roth (born 1950) was an active member in the anti-war, anti-racism and anti-imperialism movements of the 1960s and 70s, and key member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) political movement in the Columbia University Chapter in New York, where he eventually presided. Later, as a member of the Weatherman/Weather Underground Organization he used militant tactics to oppose the Vietnam War and racism. After the war ended, Roth surfaced from his underground status and has been involved in a variety of social causes to this day.

I first learned about this Robert Roth when a woman I met at a movie screening called me and pretty early on in the conversation told me she once had an affair with him. And while not being in the grip of a powerful and rare fetish, she did find the thought intriguing of maybe us having an affair also.

Often after seeing my name on a mailing list or a petition, I would get emails, phone calls and letters from people who thought I was him. Talking about some shared experience from the past. I would have to tell them that it wasn't me. 

And just a couple of years ago a new neighbor looked me up and was so impressed with what she read that no matter what I said I couldn't convince her that he wasn't me.

Robert Roth (born 1966) is a songwriter, vocalist and guitarist of 1990s Sub Pop and Capitol Records band Truly. He is still touring today.

And then there was Robert Roth gay movie critic, as opposed to the novelist, who died a number of years ago. I think he may have also started a film magazine in Chicago.

And what about the Robert Roth who wrote an eloquent letter to the NY Post furious at George H.W. Bush for calling someone retarded. He wrote about his two children who had Down syndrome and the wounding ignorance that slurs like that have as well as what they reveal about the person using them.

He had at least two children. I see he got acknowledgments in landmark books on disability. Yes. It is very likely he wrote the letter. As far as I know, he didn't write about his children anywhere else. That doesn't mean it is not true. He has a brother who he rarely mentions also. But I did find a manuscript of scattered typed sheets where he wrote a lot about him.

Then there was the Robert Roth who made an anti-war movie. He fought in Vietnam.

Now it is possible some of these Robert Roths are actually the same person. What do I know?

There was also a person whose name was close to mine who wrote a letter to Seven Days, the radical weekly not the sleek trendy weekly of a few years later, that a number of friends—yes friends—complimented me on.

And then there was the Robert Roth fighting for the preservation of landmark buildings on the upper west side of Manhattan. Why not?

Mobilizing support he used all his political organizing skills to convince people who thought there were more pressing problems that it wasn't a question of either/or. It was important as a way to resist the uglification of the city and the desire to erase history and that the huge power of the real estate industry had to be prevented from imposing its will whenever, wherever it pleased. He learned the history of architecture in New York. He became an expert on the social political economic forces at play when the buildings were built. He was very well versed in housing law. All this while touring the world with his band, raising at least two children. He was continually on the front lines of social activism, and while there is no recorded evidence it was rumored that he was the last person to swim the English Channel before it became a stretch of hard dry dirt. 

And before I forget there was an article in New York magazine that a Robert Roth and Arnold Socher opened up a club in lower Manhattan featuring drag performers.

That has to be them. Arnie's name is a little off in the spelling. It should be Sachar. But mistakes like that happened all the time.

It was mind blowing to stumble across this article. Arnie and I did so much together. We wrote poetry, short stories, public statements and public petitions where we had to gather signatures of as many people as we could. Our politics roughly, anarchist, pacifist, sex radical. We organized discussion groups, writing groups, sometimes gatherings to discuss a particular issue. We started And Then together with Shelley Haven and Marguerite Bunyan. So in some alternative universe we might have opened up a drag club. Again just reading the article some people might just assume it was us. In addition Arnie one time heard both our fathers discussing what kind of business they could set us up in. They were worried about our future. He said it was both funny and moving hearing them trying to grasp who we were and trying to figure if there was anything at all that could be done.

One time I did meet a Swiss banker at a wedding anniversary and spoke to him for about a half hour discussing the finances of the magazine and what it took for us to break even. “If lovers or friends or family members of the contributors buy copies that is a big plus.”

Dead Friend Press

Stephanie's novel 40% done
Muriel's book about her therapist crossing basic sexual boundaries 97% done
Shulamith's novel 100% done
Karen's memoir one chapter short of being done (there are extensive notes of what she might have included in the section)
My mother's dissertation 100% done

A writer I greatly admired and was friendly with died and left boxes and boxes of notebooks filled with descriptions of people, interactions of people in various circumstances, descriptions of nature and small town life. Powerful thoughtful descriptions infused with the full power of his genius. His two literary executors poured through them and selected sections and put them together into a book. Both were fine writers and though half a generation younger shared a similar sensibility. But even though all the words were entirely his, the book itself, how these sections interacted with each other was entirely theirs. It was unsettling. You had absolutely no idea how he might have used each of those sections in some larger work. In the way the sections were arranged, the book seemed much more politically and culturally conservative than any other work of his I had ever read. The executors were very close friends of his. So maybe they remained faithful to how he saw the world at that time. 

I hope not.

One time I read an article by a friend of mine that appeared in Ms. She and I had some political differences over the years. But in the article those differences were taken way beyond anything I had read from her before. I saw her later that week and she was livid. They had changed her ending without telling her. She was very embarrassed and distraught that people would think she would say those things.

I ran into another friend sometime later who said The Nation. just published an article under her name where they changed every word of it.

In the first issue of And Then Volume One, 1987 we published a conversation between Gary Sheinfeld and James Baldwin.

Baldwin: Giovani's Room was one of the most troubling I've written. You know I was warned not to publish it....I'm a Negro writer and I can't afford to alienate an audience...they told me. I don't think any artist can be told who his audience is or what to write. I believe you had a similar problem, with your short story, about a black child on the subway.

Sheinfeld: I think so. Yes at Columbia the editors of this journal wanted to publish it, but they said it was a racist story, because a white man is able to calm a black child while her mother remains helpless. They wanted to change a few key words. I asked them not to, I'd rather they not publish the story. They assured me they wouldn't change a word. They published it after changing “white” to “withered.”

Baldwin: It was a very beautiful story, very bitter, but very beautiful.

Now my uncle told me that Esquire wanted to change the ending of a short story he wrote. He told them he wouldn't. So they didn't publish the story. He felt he made a grave error. No other opportunity of that magnitude came his way again.

So my way-in-the-future biographer sleuth soulmate friend collaborator can't be sure that whatever appeared under my name, assuming it was actually me, really was what I had intended. Also will they have to track down these unpublished works of friends of mine. And follow wherever they lead. Traces of me might be found in at least some of them. 

We published the original version of Gary's story in And Then Volume 2, 1989.

Acknowledgments

One time in the 1970s a woman came over to me and said I can't read a book about feminism without seeing your name in the acknowledgments. This has been true of many other subjects as well. Jazz, opera, Eastern Europe, cook books, even real estate to name a very few. Books, articles, dissertations, an occasional footnote, being mentioned in the program of concerts and plays. Called out from the stage by a singer in between songs. Is he a critic, does he work for a record label, a producer, a musician, a song writer, a family member, a former lover? There are works that I feel particularity attached to. And then there are poems and prose pieces and music pieces dedicated to me over the years. I feel very appreciative and grateful and deeply moved when that happens. But still it might not be so apparent to someone looking back from the future as to the "why" of some of those acknowledgments.

As the lights went on in the darkened theater, my name was the last to appear in a long list of credits that rolled across the screen of When Two Worlds Collide. a documentary about the struggle over resources in the Peruvian Amazon. The credits disappeared in the Netflix version, eliminating crucial primary source material. Basically my role was to put the filmmakers up in my apartment when they came to New York. I also accompanied them to Chinatown where they bought film equipment from the back of a van.

How Reputations are Formed

My friend Marvin Schwartz was the official photographer for the Calder exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. The animal sculptures for the mobiles to be assembled were all inside a roped off area. Marvin stepped over the rope and started combing the hair of one of the lions.

A higher up in the museum, worried that he would damage the lion, started racing toward him waving her arms frantically yelling for him to stop.

A friend of Marvin who worked there raised his hand and said, “But Marvin is a genius.” She stopped in her tracks and said, Oh!”

And that, according to Marvin, is how he became a genius.

*

Roth's understanding of the cultural, political and economic forces in Peru was legendary.

A friend was doing a dissertation on the political economy of Peru, very detailed very technical work. Different from the more accessible, incisive essays she wrote for various leftwing journals. As we were putting together the first issue of And Then, I asked her if she could write an essay about the clashing economic forces in Peru. Instead she wrote a magnificent poem about Peru and the infliction of economic pain by powerful forces there to plunder the country. One great thing in doing the magazine is that I always have to let go of whatever preconceived idea I have about what the person will do. Usually it does take a couple of days to adjust. And then, Wow!

I also remember my friend once did a phone interview with Noam Chomsky. They just couldn't click on anything. Noam said, Let's try again tomorrow. And they did. And it went extremely well.

In any case, the dissertation was being written in very technical language. At one point she got totally stuck, I suggested that each month she send me something that she had written, “It will give you a goal, something to shoot for. I won't understand a word but so what.”

So each month she sent me a number of pages she had written. And I was right. I couldn't understand one word. Still I read everything she sent. One month she sent me something that somehow made less sense than everything else that made no sense to me. With great hesitation I wrote back and told her that maybe there was something off about that section. Being an exceptionally warm, generous and considerate person, she tried to be as nice about it as possible. Reminding me that my role basically was to be someone to send something to each month to motivate her to keep her on track and to mark her progress. That she very much appreciated what I was doing but there were no expectations beyond that. I loved her even more than before for the care she took in telling me that.

Three days later she called and apologized, telling me that her dissertation advisors told her that section was a total mess.

Later she submitted an article to a journal where an outside reader wrote a totally ridiculous nitpicking critique. I said why don't we turn this into a poem. And we took the words from the critique and arranged them into a poem. We called it Reader's Comments. It was published in a Socialist newspaper. Previously we had submitted it to Monthly Review. Paul Sweezy, one of the most important Marxian economists of the 20th Century who was both founder and editor of Monthly Review wrote back an absolutely gracious, apologetic rejection letter saying how much he liked our poem but the Review didn't publish poetry. It was such a high being personally rejected by him in this way.

Still as rejection letters go it was a distant second compared to the one another friend once received. When her short story was rejected by a very prestigious literary journal, the editor wrote, “Sorry. I just don't get it.” In a handwritten note underneath, the woman working as his secretary added, “But I do.”

In addition to being an adviser for a major documentary and the go to guy when it came to understanding the Peruvian economy, there was his life long friendship and collaboration with Fredy Roncalla, Peruvian writer, poet, musician, literary critic, political analyst that was crucial to the forming of his deep grasp of the subtleties and intricacies and beauties of Peruvian culture. Fredy and Robert wrote poetry together and essays. They would meet every Sunday before the flea market opened where Fredy would sell his jewelry. While they often conversed just with each other, people would gather nearby and try to overhear their conversation. So immersed were they in conversation they barely noticed other people being there. Even though the conversations moved seamlessly back and forth through Quechua, Spanish and English, what they were saying could immediately be understood by anyone who just spoke any one of those languages. It was a vivid example for a discipline started a couple of decades later by someone overhearing them and then using them as the original model to build a whole theory around. It is the study of how through facial expressions, intonations of the voice and an overflowing humanity and intimacy, “understanding” in its rawest and most authentic form, can break free from the confines imposed by spoken language.

There was immediate pushback from poets who knew them both and who thought to reduce them into being examples for a new academic discipline was a way to neutralize the actual expansive power of the words themselves.

No one knows how Robert at 105 or Fredy at 95, who were known to still meet regularly, felt about any of it.

*

Poet, composer, librettist, economist, cultural critic, map maker, all around troubleshooter

Two super close friends of mine who were working on an opera had a bitter falling out. They wanted to complete the opera but because each had taken an order of protection out against the other, they couldn't be in the same room together. I was asked to be the go between.

One would say “You go tell her that...” I would answer, “I can’t ‘you go tell her that.’ There must be a better way to say it.” Only to have the other person then say, "You go tell him that...” “I can’t ‘you go tell him that'...!’”

I also received a phone call from an entertainment lawyer who was beside herself about what to do. And so on and so forth until the opera was completed. 

And what an opera it was! And just for the record they later made peace and went on to do other magnificent things together.

There was a reading of the opera in the huge loft of the director. Instruments from the 13th century to the present in one section, posters on the wall from hit shows he had directed on other walls. In the program there was a special mention of how indispensable I was to the completion of the opera.

Afterward I was approached by a number of people. They asked if in some way I helped with the libretto. Or just assuming that I must have some vast knowledge of music did I help get over any rough spots in the composing of the music.

So if that program is ever discovered in the directors papers or written about in the biographies of the composer and/or the librettist, or even somehow salvaged from wherever it is in my apartment, it will provide further evidence of my multiple talents as a writer and musician. While my ability as a world class mediator will simply get lost in the shuffle.

*

Just as I was completing this section, I received Ahmed Abdullah’s memoir A Strange Celestial Road: My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra. In the introduction he described a conversation we had In Prospect Park in 1997 that helped start him on creating this historic work. It felt so good to read. He and his life partner the oh so brilliant poet and singer Monique Ngozi Nri have been a constant source of validation over the decades.

What I haven’t written about here is how much I like writing acknowledgments myself.

Often when I write acknowledgments I get swept away with pleasure in celebrating people who are vital to my life. If these acknowledgements survive into the future they will provide a treasure trough of clues for My Looking Back into the Past (my present) Companion. They will provide a sense of the people I knew, the environments I was part of. The joys, the terrors, the ferment, the tragedies, the magic and richness of sharing this time on earth with all these wondrous people I love beyond measure.

*

Pen Names, Pseudonyms, New Names, Different Names

Doris Lessing wrote two short novels under the name Jane Somers to see how people would respond to her work not knowing it was her who had written them. It was also done to highlight the difficulties of unknown writers getting their work published. A respected publishing house rejected the novel out of hand. A small publisher finally published it. It received a couple short reviews that were low key in their praise. Of curse when it was revealed who wrote them all that changed.

Both novels were released as a paperback called “The Diary of a Good Neighbor.” I got a copy of it as a present. Many years later the Living Theatre did an adaptation of one of the novels. The play was called Maudie and Jane. Judith Molina was breathtaking as the lead character.

*

One time in my early 30s I was more or less just staring through the window of the New Yorker Bookstore not focusing on anything in particular when Stanley Aronowitz, radical social critic, author of many books and articles, and non stop political organizer came to stand next to me. He pointed to a book and asked if I knew who the author was. I said I didn’t. He then told me it was a pseudonym that Murray Bookchin the great anarchist theorist used at some point in the past, quickly adding that he thought it was cowardly of Bookchin and anyone else not to write under their own name. He sounded totally ridiculous.

Without even thinking I blurted out. “Well people have their reasons. In fact I’ve written books under a different name that you use in your courses.” Which was totally untrue.

Stanley was one of the creators of The Free Association, a radical libertarian socialist/anarchist school. He was in his early 40s. He had a huge personality. A mix of insecurity, massive ego, profound commitments, genuine accomplishments, warmth and a compulsive need to assert his brilliance and importance.

From treating me like an “equal” he was now very unsure and clearly nervous about where I fell in his hierarchy of importance.

“Robert, Do you write popular best sellers?” 

“No, radical social criticism. Like I said, you are using my books in your courses.”

He grew more nervous.

“You can tell me. I promise I won’t tell anyone.” 

“I’ve said too much already,” I replied, a bit guilty that I was carrying it too far, but still locked into it.

“Really. You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”

 “Forget I said anything. I was just joking.”

A few days later Joyce Johnson, the writer and editor, who organized a writers group I was part of, came over to me at the The Free Association. With a big conspiratorial smile on her face she whispered that Stanley had come over to her apartment after our exchange and asked her who I really was.

She said she answered, “I’m sworn to secrecy.”

Now I’m not one to talk. A scene for a movie was being filmed in a long unoccupied bar on the corner of my block. I stood behind a police barricade watching the filming when an extremely friendly black man his shoulder warmly leaning into mine started talking to me. He was straight out fun and we just got into a totally riotous back and forth. We were talking and laughing when suddenly it dawned on me that it was Richard Pryor. My voice cracked in mid sentence. I tried to continue as if nothing was different. Fortunately for me he had to go back to work.

“Nice talking to you, man.”

“Nice talking to you too.”

A number of years after my conversation with Stanley in front of the bookstore, while attending an anarchist conference in the early 1980s in Montreal, I showed Murray Bookchin a copy of a magazine where my short story In the Audience had recently been published. It was the first story of mine published since college.

It was a long short story. It had the feel of a novella, even a novel. It was about people who inhabited an alternative universe of radicals, who had one foot in and one foot out of the mainstream world that they were trying to change, overthrow and yet find a place in. The ways also they had internalized the values of the dominant culture and how the impact of those values seriously undermined the types of transformations they, with great imagination and courage, were devoting their lives to achieving.

 As soon as Murray took the magazine from me his eyes lit up. A big smile crossed his face. He saw that Raymond Aron had an essay in it and without even the faintest acknowledgment or congratulations turned immediately to Aron’s essay. On top of it he wanted me to share in his delight. Those tiny slights, these tiny hurts, in this case more an expression of his massive self-absorption than any desire to diminish me, though in this case I wasn’t even present enough to be diminished, can, at least by me, be quickly rationalized away, overly understood and easily buried. Only to unexpectedly surface like now many, many decades later.

*

Early in her career, the brilliant Argentine pianist Arminda Canteros developed a huge reputation as a classical musician. But unknown to most people she was also an extraordinary tango player. At the time it was considered unseemly for a woman to play the tango. It was considered too bold, too sexually assertive. Somehow a radio station hired her to have her own show where she would play the tango. But they insisted she assume a male persona whose name would be Jacinto. People went crazy over Jacinto and during the 1930s and 40s, he developed an avid following. To keep the ruse going they created a whole ongoing story about his life. For example the publicist from the station would feed juicy gossip items to the local tabloids. Last weekend Jacinto and a beautiful (unnamed) starlet were sighted at a romantic hide away by the ocean.

Eventually the stigma of women playing the tango lifted and Arminda would give full concerts performing as herself. Over the years she would tour the world sometimes doing classical music concerts, other times concerts where she only played the tango. Once in New York after a tango concert, an older man came up to her and said it was the most beautiful tango he had heard since listening to someone named Jacinto play the tango on the radio a long long time ago.

 I went to a concert of Bennet Lerner who had once been a student of hers. It was through him I had met Arminda who was also at the concert.The concert was in the small theatre inside a piano store. After the recital there was a reception in an upstairs showroom filled with pianos. Bennett was on the far end of the room when he heard one note coming way from the other end. Arminda had hit just one key on one of the pianos. As if almost connected by an invisible string, you could actually see Bennett’s ears perk up as he spun around searching, smiling, instantly knowing who had played the note and where it had come from.

*

My uncle keeps popping up in this piece. I sent my cousin Jos Kraay, Sandor’s daughter, the first few pages of Genius of 10th St. where I write about her father. She sent me this email in reply.

Thank you Robert, what is a name. When my father Sandor as the last of the family went from Hungry to Amerika, he was asked his name. He thought it would be better to to not gave up his Hungarian name, Voros, Voros was translation of red from Russian, so he translated and as red, he meant Roth, but they understood Wrought, therefore his name is different from the rest but sounds the same. When Sandor was here in Amsterdam in 1966, we went to the big synagogue at the Waterloopplein, Sandor said to the woman who was in the entrance that he was not a jew at all, she laughed and said you are an Askenace.

My uncle used two names. Alex Wrought in his daily life and Sandor Voros in his creative public life. People keep asking me if I have an uncle Philip. I do. But not the Philip they are asking about. My uncle Philip was pretty spectacular in his own right. His name was Philip Voros. He toured the country as a mind reader. Also held private mind reading sessions at rich people’s homes. He had a photographic memory and developed a recipe for diet bread. A bread company stole his recipe. I saw an item in the newspaper that he won a suit against the company and was awarded damages. Not exactly a fortune, but still something.

When I was in the first grade we went around the room to introduce ourselves. I said I was Robert Roth (pronouncing it as Wrought) The teacher said, No it’s “Roth.” I said it was “Wrought.” I was furious. I went home all upset I told my father they said my name is Roth. I told them it was Wrought. He said they’re right it is Wrought. He tried to pronounce “th “and just couldn’t. Even now I have a slight moment of hesitation and discomfort when I have to say my last name.

My father, Irving Roth, who came here from Hungary as a kid was never fully comfortable in any language. He spoke Hungarian, English and a bit of Yiddish.

Twice I wrote a letter to the editor using the name Laszlo Voros, Laszlo being my middle name, my mother’s “maiden” name. I felt a sense of freedom to write something I thought, without the need to add a 10th qualification to what I was saying. I also named a character in a short story Robert Laszlo. My father got a particular kick out seeing a character who clearly wasn’t based on me with that name.

As for Jos. Her mother met my uncle in Spain. She had volunteered as a nurse in the fight against Franco. She and my uncle had an affair there and Jos was conceived. With the defeat of the International Brigade her mother went back to The Netherlands and my uncle came back here. Fast forward. For reasons too complex to go into here, Jos and Sandor met for the first time when Jos was in her late 20s. I knew nothing of her existence until I was in Amsterdam in 1968 where my aunt Gladys was also visiting. I went to see Gladys in her hotel room and with maybe only five minutes of a heads up, in strides this woman dressed in black leather, all filled with attitude, passion, warmth and having something to say about everything. In short, looking and sounding like all the people on my father’s side of the family. She is now in her mid 80s. Five books could be written about the astounding life she has lived.

*

Many people have written pieces for And Then using a variety of names, sometimes writing under different names in the same issue. I never ever reveal who wrote what except with their permission, even with a co-editor. In issue two we published a couple wrenching, jumping with energy, personal letters to ex lovers written under different names. At some point one of the writers, someone pretty well known, became very frustrated that people didn’t know it was them that had written the letter. So they said I could reveal it if it came up. The person they had written the letter to originally had made a number of other lovers miserable in the same ways. Once I could reveal who wrote the letter, I sold a bunch of issues to those who had waited by the phone for the call that never came.

*

I invited my friend Shulamith Firestone into a discussion group. She was withdrawing from public life and really didn’t want to be recognized during that period in time. She agreed but only if I introduced her as Kathy and not tell anyone who she was. I agreed. It was not a great thing to agree to. At the end of the day it was worth it. Because our friendship blossomed. But I would never do it again except if someone was really in trouble. Because you are constantly making up things on the run, misdirecting, deceiving. It became very unpleasant.

One time someone in the group brought up her book The Dialectic of Sex. As the person was about to say something, the conversation shifted direction. Shulamith laughed and later said that that would have been the only time she would have heard a totally honest response to her book from someone who didn’t know they were speaking to her.

Over the years Shulamith used various versions of her name. You can identify each distinct period of her life as well as when any one of us met her by what name of hers we use. As well as what name we use when writing about her.

*

It was rumored that Roth wrote many books under a whole series of different names. He was very prolific. Each name opened up a whole wide avenue for expression. Before computers James Baldwin, the iconic mid to late 20th century Black author had typewriters (a popular writing instrument of that period) in different parts of his house in Southern France, each with a piece of paper from a different book he was working on.

But in Robert’s case no one really knows. He was very secretive about it. In a surviving oral history recording a friend of Ann Snitow (Ann is credited with being instrumental in forming what was known as the second wave of the feminist movement), said Ann had introduced her to Robert whom she called a “major figure in the downtown art scene.” It was said by many others that his endorsement of an event would guarantee a huge turnout. 

Asked about Ann’s description of him, Robert at the time replied that he didn’t even know what the downtown art scene was. But that he went straight home and wrote a poem.

Roth was protective of these multiple creative identities. He would never acknowledge that any of them were him. Or maybe in fact all those disputed identities were really other people and not him. As a biographer, historian and sleuth I am torn whether I am justified in revealing identities he kept protected. A kind of outing that has no real purpose. What are my responsibilities to him/they and what is it to history. Compounding it all I am far from certain who wrote anything other than what has survived. Things written under his name are in the Aronowitz Pavilion where relics from the ancient moderns are stored. So even speculating out loud about authorship of works attributed to others creates doubt. Even if disproved, once that doubt is there, it remains there forever.

One thing I plan to discuss though are unattributed social political psychological categories he created as well as aphorisms he wrote without signing his name to them, that have become part of the language. I will trace them back to him and discuss their original meanings and discuss how those meanings have changed and evolved over time.

Part Two or multipage footnote

“Who are you favorite writers?”

“Margaret, Amir, Brian, Tania, Marlene, Gilbert.”

No. I mean who are you favorite writers?” 

“I just told you. Tania, Amir, Margaret, Gabbie, Brian, Marlene, Gilbert. Oh I forgot to include Luisa.” 

 “I mean who are your favorite writers?”

“And you too of course.”

I delivered newspapers for close to 30 years. For a few of those years I delivered the Poetry Calendar to various locations throughout the city. Hundreds of events were listed. Within the pages of the calendar no event was privileged over any other. Unlike most of the other things we delivered this felt like something more than just a job. My boss was Donald Lev, who with Enid Dame, was co-editor of Home Planet News. Both Donald and Enid were almost mythic presences on the alternative poetry scene. For him delivering the Calendar was part of his poetic calling. For me it was still a job. But a job with emotional benefits. HPN, Central Park, Socialist Review, Socialism and Democracy and The Sun were older siblings of And Then. Our magazine reflected different aspects of each. Working with Donald we had endless discussions in the van, a kind of constant cross fertilization of our two publications.

In the calendar no event or any particular writer was treated as more important than any other. So at least inside its pages everyone was treated equally. The poetry calendar was sold and taken over by very politically astute, culturally aware editors whose entrepreneurial energy mixed with insurgent cultural awareness would, in their minds, merge seamlessly with the most dynamic forces inside the poetry scene. In this new vision of things certain events and writers were highlighted. Who could object? The cutting edge writers to be featured were part of something vital. And the new poetry calendar was going to reflect that vitality, to amplify it. In the very first issue there was a beautiful photo of a friend of mine on the cover. Along with a very warm profile of her which included an interview about her life and work. It was a strange feeling. My dear friend through no fault of her own, an active symbol of my [am not sure what word to use]. And here I am distributing her all over the city. Which under normal circumstances would be downright thrilling. It was ironic and a bit comical, but still genuinely unsettling. In what was started as a service to a community where multi hierarchies of talent, status, location, power, money, lack of money and consciousness often felt intractable, the calendar reflected the part of that world filled with yearning, respect and far reaching artistic ferment.The new calendar pretty much was designed to become an organ of all the stratifications inside the poetry world or probably more accurately in the semi alternative, semi insurgent version of it.

All this was clashing inside me as I was carrying a bundle of the calendars to Poetry House when it was still located in a small office in SOHO. Convincing myself that I was less upset than I was, rather than waiting until I could put the bundle on a table to cut the plastic straps binding it, I took out my box cutter and tried to cut it open while walking. The blade slipped and I badly sliced a couple of my fingers. Back in the van, I wrapped my fingers with a page from one of the newspapers we were delivering to absorb the blood and try to slow down the bleeding. We went straight to a clinic where I got my fingers stitched up. 

When Arnie Sachar and I started discussing doing And Then we wanted it to be as open as possible. The age range over the years has been 5 to people in their 90s. A mix of people who saw themselves as writers and artists and people who didn’t. It could be someone who hadn’t written since junior high school and some who weren’t yet old enough to be in kindergarten. And it would include a whole range of people coming from different backgrounds different cultures. People with widely different experiences. We decided early on not to have readers notes except where it was crucial to what was being written about. So at least inside the pages the pieces and contributors were all equal. Marguerite Bunyan and Shelley Haven who started the magazine with us, who worked on the design over the years tried as much as possible not to have one piece privileged over any other. Nothing was considered or treated as a filler.

While doing the first issue of And Then I asked my friend Gary Scheinfeld, a writer and close friend of James Baldwin if he thought Baldwin would agree to interview Gary for the magazine. I thought it would be an interesting reversal. I very definitely didn’t want it the other way around. It started out as the interview we envisioned and quickly evolved into this powerful conversation between two close friends who loved and admired each other deeply. Sadly the conversation chronicled [James Baldwin’s, Baldwin’s, Jimmy’s] last day alive in the United States. The piece ended as he was about to board a plane back to France where he died a few months later.

Kate Millet also agreed to contribute an art work. How did this come about? I was going with a friend to an exhibit of hers. The Loony Bin Trip was about her experiences in the mental hospital. On the way there my friend had just given me a copy of a publication he was working on. I said why don’t you wait, maybe you would like to give a copy to her. He said he is not into that type of thing and I should just keep it. We were in the room for maybe thirty seconds when he grabbed the magazine out of my hands and ran to give her the copy. The exhibition was of Kate’s drawings. I thought maybe she would give us one for the magazine. I spoke to my friend to try and get up the nerve. He said he would ask her and he did. And she agreed. He then said to me, maybe she could do the cover. Why the fuck are you suggesting that when you know Shelley is doing the cover. I was really angry. But there is where the temptation and the corruption begins. Two world famous artists appearing in the very first issue. And one doing the cover. 

 What are you guided by, a silly sense of loyalty? Big things can happen here. And of course it wasn’t just loyalty to Shelley that I would be betraying but also the deep sense of exhilaration and satisfaction that I got from working with her. And the spectacular creation she would come up with for the cover.

Fortunately and unfortunately because of certain questions of logistics things fell through with Kate and the drawing. I pretty much let it slide. I was in fact more relieved than disappointed.

Here were two people, public figures, who politically and spiritually were as close to us as could be. We had some personal connection to each. In that sense it was organic and continuous to how we took in the world. Still to have two world famous artists in the first issue would have very possibly killed something vital to its emerging essence.

Recognizable names (just because someone was well known didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be included) in a sense helps everyone else in the magazine. It draws attention to the magazine and everyone in it. But the down side and it is a very serious downside, is that a very famous public person no matter how you might want to get around it will create the lens though which the magazine will be seen. And the stratification in the outside world will reproduce itself almost immediately in how most people will take in the other work. As well as how the magazine itself will be defined.

*

Recently, I finished reading Ahmed Abdullah’s memoir A Strange Celestial Road: My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra.

In addition to being an extraordinary musician and band leader (and friend), Ahmed is a vivid story teller. Reading the book you actually hear the “music of the spirit” pulling you along as you keep turning the pages. 

The book is one of celebration, yearning; a deep exploration of creativity, pain. Connection. Resistance. 

Profound social and cultural analysis is laced throughout. Oppression, neglect and brutality in the overt and more subtle forms are looked at, then looked at again. He describes and reacts to the devastating fault lines in the society as well as the serious fault lines that [exist, are created] in the responses to it.

 It is a story of his life beginning at a young age, but also of SunRa’s vast, remarkable life, and Ahmed’s complicated, at times tense relationship with him. There are many crucial historic and personal insights about Ahmed’s life in the Arkestra. His own years as a musician performing with it. The book also brings to life the musician driven Loft Movement of the 70s. Insurgent, communal and forging an alternative vibrant music [scene, community]. The Loft Movement grew as a response to forces of repression and oppression and marginalization. We see people immersed in a culture of intense ongoing creativity. We see the tragedies that can unfold. The tensions, the cruelties, the intense disconnectedness as well as the profound life affirming creativity of the musicians. The strains and pains pulling at them. The enormous love binding them together.

These dynamic are important to look at and understand. But what also is looked at with extreme sensitivity is how new and far reaching insights when applied to real people in real situations can curdle and become dehumanizing and one dimensional. Insights hardening into truism can at times be comical, absurd but also deeply hurtful if not outright destructive.

One particular scene keeps playing itself out in my head. There was an all black music venue where whites were excluded from. It was presented and thought of by the people running it as an autonomous liberated space, space free of the intrinsic racist dynamics that would automatically be set in motion even if the most decent white person would be there. One night a number of groups were scheduled to perform. A musician came with his white [girlfriend, partner, woman]. The man at the door said the woman couldn’t come in. He was somewhat uncomfortable doing it, glancing in her direction saying no disrespect intended. The musician was indignant. Particularly so since no one told him about the policy beforehand. Back and forth like this. The woman spoken about in the third person, treated more like an object of contention than a person, finally expressed her own bewilderment and anger. Then a parting shot of anger from the musician as they left. 

If she had come into the venue, the dynamics inside would change instantly. Keeping her out, a real person not an abstraction, intrinsically changed the dynamics inside also. And winds up being written about in a book 50 years later. 

Discussed briefly but pointedly in Salim Washington’s Forward, and alluded to inside the book itself, without Salim or Ahmed fully going into the whys of it, the sexual, romantic relationships between white women and black men is spoken about as a particularly complex and fraught one. 

Inside the venue that night groups performing would create beautiful music together. The venue and others like it were in significant and real ways liberated territory. Where racism and humiliation and oppression [dissolves, melts away, is transformed] But also at the time except maybe for occasional dancers and/or singers, transcendent in their otherworldly/ this worldly brilliance, black women for the most part, if at all, were not performing with any of the groups. Instruments like the trumpet or the saxophone were played exclusively by men. Invisibility, one of the most powerful tools of oppression, one that the male musicians knew all too well and had resisted with great courage and imagination, was being used against women musicians without giving it a second thought. Except where it was willfully and very consciously done.

“Certainly, [Sun Ra’s] views on women were stringent, whether they were Black or white. Sometimes he’d say that women interfered with the creative process, so much so that he didn’t encourage females to attend rehearsals. But then he’d make exceptions. June, for example, was one woman who was regularly allowed to be in on rehearsals. She seemed to transcend every one of Sunny’s dictums and helped to create his persona—the enigma wrapped in a paradox. He didn’t think too much of women as musicians, and yet there were two women pianists I frequently heard Sun Ra praise, Dorothy Donegan and Mary Lou Williams.” [A Strange Celestial Road, p 120]

And then there was the question what was the relationship of venues like these to the citadels of mainstream culture like, let’s say, Lincoln Center. Do they exist outside the cultural pipeline as [autonomous, confined, obscure, liberated] venues. Was this an autonomous space rich in creative ferment—subversive and independent. Were the musicians pitted against each other. Who would be selected, highlighted, their talent validated, celebrated by the cultural machine. And when and if the music reaches into the cultural mainstream is it absorbed and transformed in some negative way. Or in very positive ways reaches and impacts much larger numbers of people. Or some combination of all the above.

Throughout the book we see musicians change in very dramatic ways. As they transform themselves, laying claim to their space in a society structured to control and humiliate and diminish them. And inside the groups themselves the tensions between leaders of a band and the others in it, between those who have, will have a large public following and those who do not and will not, is explored with great love and sensitivity and pain and at times anger.

Ahmed grapples with these deep clashing [forces, contradictions]. He rests inside those spaces and others like it, with great humanity as well as with humility and self-reflection. If people can tolerate the deep discomfort of those spaces and don’t immediately need a way to escape from them, I think far reaching forms of awareness, change and resistance are possible.

My friend Lana Povitz is writing a book about Shulamith Firestone who was one of my all time closest friends. Her project has brought Shulamith vividly back to me. Among the things she will write about will be the early days of radical feminism. My strong guess is, but would not remotely presume how she will go about doing it, the structural oppression in the society and the fault lines inside the response to it will be looked at, explored and discussed. The burning hot intensity of Shulamith and the other women in the first rush of insight and awareness that ignited the second wave of the women’s movement. The breathtaking connections made at dizzying speed, as awareness and understanding just kept multiplying almost by the second. Then the implosion and crackups that followed. Many of the same issues—personal/political/structural —that are explored in Ahmed’s book, some in different guises along with some that are very different, will also I think be discussed.

As if in a call and response to Ahmed’s description of Sun Ra’s views on women, in her first draft of chapter one, Lana quotes Shulamith saying:

“Though men in general believe women in general to be inferior, every man has reserved a special place in his mind for the one woman he will elevate above the rest by virtue of association with himself. Until now the woman, out in the cold, begged for his approval, dying to clamber onto this clean well-lighted place. But once there, she realizes that she was elevated above other women not in recognition of her real value, but only because she matched nicely his store-bought pedestal. Probably he doesn’t even know who she is (if indeed by this time she herself knows).”

*

I am writing this shortly after the Oct 7 massacre by Hamas in Israel and the mass slaughter and destruction in Gaza by Israel.

One of the very few places I can turn to where people are talking about it with any real seriousness is Democracy Now. People being interviewed clearly trust the consciousness and integrity of host Amy Goodman and co-hosts Nermeen Shaikh and Juan González. 

In addition to what is being reported an extra layer of horror is watching someone interviewed one day —a reporter, an aid worker, a thirteen year old girl whose legs have been amputated —and learn a few days later that that that person often along with their entire family has been murdered by an Israeli bomb or soldier. 

As the carnage mounts even some writers in the mainstream press are beginning to speak with rare seriousness and concern. In cases of reporters who have been killed it is hard to know whether they have been specifically targeted or their death is more a random part of the wholesale carnage taking place.

One thing I have noticed that in listening to Democracy Now there is very little interchange among those interviewed. The positions and statements that people say seem at times subtlety, at other times markedly different from each other. The large outlines of what is said are similar: serious revulsion and opposition to the Israeli orgy of violence in Gaza, criticism (with various degrees of intensity) of the Hamas massacre and the taking of hostages, long standing opposition to the Israeli occupations of Gaza and the West Bank, condemnation of settler violence with the complicity of the Israeli military and government on the West Bank. Everyone agreeing and calling for an immediate ceasefire as a minimal demand they all can agree on. Now does the way people speak reflect real differences, differences that can lead to very different outcomes down the line? 

 Shulamith once told me that bitter skirmishes over seemingly small differences taking place on the outer margins can widen as they work their way from the margins to the [mainstream, center] of what people will focus on in the future. At which point those differences can magnify and widen, often impacting the shape, focus and direction of a movement. So are these differences just questions of semantics or differences that seriously portend very different, and if history is any guide, often tragic outcomes. 

As important as what people say, is what they don’t say. And it is always important to pay attention to both. Though often enough you might not be clued in until way later to what was left out.

Something not said could be an oversight, or someone might think it is implicit to what they are saying. It might only be different words used to express shared outrage and pain. Also someone might not want to say something that feels like they are capitulating to bad faith objections and being trapped or folded into an agenda they are actively resisting. It also can be a form of conscious misdirection or outright manipulation. Or can lead someone to think they know more than they do about what is happening. Also words and ideas don’t remain static. As more people are exposed to them they can start to take on different meanings. And powerful ideas often get coopted, absorbed, transformed. The liberatory power of those words reduced, diluted. So as a result people often talk past each other. 

I think there has to be a place where these differences can be discussed. Right now as things grow increasingly more dire everyone on the show seems to implicitly agree that in the midst of unspeakable horror that discussion will have to wait.

One thing about the show that seriously does upset me. It is kind of what the new poetry calendar was trying to achieve writ large. Other than where it is important to know, like if someone is a doctor in a hospital that is being bombed, people are way too often introduced by the status conferred on them by powerful corporate institutions: award winning writer, long time Harvard Law professor, best selling novelist, Dean of the Media Department at MIT, star of the new hit Netflix series, winner of the prestigious Booker prize, Three time Emmy award winner, Nobel Prize recipient in biology, Pulitzer prize winning, Recipient of the prestigious MacArthur grant, Acclaimed World Renowned .... Golden Globe nominee for their role in.” All said with a flourish that seriously reinforces the potency of those institutions in giving them the legitimacy to determine who will be listened to or not. Achievement means institutional and corporate validation of what you’ve done. And who should be paid attention to. All the more disturbing because the people themselves are serious, socially/politically engaged, often physically courageous and have important things to say. The intense stratification creates a kind of animated docility where your thoughts, opinions, curiosity, commitments are validated, yet simultaneously you are over and over again being told to know your place.

*

There was a documentary called Shulie made in 1970 that surfaced a couple of years ago. It was about the then 22 year old Shulamith Firestone in art school. She speaks of a life she wants to live where every word, every brush stroke is infused with meaning. It was about a year or two before all of everything started clicking into place for her. She doesn’t yet have crucial categories at her disposal, some of which she herself as well as others will create in the years to come. She is piecing things together with words and concepts that are available.

I think we are at a similar point right now. We are going to have to figure something out. Circumstances [might, could, should, will] force us to. Or if not we might be frozen in place. Or worse just ride the momentum to unexpected and grim places that our increasingly unexamined and significantly inadequate assumptions might take us.

On Turning 80

Between twilight and daybreak
Lovers who were never lovers 
Come to me and say,
“You were always so clueless
How can someone be that dense.”

Saw my ancient face in the mirror of the cafe. First time since the pandemic I didn’t wear a mask inside. The first time that I bought coffee there that they could see my face. Ghostly, faded, my thinning hair powdery white. How do I deal with this ever growing older, old, old me. 

At 79, this is the first year I said kaddish on my father’s yahrzeit, the anniversary of his death, when I was older than he was when he died. Looking at him from this side of the divide I feel his vulnerability/fear. How he was only a younger version of me. In fact everything he ever did in his life he was younger than I am now.

A dream by Myrna Nieves:

I wake up, and miss many things, including my friend Ana and her curious face.

Sueño

My friend Ana came to me (she passed away years ago). I tell her:
—Ana, let’s visit the past.

A whole world of people we knew shows up in a slightly blurry way. They move around and seem to be inside a room or several rooms. Our world is separated from that world by a thin transparent membrane or wall, like the one made by a bubble of soap. We enter the “bubble,” which does not burst, and join a familiar world of 30 or 40 years ago. I tell Ana: “this is how we can visit any time frame, any place.”

 We look at the people in the world we entered, including us at that time, and delight on how lively and joyful they are. It is not blurry anymore. They cannot see us. We can watch, but not interact with them.” There is so much passion and light on their faces. They are all beautiful, in the prime of their lives. I watch them more than I watch me. I am aware that I am there at that time, 40 years younger, but for some reason I mainly focus on the people I knew. They are not concerned with their bodies; if they look good and are healthy or not. They just are. Bright, alive, fully existing in the now.

I don’t know how long we can stay in this time. We are just visiting, but I am also aware that there is no pressure to return to our world.

*

Ros Pechesky 81 year old professor arrested at a major demonstration in Grand Central Station calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. I hadn’t heard her name for over 40 years. I was so happy that she was still on the planet. I don’t even know if we ever spoke. But I remember her as someone front and center in the struggle for reproductive rights. And I had a very vivid memory of how she looked. The next day I saw a clip of her being arrested. Her voice sounded different. She looks the way politically engaged older women looked when I was younger. The same commanding presence, commitment and unswerving purpose.

 Dec. 2, 2023.

I turn 80.

I see people who I think I know. They have grown ancient. After the initial confusion I try to place them or more try to confirm my initial “could that be, that must be, is it.” I recognize them by my general impression of them. I look for familiar mannerism, how they scratch their head, tap their feet. Maybe by their shoes. Often by something I never realized I had observed before.

I attended the birthday party of a friend who turned 88 at the rehab center where he was recovering from a fall. The place slowly filled up with members of a music group he was part of. A group whose concerts I have attended for decades. I heard someone say something about “D minor.”

I sat sunk deep into a sofa, making groaning sounds, a bit exaggerated, whenever I had to get up. For years now I thought a recording of the sounds many of my friends and I make when we get up would be a huge worldwide hit. I guess mostly for a niche audience. But a huge, huge one at that.

I keep reading about what 80 looks like, feels like, is capable of being. For me the experiences of my childhood are growing further and further removed from what other people’s childhood memories are. Even then all of our childhoods from the time I was a child were quite different. But still the differences across generations are pronounced.

I have a friend who is 37. While much of our thinking is very similar we have very different associations about who and what brought us into consciousness. Sometimes our conversation go too quickly and those differences don’t fully register. In the sense I have a second conversation, always rich and interesting in my head after we separate. “What in fact did she mean by that? I think I responded too quickly.” Many people she read and was influenced by, I knew as actual people. Some of whom she now knows in their older forms.And many of the wide range of people she knows and has engaged with are people I have never heard of. 

That has always been the case. Even now as people keep dying, people I never knew or at best barely heard about, as I read about them, major blanks get filled in. Things of great importance were happening in and around me and off to the side as I was stumbling, sleep walking my way through the decades.

The last few years I have grown more distant, more removed, more cut off. A fear, an emotional lethargy, a sense of resignation intensified during the pandemic. 

Illnesses related to age also loom large. Dread is a constant companion. But what I also do find very disturbing is the attempt to continually socialize me or imprison me into very demeaning social categories. Negative or positive stereotypes about how I look, what my desires have to be, what I am capable of and on and on and on about things that have absolutely nothing to do with who I am. Though a lot to do with what I have to contend with: the structural and personal ageism and bigotry that I am continually faced with. And in that way has had an impact on who I am. Not to absorb the bigotry coming at me is an effort that does change you.

*

One thing I have noticed is friends and family of friends that have died, people I felt close to, maybe not in the same way as to the friend who died, slip away. I make some efforts to stay in touch. But those don’t take hold. The pandemic I think played some role in this. Before, I might be invited to a gathering, a party, a seder as a way to stay in touch. But when those stopped, all contact basically stopped also. This hasn’t always been the case. Things are a bit more fluid than that. But it has happened more than I expected. It has not been hurtful in the sense of feeling rejected (well maybe a little). But painful in the sense of missing them. 

*

A quiet death, a painful death, a violent death, an accidental death, a drawn out death, a whatever death—expired is a word that seems to describe the state right after your last breath. Maybe that’s too tame a word to describe a violent death. Your first breath at birth is the one you breathe in. Another thing I learned just recently.

*

A sudden scream of anguish and dread coming out of me in the middle of the night bolting me upright in my bed. A groggy, worried voice from the other room asking me if I were okay. I reassure her that I was. 

Death terror seized me. With a rawness I haven’t experienced since I was in my early teens. Not the when of my death or the how of my death. But the very fact of it. Periodically that terror seizes me again. The reality of it, the unreality of it. Not as fiercely as that night. But there never the less.

At some point as a teenager the death terror left me. I actually remembered the sense of relief I experienced when it was replaced by other fixations and pain.

Now sixty five years later it is back again.

Right after I wrote those last words, I wrote a comment to the Times, very tangentially related to an article I had barely glanced at, “Easter 2050. Here’s What American Religion Looks Like” by Ross Douthat. I was surprised that they actually published my comment. Even more surprised when one of my favorite commenters (a reader who responds in the comment section to articles in the paper) responded to what I wrote. We kept going back and forth, the paper still publishing our exchange, even as we moved further and further away from the original article.

Even though a bit lighthearted, my own state of mind was very unsettled when my initial comment sprung out of me. I think it was a way to neutralize the actual unsettled state I was in. The intensity of my emotions were more visceral than my words would indicate. I often write about very intense emotions as well as very scary, unsettling situations. But this was different. The very act of writing and reading my fellow commenter’s responses triggered panic. After one exchange I lay down and for about thirty seconds images kept fracturing, spinning and spinning ever faster in my head.

The Exchange:

Robert Roth
NYC 4h ago

60 years ago I was 20. In 60 years I will 140. Time moves fast and slow.
9 REPLIES

617to416
Ontario via Massachusetts 4h ago

@Robert Roth Or, if you look at it another way, you’ll have reached infinity—or maybe negative infinity.

Robert Roth 
NYC3h ago

@617to416 Since it might be my forever future what do you mean by negative infinity.?

Robert Roth
NYC2h ago

@617to416 Have been thinking and writing (at least trying to write ) a lot about that recently.

617to416
Ontario via Massachusetts 2h ago

@Robert Roth I guess if you’re religious, it’s infinity—eternal existence. And if you’re not religious then maybe it’s eternal nonexistence?

617to416
Ontario via Massachusetts 1h ago

@Robert Roth On immortality (or the lack thereof)? I’ve always thought that the infinity of the universe focuses briefly into a point that is our individuality and then, when we die, that point dissolves back into the infinity of the universe. Or something like that . . . I think this is why I’ve always been drawn to Wordsworth’s poetry.

“….And I have felt

 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things.”

Robert Roth
NYC50m ago

@617to416 Thanks. Sort of right where I left off this morning. Might quote you in my piece.

617to416
Ontario via Massachusetts 37m ago

@Robert Roth I’d be honoured—and would love to read it.

617to416
Ontario via Massachusetts 16m ago

@617to416 Oh, and I’d also say that philosophically there’s something in my thinking very close to the idea from the Bhagavad Gita of the self (atman) yoked (yoga) to the self of all beings (brahman). So Wordsworth and Krishna . . .

Robert Roth
NYC 3m ago

@617to416 definitely grateful the infinity of the universe focused briefly into a point where we could have this exchange.

Robert at 80 [Written when I was 65]

What a Pathetic Life I Lead

A German filmmaker in her 70s
A Zimbabwean woman in her 20s
Love them both
Wildly attracted to each
Have no chance with either

“I’m a very good lover, a terrific friend and a lousy boyfriend.” I would say this to women and it worked like a charm and more often than not we would have sex. An anarchist poet living in the Village. Sometimes that’s what it would be. We would keep it that way. A bit impersonal, more impersonal maybe than it should have been. It created a space of excitement and had an allure of freedom. Sometimes my actual talent would disrupt the fantasy. “Hey, you write beautifully” with a slight surprise that was always a bit hurtful. But still I enjoyed it. It moved from a kind of cool “impersonality” in playing out a fantasy, to a subtle but real distancing which while at times disorientating was not the worst thing. Because I thought it was still mostly play acting and not all that impersonal. And I said what I said with conviction because I thought it was true. But unfortunately emotions crept in. Jealousy. Possessiveness, expectations etc. One lover said, “I have the worst of both situations. I’m too caught up with you to have other lovers. And I don’t have the security that a commitment would give me.” And that was it in a nutshell. Not exactly a nutshell. Because it doesn’t include my own insecurities and jealousy. Once I understood that I really couldn’t follow through I could not say it again. It would have just been a line, a lie to get sex. And without conviction it wouldn’t have worked anyway. So I stopped saying it. Have not really been able to figure out what to say or do since.

My downstairs neighbor. A very thin dark brown woman always spectacularly dressed. A Mohawk haircut and an aura so bright it lights up the stairs or the street, always bringing a big smile to my face. Before we actually met I saw her talking to a tender, muscular man who works in the restaurant on the ground floor of my building. His father had recently died and he had been away for quite a while to be with his family. They stood in the vestibule, her empathetic face filled with emotion, her heart wide open and present. A couple of months later we spoke. A fashion designer from Zimbabwe with magic, soulfulness, tenderness and wild, brilliant perceptions. My head spins whenever we are together. What can I have with her, a woman in her 20s maybe early 30s, who wants to get married and have children. And who doesn’t want anything interfering with the plan.

There is nothing I can say at 64. If I were 28 or 33 or 42 I wouldn’t have wanted children any more than I do now. And I certainly never wanted to get married. A younger me now would probably be different than the younger me then. Who knows how and in what way. But for better or worse it is this older me that’s at issue. What would I need to change in myself to have even a remote chance of being lovers with her? 

Friends with benefits? My feelings for Aziza too intense and complicated for that. Fuck buddies? There is I guess a difference between fuck buddies and friends with benefits. Fuck buddies might in fact be easier. More straight forward. More direct. Why? I don’t know why. Just felt like saying it. Though I haven’t heard that term for a while. Francesca’s fuck buddy moved into her apartment after 9/11. He came over the night before and it was two years before he left. What starts out as friends with benefits often winds up on court TV. At 65 being Aziza’s “boy toy” is probably out of the question. But then again stranger things have happened.

I think again of my beautiful downstairs neighbor. For the first time age really comes in on me. I think of myself at 80. That is just 15 years away. Though 50 was a while ago. And what does she need with that? And how then can this intimacy be expressed without committing her to the possibility of tending to an old man. Obviously anything can happen to anyone at any time. But here there is an almost certain future if I live that long. A commitment to each other would take that into account. Eighty though is still potentially very vibrant and very sexual. Another reason monogamy as an ideal is shit. With some real fluidity between us whatever sexual connection we had would not limit her to it. Me neither I guess. But in this case it would be her I would be most concerned about. Why am I obsessing and fretting about something that is very unlikely to happen? I guess because it’s fun to do. 

Months later. We speak about one weekend before we became good friends, when she was still living downstairs, when she cut herself off from everyone and everything. No email. No phone. A four day urban retreat, looking deep into herself, trying to find a “purpose,” a direction, a deeper meaning, a deeper pursuit. I tell her about a small cottage on the top of a hill somewhere in Zimbabwe where I imagine living when I’m 80. In my fantasy Aziza has created some space for me on a large plot of land that is dedicated to some very significant pursuit. Maybe a place for children. Maybe something entirely different.

 “What will you do there?” she asks. “Well, I’m there. That should be enough,” I answer. “You have to do some work,” she laughs.“You can’t just live there.” “I’ll be a presence. What more do I have to do?” “A presence is more than enough,” she answers, yielding to the power of my argument. And so there it is. My future. A cottage on a hill in Zimbabwe. The destination a certainty. The route getting there very much a mystery.

Walking toward the East Side I come to Greenwich and 10th where there is a fork in the road. Totally forgot where I am going, who I am visiting. A total absolute blank. This has happened a few other times recently. Two times at that very spot. Scary feeling. Tried to relax. The destination returned and I continued. At 80. Hot muggy Zimbabwe summer. Wild committed energy everywhere. Up and down the hill. Not knowing where I am. Which direction I am going. Maybe this is something that will happen from time to time. Hopefully no more than that.

The total blank was very scary. Maybe try to surrender to it next time.

My father at 76 had sold his business, but still tried making deals, still overflowing with energy. “You’re still wheeling and dealing,” I said. “I’m doing more wheeling than dealing,” he replied.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————Postscript:

At 73 I might have a whole new future.There was a magnificent Times Op-Doc [documentary] focusing on a heavy set black woman in her thirties who had taken up pole dancing. She was beyond graceful. She was strong, limber, just shining with energy, focus, charm and determination. She spoke of the racist, sexist body shaming forces she had to overcome in pursuing her pole dancing career. In addition to performing she had started a pole dancing school.

Here’s a link to the video. The comment section seems to have disappeared. So I reproduce the exchange we had below the link.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/opinion/dangerous-curves.html?comments#permid=20725831

NYC December 7, 2016
I just turned 73. Was wondering what I should do to strengthen my body and increase my flexibility. Admittedly from this chair to a pole might be a long trek. But then again...

Roz The Diva
Brooklyn December 8, 2016
Robert, I’d be HONORED to have you in my class. HONORED. I’m not kidding at all. Hit up my website to see my schedule: rozthediva.com/schedule

I was walking on air for two days.

***

A recently discovered fragment called Endless Footnotes has been authenticated as being original Roth writings. Evidence is very strong it was written at a point in his life that his usual melancholy and fears and terrors were in a heightened state. We still do not know what Endless Footnotes was in reference to. But it does provide an important window into his life at a very vulnerable and critical point. Though not knowing what they are in reference to greatly limits what we can confidently deduce from them.

What we are less sure of are the thousands of comments written under his name that appeared in the long defunct New York Times, a popular news source of the period.

Many of these comments have identifiable elements of Robert's own writing. But there is much speculation that most if not all of them were not written by him. That they were in fact generated by an early version of AI. The slight variations in the focus of the comments seem like primitive attempts at making them look genuine. But they feel very much like programmed variations, not anything real. They don't even have the flattened out monotone of some of his other writings. The arid sound of the words devoid of any real music would likely be due to early AI program inadequacies. The comments quoted in Endless Footnotes do in fact seem genuine. Though it could be an attempt at humor, a wry form of counter appropriation, using what was meant as a form of undermining his integrity or was conversely an attempt to piggyback on his reputation, and by turning it on its head, claiming the words are his own. And by that very claim  giving them a relevance that otherwise would not be there.

What is very clear, and this everyone agrees on, none of it could have been written by another Robert Roth. The cliches repeated and repeated over and over again—even if computer generated—were personalized cliches very particular to him.

*****

I'm having the hardest time with this next section. It goes on in so many directions at once. Maybe just saying it out loud will help. It is about different ways I have been written about, sometimes by name, sometimes as an inspiration for a fictional character, sometimes in poetry, sometimes in prose, as well as ways I have written about others and myself. Where it is all made up, where the emotional truth is pretty accurate but none of the facts are, where it all goes off the rails. 

Some versions of me, not by name, appear, for example, in poems by Louise Rader. Once, while reading a new book by her, a collection of poems each in the form of a single sentence, the following poem brought me up short.

NOT JUST LUST SENTENCE [Hmm]

With female soft murmuring upstairs
the man's hourly Tourette cries have
mutated to whispers and I think how
could she on those crusty sheets by
a towering heap erupted cascade of
envelopes crucifixes on walls seen
when a locksmith toiled there but
what of my long ago lover on 13th near [Oh damn. That's me]
Avenue B whose floor tumbled in cast
aside layers of typed brilliance our [wait]
anarchist hot-lava-lust sloshing toward
his newsprinted bed my compulsive
aesthetic cleanliness flung to the fire [okay]
escape rail until the uptown bus a not
quite Kafkaesque cockroach emerging [EEEk! Damn! I didn't know that!]
from my burgundy velvet bag to pause
beside leaves of the shocking pink [Oh God! Come on!]
embroidered rose as I stifled screams 
to brush off attention determined never [I guess I can see how that could be off-putting]
to return to that squalor of gouged out
plaster yet drawn to it again and again
a huge post-modern painting unblessing [What happened to that painting?]* 
forth though a sense of our golden touch. [That part I remember]

*A painting by Charlotte Hastings. It was an explosion of brilliant color and energy. My aunt Claire compared it to an orgasm. Sadly, very sadly the painting got irreparably damaged decades ago.

Louise Rader whose storied career as a poet, tax resister, psycho therapist, dancer is well chronicled in the recently discovered Breath and Brilliance an anthology of poet activists in the upper Northeast of what was then the United States, now an alliance of interconnected self-sustaining communities. Published in the late 21st century, it provides a comprehensive sweep of the creative forms of resistance from the early 1900s to the time the book came out. The chief archivist from Transitional Upheaval an organization chronicling historical epochs in the midst of major transformations called me with the discovery. Keeping with the traditions of the period Rader referred to her artist endeavors as a spiritual calling. A close textual reading of her huge oeuvre has identified a handful of poems that very likely were about her romantic relationship with Robert. There is a subtle at times marked shift in the breath and cadence of the poems when writing about him.

*

Diana Liben gave me a piece of paper with a key to the real world identities of thinly veiled characters in Delmore Schwartz's The World Is a Wedding. Many of whom, including Meyer Liben her former husband still friend who died a few years before, had become very prominent literary/political figures in the 50s, 60s. People whose work and reputations have faded over the years. Though the influence of their work is still with us today. Occasionally someone writes a book or makes a documentary and that period comes alive again, at least for a short time. One character in The World is a Wedding is The Kid. I would see the person it was based on at the annual Christmas party thrown by the daughter of another person appearing as a major fictional character in the story. Over the years I would see The Kid occasionally walking around the Village. Well into and past middle age, he had a bounce and buoyancy to his walk that always conjured up the image of The Kid to me. We would say hello and chat for a minute or two. “The World isn't a Wedding” he laughed retelling the story the one time I brought it up.

I have no idea where that list is. The information on that list is in fact historically valuable. It could still be buried in some drawer along with Herschel Walker's signature on an attendance sheet he signed as a student in my friend's philosophy class at Georgia University. At the time he was the most famous college football player in the country. My friend, who herself has become an influential social political thinker (fictionalized aspects of her have flitted in and out of my own work over the years) gave attendance sheets after the semester with Hershel's signature/autograph on them as gifts to her friends. She said Herschel would hold court in class, the young white women in particular hanging on his every word. And if he had a notion, it would remain fixed in his brain (my friend called it idée fixe) and nothing said could shake him from it. A trait that has grown infinitely more extreme and disastrous over the years. I visited my friend in Georgia at the time and we sat on the grass outside the packed stadium. We stayed for a while as we listened to the public address announcer describe what happened after each play: Herschel Walker seven yard gain over left tackle. First down.

Lana Povitz is writing a biography of Shulamith Firestone. In the course of doing her research Lana came across an unpublished novel that Shulamith wrote. The Adventures of Faygi and Jude tn Amerika.

 Desire. Disappointment. Massive tragedy. Massive horror. It covers decades of life, struggle, awareness, pain. It is the story of two women deeply, often bitterly locked into each other's lives. Lana, Shulamith's sister Laya Seghi (so similar to her sister in poignant, profound ways) and I spent some time discussing the book.

One interesting aspect of our conversation was moving back and forth to the sources of some of the events written about and keeping in mind that these were characters in a novel and not the literal story of Shulamith's life. Lana and Laya agreed that both women Faygi and Jude each represented different dimensions of the massive reality of who Shulamith was.

I suspect for Lana, who is writing Shulamith's biography, the novel offers a treasure trove of clues. And my own admittedly prissy and unprovoked bringing up a couple of times that we should remember this is fiction no matter how closely resembling real events it might be, was more trying to protect my own blurring of lines in the fiction I've written than anything Laya and Lana were saying. In addition hearing Laya's response to fictionalized events that were based on real fraught interactions between Laya and Shulamith that had dire real world consequences was straight out riveting. As is her soulful, deeply searching, at times harrowing, eulogy written about her sister.

In my case, the fiction I wrote when I was in my 30s was about people straddling an alternative, insurgent radical world and a mainstream world they were significantly, militantly in opposition to. Yet in some serious, often unexamined ways, were still a captive of. Living lives both of resistance and compliance.

In my long short story In the Audience, a short story with the feel of a novella, many of the characters were composites of people I knew. Some are just totally made up. Those that resemble or were seriously based on real people were not remotely written about in the same way as if I were writing about the actual people themselves. They do take on independent lives. I did try and change their physical appearance. And I did make up situations that they found themselves in. Now what was interesting is that people who didn't know who inspired my characters often recognized people in their own lives who were similar to them. And the characters I created or who created themselves felt very distinct and alive to me. In another book Health Proxy written much later which some called a novel, some called a memoir, I saw it more as an extended meditation. I mixed fiction with real events. There were times I used someone's real name, other times when writing about the same person I might use a made up name or no name at all, presenting them as an entirely different person.

Maxwell Berman, one of the major characters in In the Audience was in many ways an exaggerated version of myself. Unlike me though, Maxwell says the first two things that come to mind rather than have a third thought that undercuts the other two. So the energy of original insight just flies out there. Allison one of the other characters was in a large part inspired by my friend Muriel Dimen scholar, theorist, therapist, poet, song writer, political activist whose transcendent brilliance infused so much of her work and so much of her life. In the story there is an intense push pull between Allison and Maxwell that parallels the early days of our relationship. 

“During the first months of their friendship Maxwell and Allison would meet every couple of weeks for half an hour or forty-five minutes, usually in the late afternoon in a coffee house or restaurant. They would meet in a space in Allison's tight, carefully structured schedule. Maxwell who had less to do could more or less be the one to accommodate.

“Their meetings were often tense and peculiar. They would speak past each other. They would both be dull. Allison would look up at the ceiling. Maxwell would talk past her shoulder. Allison would withdraw. Maxwell would grow panicky and start speaking compulsively, speaking loudly with uncharacteristic bravado. And the more Maxwell would talk the more Allison would withdraw. And the more she would withdraw the more he would talk. Allison would feel she was drowning or she was being consumed. Once, in the street, she grabbed her chest and grew faint. “Please, no more,” she demanded. Whenever he left her Maxwell would feel relieved. It's not worth it, he would think. And then a half hour later he would be flooded with affection and longing….

One day Maxwell blew up. “I'm always in the interstices of your life,” he said with a flourish. “I'm neither your friend or your colleague. I'm neither in your public life or your private life.”

Allison answered, “There are certain things, very intimate things, that I can tell you. Other things I make a conscious decision not to. It must be painful and confusing. Our conversations are stilted. There is something twisted in our friendship.” And with a flourish of her own, “From now on I will be consistently less intimate.” [In the Audience]

Soon after I wrote the story I gave a reading, The reading lasted about 45 minutes. Arnie said all through it he watched Muriel who previously had read the story, pacing up and down the aisle of the auditorium, shaking her head, nodding her head, laughing, looking annoyed, knitting her brow, laughing, smiling, grimacing, shaking her head, nodding, laughing.

Another time, much later, in what may have been the best reading I ever gave, Muriel was sitting next to Stephanie Hart. They didn't know each other. In this case the pieces I read had nothing at all to do with Muriel. Stephanie said Muriel was totally involved in my performance. Slow down, stand up straighter, what a good line, I never read that one before. Project your voice, why did you have to read that one! Stephanie said she couldn't stop laughing to herself. Like Arnie, she got totally lost in Muriel's reactions and couldn't exactly listen to my reading. And like way too many things, as much as I knew it, I didn't really appreciate or understand or ever fully take in how deep Muriel's love for me was.

*

A fictional character named Robert Roth appears in the novel The Cutting Edge by David Lansky.

The novel is divided into two parts. The first is The College Essays of Jenny Delight. No one is quite sure who Jenny is. It is an obvious pseudonym since there is no student by this name at the college, a community college on Long Island. It is a hilarious section laced with social and personal insight as Jenny tries to understand the world around her, often using categories she's learning, sometimes the most abstract categories available, and infusing them with vivid meaning. The second section, Bill of Sale, is the posthumously-discovered manuscript of Sociology Professor Fred Snyder. It is a harrowing account of very vulnerable and often screwed-up people who are totally against their society. It is a section revealing, with extraordinary power, the ruthlessness of contemporary capitalism and its relentless destructive force.

Robert Roth is an anarchist poet and editor of a small literary magazine called And Then. Even though he appears only on rare occasions, he cuts an impressive figure. Other than a slightly below the surface resemblance to me, there are noticeable differences between us. Which in no way diminished the thrill I felt whenever he popped into the story.

As for David Lansky the author, that really is the pseudonym used by the radical sociologist and poet George Snedeker who at the time was teaching sociology at a community college on Long island.

How am I expected to figure any of that out? Who’s real, who’s not real. What’s fiction, what’s a memoir, what’s a scrap of paper with scribblings on it. 

 In the case of Robert, not the fictional Robert but the actual Robert, by his own admission he was not a reliable narrator, a popular term among academics and literary critics of the time. He learned the term late in life and said as categories go it describes him perfectly.

No way to say it other than just say it outright. People were totally confused back then. Confusion was an emotion I learned about in Advanced Research Studies, but never experienced until now. Everyday I sound more and more like Maxwell Berman. How do you experience Stockholm syndrome with a fictional character and not a malevolent one at that. I feel like I am a total captive of his anxieties, of his consciousness. Fortunately everyone has reassured me that this is only a temporary condition.

And then there is Robert Roth, stealth deus ex machina, appearing here and there in a memoir being written as we speak. This Robert is also a fictional character. I met the writer L.K. Madrid a decade after the period written about. In the book Robert swoops in when there is an insoluble problem that needs attending to. For example when L.K. is writing about times he was out of the country and wanted to include things that were happening elsewhere, fictional Robert is brought in to give a first person account of having been there. Or if not there, he might repeat what others have told him or how the underground press had covered it. Or if the political tensions of the era needed to be explored, described or shed light on, Madrid engaged in mock discussions with me where I had to get into character and become the fictional Robert Roth. Sometimes he would say things I might actually have said at the time, other things that I would never have said but L.K. wanted that perspective articulated in the book. That was something he was always very particular about. Some of those discussions, some of the very best ones, have already been cut from the book because the book was getting too long and unwieldy.

In Madrid's groundbreaking masterpiece we see early examples of Roth's thinking. Scattered through the book are crucial discussions between the two of them. While some of Roth's thoughts are all over the place and at times appear to contradict each other we see the genesis of ideas that will take form later in life. Ideas that have passed down through the generations and are, in only slightly altered forms, still with us today.

***

These jottings were found on scraps of paper buried under water damaged notebooks in an abandoned warehouse in Red Hook a breakaway region in the former United States.

 A visitor came to see my mother in the hospital. Someone whom she has spoken to for years on the phone. A woman younger than myself, the daughter of a friend of my mother’s who had a four year ending badly painful affair with a psychoanalyst, a“brilliant charismatic” man who touched her in deep and profound places. Places, she said that her husband could never reach. At the time she told her husband straight out about what was happening; he still wanted to be with her but she told him that she had to leave him. After her breakup with the psychoanalyst she returned to her husband. From time to time, she still sees the ex-lover who has grown very old and frail and helps take care of him.

My mother suddenly very alert waded headlong into the conversation, constantly referring to the ex-lover as “That son of a bitch.” In truth her words seemed to grow more out of loyalty than real conviction. But when Ruth insisted that she wasn't a passive victim in the affair, that it was something that she chose to do, my mother answered that charisma was a powerful allure and people with it have some responsibility for its power. Back and forth. Great discussion about love, life, and desire.

*

I remember a conversation with Kirk Sale who wrote a book about SDS. I was friendly with him. I was close to his wife Faith Sale who along with Joyce Johnson had organized a writers group at the Free Association. Two other people Steve Fried and Ann Rower also conducted a writers group there. Both in different ways helped me start writing again.

One time Kirk invited me to a talk he was going to give. For some reason I couldn't make it. I think, though I may have come up with other ways to justify it to myself, but as I vaguely remember it, it was a decision not to go. A decision in the sense I could have dragged myself there but I was either too exhausted or depressed to go. Not that I had to be somewhere else. I didn't think he would care. He was genuinely upset I hadn't come. Not knowing your own power or importance to another person can lead to hurting them in ways totally unintended.

Though as I write this, one real shameful act on my part is flooding back to me. Knowing, but maybe not fully knowing, but how could I not know, I talked myself into thinking that it would be okay to do something else than go to a party I had agreed to go to. I convinced myself of all the reasons it wouldn't matter. I didn't know the man that well, I did have something that really mattered to me to go to which I found out about after I agreed to go to his party, there was no way to do both, or it would have been too difficult to do both, he wouldn't really care, so on and so forth. I was very apologetic when I called to cancel. It was creepy self-serving bullshit on my part. I knew it was important to him that I be there. The person was deeply, seriously wounded by it. It was like I had punched him in the stomach. And there really was no way to undo it.

*

One  similarity between Arnie and Shulamith was both could, in Shulamith's case particularly when she was younger, put all their focus, very intense all absorbing focus on a person they were talking  to. If someone else was there they could be totally beyond ignored. Kind of obliterated as if they didn't exist. Never pleasant under normal circumstances. Both because of the power of their personality and/or the power of their fixation it could be incredibly hurtful. I think it was a kind of extreme obliviousness on their part. Not everyone felt negated of course. But it could create real seething anger and sometimes long-lasting bitterness.

*

When Arnie and I did our first reading together, Bayard Rustin and Igal Rodenko both came and asked if people could comment afterwards. I was so tense and nervous and also worried that we would be upstaged by these extraordinarily gifted charismatic beyond brilliant speakers, that once they spoke all the attention would move in their direction. Arnie was more than okay with it. He was far saner than I was about it. But in his case he was more preoccupied whether someone he was totally in love with would show up or not. All through his part of the reading any sound coming from the back of the room would cause him to pause and look at the door to see if they had come. As for my saying no to Bayard and IgaI, I won't say it was exactly stupid because I was so insecure. But it was an example where insecurity can radically undermine something that would benefit you in a big way. If Bayard Rustin and Igal Roodenko spoke, as well as anyone else there who felt they wanted to speak, it would have added a dimension to the night that would have been outright spectacular. As they were leaving Bayard said, “Quite an experience.”

*

I was standing with a group of other demonstrators outside the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco. James Forman Sr. ( I am almost certain it was him) very calmly laid out the various things we could do. He spoke of the dangers involved and the legalities of each. In no way did he try to subtly coerce us to do anything that we felt uncomfortable doing. Or take risks we didn't want to take. He was extremely respectful of everyone there. There was room to make whatever decision each of us needed to make.

As for me I infiltrated the Mississippi Scranton for President delegation. Someone else infiltrated the Alabama delegation. At some point we unfurled a banner that in dripping red letters said JUSTICE. A woman called out. “You're not from Mississippi.” A man then firmly but not in any way violently, escorted me out of the convention hall.

My mother later told me she had seen me on television and thought, “Now what has he got himself into.”

 *

My father died on the day that Geraldine A. Ferraro was nominated to be the Vice Presidential candidate during the 1984 Democratic convention. He had lived his whole life and never saw a woman nominated to be a vice presidential candidate. It was something he would have been very excited about. Her husband, John Zaccaro, had once been my landlord. I paid $23 a month rent and the building was well kept. So all through all the negative things written about him over the years I always retained some residual affection. That is until way later John and Geraldine viciously forced a friend of a friend out of a brownstone they owned in Greenwich Village where he had lived for decades because they wanted it for their own use. He was very old and sick at the time. And died shortly thereafter.

*

There was an article in the Time magazine stating that Denzel Washington was the sexiest black male entertainer or something like that. The writer made a point to say that Harry Belafonte did not have anything close to the same sizzling sex appeal. A couple of days later my friend gave me a ticket to attend Richard the Third in Central Park starring Denzel Washington. And right in the box next to me was a buoyant Belafonte with a friend all excited about Denzel and the play. "How could he not be hiding under the covers?" I laughed when I saw him. He had recently organized Nelson Mandela's visit to New York. I eavesdropped on their conversation. He knew so much about Shakespeare. All through the play I was trying to get up the nerve to ask him if he would write a short piece about Shakespeare for a small magazine my friends and I (still) put out. I never did get up the nerve to ask.

*

Listening closely to people with empathy and curiosity was one of Roth's most commented on attributes. Though along with genuine interest in the person, he was also looking for material for And Then. So a passing comment in the midst of any discussion might catch his attention, and he would wait until there was an opening in the conversation to bring it up. Not knowing when something said might issue into a request started playing a role in any and every interaction with him.

My friend Bennett Lerner, the great pianist, would drink a big bottle of Gatorade before a concert. It gave him a lot of energy. I would often tell people about this. Many years later, I spoke to him about it. He said he didn't remember doing it.

Five Stories That Have Never Made Their Way into the Pages of And Then

1. Emmet Durant grew up in Lake City, a small town in South Carolina. His father had been in the military. Originally, I had met him in New York where he worked as a bartender at the Annex located on the Lower East Side. He was white and the clientele at the bar was largely, though far from exclusively, Black.

Lake City was a small Southern town that had a segregated movie theater. There is a hole in how I remember the story. It went something like this, I think. Segregation was outlawed. But at the local movie theater, if a white person wanted to buy a ticket they could, while a Black person would be told that the theater was sold out. Emmet was part of a group trying to integrate the theater.The strategy was to mill around with the crowd outside the theater and at a signal, two people, one Black, one white, would step forward and go to the ticket booth and attempt to purchase a ticket.

While Emmett was waiting his turn, an old white man who knew him since childhood, who had real affection for him, who always treated him kindly, started up a conversation about outside agitators stirring up trouble. Emmett listened politely, said a few words, and then it was his turn to step forward. As he moved to the ticket booth, he glanced back and saw the old man looking bewildered, hurt and betrayed.

I tried looking Emmet up on the Internet. His name wasn’t there. I called up a Durant in the town that he once lived in. There were a number of Durants living in the area. I got an answering machine and didn’t want to leave a message. If something had happened to him, I didn’t want to have to have them tell me. I liked him so much and it was so long since we had contact.

2. The second piece involves Robin Walsh. I first saw Robin riding a motorcycle through the streets of Cambridge, Mass. As a freshman at Radcliff, she was a long jumper with world class ability. At her very first meet, an unsanctioned event, she leaped beyond the sandpit and broke her ankle. Though she recovered, she could never compete at that level again. The sandpit was where it was because meet officials never imagined that a woman could jump that far.

3. The third story involves Richard Brown, whom I had known for years and with whom I had a warm acquaintanceship. We never really spoke, but we both always lit up when we saw each other. I remember him mostly from Broadway Charlie's, a bar I would hang out in. It was a bar that Gary Francis Powers would come to. Powers had flown the U-2 spy plane that was shot down by the Soviet Union in 1960. Here he would sit on a bar stool drinking silently for hours. Don’t have any other memories of him. Just an occasional figure out of the corner of my eye. And I also remember a broad-shouldered guy, rumored to be a hit man, who would sit at another part of the bar. He was a bit more gregarious. I saw him once lose his temper, but it didn’t seem like it would escalate beyond that.

Richard was always quiet, not in a sullen or angry way. Didn’t seem like he drank all that much. I didn’t drink at all, just hung out with friends, some of whom did drink a lot. Richard had a sweetness and warmth about him. One afternoon, while I was sitting alone at a table, he asked if he could join me. It was the first time we were ever this alone with each other. He told me about having once been convicted of murder in a very public trial, months of New York Post headlines. He was sent to prison. Two detectives who were sure he was innocent spent the next two years gathering evidence that would eventually clear him.

Try looking up Robin Walsh and Richard Brown. Particularly Richard. I think he moved to California. I don’t think it is even possible to count the number of Richard Browns who live in the country. The Robin Walshes, while not even remotely a close second, are way too numerous to track down. Maybe I could find Robin with some

effort. Recently I got the address of a mutual friend from long ago. But I am far from sure.

Robin was a good friend. I spent one summer in Cambridge, MA. immersed in a world made up mostly of lesbians and gay men. One time, I spoke to Robin and told her that no one ever called me just to say hello. She called the very next day. I am still touched by the memory of that call. She was a singer as well as an athlete. She was straight out gorgeous with a playful sparkle in her eyes. She also played basketball, had a killer jump shot, and was an excellent swimmer for her college team. But it was as a long jumper that she excelled at a world-class level, and that would never be the same again.

4. The fourth story involves my friend Sharon. Once when we were teenagers, she told me, at an event at the local synagogue, that she and two friends of hers, two young black men, the same age as her, got stoned smoking grass while hanging out in a Jewish cemetery and started scrawling graffiti on tombstones. She thought at the time that it was an ironic hoot that three kids who were as politically and emotionally aware as they were, three people you would least expect it from, would do such a thing. I always remembered that story. In part because it was very clear that what they did wasn't motivated by hate or malice but by stupidity and lack of awareness of the impact it might have. I thought that distinction was important to keep in mind. Once while visiting Jackson Heights for the High Holy Days, I ran into her walking with her mother. I pulled her aside and asked if she would be up to writing about it for And Then. Not exactly the smartest or most sensitive  thing to do after not seeing someone for decades. But it was something I always was hoping she might write and reflect back upon. So it was still very alive and active in my mind. She said it never happened. And that was that.

5. The fifth story would have been a scoop of international importance, even if only a thousand or so people would have first seen it.

Someone I knew had possibly the most grotesque job of anyone I have ever met. He had been a medical technician in China. His job was to examine death row prisoners to see who had compatible organs for someone with influence and power who needed a transplant. He would then select that person to be executed. After the execution, he and his medical team would run out to immediately extract the organs for transplant. The story he was going to write was about selecting a seventeen-year-old prisoner who had been in prison since he was thirteen for murdering someone. In China, no one could be executed till they were eighteen. But because his organs were especially needed, they moved up the execution date. The piece was about to be completed when a front-page article in the Times spoke of rumors about the harvesting and trafficking of organs from executed prisoners in China. The writer panicked and thought there could be terrible consequences for his family in China if his piece was ever published.

Memories
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv0jrL3Uzpo

Shortly after Arnie's mother died he was in such a state of devastation I felt I needed to do something to try and help pull him out of it. I suggested we write a piece together called Leslie Klein's Petition where Leslie Klein would speak in front of a room of left intellectuals and activists, people Leslie felt insecure around, was always trying to impress, and demand to be paid attention to and be respected. I said Arnie, present the rawest version of yourself. What you would ask for if you weren't embarrassed to be totally vulnerable. The important thing to remember is that Leslie Klein should not necessarily be an unappreciated neglected genius but someone who like anyone else deserves to be celebrated, paid attention to and respected. The demands should be very modest but virtually unrealizable.

 The name Leslie was chosen so you couldn't be sure if Leslie was a man or a woman. I had no idea how important that would be in how people responded. Some people read him as being a man. Others read her being a woman. One person read it simultaneously as two separate stories. I also later learned from my mother that Klein meant small. A couple of friends had just assumed that was why we had chosen the name.

As Arnie dictated the petition and the demands, I had to stop him a couple of times and told him to be less eloquent (something that was so much a part of him that it was almost impossible for him not to be). As I was writing it down I changed a word here and there in an effort to bring it more in line with what I had in mind. We looked at it and then made some small changes. Pete Wilson copy edited it, making the speech and demands more raw and basic.

To indicate that it was fiction we dated it sometime in the future. Something we had to keep doing since the future kept coming and going. 

Arnie and I wrote this story in 1980.

Leslie Klein's Petition
The following speech was delivered at the Caucus for Radical Concern during a three day conference in Shimmel Auditorium, N.Y.U., in February 1985.

Several years ago the gay and feminist movements came along and introduced a new form of consciousness. Pain and anger were expressed over concerns that weren't thought about before. Feminists and gay activists spoke out with deep seriousness; they were ignored and belittled, but they insisted on the truth of their complaints and the validity of their demands. It was embarrassing and uncomfortable. It was a long process but much of what they said and did has been incorporated as a regular part of our thinking.
Now in that tradition I bring a new problem and a new concern, difficult and embarrassing once again, something that will cause confusion and hostility. Let me explain the background here much in the style of the earlier consciousness raising.
I live with my father in a middle class neighborhood. I go to the neighborhood park and people say to me: What do you do? How do you earn a living? I say I have significant contacts, people in an active intellectual ambiance, people whose work appear in the Village Voice, the Nation, the New York Times Book Review as well as several small periodicals devoted to social change. They say that sounds exciting. Does it pay? Are you respected? Do you enjoy being with those people? I say it is intense and exciting. I may be on the verge of something very big. But it's complicated; these things are hard to spell out exactly. As I say this to them I am filled with confusion and there is pain in my heart. I am telling only a half truth. I do have some connections. I know some people respect me, but I have no real sense of security and dignity.
I sit alone at home often frustrated and sad. I feel left out of everything: parties, study groups, conversations, meetings. Everything. Most of you never even phone me. I feel neglected. It is with this in mind that I come before you today. I feel extremely angry and frightened. I am also very embarrassed. What I am asking might seem presumptuous, but all such things will appear presumptuous at first. I repeat again that a legitimate response to what I ask might demand a new consciousness and outlook.
I can't seem to do coherent and sustained work. I try. Occasionally I do call up the talk shows on the radio and make an intelligent statement, and every so often I will write a reflective essay. I feel the neighbors mock me behind my back, and I use my contact with you to justify myself with them. But I really don't know how I am seen in your eyes. This is a problem, I think, for many among us, which makes it a problem for all of us. This is why I have chosen to present a formal petition. In doing so I feel hesitation and ambivalence. I don't know if I will be listened to. If I will be paid attention to or will be rejected and ignored. Also even if I am listened to I don't know how much trust I can feel.
If I am rejected and ignored I will be filled with pain, confusion and finally bitter rage. I will then likely reach out to all those similarly betrayed who will join me in my rage. I hope we will never have to come to this point.
Now I will offer an explicit set of demands that are particular to my situation, but hold out the possibility for a solution to the problems of isolation, neglect and abandonment that I have raised. It's not a rigid formula or blueprint. On the other hand, I would not want to whittle down the force and essence of the demands I am here proposing. I want the substance and essence of them preserved without dilution or compromise.

1. I would like a phone call once a month from a prominent person.

2. I would like to appear three times a year on significant panels.

3. I would like at least a couple of my reflective essays to be published in respected journals.

4. I would like a small weekend symposium devoted to a critical review of my work and its overall coherent pattern

5. However little or much writing I do must absolutely not be a criteria for attention or acceptance by members of the Caucus of Radical Concern.

Some people identified strongly with Leslie Klein. Others were annoyed. A couple people were furious. It got published in three different places. Cultural Correspondence published it along with a striking graphic which some friends put up in their offices, others on their refrigerators.

One friend, a galvanizing, charismatic, deeply engaged radical feminist called me and said we should get together and talk about the piece. Over lunch she just tore into Leslie Klein. That she wanted to piggyback on the work of others. Undermine their achievements. That Leslie Klein was always (yes, she said always) whining and pleading while others were doing the heavy lifting. I was startled by the intensity of her remarks. At some point I mentioned that Marty Duberman playwright, social critic, gay rights activist, and world renowned historian told me he strongly identifies with Leslie Klein. My friend with a slightly perplexed, slightly grudging smile replied, “But he's the person you want to have call you once a month.”

The piece itself took on a life of its own. Arnie and I had to surrender “ownership” of Leslie Klein. We had become, if anything, distant stodgy forbearers of Leslie Klein with just the most tenuous of connections. That is if anyone even remembered that we had written it.

"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." Jane Schroeder took Emma Goldman's declaration totally to heart, dancing and singing at demonstrations, parties, lectures, at almost any kind of gathering. At some point she took total possession of Leslie Klein. Most notably at one Socialist Scholars Conference where she handed out hundreds of copies of the petition that she had typed up and photocopied. She had slightly but not inconsequentially altered the text as well as the demands. While handing them out she introduced herself as Leslie Klein. The organizers of the conference had no idea how to respond.

This was way more than anything Arnie and I had imagined. One part of me was totally embarrassed watching her in action. Another part was outright awe struck and exhilarated by what she was doing with it.

A week after the conference I attended a panel discussion. Lucy Lippard, the great radical art critic, started to speak. As she began relating a story it slowly dawned on me that she was talking about Leslie Klein. She smiled at me. She spoke of seeing a woman whose name she didn't know handing out sheets of paper at the Socialist Scholars Conference. She said it might seem pathetic, or difficult to hear, but the woman was demanding that people pay attention to her, that she felt humiliated and unappreciated by the lack of recognition. Lucy said it is part of our work to create a society and a movement that deals with loneliness, despair, and the humiliation and injury of constantly being judged and evaluated.

 As Lucy spoke I thought that maybe this was getting a little out of hand. It was disorientating to listen to. I started imagining, more than imagining, I was actually visualizing people in Tokyo and Warsaw and Sydney, Australia talking about Leslie Klein in whatever altered form, with whatever embellishments and alterations she/he/ they had been transformed into. For a fleeting moment I was tempted to set the record straight. But that did seem ridiculous. More importantly I felt an overwhelming need to rush home and call Arnie and tell him all about it.

As I write this all these years later it occurs to me that Lucy maybe, just maybe knew what Jane had been doing, was, even now one week later, just playing along and extending the performance one step further. More likely, why more likely?, she was actually responding to Leslie Klein as a real person. Either way, Lucy underlined the importance of the issues raised.

In the early 1980s Lucy Klein, a woman wearing wild colorful outfits and various styles of broad brimmed hats appeared on the scene. No one knew where she came from, what her nationality was, her age or if she had any specific political affiliations. Rumors were that Lucy was from El Salvador or Guatemala. Others said she was here from Sydney, Australia. It was as if she appeared out of nowhere. She had a reputation of boldly questioning both “legitimate” and “illegitimate authority,” a popular distinction often asserted at the time. She was known to be either relentless and irritating, or relentless and inspiring. No one knows whatever happened to her. She disappeared as suddenly as she had appeared. Her manifesto stirred deep emotions. Controversy followed her everywhere. But none of us have been able to locate even one copy of the original petition. Still even today whole books have been written about its impact. Different versions of the petition, each one claiming to be the original, had been passed down through the generations by word of mouth. Her manifesto has been alternately described as emblematic of a politics of scatter shot grievances or as one of liberation and transcendence. While still somewhat disputed, to me the evidence is overwhelming, that this was when the now ubiquitous expression “kleining it” became part of everyday speech.

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