Friday Evening at the Union Square Barnes & Noble: The "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" Debut

This report by Richard Grayson first appeared on Jeff Bryant's blog Syntax of Things (go there for the original links) on Friday, July 20, 2007:

First Report from Night of a Million Muggles: Richard Grayson Braves the Deathly Hallows at the Union Square Barnes & Noble So You Don't Have To
7:30 p.m. and the L train has just safely evacuated me to Brooklyn from the combat zone that is Barnes & Noble's flagship New York store on 17th Street. This is going to be a little rough, folks, because it's spot reporting and I'm pretty much farblonjet. I'd thought I'd spend the whole evening at this, going uptown to the Time Warner Center Borders for their 9 p.m. Great Hallows Ball, then to the Park Slope Community Bookstore's feast of chocolate frogs and unicorn blood, and finally to Greenpoint's new Word Bookstore adults-only party with sangria from a cauldron and an adults-only dungeon, but I can't stand seeing any more wizards for, well, maybe the next couple of decades -- not even the ones I use to install software on the notebook PC I'm typing this on with shaky fingers.

I got out of the subway at 14th Street and found myself waiting to cross standing next to a student who was in my summer school course that ended two weeks ago. She didn't hand in her final two assignments or show up for the final; the books I assigned were too "difficult," she said. Though we're a few inches apart, she doesn't notice me until I stare at her.

"Oh, hi," she says.

"Well, I gave you a grade," I say. I gave her a mercy D+.

"It was a difficult semester," she says, "so I don't mind getting the grade I deserve."

"If I'd given you the grade you'd deserved, you would have failed," I tell her as we cross the street.

She nods. She's off to the Barnes & Noble too, with her camera, to take pictures. I've got my little memo pad to take notes. Walking through Union Square, we fall behind people wearing orange T-shirts. They're chanting "Peace now!" and "Impeach Bush" and one of them hands me an orange leaflet saying "Declare Yourself: Wear Orange! Drive Out the Bush Regime!"

As we pass the Greenmarket vendors packing up for the day and preparing to go back to their rural retreats, I say to my former student, of the orange shirts, "Where are these people's priorities? Don't they know what night this is?"

It's 6 p.m. As we approach the Barnes & Noble, she decides to run up ahead and says, "See you!" She obviously wants to get a shot of some sort of four-legged black monster hogging the sidewalk. (Twenty-eight years ago, when my first book came out, the Taplinger Publishing Company, which probably was able to do my short story collection because of the profits from its blockbuster Linda Goodman's Sun Signs, had its headquarters in the building next door to B&N.)

The monster has long, spindly legs like a giraffe and a stylized conic head. It alternates between nuzzling young women and menacing little kids. "That is not a Harry Potter creature," says one of a group of African-American teens standing next to me.

Another says, "Could it be that horse that's invisible to people unless..."

I'm swept away by the crowd into the store, along with a girl with pink hair, a quidditch broom and lots of beads. Barnes & Noble employees in black T-shirts are handing out fake aged-parchment leaflets, but I get one from the security guard, still in her regular blue uniform.

I glance at the leaflet to avoid the cacophony of the store till I can adjust. One side consists of "some tips to help you enjoy our Midnight Magic Costume Party to its fullest." If we've already reserved a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, we need to pick up a numbered GOLD wristband on the first floor; those people with the wristbands numbered 1-250 should begin lining up on the first floor at 11:15 p.m. and those with GOLD wristbands numbered 251 should sit tight: "We will announce when you should join the line."

If we have NOT reserved a copy of HP&tDH before we came in, we need to pick up a numbered RED wristband on the first floor and should not expect to "be announced" until after all the GOLD wristband numbers have been called.

Hanging on the ceiling in front of me is a collection of manila and white mailing envelopes guarded by stuffed owls. I check to see one address:

To: Hermione Granger

Tudor Highland Hill

London, England

Two Chinese-American teens ask for T-shirts. "Then you're volunteering?" says the B&N employee. "I guess," says one of the boys.

Next to me is a young hipsterish guy wearing a long braided black cloak with gold trim, doing card tricks for a small crowd. He makes some magician-like moves and does indeed finally display the King of Hearts that a girl had picked earlier.

The line for wristbands is very long, so I move along, past two kids with black wizard hats and two others wearing round fake glasses with white rims. I look down and see a twenty-something guy in a floor-length costume looking very unhappy. His black fur gloves look uncomfortable.

REAL LIVE OWLS says a sign, and they are: a middle-aged man with a blond beard and hair holds one of them in his gloved hand and another is perched nearby, yawning. A father holding a boy with a black cape who's waving a little wand points the kid to the live birds. "What is the name of Hermione's pet cat?" I hear someone ask.

I notice on the store employees' black T-shirts have only the store name on front, though no doubt in the font approved by Scholastic. The back gives the new book's title and the date. What? J.K. Rowling's name is nowhere to be seen. We authors always get screwed.

As I ride up to the second floor on the escalator, I pass a woman around age 45 who's on the down escalator. She's got a yellow lightning bolt on her forehead.

The second floor is designated Diagon Alley and there are signs on a pole, fake weathered arrow signs pointing in different directions to THE APOTHECARY: POTION MAKING, MAGICAL MENAGERIE: FREE FACE PAINTING, OLLIVANDERS: WAND MAKING, and WEASLEYS' WIZARD WHEEZES: MAGIC TRICKS & PRACTICAL JOKES. I am almost run over by a woman pushing a wide stroller containing her twin toddlers.

There's a mountain displaying the old titles in the series, in hardcover, trade paperback and mass market editions, along with lots of other books and non-book stuff like a Divination Sticker Kit, Collector's Sticker Book, Hogwarts Building Cards (on the box, Draco Malfoy says: "Build your own Hogwarts!"), puzzles, calendars, an unabridged 25-compact-disk audiobook narrated by Jim Dale, and a Hogwarts Journal with lined light-brown pages so young wizards can write their own diary entries or whatever.

Among the titles on all four sides of the display: Harry Potter y el misteria de principe, Harry Potter y la camara secreta and other Spanish titles; Hidden Myths in Harry Potter; Quidditch Through the Ages; Fact, Fiction and Folklore in Harry Potter's World; Conversations with J.K. Rowling; Muggles and Magic; The Ultimate Unofficial Guide to the Mysteries of Harry Potter; and more. I pick up a paperback, Daniel Radcliffe: No Ordinary Wizard, and am disappointed to find no photos of his recent stage appearance in Equus.

The second floor is jammed with teenagers in capes, little kids with wizard hats and various kinds of wands (I favor the ones whose tips light up) and adults, most of whom thankfully are not in costume, wandering amid forlorn, untouched displays of non-Harry-Potter-related books. A fat, bald, sixtyish man in a Hogwarts T-shirt nods as he passes me on my way to Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes. Their next magic show is an hour away, according to the fake clock, so I head over to the Magical Menagerie at 53 Diagon Alley and see four face-painters turning the littlest of the kids into the animals of their choice or giving them Harry's glasses and lightning bolt. I'm getting both bored and overwhelmed. I don't like crowds and have never read a Harry Potter book though I've inadvertently seen two of the films.

At 75 Diagon Alley (I don't know what a Diagon is), there's the Apothecary Shop where some workers stand by a steaming (dry ice) cauldron and are ladling out some liquid, adding what appears to be chartreuse chopped liver to it, and handing it out to people standing on a long line for this beverage, whatever the heck it is.

As I walk over to Ollivanders to see kids sitting at tables decorating plain wooden wands with glitter, colored twine, and other arts-and-crafts stuff, I pass so many people in long black gowns that I feel I'm in one of the Oxford quadrangle scenes from the BBC's Brideshead Revisited.

I pass a middle-aged man, the first who doesn't appear to be here for Harry because he's on the floor reading a Stephen Covey 7 Effective Habits book as I make my way towards a gray-bearded man who even I know is Dumbledore, a woman with headgear that says PLATFORM 9 3/4, and guy with longish straight black hair -- I don't know who he is but he's displaying a weird tattoo on his forearm for all the people with cell phone cameras standing in front of the costumed trio.

Nearby is a woman whose face makeup gives her the appearance of having a very bad case of either measles or Rocky Mountain spotted fever who's holding a bunch of peacock feathers. This must mean something to someone who's read the books, I guess. Or maybe not.

The third floor of Barnes & Noble has been renamed Hogwarts Castle. There are video screens of a wizard woman presiding over a spelling bee, but I don't see where it's coming from. I follow a sign to the Forbidden Forest and see four little round tables with crystal balls and tarot cards with middle-aged women telling the fortunes of teenage couples and yuppie dads with toddlers in their laps. Another sign reads LOST PARENTS, but all I see next to it are books by Suze Orman and Who Moved My Cheese?

The crowds are getting thicker and I feel a panic attack coming on, so I head over to the more spacious B&N cafe, which has been transformed into the Hogwarts Dining Hall, featuring long tables with balls of golden twine and numerous candles of all shapes sitting atop green and orange tablecloths.

Closer to where people are on line for food (it still looks the way it always does!) are "normal" tables. Most of the people sitting at them appear to have been born before the New Deal. Not to far away, people are posting with five-foot cardboard cutout posters of the book featuring the same image as the cover art, featuring Harry before he's...oh, we know what happens at the end, those leaked pages on the Web were right, even Michiko Kakutani broke the embargo with her review -- but I won't say any more in case someone reading this has a brain deficiency.

Clearly, I'm not going hog-wild for Hogwarts; I just am going wild. There's a tree walking next to me, a tree with a face in the middle of its trunk and leaves on its top. Oh, I see: I'm in the Forbidden Forest...which seems to be filled mostly with middle-aged women whose religion, I presume, is Wicca.

The majority of people here are in costume: people of all ages, races and levels of sophistication. I have heard Mandarin, Spanish, Haitian Creole, French and German spoken in addition to English and Muggle.

I am glad to see I'm not the only person getting tired. I spot kids sitting sleepily in the aisles of books on Unix/Linux and Microsoft Office application and a woman knitting on the floor of the poetry section, leaning against volumes of Cavafy, Auden and Sylvia Plath.

Okay, up to the fourth floor, as the thirty-something store employee wearing a wizard hat ahead of me on an escalator complains to a colleague that some kids were calling him "Harry Pimp."

The fourth floor is where the big events are always held, as it's mostly open space that can be covered with folding chairs. This is where the spelling bee is taking place, up on the stage. A woman dressed like one of the Hogwarts teachers I saw in the movie brings up the latest age group, all of whom have a single digit number hanging from their necks.

I watch from an approved distance for a while. Three of the kids, who appear to be fifteen or sixteen, are eliminated when they cannot spell "astronomy." Harry Potter has done a lot to get kids to be literate. I must be mishearing things at this distance. Can so many teenagers not be capable of spelling "ridiculous"? The last contestant standing, the winner, gets a prize and much applause for correctly spelling "transfiguration."

I've been transfixed, and I need to get out of here, so I take the escalator down three flights. Someone says, "Did you see Hagrid?" I probably didn't but failed to recognize him. He's big, though, right?

The store is getting more and more crowded. More conical black hats. More round glasses. More lightning bolts on foreheads.

On the way out, I see a table that says MEDIA CHECK-IN. Some members of the media appear to be getting their photos taken in front of a replica of a castle by the store's east front window. A man and a woman, the first people I've seen dressed in formal business attire, who look every bit corporate executives, confer animatedly and the man takes out his BlackBerry and starts typing something.

I exit the store. Looking at the digital countdown clock in the window I see 4:57. It's just turned 7 p.m. This is really only getting started. Even now, after I've been writing this for a couple of hours, it's 9:30 p.m. and there are still two and a half hours to go before that damned book gets sold to the wristbanded customers. And to people all over the world.

But I'm leaving Harry Potter World for now. I'll have to miss Jim Dale, man of a million voices on the audiobooks, at 10:30 p.m -- not to mention the witching hour official pub date. I pass the last of the people in wizard hats, two teenage boys leaning against the window of the Sephora store next door, eating empanadas and sipping Cokes.

At the corner I'm asked if I want a free Harry Potter bookmark. I take it. On one side it's like an open cell phone, clearly labeled "Motorola" and a picture from the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix movie where the cell phone's screen would be.

I pass just one more of them, a kid with a white stocking over his head, trickles of fake blood running along his face, before I enter the crowded 14th Street-Union Square subway station. On the train back to Brooklyn, a drunk is asleep in the seat for two at one end. He's not wearing a wizard cap.

Thursday Night in Williamsburg: Domenic Priore and "Riot on Sunset Strip" at Spoonbill & Sugartown

This report by Richard Grayson first appeared on Jeff Bryant's blog Syntax of Things (go there for the original links) on Friday, July 20, 2007:

"Rock history is fucked up," says Domenic Priore, author of the terrific Smile: Brian Wilson's Lost Masterpiece and other books, because its standard narrative about the 1960s West Coast scene concentrates on San Francisco's admittedly immense contributions to the virtual exclusion of the energy and innovations found in Los Angeles.

Last evening I walked over to Bedford Avenue here in Williamsburg, which we must never forget is the hipster capital of the known universe, for an appearance by Domenic at Spoonbill & Sugartown, the quirky and eclectic art bookstore. It's got an incredible selection of art, design and architecture stuff. Before the reading, I spent 15 minutes playing with a pop-up architectural history of the world, the perfect gift for the kid who wants to be Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid.

Domenic Priore's new book is Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock 'n' Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood, which presents a revisionist rock-history view of the years 1965-66 by focusing on L.A.'s vibrant youth culture, centered on Sunset Boulevard clubs -- among them, Pandora's Box, Trip, and It's Boss -- that introduced and nurtured such acts as The Doors, The Byrds, The Turtles, Buffalo Springfield, The Mamas and the Papas, and others.

I was 14 and 15 back then, entranced both by the mod scene and the kids I saw dancing on such TV shows as "Shindig," "Shebang" and "Shivaree." LSD was still legal till October 1966 but life seemed so surrealistic to some teens that chemical enhancement was nice but not necessary.

Eventually the conservative city fathers felt things on the Strip were getting "out of hand" (reefers and race-mixing!) so the LAPD came in and busted young heads, and city supervisors used their zoning powers to basically shut down the clubs and the whole scene. (The clubs got away with having teens there by serving food and ID'ing everyone, stamping underage hands with the purple admonition "NO BOOZE FOR YOU!")

Domenic explained that when Las Vegas became the venue for Sinatra & company, their contracts with Vegas Strip hotels forbade them from continuing to perform regularly at Sunset Boulevard nightclubs like Dino's Lodge, Fred C. Dobbs, The Playboy Club and Ciro's -- which thus were free to morph into places that concentrated on the very different music of a younger generation.

The evening's highlight was a slideshow, with appropriate subtle background music featuring some dreamy favorites of the period, a slide show of Sunset Strip in the 1960s, with photos of the very young Beatles, Sonny & Cher, Mike Nesmith of the Monkees, the Doors, Marvin Gaye, Nico and the Velvet Underground, Turtles, and lots of Buffalo Springfield, along with the luxe exteriors and cool interiors which grew more and more psychedelic until the scene's end, its Griffith Park beads-and-good-vibes love-ins contrasting with the violence of the LAPD raids and the ultimate riots.

My personal favorite slide: a marquee featuring, among others, a group I liked a lot but probably haven't thought about in thirty years: The Peanut Butter Conspiracy.

The producers and movers and shakers behind this short-lived but exciting scene -- which affected fashion, art and design almost as much as music -- went on to take part in Monterey Pop and other seminal events that shaped the soundtracks of more than one generation's lives.

If you're interested in American rock history, Riot on Sunset Strip is an interesting addition to the literature about the 1960s West Coast scene -- at least to one old fart who can't help affecting a cheesy style when he writes about this stuff.

And if you're in Williamsburg and looking for an interesting bookstore, Spoonbill & Sugartown is the best one going on.

Exploring Brooklyn by Bus: the B100 to the Wilds of Mill Basin

This was posted to Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Wednesday, July 18, 2007:

Exploring Brooklyn by Bus: the B100 to the Wilds of Mill Basin


The B100 is the bus that went past the block I lived on – East 56th Street between Avenue O and Fillmore Avenue – from the summer of 1958, when I was about to start second grade, to the fall of 1979, when I was a 28-year-old with two masters' degrees and a recently-published hardcover collection of short stories, critically acclaimed by The Minneapolis Tribune as "a cornucopia of crap."

The MTA lists the B100 as the Quentin Road/Fillmore Avenue/East 66 Street route, but we always called it the Mill Basin bus. Actually, we often just referred to as "the Pioneer bus," not because it went to Brooklyn's then-newest neighborhood (many of my friends' homes in Mill Basin proper were, to use the euphemism, "settling," for the first few years of residence; "sinking into the marshlands" might have been more honest) but because the route was operated by the private Pioneer Bus Company, which obtained the franchise in 1960.

After an incredibly long 1979 strike, the Command Bus Company took over the route until 2005, when it joined the other city-owned buses. But not quite. Technically, the B100 is run by a separate entity called the MTA Bus Company, not the New York City Transit Authority which runs the other Brooklyn bus lines. It's only in the last year, however, that the broken-down old buses with the Pioneer and Command colors began to be replaced by the standard MTA electric hybrids with the raised rear section.

The B100 was presumably designed to give those of us in subway-less extreme southeastern Brooklyn access to the Brighton BMT line at the Kings Highway, where I get off the B train, currently the express, with the Q serving as the local. For many years, though, the D was the express and the M the local. In the mid-1960s, when I first started riding the trains by myself, the Q was the express and the QJ and QB were the locals (they differed in their routes to Manhattan; the QB went over the bridge and the QJ went by tunnel).

I walk down from the el to exit at East 16 Street, my ears assaulted by having to listen to the N-word about five dozen times by the African American teens I follow onto the B100 at its starting point. Do I really need to hear sentences like "Niggaz need not to smoke on an empty stomach"?

It was on the Mill Basin bus around 1970 that I was sitting across this guy a few years younger than I was who I thought was really cute – that is, until we passed a corner house along Quentin Road where a black boy was watering an expanse of lawn. The kid on the bus yelled out "NIGGER!" at the young gardener, and I'll never forget the expressions on both their faces: the cute kid suddenly looked disgustingly ugly and the black kid looked up, his hose limp in his hand, his face a mixture of bewilderment and hurt.

The racist kid on the bus then turned to a couple of girls behind us, smirked and said, "That's what we call them in Maryland, where I live." The girls rolled their eyes and turned to each other to avoid looking at him.

I'm the only one of my baby boomer friends who likes hip-hop music – in 1990 I published a New York Newsday column and made the national news when I started Radio Free Broward to send 2 Live Crew albums that had been declared obscene by a federal judge in the Southern District of Florida to anyone in three counties that wanted to hear Luke Skyywalker's obscenities – but I've always had trouble with the N word, which I'd never heard pass the lips of anyone in my childhood.

The bus driver closes the door and makes the left turn onto Quentin Road. Despite what Broadway musical audiences may believe, there is no Avenue Q between Avenue P and Avenue R in New York. I always assumed this was because Q was an odd letter (not on our phone dials) but later learned the street was named after Theodore Roosevelt's beloved youngest son Quentin, who in the First World War was shot down in France behind enemy lines. T.R. never recovered emotionally from the loss and died less than a year later, in 1919; Quentin is buried in St. Laurent-sur-Mer, France, alongside his brother, General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who died of a heart attack the day after D-Day in 1944.

Quentin Road is residential: a few brick apartment houses, mostly private detached one-family homes with porches, as we go through the East teens and 20s. At Bedford Avenue, the black teens get off and others get on; sitting on the steps of James Madison High School are a group of teens, only one of them white. Madison boasts among its graduates three sitting U.S. Senators – a Democrat, New York's Chuck Schumer; a Republican, Minnesota's Norm Coleman; and an Independent, Vermont's Bernie Sanders – as well as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

But although I entered tenth grade at Madison in September 1965, I left the next month, transferring to a private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. There were no high schools close to our new neighborhood, and I'd gone to junior high at Meyer Levin in faraway East Flatbush. All my friends were zoned for Tilden, across the street from our JHS 285, or to Midwood, ten letter blocks north on Bedford Avenue at Glenwood Road. (There's no Avenue G, either.)

However, what really bothered me about Madison – because I was extremely phobic about putting my head under water – was that I was forced to take swimming. This neurotic fear trumped everything else. I wasn't even all that bothered by the Board of Education's edict that boys had to swim nude, as if we were athletes in ancient Greece. The first day of school, our swimming teacher, Mr. Singer, tried to reassure us about being naked in front of others: "Some of you are dark-skinned and some of you are light; some of you are hairy and some of you are smooth; some of you" – here he pointed to a tall obese kid – "are big and some of you" – here he pointed to 98-pound, five-foot-one-inch me – "are small."

"How do you know he's that small?" a wise guy in the back row called out. "We won't find out till tomorrow."

People today find it hard to believe that this forced nudity occurred not at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 but at Board of Education facilities in the Wagner administration.

To this day I do not know how to swim. I barely escaped the requirement that Brooklyn College graduates had to pass a swimming test when the rule was rescinded by the faculty council in 1972, when I was a junior. My friend and fellow aquaphobe Robert Wechsler, a history major who'd later teach at BC, spearheaded our drive to get rid of mandatory swimming tests and won the day despite what many professors thought was a logical argument by the chairwoman of the Women's Health and Physical Education Department, who explained that since Brooklyn was on an island, it was essential that, in the event of a devastating flood, graduates should know how to swim to safety on the mainland. Perhaps in light of global warming, the college might want to revisit this issue. I don't care, as long as I don't have to stick my head under water.

Yes, I am embarrassed to admit this, but making my fear even more ridiculous is that our house on East 56th Street was one of the few homes in Brooklyn, then or now, to have a swimming pool in the backyard. As a BC student, I hosted many pool parties in the summer when my parents were upstate in the Borscht Belt hotel they owned in the early 70's, but none of my friends ever saw me do more than dangle my darkly-tanned legs in the water. The only thing I got out of growing up with a pool was basal cell carcinoma.

Starting in October 1965, now a private school student wearing a rep tie, dress slacks and blue blazer with the school crest and carrying a brown attache case, I still took the B100 every weekday as it took me to and from the first (or last) of the three subway lines that got me to the Franklin School on West 89th Street and Central Park West.

With sophisticated Manhattan classmates whose parents were familiar to me because I'd seen them on TV or read about them in the Herald Tribune, I got to experience a world totally alien from the Jewish/Italian neighborhoods I was from. At one boy's vast East Side apartment after school, we were on his way to get the maid to get us a snack when he casually pointed to a weird flag painting on the living room wall and said, "That's a Jasper Johns, of course." I had to go to back issues of Time Magazine and read the Art pages I'd always ignored to find out what he was talking about.

But the almost four-hour roundtrip commute got too much for me, and the next year I got a phone in my name at the home of my parents' friend NYPD Lt. Joe Cone, who lived across the street from Midwood, and I transferred there, fooling the Board of Ed's Zoning Police.

Mr. Singer, my Madison swimming teacher, reappeared in Midwood as my boys' hygiene teacher, still reassuring young males about their sexuality. He came in one day and began the class with the question, "How many of you masturbate?" and when no one raised his hand, he shrieked out, "Every one of you is lying!" and then added, more quietly, "If you're not, see me after class."

As the bus makes its way to Nostrand Avenue (Ocean is East 20th, Bedford East 25th, Nostrand East 30th for those of you who've never been south of Prospect Park) and Gerritsen Avenue and turns left on Fillmore Avenue past Marine Park park in the neighborhood of the same name, the houses are still basically one families, with a few brick "garden apartments" more commonly seen in Queens. I recall watching my parents jog around the Marine Park running track at the same time they gave up smoking in the mid-1970s, just before they became vegetarians.

At Marine Park I watched more than a few cricket and soccer games, played by West Indians, and even my Manhattan friends would deign to meet me this far out into Brooklyn, bringing goodies from Zabar's, for summer Metropolitan Opera contests. I was taught to appreciate opera by tough old Italian men whose radios and Victrolas blasted Monteverdi, Scarlatti, Verdi, Rossini and Puccini into our neighborhood streets.

Contrary to what residents of Brownstone Brooklyn may believe, there always was culture in suburb-like neighborhoods like Marine Park and Mill Basin. The Tony Award-winning director Gerald Gutierrez, who helmed Lincoln Center Theater productions of Dinner at Eight, The Heiress, and A Delicate Balance and who I met at Midwood when I was a junior and he a senior, was still living in the Marine Park house he grew up in at his untimely death a few years ago.

We pass Batchelder Street, where I went to see a psychologist in 1979, stressed out by my parents' sudden selling of our house and their move out of state and my uncomfortable status as a published author who saw his name in the New York Times when he still felt like a boy. After a couple of sessions, I realized that Dr. Gentile had been in my Midwood graduating class of '68. He was Mike from the football team, who had seemed a nice guy – but then those of the drama club didn't hang out much with the jocks. It was good to know that a decent halfback could turn into a perceptive psychotherapist. I think that today he and his wife, Dr. Judith Cohen Gentile, see their clients at an office on Avenue T.

On Fillmore Avenue on the block between the major Brooklyn thoroughfares of Flatbush and Utica Avenues, we pass the Flatbush Depot, a two-block-square car barn filled with nothing but buses. Originally built in 1902 by the Brooklyn Heights Railroad for a number of the borough's streetcar lines – many older bus routes, like the B46 along Utica Avenue from Williamsburg to the Kings Plaza shopping center a few blocks south of here and Flatbush Avenue's B41 from the Civic Center to Kings Plaza, follow the same pathways as the trolley routes of the early 1900's.

Utica is East 50th, so we pass my old block before I know it. The last time I visited, a couple of weeks ago, it looked pretty much as beautiful as I remembered it from the 50's, 60's and 70's, except the once spindly London plane trees had become big shady ones.

As I watched ten boys play basketball in the wide two-way street (a rarity here), a hoop set up at the edge of what we called "the gutter," I noted that each team had a token nonblack player, one white, one Chinese. It reminded me of how we had gym outside at our crowded junior high and couldn't play the classic skins vs. shirts in the chilly weather, so we decided it would be easiest to play whites vs. Negroes.

The only problem was that the Negroes would always win. To solve that, it was decided that I – the shortest kid and the worst player (except for foul shots because I had very good aim) – would become "an honorary Negro" for the duration of the gym period. When one of my teammates said that being an honorary Negro may not have been as good as a real, at least I could never become an "H.N.I.C.," I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn't figure it out till I read a book for a law school class on Race and Race Relations in 1994.

One night in September 1990, living temporarily in Rockaway, I came to visit the old block and found incredibly bright lights enveloping it. Spike Lee was shooting "Jungle Fever" there, with our more tolerant Italian neighborhood standing in for what the producers thought would be a more hostile Bensonhurst. For about an hour I watched one of my favorite filmmakers direct Annabella Sciorra and John Turturro outside a house a few doors from the one I grew up in.

Fillmore ends as Avenue T crosses it, and the residents of East 58th and 59th Streets and Ralph Avenue have to tell people that they live on the block between Avenue O and Avenue T. There's the Mill Basin Delicatessen, one of the few kosher delis left in a town that used to be crawling with them. I ate my Hebrew national franks and my French fries and later turkey, white meat, on rye with a slice of onion sandwiches here with my parents and brothers at least once a week.

We ate out most nights because my mother "never saw the point of cooking." When my friends would ask me what my mother made for dinner, I'd say, "Reservations," but we mostly ate in delis, Greek diners, Cantonese restaurants, red-checked-table Italian places and pizzerias like the one next door to the Mill Basin Deli.

By the time I grew tired of buses and began driving my mother's fire-red 1964 Valiant around the neighborhood – first illegally, then with the sanction of a driver's license after I passed my road test in Canarsie on the third attempt – I was taking potential and actual girlfriends and boyfriends out to dinner dates at the Mill Basin Deli.

Mark, the owner, has always been an art lover who graced the restaurant's walls with paintings. Of course in this benighted backwater of the borough, you can't expect to find a Jasper Johns like in the Sutton Place apartment of my private school classmate. No, if you want what many people think is New York's best pastrami, you'll have to settle for looking at a Roy Lichtenstein, a Chagall and an Erte.

The B100 goes up Mill Avenue, leading to Mill Basin proper (once Mill Island was filled in, as was Coney Island, but Mill Island got a name change to reflect its true geographic status) and across Avenue U, past the Flatbush Park Jewish Center, where I was forced to endure Hebrew school.

Supposedly I became a man in the main sanctuary on the morning of Saturday, May 23, 1964, but I'd long before decided to follow the socialist, atheistic beliefs of the grandfather and great-grandfather I'd idolized.

I did graduate Hebrew school but refused to go to the ceremony or pick up the diploma after four years of playing a lot of hooky from the only classes I ever hated in my life. Riding my bike around the neighborhood, reading in the storefront Mill Basin branch library next to the deli, buying The Flash or Green Lantern or Justice League comic at the candy store which in "Jungle Fever" was the owned by the Anthony Quinn character, watching older guys fish in the actual Basin, wandering around the marshes looking for the wild cottontail rabbits and ring-necked pheasants who lived there, going to Barbara's General Store and buying penny candy as I warmed myself at her potbellied stove in winter – all of that seemed like much more fun than sitting in Rabbi Rubin's class, having to endure reading passages that were gibberish to me.

I would make the right sounds in Hebrew but had no idea what these words meant in English; telling a kid like me "It isn't important what the words mean" was about the worst thing I could hear from a teacher.

As we make a turn by Brooklyn's most suburban strip shopping center, where I spent many hours sitting at the luncheonette, pizzeria and Chinese restaurant or walking the wide aisles of Waldbaum's (now Key Food), I realize that growing up in this remote part of Brooklyn prepared me pretty well for a couple of decades of living in the car culture of brand-new Sun Belt communities in Florida, Arizona and California.

Now we're in fancy-schmancy Mill Basin, home of Brooklyn's original McMansions. Boats are docked in the marina, with luxury yachts anchored behind nearly every waterfront house. The bus goes up and down residential streets filled with detached homes that resemble Johnny Sack's place in "The Sopranos" – one of these houses probably played the Brooklyn Mafia don's home in the HBO series. We make a turn and across the water, I spot Kings Plaza, Fun City's first indoor mall.

My father and mother's brother owned one of the original stores when it opened in September 1970, the newest location for their 15-store chain The Pants Set, started on Long Island a few years before as women began to abandon their dresses and skirts. I recall the woodsy smell as I accompanied my uncle inside the shopping center while it was still under construction.

I've always loved that new building smell, just as I still love what I called "the smell of Mill Basin" that would be in the air on very foggy days in the neighborhood, that brackish smell of fish when I could almost feel the saltiness on my lips. At night, an insomniac even as a kid, I liked to listen to the foghorns from the boats.

The morning of Kings Plaza's grand opening, I got up early and went over to Fillmore and East 36th Street, to my friend Ken Falk's house, to wake him up so we would be one of the first people to get into the mall. We shook hands with Brooklyn Borough President Sam Leone as we entered by the Alexander's Department Store entrance on Flatbush Avenue. At the Pants Set, my uncle had slept in the store overnight, frantically trying to get everything ready.

My mother had her first job ever as a saleswoman in that store, three blocks from our house. She'd give away smaller items of clothing to my girlfriend and my girlfriend's female friends.

I worked only in our Bensonhurst store on 86th Street near Bay Parkway. My psychologist in Brooklyn Heights, with whom of course I'd discussed my homosexual feelings, once asked me if I ever had a desire to wear women's clothes. "Uh-uh, no sir," I said. That was one thing I was sure about: I was a guy and would only dress like one. And then I said, "Working in that store, it's not like I don't have the chance to try them on."

The last stretch of the B100 bus is Strickland Avenue, and I get off a couple of stops before the terminus. I look out at the El Caribe Beach Club, said to be the model for the place where Brooklyn cabana boy Matt Dillon worked in the film "The Flamingo Kid," although it was actually filmed in Rockaway at Breezy Point's Silver Gull Club, where my friend from Troy Avenue, Nancy Penncavage, was a lifeguard.

I walk past an assisted living facility, a newly-built medical center and The Bay Front Estates at Mill Basin, a brand-new, still-unfinished six-acre private community and marina, where, according to the printed hype, "thirty-four privileged families will experience a lifestyle within this enclave that will afford them luxury, safety, quality and value." Most of the models have five bedrooms and if I wanted to take a peek inside, I'd need to call in advance for an appointment. This could be Boca Raton or La Jolla.

Further on, there's Gil Hodges Lanes, which used to be, when I was a kid, on Ralph Avenue and Avenue M, where I went to a lot of boys-only birthday parties as a student at P.S. 203 a few blocks away. I wasn't too good at bowling, either. I don't know if this is still owned by the Hodges family. Gil Jr. used to sit next to me in eleventh grade math at Midwood, and he treated me, a new transfer student, nicely enough – that is to say, with minimal sneering disdain – so that I let him cheat off me on tests.

Unfortunately, trigonometry was the one subject I wasn't good enough in to later get into twelfth grade honor classes. In fact, along with Gil, I was transferred into "Fusion," where we took the regular eleventh grade math curriculum in three semesters rather than the usual two. I just didn't get stuff like logarithms and cosines.

After a couple of tests that first semester, I whispered to Gil as he motioned for me to let him peek at my answers, "I think you're actually better than me at this." He snorted and mumbled back, "Kid, you can tell just by looking at us which one's the brawn and which one's the brain."

The last time I saw him was in April 1972, at the Torregrossa Funeral Home which the B100 had passed at the corner of Flatbush and Fillmore. I went to pay my respects to his beloved dad, who'd died of a sudden heart attack. I had been a Mets fan since the first season when I was in sixth grade.

(We didn't "graduate" P.S. 203 but had only a "farewell assembly" since we'd be the first class not to stay for seventh grade; in the early 1960s they were phasing out the old K-8 schools and sending kids to junior highs, although in the last couple of years they've been reviving the K-8 concept.)

After passing by the Dodger star and Mets manager's coffin, I went over to Gil Jr. and said how sorry I was. He didn't remember me, but that was okay.

Across the street there's a baseball field where a fat bearded man wearing a yarmulke is pitching while all the other players look of such varied sizes and ages that they must be early adolescents. I assume all the boys are Orthodox Jews, but they've got on baseball caps, not yarmulkes. For some reason, a lone, rather skimpily-dressed girl is playing first base.

I watch a couple of guys get base hits, then walk over to the handball court, where two bare-chested boys about 16 or 17 are playing as two girls sit on the ground, watching them and looking bored. As Richard Price said in "The Wanderers," his terrific novel of Bronx adolescence that takes place a few years, shirtlessness on the playground is more likely to impress girls (and some boys) in late October or early November than in summer.

My first girlfriend and I once took our tennis rackets and balls there on a Sunday in June and fooled around for a while. A couple of Israeli boys with giant curly Jewfros came and waited impatiently for us to yield to finish our "game." Finally the shirtless one of them came over and said, "Hey, don't you think you've been here long enough? This court's really for handball anyway, not tennis."

He wasn't quite threatening, but I nodded as I put my own shirt back on. "You're right," I said. "It's all yours."

In my 1969 Pontiac Custom S as we drove down Mill Avenue, my girlfriend seemed annoyed. "You gave in so easily," she said. "You would have won a fight against him. You have bigger muscles."

Not wanting to explain that as a skinny kid I'd observed only a very slight correlation between muscle size and the ability to win fights, I just sighed and said, "It hardly seemed worth it."

A few months later, after she'd left me for another guy at school, she asked me why I'd given her up so easily, why I hadn't tried to fight for her. I just shrugged, not wanting to give her the same answer I'd given about the handball court.

For some reason, her new boyfriend – within the year, her husband – refused to talk to me, and it bothered me. I'd been really upset with him at first, but I'm the kind of guy who loves to talk so much, I'll talk with anyone. They moved to their first apartment in Bergen Beach, about ten blocks from here.

I got the first hint that their marriage was in trouble a few years later when I had a new girlfriend with whom, unlike the first one, I hardly ever had fights. My then-current girlfriend and I were invited to a party in the backyard of Ken's house in Marine Park and were sitting on the back steps, talking to a younger boy who was quite stoned. He looked at me and Randi sitting there and said, "You know, you guys look married. Are you married?"

My first girlfriend's husband, walking down the steps with a drink in his hand, overheard the kid. He still didn't talk to me, but he said to the boy almost angrily, "Are you crazy, kid? Can't you tell that they look too happy to be married?"

Randi and I broke up a few years after that but we've been close friends for many years. I went to her older daughter's bat mitzvah in New Jersey last fall and sat at a table with other Brooklyn College friends who'd long since abandoned the borough. In the nadir of the 1970s almost everyone wanted to get out. When I told them about the Atlantic Yards project, five of them said they'd been mugged around there and they couldn't believe how things had changed.

In the disco era, my first girlfriend and her husband had an "open" marriage. They'd go to Studio 54 and pick out each other's trick for the night. The last time I saw them together, we ran into each other on the Brooklyn College campus and we went to Sugar Bowl – now it's a Starbucks – on Hillel Place for lime rickeys.

Her husband still wouldn't talk directly to me but said things to her for my benefit. They were just visiting Brooklyn, having moved to a college town in the Midwest, where they lived in a two-bedroom apartment, she with her boyfriend and he with his.

I heard when they got back, they found out the two boyfriends were fooling around with each other. My first girlfriend and her husband got divorced soon afterwards.

He eventually talked to me years later, in the late 1980s, on the Brooklyn Heights promenade. It turned out that the guy I was walking with knew his boyfriend and when he saw them – they had a place nearby on Henry Street – we were all introduced. I laughed as I shook his hand and said, "Actually, we're old friends."

"That's right," he said, finally looking at me. I think he may still live in the Heights.

Two B100 buses are sitting at their final stop, waiting to make the return trip to the Kings Highway train station. I can wait to go back. I'm hungry, and the strip mall just across the street has a lot of choices of places to eat.

There's a Subway – I'm basically a vegetarian but I do make occasional exceptions – and a "natural foods café" with a certificate from a rabbi on the front door; Dagan Pizza, with a sign partially in Hebrew that even I can understand: "shomer shabbos"; and Pita Plus, a "glatt kosher grill" featuring "Israeli-Turkish shawarma."

I have no idea what shawarma is, but I need to put something in my stomach before I get back on the B100 bus, so I walk in to Pita Plus – as we say in the deep south of Brooklyn – fixing to find out.

Saturday Evening in DUMBO: Susan O'Doherty' & "Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity"

This report by Richard Grayson first appeared on Jeff Bryant's blog Syntax of Things (go there for the original links) on Monday, July 23, 2007:

A week or so ago I attended an event at Brooklyn's P.S. Bookshop, an elegant addition to Dumbo's Front Street that opened last fall. Susan O'Doherty, known to many as "Dr. Sue" for her Friday "The Doctor Is In" advice columns from M.J. Rose's blog Buzz, Balls & Hype, was celebrating the publication of her new book, Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity. Although I know Sue first and foremost as an excellent fiction writer -- our first stories were published in the same rather obscure little magazines back in the mid-1970s -- she's also a psychologist whose Brooklyn Heights private practice has specialized in the treatment of working with clients -- writers, artists, composers and others -- struggling with creative blocks.

As her book explains and this recent Brooklyn Daily Eagle article notes, Sue is an expert on the external and internal factors that prohibit artists — especially women — from pursuing the work that they love -- and not just from her professional life but personally as well. Getting Unstuck's introduction, "Why I Wrote This Book," and its first chapter, "What We Learned at Home," chronicle Sue's own longterm fight to overcome the subtle and not-so-subtle messages conveyed by her parents and grandparents -- and the experiences of her case histories (fictional composites of clients from varied social and ethnic backgrounds) with their own families' messages that girls' artistic, literary and musical efforts may be "nice frills" but they are not what a young woman should aim for in life.

Now, it's no surprise to hear that an 84-year-old novelist like Elizabeth, who has never taken her own books seriously, feeling they were more frivolous and silly than the literary works she really desired to write, got this message:

Elizabeth had learned from her blue-collar, no-nonsense family that life consists of hard, grinding work, and that, in her words, "a woman's place was in the home, serving her husband and raising the children. Any striving for beauty or accomplishment was squelched as 'silly' or, worse, 'putting on airs.'"

But I'm disappointed that these same messages are given to girls like Janna when she submitted an angry poem (dealing with feelings about her mother after Janna's years-long sexual abuse by a stepfather) to her high school literary magazine in 1996:

The poem was rejected by the journal, and Janna was encouraged to submit one of her "nice" poems. She refused. With her mother's support, she started submitting this poem, and others like it, to small literary journals, and within a year, two of her poems were published.

Janna moves to New York and becomes a painter, but she finds that her work's violent and often disturbing images find resistance as well as much support. When a parents' group tries to remove one of her paintings from an exhibit, Janna triumphs but the experience shakes her:

"It was like high school all over again. There were people calling me names and saying my work isn't art . . . I should be used to this by now, to being hated for expressing what I see as the truth. It was a nightmare, though, and I realized there was a lot I hadn't dealt with."

At that point Janna consults the author. Despite being a fairly successful artist -- like Elizabeth, whose novels "have a small but loyal and literate following -- Janna has never been able to take her work completely seriously.

Each of the chapters in Getting Unstuck concludes with an exercise for the reader designed to help apply the chapter's main ideas to your own life and goals. At the P.S. Bookshop event, after reading excerpts from the book and talking about her own experiences, Sue had us all -- female and male, young and old -- engage in a similar exercise, a creative visualization imagining our ideal day. It was an enlightening experience for many of the participants -- although some of the exercises in the book may raise more discomfort for readers as they are forced (okay, not forced, as the author says to skip any exercise that makes one too uncomfortable) to confront their inner critics and "shadow selves."

Having been prevented by sacroiliac joint dysfunction in the past day and a half from attending literary events much further than my own backyard, I spent several happy (if not quite pain-free) hours there the past two afternoons reading Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued, and I have to agree with my old friend Michelle Herman, who said, "This is the best -- the smartest and most lucid -- book about creative blocks I have ever read."

And I'm a guy. Yeah, I think that as a boy and a man, I didn't have to deal with the kind of "young-ladies-should-be-nice" or "this-isn't-for-girls" message that the women artists profiled in Sue's book have dealt with. Despite growing up in a family and neighborhood that contained few role models for writers or artists -- I was the first person in my family to graduate from college -- I never really doubted that I could be a writer if I wanted to. That's very unlike the experience of some women profiled here, whether they are growing up in an affluent African-American suburb of professional strivers or a rural Appalachian village where most girls aspire to no more than an early pregnancy and a job at the Family Dollar store.

Yet even after umteen years of therapy with seven different psychotherapists (none of them Susan O'Doherty), I still find it hard to express some of my less-than-"nice" thoughts and feelings -- the ones often necessary for truly important artistic works. Because I've never really made much money from my books and other writings, I have often discussed my literary work not so much as a career as a hobby -- unlike my paid work as a law school administrator, college professor, attorney, computer education consultant and newspaper columnist.

I'm not all that different from Sue in that respect, and like her, for years at a time, despite previous publications and successes, I've just stopped writing. Like her, I've always gone back to it.

For those writers, male or female, published or unpublished, and for any other kind of creative artists who are searching for a way to become unblocked, I can't recommend Susan O'Doherty's Getting Unstuck Without Becoming Unglued highly enough.

And check out Sue's fiction and creative nonfiction too. Her memoir in the anthology About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope was for me the highlight of a series of wonderful essays by other terrific women writers at a reading for that book, edited by Jessica Berger Gross, at McNally Robinson last month.

Sue's website has links to recent stories, proving that she's one doctor who takes her own advice -- and has profited from it. So have her readers.

Richard Grayson Reads "With Hitler in New York" on TothWorld Podcast

TothWorld, a literary podcast from author Paul A. Toth, this week features Richard Grayson reading the title story of his first book, "With Hitler in New York."

Wednesday Evening at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen Library: "Save Our Book Reviews!" Panel

Recently many newspapers have been cutting or eliminating their book review pages or sections and downsizing their book review staffs. Last evening we went to the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen Library on West 44th Street for a "Save Our Book Reviews!" panel discussion sponsored by the New York Center for Independent Publishing (NYCIP; formerly the Small Press Center) and the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC).

After being introduced by NYCIP executive director Karin Taylor, moderator John Freeman, the NBCC President, who's reviewed hundreds of books in publications worldwide, in turn introduced the panelists: M.A. (Michael) Orthofer, managing editor of the web site The Complete Review; Sarah McNally, owner of McNally-Robinson Booksellers; Dan Simon, publisher of Seven Stories Press; Tim W. Brown, freelance reviewer and NYCIP Executive Council member and Hannah Tinti, author of Animal Crackers and editor of One Story.

John began by asking if book reviews matter, if they sell books.

Dan said that at best, book reviews start beautiful electricity, that some books would have been ignored but for an inspired New York Times Book Review notice that led to a snowballing series of events that got them a lot of notice and sales. Historically, book reviews have made all the difference in the world; in some ways, reviewers are his press's ideal readers. However, today book reviews carry less weight than they used to. Once the cover of NYTBR would be magic for a book's sales, but now a NYTBR cover review may not create a ripple.

John noted that the crisis in newspaper book reviewing did not affect the New York Times, whose book review is healthier than ever.

Sarah said that in smaller cities, book reviews did affect customers. Younger people may use websites to get book information, not reviews, but older people are very review-conscious. She wondered if fewer local reviews outside the New York area, particularly in the South and Midwest, have affected book sales there.

Sarah continued that although the NY Times may be okay, literary culture is based locally all around the U.S. Some reviewers do sell books, and she said that Dan's use of the word "inspired" was perfect. A single review can bring in dozens of customers in one day. An example she offered was Australian writer Tim Flannery, who got a glowing daily NY Times review for his novel Deconstruction Acres.

Tim agreed with Sarah about the importance of reviews for sales, but said that newspaper cutbacks were leading to fewer reviews. People also use their personal networks and word of mouth to decide what books to buy as cracks appear in the edifice of mainstream media.

John asked Hannah about One Story's audience, and she said the publication's now five years old; it began to fill a gap after Story and other fiction magazines closed. It provides a focus on one story, is only subscription-based, and now is sent out 18 times a year, every three weeks, to over 4,000 subscribers. When her authors do have books published, they have to work harder than ever to get book reviews.

John brought up the example of Virginia Woolf and how her literary criticism provided her with income. If literary interest leads to fewer book reviews, where will today's Virginia Woolfs make their living? He then turned to Michael and asked him about the Complete Review.

Michael said he was interested first in the possibilities of the Internet, where he noticed lots of book reviews but few places with links to them. He wanted to provide access to opinions and publish information. The Internet has great potential for book information, but it's not a substitute for newspapers.

John said that the Complete Review focuses a lot on independent presses and asked if print review culture does less for indie publishers. Michael said yes, and gave Tina Brown's book on Princess Diana, which got the cover review in Sunday's NYTBR and is being reviewed by many newspapers. But it's not appropriate punishment for lack of newspaper attention to small presses to cut back these reviews. It's just that papers aren't living up to their potential when they pick Tina Brown on Diana over their own local literature.

John said that print reviews vary widely in quality. Some NYTBR reviews are so badly written that no one would buy a book because of them while a more stylishly written review on the web could be more productive of book sales.

Sarah quoted the line said to the nineteenth century literary critic Belassarion Belinsky in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia: "You are our one true critic." What is the point of reviews, though, if publishers have only a short-term mentality?

John said that Dan published the 2007 Human Rights Report but found it impossible to get reviews because of newspaper editors' fealty to mainstream publishers' frontlists.

This led Dan to discuss what being an "independent" publisher actually meant. He saw it not so much about non-corporate ownership but about non-corporate values: an alternative set of values that have created a network or an ecosystem that includes not just presses but indie bookstores, web people, reviewers (including NBCC folks): picaresque underpaid true believers. Nobody owns these people, so smaller newspapers can't tell them what to write. The literary ecosystem can't function without any one of these groups. As publishers, it's hard to get reviews yet somehow we always get them. When the ecosystem breaks down somewhere, as in the loss of book reviews, it has a devastating effect; writers get depressed they can't sell their books and they stop writing.

Sarah said that for her as a bookstore owner, it's impossible to buy books without review quotes, especially for paperback originals. Consumers respond to the review quotes when they see books at McNally Robinson's front tables. John asked if front table placement affects sales more than book reviews, and Sarah said yes, but not without review quotes. She will not buy paperback originals that don't have review quotes.

Tim said this was not so much interconnectedness, the term Dan and John used, but a kind of sick symbiosis in a highly dysfunctional publishing industry and went back to his metaphor of cracks in the edifice of mainstream media. He mentioned Rain Taxi, which he reviews for (copies were being given away for free at the symposium), as an example of a thoughtful independent journal that reviewed books. Other ways to sell books are through personal appearances, panel discussions, publicity events. NYCIP's mission is to defend and uphold the ethos of indie presses. Aside from Rain Taxi, Bloomsbury Review, American Book Review and other publications exists besides the NYTBR.

John said he was worried that Tim's model for book culture excluded the mass audience. Tim said no, books like Jerry Seinfeld's autobiography are review-proof and will sell to the masses regardless. The type of book Tim wants to review is not for everybody, it's for a niche audience: "I work as a reviewer below the radar."

John noted that many of the publications Tim mentioned are also available on the Web and that Rain Taxi is sold in China. Turning to Hannah, he asked if her story collection (an excellent book, if I can intrude here) Animal Crackers got a wider audience due to book reviews.

Hannah said word of mouth helped more, especially her parents' word of mouth. (Laughter.) But also before every reading she did in various towns, the local indie bookstore would usually contact the local newspaper, which would schedule a review or interview her. She said that playing all angles with a lot of will power can overcome a publisher's lack of financial resources for publicity.

Book blogs are exploding, Hannah said, and these vibrant websites are more "where the action is" than a newspaper recycling an AP review. Authors want a variety of reviews, wherever they are found. She said that One Story's website provides information about their authors' books and their forthcoming readings; this has made a lot of difference for some of these writers.

Tim said that journalists were very lazy people, that the books they write about are the result of being fed press releases: "Every newspaper reviews the same five damn books on Sunday." Book review pages shouldn't be this passive; they should be more engaged and proactive.

John noted that of NBCC's 700 critic members, many live outside New York, with the largest contingent in San Francisco. The NBC believes that the more people discuss books, the better off American culture is, and the best way to reach average people is in the local newspaper. However, regional papers are abrogating cultural responsibility to the New York Times, AP, etc. No matter how great book websites are, the average person can't read 200 blogs and webzines every day, but they can pick up a newspaper.

These papers are, with the exception of some family-owned entities like the NY Times, owned by conglomerates, John said. For example, the Village Voice is run by a Phoenix-based chain of alternative weeklies that is openly hostile to book reviews. The venues for young writers to get paid for their reviews are shrinking as these weeklies tool their culture coverage to entertainment, pop culture and corporate interests. While the Internet exhibits a lot of promise -- and have the advantage of being able to review books past the narrow time frame newspapers require (very close to a book's pub date) -- does this mean giving up on the "accidental reader" that a newspaper review may attract? Will book reviews be read only by a certain niche?

Michael said that although he publishes on the Internet, he wanted accidental readers. If we are just talking talking to ourselves, separating ourselves into a group of people who think the same, can that be good?

John then turned the discussion to literary prizes, one of which seems to be given out every three weeks. What effect do prizes have on sales?

Sarah said that prizes are a huge deal. People particularly love her store's Booker Prize display (they put out the current and past winners) even more than the displays for the National Book Award or the Pulitzer. Prizes bring people into the store and give books a wider audience. She thinks it is a good thing for a lot of people to read some particular book so that it serves as a pillar for discussions. Prizes also can eliminate the gap between indie and corporate publishers. She reiterated that indie books sell well only when they are on a table with "mainstream" books, and this happens when stores create displays based on prizes and awards.

Then the panel took questions from the audience.

Someone asked who is the "client base" of book reviewers, publishers or book buyers? Reviewers seem to hype big-advance Random House books, for example. If you rip off a book's title and strip it of its publisher and author, it would be better for the many good books that get published but not read.

John said that critics don't all think a lot. He just sends publications queries about reviews he wants to do, and some venues are more receptive than others. If he suggested doing a book in translation to an editor in Cleveland, she might counter by suggesting a book for which she'd received a press release that day.

If a critic said he wanted to review Robert Walser but the editor wanted a review of Jasper Fforde's latest book, the latter would be the one to get assigned. If we reviewed only small press books, we'd miss out on good work. One problem small presses have in getting reviews is that unlike large publishers, they can't afford to print 5,000 galleys for distribution.

Tim said that being proactive pays off. He's never reviewed for major newspapers. He deliberately looks for books to review based on his own level of interest; for example, he reviewed one of Dan's books for that reason. Employees of newspapers are beholden to their corporate employers, but he had a day job and just got paid in copies, like most writers whose work appears in literary magazines.

An audience member said she had been reviewing books for 30 years, but she can't find anything out about small press books before their pub date. At small press book fairs, she approaches publishers asking for info before the pub date; these small presses seem unaware that editors won't accept books for review after the pub date.

John said there's a six week window generally. He just reviewed a book published in March and tried to hide the pub date from his editor. He agreed that there are structural problems regarding both time and information; if it's hard to get a book, people can't review it.

Tim said that proportionally, books from small publishers probably get reviewed more than most conglomerate books because at these giant companies, only their top tier books get reviewed and they don't care so much about the others.

Karin said that small presses should realize that they can declare the pub date later than when the books actually come back from the printer. NYCIP can help provide small presses with information like this, that they don't necessarily know but which might be crucial to success. Also, prizes specifically for indie presses tend to get overlooked and that they should work with the NBCC to get these prizes better known. John mentioned that NBCC's poetry prize winner had a press run of only 500 copies, so how many copies could that publisher afford to give away for free? They needed a targeted list.

An audience member who identified himself as a self-published writer noted that the New York Times dropped its Sunday TV listings section but kept the book review because it generated ads. He gave What Color Is Your Parachute?as an example of a book originally self-published that gained a large audience through word of mouth, which is how music albums also have achieved commercial success.

John agreed that word of mouth is the number one reason books are bought. People pick up books that look and sound interesting to them.

Tim said there's a difference between the corporate and indie personalities, and reviewers are, of course, individuals. The empowerment of an individual voice can do a lot in assessing the value of books or other cultural objects.

Hannah mentioned the lack of profitability of books of short stories, which she said were just "one step ahead of poetry."

An audience member identifying herself as an academic said that in the academic book reviews she writes, the pub date is irrelevant, that she's reviewed books years after they first came out. She stopped reading the NYTBR because it's too boring; missing from is a sense of style, a sense of verve, pizazz, or a moral vision.

She asked if NBCC members discuss this problem of style. She herself never reads reviews of fiction books because they are all plot summary; instead,she depends for recommendations on booksellers and, yes, Oprah. She is not interested in plot summary but in the use of language, a book's theme and vision, but the NYTBR fiction reviews are almost entirely plot summary when they should be the kind of essays that Woolf wrote.

John said it was often a question of space in a review that could not be more than 600 words. Once a critic presents the book, there may only be 450 words left. But longer reviews are not necessarily better; an example was the 6,000-word NYTBR review of Norman Mailer, which he found "deadly." The academic in the audience said that she enjoyed that review.

John said some NYTBR reviews are quite well-written. The NBCC has the Nora Balakin Citation for excellent book reviewing, and it was won recently by someone who reviews for the San Antonio Current. Other great stylists have also won this award.

But, John continued, some newspapers require an institutional style. It's almost always verboten to use the first person. He was assigned a review on the aftermath of Hiroshima and was writing the review on the morning of 9/11; he thought that it would be relevant to use "I" in the review to describe what he saw from his window that day, but it got edited out. For the most stylish reviews, people probably have to go to literary journals and magazines like The New Yorker.

Tim said his novel reviews were often from 400-600 words, and he compared composing this kind of book review akin to the structured way a poet might write a villenelle. Most of the skills to do this kind of review he learned by third grade, from doing book reports, perhaps combined with what he learned in high school about "theme."

Hannah said that she got a lot of responses to reviews of her book that appeared in small local newspapers. Whether the reviews were good and bad, she connected with people, and it was interesting to see the different responses.

John asked everyone to name a stylish critic and he himself offered Anthony Laine and also John Updike, whose tools include his vast experience and vocabulary. Karen said she agreed with the audience member who found the NYTBR boring. Dan offered the name of Joel Agee (an old friend of ours from a Park Slope writing group in the 1970s), who reviews books in translation. John mentioned that the New York Sun has well-crafted reviews, particularly by NBCC member Adam Hirsch. Tim said Christopher Hitchens was a stylish reviewer and Hannah offered "this guy named John Freeman." (Laughter.)

A young audience member discussed the issue of not wanting to alienate the casual reader. There is a myriad of strategies publishers can follow. He mentioned Big Crossing, a book borrowing system, as well as niche blogs. Casual readers, especially if they're older, don't have the time to do Internet surfing. But for younger people, aren't these alternative methods of reviewing becoming mainstream?

Dan agreed that the Web is becoming mainstream; as a publisher, he couldn't survive without it.

John mentioned the NBCC blog, Critical Mass, which has half a million readers. However, in comparison, every Sunday's Hartford Courant had 400,000 readers, half of whom read the paper's book reviews while the NBCC blog attracts about 2,000 each day. He said a recent New York Times article portrayed a "beef" between bloggers and print reviewers and said this was inaccurate, that there is no war happening: "If people stop talking about books, we'll all be screwed."

An audience member asked what the panel thought of C-SPAN's book coverage. He also wanted to know about the demographics of Michael's Complete Review website. Michael said that The Literary Saloon blog gets about 10% of viewers and the reviews get the rest. Individual reviews can get as much traffic as the blog on a particular day; recently, reviews of Lolita and The Coast of Utopia got a lot of hits.

Dan said that C-SPAN did some events right here (the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen Library) and are supporters of indie publishing. Karin said her husband appeared on C-SPAN and for a while afterwards, they couldn't go out on the street without his being stopped by people who recognized it, so it must be bringing attention to books. John said C-SPAN's book coverage was nice but a little too much like cable access. The book coverage on Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's shows is livelier but they never invite novelists on.

An audience member whose voice sounded familiar (later we realized it belonged to Ed, the young roving correspondent who interviews authors on the Bat Segundo podcasts) returned to the question of "the lack of pizazz" in the NYTBR. He mentioned John's statement about the banning of the first person in NYTBR reviews. If book reviews are so dull, why save them? Maybe they are making themselves obsolete with their current format and style (or lack of style). Why not grab readers by their lapels and give book reviews more electricity? And isn't the latter what online coverage is doing?

John said that book reviews aren't perfect. Because the NYTBR is so widely read, people copy the style of the reviews there. But there are hordes of book reviews, not all with that NYTBR "voice." He was not saying that book reviews are perfect.

Dan noted that Ed was speaking provocatively, that a writer can slip stuff in a book review that would never appear in another section of the newspaper.

Hannah said it would be great if reviews are more dynamic, but for that to happen, we need more book reviews. First-time authors don't have the kind of personal networks in the publishing world that allow them to survive without reviews.

Tim said it was bad to cut back on book coverage but that Ed may be right, that what is happening could be creative destruction, as one thing falls by the wayside as another grows up. He said the New York Times treated him well, that the paper was highly useful, but it is still a bit narrow and parochial.

Dan said we need local diversity, not just the NYTBR. We need to make sure books are talked about at the grassroots.

An audience member asked if galleys are beyond the financial reach of some small publishers, will book reviewers or publications that review books accept digital galleys. Tim said, "PDF is OK with me."

John said he recently reviewed a 3,000-page book which he read entirely on PDF, but some reviewers like to make notes in pen or pencil on the pages of the books they're reviewing, something they can't do yet with PDF although perhaps the technology will change. As for himself, he would like to see more books on PDF. He gets 100 galleys a week. Hannah suggested small publishers might try gauging interest and then doing a small sample of galleys to send to selected reviewers.

An audience member asked a question about pack journalism, and most panelist members agreed that was always a concern. Finally, it was well after the 8 p.m. scheduled end to the discussion, and Karin thanked John, his fellow panelists, and the audience for coming.

Afterwards we had the pleasure of meeting for the first time some of our favorite litbloggers: the aforementioned Edward Champion of Return of the Reluctant, Levi Asher of Literary Kicks (Lit Kicks), and MaryDell of Book Blog. Others in the audience engaged in informal discussions with the panelists for the next 20 minutes or so.

Tuesday Evening in Soho: "About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope" at McNally Robinson

This was posted to Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Tuesday, June 12, 2007:

Tonight I went to a great reading at the McNally Robinson bookstore in Soho. Several of my friends are contributors to this anthology, About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope, and they were among the six writers who read excerpts from their memoirs of miscarriage.

Editor Jessica Berger Gross read from the introduction and how she looked high and low for a book to help her after her own miscarriage -- there really wasn't one about women's experiences from their point of view, so she created one here.

Caroline Leavitt's excerpt dealt with her insensitive coworkers who said the most thoughtless things and her friend who came up with the perfect antidote; Andrea (Andi to me) Buchanan's, about the loss of her son's twin brother, and about the feeling of having a dead fetus as well as a living one inside her; Rachel Zucker (whom I know as poet-in-residence at Fordham, where I teach), her 12-day-old son wrapped around her, read about her miscarriage; my Readerville friend and fellow Rockawayite comic novelist Rochelle Jewell Shapiro read about the events leading up to hers, namely her courtship and marriage proposal by her husband Bernie (sitting next to me); and finally, Susan O'Doherty (to me, the one and only "Dear Dr. Sue") read about the aftermath of a twenty-year siege of miscarriages, the nearly unbelievable birth of her son Ben, now 12, who was eating a pumpkin scone with his father at the table beside mine.

We also had an interesting and productive discussion after the readings. Anyway, if you know anyone who's had a miscarriage or want to understand what women go through when they do have one (and why the absolute stupidest thing you can say is, "Some things weren't meant to be"), get About What Was Lost. And even if you're not that interested in the topic now, the writing is so good you will be once you get started.

Tuesday Afternoon in the Theater District: Kitty Carlisle Hart Memorial at the Majestic Theatre

At noon today, we stood on a long line outside the Majestic Theatre to get into the memorial service for Kitty Carlisle Hart, singer, actress, TV personality, (extremely) longtime chairwoman of the New York State Council on the Arts, and an icon of Broadway and NYC life from a different era. In the 1950s and early 1960s, we used to watch her on To Tell the Truth and sometimes What's My Line? and often saw her greatest movie role, as a supporting member of the cast (the young female romantic lead, though) in the Marx Brothers' funniest movie, A Night at the Opera. Broadway-loving kids like us idolized her late husband Moss Hart, playwright, director of My Fair Lady and many other hits (and plenty of flops) and author of perhaps the most fascinating theater memoir ever, Act One, which entralled us when we read it in junior high.

We sat up in the nosebleed section of the highest balcony -- but then again, it's about the same spot we were sitting our first time in the Majestic 43 years ago, watching Sammy Davis Jr. in Golden Boy. We could tell when our family walked into the Saturday matinee, the people around us looked nervous when they spotted three boys ranging in age from 13 to 3. But we were the kind of kids that sat quietly if not silently and didn't fidget. We started taking our youngest brother Jonathan to Broadway shows and museums when he was two -- even to the show at the Hayden Planetarium, where the people in charge expected a 2-year-old would cry in the dark. But Jonathan just sat there and looked up at the Christmas "Bethlehem star" show.

We met Ms. Hart only once, at an AIDS benefit at the 92nd Street Y sponsored by the writers' organization PEN in the fall of 1987. We were introduced by our friend Gregory Kolovakos, the late great translator who worked for Kitty as head of the Literature program at the Arts Council. (Gregory was the one that told us about her relationship with almost-U.S. President Thomas E. Dewey [and he also disabused us of the notion that Elizabeth Taylor was seeing Malcolm Forbes, who preferred younger guys].) The next summer, we got a letter from her saying we'd won a $3,750 Writer-in-Residence Award at the Rockland Center for the Arts in suburban West Nyack; in the fall and winter of 1988-89 we spent several months doing creative writing workshops with schoolkids (from third to twelfth grade) in Rockland County.

Anyway, Kitty's memorial - which we're sure the New York Times will cover so we don't have to, at least not in detail - was a terrific "show" and a great sendoff. The best speakers were her son and daughter, who told great stories about their irrepressible mother, who well into her mid-90s was running circles around people one-third her age. Barbara Walters told some good stories too, and others that spoke included Gerald Schoenfeld of the Shubert Organization and Mario Cuomo. Kristin Chenoweth and Michael Feinstein sang some of Kitty's songs, and they showed clips from her on the TV quiz shows, on a PBS documentary and from the movies.

Our personal favorite Kitty Carlisle song was the one she sang in Woody Allen's Radio Days, about the lack of eligible men in wartime, "They're Either Too Young or Too Old":

They're either too young, or too old,
They're either too gray or too grassy green,
The pickings are poor and the crop is lean.
What's good is in the army,
What's left will never harm me.

They're either too old or too young,
So, darling, you'll never get stung.
Tomorrow I'll go hiking with that Eagle Scout unless,
I get a call from grandpa for a snappy game of chess.

We know the feeling ourselves, but we imagine that in real life, Kitty Carlisle Hart never did.

Monday Night at the Old Stone House: 808 Union Writing Group's Tenth Anniversary Reading

This was posted to Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Tuesday, June 12, 2007:

I enjoyed last night's reading at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the 808 Union Writing Group. It featured:

Kevin McPartland reading a novel about pre-gentrified Park Slope gangs and all by someone who lived it;

Marian Fontana reading from her hilarious new memoir about dating as a 9/11 widow;

Louise Crawford, reading a short story called "Halloween Blonde," about Upper West Side high school girls in the 70s;

Mary Crowley reading a beautiful set of poems;

Wendy Ponte reading from novel about a woman in search of her Portugese identity;

Barbara Ensor, reading from her forthcoming kids' book, Thumbelia, Runaway Tiny Bride;

and playwright Rosemary Moore presenting scenes from a new play with actors.

This writing group all have different voices, work in different genres, but each of their selections was well worth listening to.

Sunday Afternoon in Red Hook: Reading at Lucky Gallery with Harris Bloom, Kevin Freidberg & Richard Grayson

Here's the flyer for an event and reading we'll be part of on Sunday along with our old friend Harris Bloom and new friend Kevin Freidberg at the Lucky Gallery in Red Hook at 1 p.m.:

Two FREE and FANTASTIC events in Red Hook on Sun June 10 at 1pm. How LUCKY is that!

First, head over to the newly-reopened LUCKY GALLERY, where Kris Monroe, our latest NYC emerging talent 'find' (by way of Atlanta) has organized a reading that's sure to get those neurons firing!

Featured writers include:

Kevin Freidberg has worked for the sitcom "King of the Hill," written for The New York Times Magazine and volunteers on a regular basis for 826NYC and the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.

Harris Bloom is a New York born and bred writer, stand-up comedian, and regulatory accountant. He eagerly awaits the day his fame will allow him to quit one of the three. Guess which one. He can be reached at harrisbloom@yahoo.com.

Richard Grayson is the author of several short story collections, including With Hitler in New York, I Brake for Delmore Schwartz, The Silicon Valley Diet, And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street and Eating at Arby's: The South Florida Stories. He has received three individual artist fellowships from the Florida Arts Council and a writer-in-residence award from the New York State Council on the Arts. A native of Brooklyn, he currently lives in Williamsburg and Phoenix and teaches at the School of Visual Arts.

After that, head over to the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition's pier show, and pick up a map for the annual RED HOOK/CARROLL GARDENS OPEN STUDIO TOUR. This year, Ellie Winberg, Matt Tieman, and I have wrangled over 100 participating artists!

See more details here.

B61 bus to Red Hook from Jay St train in Downtown Bklyn is one way...or B77 from Smith/9th...see BWAC.ORG for more detailed directions.

If you're coming from downtown Manhattan, we've even alerted Water Taxi to Red Hook!

Mark your calendars for what's sure to be a GREAT DAY!

Monday Night in Williamsburg: 3:AM Night at Galapagos Art Space with Richard Grayson, Ellen Kennedy, Tao Lin & Kim Chinquee

This post appeared on Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Wednesday, April 4, 2007:

May 16 is 3:AM Magazine Night at Galapagos Art Space

5/16 back $tbd
7pm doors
7:30 show
9:30 end

3:AM MAGAZINE NIGHT

3:AM Magazine authors and editors will read stories and poetry about hot sex, insane violence, and coke fiends.

Richard Grayson is a retired teacher and lawyer who was born in Brooklyn in 1951. He is the author of a dozen books, including With Hitler in New York, The Silicon Valley Diet, I Brake for Delmore Schwartz, And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, and WRITE-IN: Diary of a Congressional Candidate in Florida's Fourth Congressional District.

Ellen Kennedy is the author of a collection of prose and poetry, yesterday i was talking to myself and i told myself that i was going to write a book and give it to you so i put paper in my bag and put a pen in my bag and rode my bike to the river bank and then sat on the ground and thought 'i will never write a book' and watched ducks swim away from me , which can be read at bearparade.com. She has been published in Mipoesias, Elimae, 3 am magazine, and Juked. She lives in Manhattan.

Tao Lin is the author of a novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee (Melville House), a story-collection, Bed (Melville House), and a poetry collection, You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am (Action Books). He has been published by Nerve, Noon, and Spork and he lives in Brooklyn. His web site is called Reader of Depressing Books. He is 3:AM Magazine's poetry editor.

Kim Chinquee's work has recently appeared in Noon, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, Fiction Magazine, New Orleans Review, Notre Dame Review, Fiction International, 3:AM, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and several other places. She teaches creative writing at Central Michigan University.

Thursday Night in Williamsburg: P.E.E.L. Reading Series at Stain Bar with Bronwen Tate, William Hubbard, Richard Grayson & Jennifer Cooke

This was posted to Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Thursday, May 3, 2007:

P.E.E.L. Reading Series tonight at Stain Bar


Special PPEE Reading: May 10

Please join us for a special PPEE edition of the PEEL reading series. The short-format reading will feature a seat-wetting double dose of poetry by Bronwen Tate and William Hubbard, Richard Grayson with an essay on the personal and political sides of Roe v. Wade, and Jennifer Cooke, presenting "After the Symphony."

Thursday, May 10
7:30pm FREE
Stain Bar, 766 Grand Street, Brooklyn
MAP

About the authors:
Bronwen Tate, a native of Portland, OR, lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Word For/Word, Kulture Vulture, Lungful!, HOW2, Typo Magazine and horse less review, among others. She received her MFA in Poetry from Brown University, and will be a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford in the fall. Her chapbook, Souvenirs, will be available for purchase.

William Hubbard is the editor of CapGun, a journal of arts and letters based in Brooklyn, New York. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, Mantis, and Red Line Blues, and his chapbook, A Suggestion Regarding Vacations, will be published by Third Class Press in July. He lives in Brooklyn, and is currently working on a screen adaptation of Robert Creeley's only novel, The Island.

Jennifer Cooke lives and writes in New York City. She has been published in a few literary magazines and newspapers. When she's not writing, she's taking care of her two kids and husband.

Richard Grayson is the author of the story and essay collections With Hitler in New York, Lincoln's Doctor's Dog, I Brake for Delmore Schwartz, I Survived Caracas Traffic, The Silicon Valley Diet, Highly Irregular Stories, And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street and the recently-published WRITE-IN: Diary of a Congressional Candidate in Florida's Fourth Congressional District, based on his 2004 feature on the McSweeney's website. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Miami Herald, The Orlando Sentinel, The Arizona Republic, The San Jose Mercury News and People. A retired teacher and lawyer, he lives in Brooklyn.

Askew Reviews reviews Richard Grayson's WRITE-IN: DIARY OF A CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE IN FLORIDA'S FOURTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT

Askew Reviews has a review by Dennis Sheehan of Richard Grayson's WRITE-IN: Diary of a Congressional Candidate in Florida's Fourth Congressional District:

Richard Grayson is your average Joe who works for a living, enjoys music, and decides to run a write in campaign for Congress against an uncontested, popular incumbent Republican, Ander Crenshaw. Richard has no campaign dollars and no endorsements, but he has balls large enough to fight for what he believes is right and the guts to do something about it. The diary chronicles Grayson's campaign run from May 7, 2004 to Nov. 3, 2007. Grayson details several interviews he granted, the dealings with obnoxious surveys by nationwide political groups, and the coincidences of several political appointments of Crenshaw's staff. Along the way, Grayson also dives into the 2000 Presidential election, some personal life stuff, and thoughts on various social issues.

Richard Grayson is a Democrat's Democrat and whether you agree or disagree with his views, you have to admire his running for office against a very strong candidate. Political junkies will enjoy the easy flow of the book and the "normal" account of running for elected office. Republicans will throw their arms up in the air with Grayson's thoughts, but also gloat in his loathing over what happened with the national and Florida state elections in 2004. Dems will cheer on Grayson and agree 100 percent with his hatred and annoyance with the opposite party. Personally, I enjoyed the read and found it magnificently interesting, but some of his writing is a bit whiney in a sore loser kind of way. Concerning the results of the 2004 national and Florida state elections, Grayson writes "The people have spoken, the subhuman douche bags." The fairly large text font and paragraph spacing makes for a quick read, but Grayson minces no words and has a lot to offer in the 105 pages.