#FridayReads, May 11–Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, Raymond Bonner’s powerful and sad indictment of the system in a S. Carolina death penalty case. Also, “Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance, 1985-1995 by Michael Barclay, et al, a rich, readable tour of Canadian rock n’ roll, accompanied by a great CD compilation of the same name.
NYC friends who love great live folk rock: If you’re in the market for musical entertainment this Saturday night, May 12, consider heading out to hear Cuff the Duke, an inspired outfit originally from Oshawa, Ontario. They’re playing at the Rock Shop, a friendly club with good acoustics on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. The nearest subway stop in Union Street on the R train in Brooklyn. Here are details. They are not the headliners–though they’re good and polished enough with great vocals and songwriting to warrant top billing–so they may go on as early as 7:30. I’ve got a call in to the club about that and will post new info when I get it. I’ll be there. If you’re curious about their sound, click on the video below or on their band page at CBCRadio3 where you can hear many of their songs. Hope to see you then/there.
Evening Update: In the most disturbing eyewitness report yet, a Mitt Romney classmate involved in the assault on John Lauber has told ABC,
“’It’s a haunting memory. I think it was for everybody that spoke up about it. . .because when you see somebody who is simply different taken down that way and is terrified and you see that look in their eye you never forget it. And that was what we all walked away with,’ said Phillip Maxwell, who is now an attorney and still considers Romney an old friend. ‘I saw it with my own eyes,’ said Maxwell, of the anecdote first reported by the Washington Post. Maxwell said Romney held the scissors helping to cut the hair of a student, John Lauber, who was presumed to be gay and who had long hair. ‘It was a hack job. . . clumps of hair taken off.’ Asked if he has any doubt that what Romney did could be considered bullying, Maxwell responded, ‘Oh my god, are you kidding?. . . I castigated myself regularly for not having intervened. I would have felt a lot better about myself had I said ‘hey, enough.’ When I saw the look on his [Lauber’s] face, it was a look I’ll never forget,” said Maxwell. ‘When you see a victim, the sense of trust betrayed in this boy who was perfectly innocent for being different. This was bullying supreme,’ he said.”
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Afternoon Update: This situation has gotten murkier all day, with Romney’s spokesperson (in my initial post below) denying that the candidate had any recollection of such an incident, then Romney himself later saying he didn’t at the time think of the classmate as gay, but implying that he did indeed know and remember him. He continues to say he doesn’t recall this incident, though he adds he won’t “argue” with the report of it. And while the Romney campaign is reportedly trying to arrange for former classmates of his to vouch for him, the only one contacted so far is still deciding whether or not he’s going to speak on behalf of Mitt’s campaign. Then there is one former classmate, quoted here via ABC who the campaign will probably not be asking for a character reference:
“One former classmate and old friend of Romney’s–who refused to be identified by name–said there are ‘a lot of guys’ who went to Cranbrook who have ‘really negative memories’ of Romney’s behavior in the dorms, behavior this classmate describes as ‘evil’ and ‘like Lord of the Flies.’ The classmate believes Romney is lying when he claims to not remember [the hair-cutting incident]. ‘It makes these fellows [who have owned up to it] very remorseful. For [Romney] not to remember it? It doesn’t ring true. How could the fellow with the scissors forget it?’ the former classmate said.”
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That is the opening of a lengthy bombshell article by Jason Horowitz in today’s Washington Post about the abusive and appalling treatment he reports Mitt Romney led against classmate John Lauber in 1965. Before going to press Horowitz asked Romney’s campaign for comment:
The nearly 5500-word article seems to be meticulously sourced and carefully reported, though I’m sure Romney allies and rightwingers will attack the reporter and the Post. Still, with five classmates remembering the incident so vividly, all looking back on it with deep regret, I predict this denial will be assailed until the campaign–or even the candidate himself–is forced to come up with a more believable response. The image of Mitt Romney rallying a veritable ‘lynch mob’ to forcibly pin down their classmate and make him submit to a sadistic and weird kind of de-feminizing of his supposedly effeminate affectation–his hair that swooped over an eye–is sick and disgusting, especially when contrasted with President Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality yesterday.
Apart from the possible political repercussions from this story, it is also very sad. The effects of this incident in Lauber’s life echoed down through the years. While Romney suffered no discipline for his deeds at “the famously strict” Cranbrook, Lauber was expelled prior to graduation, for smoking a cigarette. He died in 2004. I suspect I’ll be updating this post and commenting again on the story as it develops. For now, I urge you to take the time to read the disturbing article.
With the news of Maurice Sendak’s sad passing today, I’ve been reminded of a brush with intolerance that I experienced many years ago, when one of his most popular books unexpectedly became an issue with a censorious customer.
When I worked in my family’s Cleveland bookstore, Undercover Books, the children’s book section was not my strong suit. I was responsible for ordering our adult books and shelving and merchandising them in their separate sections of the bookstore.
While I looked after the adult books, my sister Pamela ordered all our kids books and worked on the best ways to display them, including the type of merchandise that I regarded skeptically—board books, plush books, sticker books, scratch & sniff books, etc. Pam knew these titles and their authors best, and had a far better knack than I of finding a particular thin-spined book when a customer came in asking for a specific title, as they often did. She had it all over me in this department, and also on our brother Joel—whose chief responsibilities included future business planning and working on the main sales floor, waiting on customers face to face—and our parents Earl and Sylvia, who handled myriad duties such as bank deposits and bill-paying, as well as minding the cash register and waiting on regulars and walk-ins. But when it came to helping a grandmother, relative, or family friend seeking a book for a little one, or a middle-grader, the call often went out for Pam. But she couldn’t be available at all times and I recall she sometimes just wearied of being summoned for this often challenging duty. Grown-ups were so often unsure what a child might like they could take a really long time deciding on a gift book to buy, even after many offerings had been shown them. So, every now and then I would be pressed into duty to take care of a customer who simply had to buy a children’s book.
One such occasion arose one day in the early 1980s, when a rather elderly woman customer who I recognized from a previous visit to our store, a Mrs. Stewart, came in and without hesitation asked if we had Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. She was emphatic in saying she wanted to purchase it, in fact, she said, “I want to buy all the copies you have.” I blanched, worrying if I’d be able to find a copy, or multiple copies if we had them—we always hated to miss a multiple copy sale if we could avoid doing so. There was something weird about Mrs. Stewart’s nervous energy, but it didn’t stop me from feeling satisfaction when I quickly put my hands on a copy, and established with certainty that it was our last one. Mrs. Stewart had come back to the children’s section with me and I eagerly presented it to her, adding that it was unfortunately our only copy, though I added, we would certainly be ordering more. She grabbed it from me, a bit aggressively, and said, “I’m going to buy it so no one else can. You should not be selling this book. It shows a naked boy and his private parts. I want you to stop selling this book. You must not reorder it or sell it any longer!”
Suddenly recalling that on her earlier visit to the store Mrs. Stewart had asked for a fundamentalist tract that we didn’t carry, I realized that I had a kind of religious fanatic on my hands, with some essential human right suddenly at stake, the freedom to read. By this time I was highly agitated, and more than a bit angry at her high-handed claim to tell me what books we should sell in our bookstore. Wanting to get her out of the store as quickly as possible, and before she made a scene in front of other customers, as smoothly as I could manage I took the book from her hands—as if I were simply walking her back up to the cash wrap where she could complete her transaction—mumbling some indistinct nicety about the naked boy in the book. Reaching the register, which was almost to the front door, I changed my tone and said as forcefully as I could without actually yelling, “I won’t sell you this book, Mrs. Stewart, and I won’t allow you to tell me what books we should be selling, or what is proper for customers to buy. You’ll have to leave now, please.”
Realizing that in my gambit to get her out of the store, I had also taken from her hands what she considered to be this very offensive book, she reached to regain possession of it but by now I was behind the counter and handed the copy to my mother. Angry and frustrated, Mrs Stewart began yelling, repeating with horror in her tone, “The boy in that book is naked and you should not be it selling it. I must buy that book so no one else can!”
Again, trying to avoid yelling over her, I said, “I will not sell you this book. Our customers have a right to buy any of our books, and we will not stop carrying this book just because you don’t approve of it.” She took a long time to decide to leave, though eventually she saw that I wasn’t going to sell her the book under any circumstances. She never came in our store again.
Over the years that have followed—as a bookseller, and later as an editor and publisher and engaged literary citizen—I alway take note of Banned Books Week as it comes around on the calendar (this year it will be held September 30-October 6), when libraries and bookstores are encouraged to make displays of books that intolerant people have demanded be removed from library stacks and bookstore shelves. I wonder about the sort of person who would do this, and then think of Mrs. Stewart with her strident voice and straining neck muscles—determined to persuade me that we must not allow anyone else to buy Maurice Sendak’s picture book, lest they see little Mickey’s nakedness—the very face of intolerance.
July 11, 2021
As a postscript to the 2012 post of mine above, I want to share an image of a poster Maurice Sendak drew to support the American Booksellers Association Freedom to Read campaign in 1991. A copy of the poster was part of an exhibit and sale at the Society of Illustrators in Manhattan that Ewan Turner and I attended yesterday at the invitation of children’s book scholar Michael Patrick Hearn. Note the many books labeled on it, from Catcher in the Rye to Native Son to The Giving Tree. His own In the Night Kitchen might’ve been on there, too, if old Mrs Stewart had had her way!
#FridayReads Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland, artist Joseph Remnant and editor Jeff Newelt’s posthumous publication of one of the late Pekar’s last manuscripts, lovingly assembled. Also, Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Joe Jones, as Told to Albert Murray, edited by Paul Devlin–Jones was longtime drummer in the Count Basie Band, a garrulous soul.
My wife Kyle Gallup is a visual artist who also writes for LeftBankArtBlog. Her latest piece, published there on April 28, is on the New York painter Katherine Bradford, whose current exhibit at Edward Thorp Gallery is up through May 26. The work of Bradford’s shown to the left is “S.O.S., 2012.” I hope you enjoy reading Kyle’s review here as a guest post and if you’re able to, get out and see Katherine Bradford’s paintings at the gallery.
Always happy to see a story involving my old hometown Cleveland’s book culture–Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly reports that an 1886 book of natural history and ornithology, Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, a copy of which was discovered in 1995 in the library of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, is now being republished by Princeton Architectural Press. PAP’s catalog listing for the book shows that the new edition has been retitled America’s Other Audubon by Joy Kiser, the librarian who found one of twenty-five remaining copies of the rare book.
The author, Genevieve Jones, an amateur naturalist of her day, was inspired to create the book after seeing Audubon’s Birds of America paintings at the World’s Fair of 1876. She created sixty-eight original lithographs in making her book, which contemporaries described as “the most beautiful book ever produced in America.” Sadly, Jones died before it was finished and her family labored seven years to see to its completion, then underwriting printing and selling it by subscription. Only 90 copies were produced, and among the subscribers were Theodore Roosevelt and President Rutherford Hayes.
I love old natural history books, such as The Journal of A Disappointed Man by W.N.P. Barbellion, to which H.G. Wells contributed an Introduction upon its publication in 1919–a few months before the author died of multiple sclerosis at age thirty. Two sample entries from Barbellion’s youth, January 3, 1903: “Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned the idea of writing 0n ‘How Cats Spend their Time.'” and March 18, “Our Goldfinch roosts at 5:30. Joe’s kitten is a very small one. ‘Magpie’ is its name.” I have an old Penguin copy of the book and a reprint published in 1989. Then there’s Fishes: Their Journeys and Migrations by Louis Roule, originally published in 1933, which I republished as a Kodansha Globe title in 1996, with a new Introduction by George Reiger of Field & Stream magazine. A reviewer of the original edition wrote, “Will please the nature student, the Izaak Walton enthusiast, or the reader who delights in believe-it-or-nots.” Living in an age of diminishing biological diversity with an accelerating pace of extinction, it is important to be aware of species and varieties that used to be common and are no more, or increasingly scarce, and I treasure these books for aiding that effort, decades after they were first published. That’s kind of miraculous.
Some readers of this blog will have noticed yesterday that an incorrectly reported Politico story–about Barack Obama as author of Dreams From My Father–which was then inflated on the Drudge Report in to a bogus “Obama lied” meme, led to me being quoted in TPM’s story on the dust-up, because I published the first paperback edition of the book, in 1996. The TPM story ran under the headline, “‘Dreams From My Father’ Publisher: Drudge, Politico Obama Hits Bunk.”
And now today, Craig Silverman–who in 2007 published a book with me, Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Our Free Speech –writes about this situation on his blog, where he covers media mistakes and corrections, in a column, How Politico can fix its mistake about Obama book. In his piece, Craig does an excellent job taking away useful lessons from the episode that all media people and news orgs should consider following, especially on how to handle the aftermath of a mistake. For media people who care about preventing errors, and the misinformation and harm that flow from them, I urge you to heed Craig’s constructive advice.
For the record, I’ve also written about correcting the Politico error and the Drudge amplification of it here, and earlier wrote about publishing Dreams From My Father here.