This one's all about legacies: familial, literary, cultural & institutional! Mirana Comstock joins the show to celebrate the publication of The Algonquin Round Table: 25 Years with the Legends Who Lunch (Excelsior Editions/SUNY Press), by her grandfather, the late literary lion Konrad Bercovici. We get into how Mirana discovered this manuscript, what it meant to edit it & write the intro, what it was like to help bring the Algonquin scene & Konrad's writing to life for a new generation of readers, and the experience of growing up in a multigenerational household of compulsive artists & writers. We talk about why her grandfather's immense literary stature diminished, the nature of charisma and The Aura, the scandal of Chaplin stealing Konrad's script for The Great Dictator, how the Algonquin habitués were the influencers of their time (only with something to say), how the Algonquin scene was like Vienna café society transposed into New York & American capitalism, Mirana's discoveries as she researched the figures in the book, and why there'll never be another book like this one. We also discuss the New-York Historical Society's acquisition of Konrad's papers, her New York and how it's changed, her idea for transforming her family's writing into a meta-stage production, and a lot more. More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter
The Virtual Memories Show
Episode 599 - Mirana Comstock
(upbeat music) - Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and we're here to preserve and promote culture one weekly conversation at a time. You can subscribe to The Virtual Memories Show through iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Google Play, and a whole bunch of other venues. Just visit our sites, chimeraobscura.com/vm or vmspod.com to find more information, along with our RSS feed. And follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at VMSPod. Well, it is late summer, and I am already making plans for some of next year's guests. See, every Monday I get this email from Edelweiss, the, they do all the e-review copies of books for upcoming titles and all. So, the email on Mondays has a list of all the fiction and non-fiction books for which they have new e-review copies. So, every week at lunchtime on Monday, I sit down, click through both of those, and I just look over the hundred or so books in each category, see if there's anything that sounds interesting for future episodes. And I've gotten a bunch of shows this year out of doing that this week. Two of my past guests showed up in the fiction section with releases coming this January and March. So, I hit 'em up, they said yes, and I guess that means I'm gonna keep doing this into 2025, huh? Weals gotta keep turning, I guess. Anyway, not a whole lot to tell you otherwise, just the summer doldrums, I'm getting run down by the whole season, and I've got a whole ton of work to do just to get ready for this fall. So, I'm not gonna bore you with any of that. Instead, let's get to the show. This week's guest is Marana Comstock. She edited a phenomenal new book called "The Algonquin Roundtable," 25 Years with the Legends Who Lunch by Conrad Berkovichi, is published by Excelsior Editions in Print of SUNY Press, State University of New York. Actually, it is not a phenomenal new book because Conrad Berkovichi died 10 years before I was born, but it is seeing print for the first time, so that makes it new. See, Marana is Conrad's granddaughter, and there is a whole story as to how she came across the manuscript for this book, and much more of Conrad's writing, as well as writing by other members of the family. And she'll get into that in our conversation, but I just have to tell you, Conrad is an amazing writer. His prose is phenomenal, clean, and clear. His storytelling chops are fantastic, and he's got this reporter's eye that he brings to scenes and settings, and he melds that beautifully with this authorial voice. In the conversation, I say, it's like melding the reporter in the columnist into one, and he really does that. Well, anyway, the book gets into the history of the Algonquin Roundtable, that hotel and then restaurant in the theater district in New York City, but it digresses all over the place into these wonderful stories of writers and the theater and the lore of Hollywood and the labor movement and all the people who worked in the hotel and the other guy who bought it and originated it and then his successor. And Conrad brings the hotel, the restaurant, the habitual ways everybody, he brings it all to life. But more than that, he evokes the whole era, this 30s, the into 50s world, mainly the interwar era, but reading this book, it just, well, it felt like an antidote to social media, I'll put it that way, and to the whole influencers and hot takes and all that stuff. To imagine this world of this restaurant and lounge where the great thinkers and writers and lawyers and scientists and everybody just hung out and chewed the fat. And, well, we compare it to Vienna Cafe culture later on in the conversation, but it's a different world than we have now. And throughout the book, Conrad drops names, but you never get the sense that he's out to impress. Really, you get the vibe that he knew everyone. It didn't just know them in passing, he got something. Whether it was, again, the biggest writers and actors in the world, or the bell boys and the waiters at the hotel, he was able to capture them all on the page. And this book really, again, it brings it all to us. Now, it comes up in the conversation. I will tell you, I had never heard of Conrad Berkovichi before receiving this book. I got a pitch from a publicist, who's a longtime listener of the show, thank you, Jesse. But I didn't know, and I was reading Marana's introduction to the book and learned what high esteem Berkovichi was held in by both critics and his peers. He was a big, big name writer with about 40 books on his shelf in America's, like I say, the interwar period and beyond. And we get into why his reputation faded as much as it did. But I just got to tell you, a writer this good should not be ignored. We need to go back and start kind of exploring this guy's prose, both for just the sheer quality of the writing and for the era he was writing about and the anti-fascist message he brought to the world. And anti-fascist, in this case, being directly anti-Nazi. It's, well, again, there's a whole story and Marana will get into that as we start talking. The Algonquin Roundtable, it's a wonderful book and Marana's doing a mitzvah, bringing his writing back for today's readers. And our introduction to the book is, it's illuminating, not just about Conrad's times, but about the family and what it was like for her growing up in this multi-generational household of Bohemian artists. And I compare it to the Royal Tannenbaum's a little bit, but it's something weirder and different than that. And I hope in our own work, Marana starts to explore that and we talk about what she plans to do with some of the other writing that she's come across as the remaining heir. So anyway, when I was headed up to Massachusetts last month for ReaderCon, I took a side trip over to Marana's house. We could sit down, have a conversation about this book and her experience bringing it to life and the other wonders that await us as we learn more about the Berkovichi family. So go get the Algonquin Roundtable, 25 years with The Legends Who Lunch. It's by Conrad Berkovichi, Conrad with a K, edited and with an introduction by Marana Comstock from Excelsior Editions of SUNY Press. Now as caveats go, there's some background noise. It was summer, we had the doors open, so you'll hear sprinklers, delivery trucks, dogs barking, her dog comes meandering in and we have a cute moment with him. Also, my main recorder had a problem. I did not realize until afterwards. Should have realized it when I saw the levels on her side, but I thought it was the air conditioning. So this is all done from the backup recorder because you should always have a backup recorder going, guys. And the audio's just fine. Anyway, oh, the other thing is we used the term gypsy throughout the conversation because that's the term as Conrad used it. And he was, he wrote about that world a lot. Just leave it at that, okay? And here's Marana's bio. Marana Comstock is a screenwriter, poet and musician who has recorded and performed in New York and the Boston area, where she now resides. She is currently adapting one of her grandfather's books as a mini series. Here's Conrad's bio. There's a longer version at conradbercovitchy.com, but this is the one from the book. Conrad Berkovitchy was a celebrated author and journalist and friend of many leading 20th century figures, including John Reed, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway and Paul Robeson. And now the virtual memories conversation with Marana Comstock. So tell me about finding the manuscript, the story behind how we bring the Algonquin round table to life. Well, it was kind of in the process of potentially moving from the house that I lived in and figuring out that everything couldn't come with me. Already 500 paintings were coming, but every single piece of paper that anybody in the family they'd ever written on couldn't come also because everybody wrote, the painter's wrote, the musician's wrote, everybody wrote also. And this is sort of a family story that I thought that our veins were blue because you all had ink in them. And so I figured it was time to go through the papers and see what was in there, what wasn't in there. In several years before Anne Wild, who was a student in Eastern European studies at Cornell, had discovered some of Grandpa's work in the library, the librarian at Cornell had pointed her in that direction. And she loved the work and ended up basically majoring in him. She passed away before she finished her thesis, but she got grants to go to France and Romania and retrace the family stuff. She knew more about the family than I did. They visited with my mom, they filmed her at free acres, the single tax colony in New Jersey actually, where they had summer when she was a child and filmed her at her apartment in New York. And she had arranged at one point for papers to potentially go to Columbia. And I had spoken to the person at Columbia, but at the time, it just wasn't the right time to do it. I couldn't go through it, I didn't have the resources to do it. And I traced down the guy from Columbia, who ended up at the New York Historical Society, but he had retired from there. And actually I can announce this as a first on here. The New York Historical Society has acquired Grandpa's papers as a few weeks ago. They were all driven to New York in 12 plastic banker boxes that lived in the second bathroom here for a while until we could get them there. So I was preparing myself for the move and also while I was doing this, remembering like these papers have to go somewhere and they shouldn't be coming around with me. It's my family produced so much writing and so much artwork, it becomes almost like family hoarding, and you keep all of it. And there's no reason for me to have all of it. It's really better off for other people to experience it. So I started going through the papers and Grandpa published literally hundreds of stories and articles during the '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s, and I'm still writing until he died in '61. And there's so much work there that it's hard for me to tell what's been published and what hasn't been published. 'Cause there's hundreds of stories, I don't know. - That's a draft versus what was-- - It's really hard to know that. And it's also difficult to know what hasn't published and what hasn't been published. And you look up copyright laws, but some of the magazines held the copyrights and some of them don't exist anymore. Some of them do like Esquire. He had dozens of things in Esquire. He was on the masthead along with Hemingway and Dryzer and Fitzgerald and stuff 'cause he was actually on that level at one point. But so I'm going through all the papers and trying to figure out what I should be saving, what I shouldn't, what's a duplicate copy of what. I've got like hundreds of little piles around the room with the same title on it. And it also allowed me to realize 'cause he wrote, it was so prolific that at one point figured out maybe he didn't edit anything. Maybe it just came out like that. But these were versions of handwritten things on them, which is one of the reasons that the Historical Society was interested in. But the books I knew, 'cause I knew there were 40 books and I knew I had a copy of which of the books. So when I found, there's three books that I found that I know of so far. This, when I found the Algonquin book, it was the way it was bound with the big old metal prongs and all kinds of things. It was obviously a book, another bunch of stories. And I knew it hadn't been published because I had all these books. I keep more careful track of that. So I found that one in a novel, written in the '50s, which we may be turning into a television series that's next project. And there was also a series of articles that he wrote about some of the people he knew. And this was kind of amazing, people that did an article about Chaplin's article, about Hemingway, there's an article about Modo Jani whose sketch of grandpa is in the modern museum. There's several about Einstein because he was on prevent World War III, publications, so there were a lot of stories, some of the stories had been published before and some of them hadn't. But if you make a collection of them, it's a new copyright, so it seemed worthwhile. And that is actually what I went out first with as a proposal because I thought there's sort of the marquee brand names in there. Gee, an article about Hemingway, an article about Einstein, an article about T.E. Lawrence, an article about Chaplin. I thought this was going to be, this is going to be more of a draw. And as I was working on it, I found other ones too. I found one on Mahler when he was a conductor and I found one on Edward G. Robinson who was a native Romanian saying his grandpa and they knew each other. And I found all these other things to start getting bigger and bigger. And that's what I originally went out with. But when I talked to an agent in New York, we suggested I go the academic route. And when I got in touch with SUNY, State University of New York, Richard Carlin was a senior editor there, was initially interested in the memoir stories, but then when he heard that there was an Algonquin book, he was, yeah, he describes it as like, hair on his neck stood up, at the launch. But actually, is what he said in the film weren't making of it, that it was like, because they haven't a division, the Excelsior editions division, and that division is New York, and New York history. - And so it was just like, it was just, beyond just being the Algonquin, this book is so New York. - Yeah, it's completely New York. And at one point he was even interested in republishing around the world in New York when a grandpa spoke. So we decided getting into ethnic neighborhoods and things and stuff like that was not where we wanted to go. It's a little too sensitive in this time to go to. And so within a few days, he was, once he read the book, he was interested in doing the book. And it was kind of cool what that would talk about other people doing the forward initially and all this kind of stuff. And then he asked me to do the forward, and I'm not a book writer. I'm a published poet, I'm not. I'm a writer, I'm a writer, I'm an advertising writer, I'm a screenwriter, I've written everything but books. It was almost like I left that for the family to do. And there's a thing with books of not having guardrails or parameters that's really weird to me, because every other kind of writing I do, I mean, screenwriting is format central. Now don't write more than four lines of action and that otherwise they'll think you're trying to be the director, you know, or the cinematographer. Poetry, you set up your own boundaries around. I set up pretty strict ones that are, you know, my voice that's not like singsongy or certain rhythm, but they're little things I want interior rhymes at certain places and stuff like that. And obviously lyrics, it's music. So you have, you have like guardrails around you for everything for a book. It's like, I'll do 10, 12 pages, what? - Mm-hmm. Yeah. - Yeah, it was like, hmm, how will I know when I'm done? - Yeah. - Yeah, it was a strange floating no-parameters thing, you know? And how will I know I've said too much about him or not too much about me or who cares about that story? And, you know, it was, it was, I sweated it, for sure. It wasn't like, oh, Jesus' writer, she's always written, it was not what I was used to writing. And then he asked me to become the editor of the book also. And that was another tough thing, 'cause I edit myself, I don't edit other people. - Sure. - And editing somebody else's voice who wrote this book like 70 years ago, you go like, well, we're grandpa have made that one sentence is paragraph into three separate sentences now, or is that just me with what I would do? So it's editing within somebody else's voice. And I guess that's why people, grab that and edit her. People have, back in the day, had their editor. - Yeah. - You know, who was the first-- - That's still a case of option. - I'm sure, yeah. - But I don't know, because I didn't do this. (laughing) - I mean, there's always stories when editor jumpships to another publishing house, all the authors go with them. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I can see that, because getting inside their head and doing it the way you think is better, but the way they would think it was better, not the way you would think it was better. Plus 70 years, plus it's your grandfather. - Sure. - And I'm sitting there going, why am I editing him? He's like, he's the person who had all the work done and all the kind of stuff. I've been knocking on these doors forever. I go out with grandpa's book and in three days, he's got a publisher, you know. It's kind of like, I haven't sold a script yet. It becomes like, so why am I the one editing him? He should be editing me if he was alive, you know. And so there's all that sort of feelings in there. I found them really difficult, you know, but I have to say I did okay, because they put my name on the cover, which was, that was, they knew how to get me to do this, because it was my name with grandpa, but I had to make it smaller. - Yeah, actually. - I was one of the few people who probably involved with me. My name's small. - Just there. - It doesn't have to be dominant, but yeah. - But I like the introduction, it flows. And it was a question I had as to how much editing was involved, 'cause I don't know what the raw material looked like. - The raw material looked good. - Yeah, yeah. - That was one of the things I learned from looking through the papers that grandpa did edit. Yeah, his handwriting is all over, a lot of those pages come, 'cause that wasn't the answer, like he did all of this prolific, incredible amount of work while raising four children who could have been the easiest in the world, 'cause they were all like independent and raised going to things like ethical culture, school, and things where you left when you felt like it, and you didn't teach them the alphabet, because that would be too constricting for their brains. That's what he raised, you know, and four of them. And he was a foreign correspondent in Europe and in covering the Nazis and covering World War One and where we was at the Paris Peace Conference and stuff. I mean, so he was traveling all the time. And writing, and writing the books of the stories, and writing the articles, and I don't, I still don't get it. But part of me thought maybe he didn't have to edit, but not true, it was him writing all over. - There's a degree of, the writer I think of in relation to a different region seemed lifetime, generally Steppensweig, who was a huge Austrian writer who just kept writing novellas, a couple of novels, biographies, memoirs, all this stuff. And you can't add up the dates and make it work. It's like, when did he stop? - I have. - Even the end, like he was in exile in Brazil, he fled, Europe goes to New York, hates it there, moves to Brazil, doesn't have his library or anything with him, writes a 500 page autobiography, and then kills himself. And it's like, okay, I mean, the last part is terrible, but it's also the, how did you just come up with the whole biography, like six months? - And it's so many different, because I would open up a thing and the things that haven't been produced, I kept copies of it that I gave to a historical society, but I'd open up a section of the drawer and it'd be like 50 plays, 50. He had realities, because he was feeling it was alive during television, in fact, the week that he passed away in '61, he did, at your beck and call, he was a TV show that had writers, and then he was on with Normie Mailer and stuff like that. And he was the one getting the most questions, 'cause Grandpa was just really charming. He was a really charming guy. And just totally born storytelling. He could sit down and tell you a story about anything, he'd be like, you just stop everything to listen to it. Which, when I was organizing the papers, I guess it was difficult, because anything I picked up, you could not put down. It just grabbed you. And a part of that, I think, is the journalist, the who, what, where, when he puts you in there. Anybody he describes, if they walk down the street, she would know them in a second. And it's just different ways of describing people. It's not cliche, or anything. - I'd carry throughout the book. - It doesn't, right, okay. - And it's just, it feels like you are there, because yeah, it's a reporter telling you this. A reporter slash columnist, like you're getting an individual's perspective, but you're getting a factual representation of it all. - It's just charming and shabby. And I'm sure he wasn't quite as charming when he was writing political stuff, or not, but that said, the great dictate. - Yeah, tell me about the story. He wrote the original? - He wrote the original story about my mother typed it. He was very different, Chaplain. One of his earliest books, I think Iliana, are Mordeaux, Mordeaux Iliana, which is Gypsy's story. He was very associated with Gypsy's stories, but it's maybe a quarter of when he wrote. I mean, it became like a good branding thing. - Yeah. - Make him the Gypsy. - He became known as the authority on. - Gypsy's, and also because he was flamboyant, and he wore capes, and he had long hair. And, you know, and-- - Did we get in trouble for saying Gypsy's, or were supposed to say Romani now? My family's Romanian also, so it's-- - Oh, why did I not know that? - Oh, my father was born in Bucharest in '37 or '38, depending on who he's lying to. Yeah, mom was in England, Ukraine, Poland, all that. Just Jews from all over Egypt. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Got some of that too. - Yeah, that's, but yeah, Dad was-- - Most of the year. - '38, or, you know, just about wartime Bucharest, so. - My grandmother on the other side was Romanian. My father's mother was Romania. And I think he, I think, and the father's family was like New England Protestant. I think somebody got written out of the-- - Yeah, you assumed there was something-- - You got written out of the family Bible for like marrying somebody, Jews, kind of, for, you know, marrying Rose, yeah. But-- - But you were saying about the Gypsy heritage we got to from something else, or just from the correspondent work in Beijing, Romania. - Well, at one point, supposedly, they want him to become president of Romania, because nobody else spoke, someone of the, he wrote that book, The Royal Lover, that was about the Romanian royal family. - Oh, we're talking about Chaplin, that's right. - Yeah. - Somehow we got from Chaplin to the Romania thing. You're saying about Merno, the-- - Oh yeah, I'll call those the Gypsy stories. - Yeah. - The grandpa's known for Gypsy stories. I think Anne Wilde, who was the Cornell student, who was majoring in Grandpa pretty much, she had a theory that they didn't necessarily agree with, but she thought some of why Grandpa's fame had gone away, because at the launch, two people were, and the Sunni guy was saying, I don't really understand why he's not better known now. He was so well known then, and he's so good, and there's so much work, what happened. And Anne actually, to certain extent, thought that they created him as the other, you know, the Gypsy guy, and then when the '50s came along, and how some American activities came along, being foreign was not a good thing. And when you look at the names of the people in his contemporaries, this whole lost generation crowd of Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, and Dreiser, you know this one thing in common about all his names versus what did he see. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And I think there's an element of truth that they created him as a symbol of this, and then he didn't trust it. And he was not communist at all. - Yeah, but it was all, you know. - It was something I've been wondering through, especially from your introduction and the way you frame, you know, or the quotes you have about Conrad's stature back then, and then he'll be compared to check off by future generations, and it's like-- - Yeah, it's true, look at that. - And that's the thing, he's not now, and that's what I've been wondering. The nature of reputation, and what happens, and that's a great theory for him. - I think it's an interesting theory. Also, politically, he didn't align himself left or right. I mean, I was raised fairly liberal, progressive, but they saw through the bullshit. - Yeah, anti-communist left. I just did a podcast about Orwell last week, and it's a second word to the anti-communist left left you. - And people misinterpreted-- - On the island. - That's just lined up with this, and it's like, no, it's not, you know? And grandpa was never called by a husband. I had a cousin who was blacklisted, one of the Berkavissi crowd from the California Berkavissis, 'cause Eric Berkavissi, who did the original Shogun, and I think his father, Leonardo Berkavissi, created, Eric created Hawaii Five, oh I believe, or was one of the initial people who ended up living Hawaii. And Leonardo was a portrait of Jimmy and some of some really, really wonderful movies, and ended up, I think the last thing he did was the remake of The Bishop's Wife of Whitney Houston, was I think Leonardo Berkavissi was the director of that in his 80s, I think it was the last piece of work that he did. - Maybe she went there. - But Leonardo was blacklisted. But grandpa was not, and he didn't align himself with the left or the right, and I think that's a problem too, because at that particular period of time in New York, Hollywood, you put yourself with this crowd and they were your allies, and helped you in work and everything else. And there's a book tramp by Joyce Milton about Chaplin, which she interviewed the family extensively, and she sort of got it right, that one of the problems was that grandpa was criticizing Hitler, and Hitler and Russia were buddies at the time. And so they wanted that criticism to come from within, not from without. And Grandpa was not part of the club who was allowed to criticize Hitler to that extent. But to backtrack on that, the mom types the treatment for that. And he presented at Pebble Beach to Chaplin with Melvin Douglas, Melvin Douglas was there at the time. And Melvin actually, in his autobiography mentions that he was there, the grandpa wrote the great dictative. And it was his first talking, so it was a really important movie for him. And it totally has the humor, that's the family humor, it's the campus humor, the kicking the balloon, that's the world. This pictures of my brother when he was a baby, kicking the balloon, like that with the world on it. But-- - The alarm's gone. - Okay, security system, cracker jack security system. It's too much for real, but he's coming. - He's looking all right. - It's lovely, it's lovely, it's lovely for me. - That's okay. - So that's my protein shakes. But a grandpa dedicated one of his earliest books, I think it's Iliana Armordo, I think it's Mordo, he dedicates it to Chaplin. Not like him handwriting dedication, it's printed on there. And it's a beautiful dedication about, to those of us who serenade below the empty windows. It's a really beautiful and shows up. - Hi baby, hi Ruby, Ruby has joined the party. Where are those cookies I heard so much about. - So it shows how publicly they were friends, I mean, Chaplin, my aunt was named revolt on her birth certificate, with an E in the end to make it like a feminine revolt. And when the story was, family story was on her 16th birthday, she demanded a new name, and Chaplin was there, celebrating with her in California. She sort of barricaded the door and said, "Nobody leaves until I have a new name." And he came up with, at hours until the night, he came up with Rada, Rada Burke at UC, and she took the name, and everybody was allowed to leave. So it's sort of in a weird way her godfather. - Yeah. - But, though he was brilliant and they were close, he was a son of a bitch. She, you know, go there. - She took on her ship of love. - It took on a ship, not just that, it took on a ship of songs. There was a lot of people who used his control and Hollywood to like kick people out. I know it's in books. Joyce got a lot of it right about the politics of who was allowed to criticize that one, but they basically told Grandpa the studio would not let them. They could not make that movie for political reasons. And then he found out it was being filmed, which is a horrible betrayal. I don't know how you get over something like that. And then it got put off in terms of, for years, it got put off for a lot of years stalled off and stuff like that. And it was finally tried and, again, Lou and Lou and I, Zero was Grandpa's attorney. - Pleasure. - It's in my life in court. - Yeah, see, it plays a significant role in the, you all got a question. - Yeah, yeah. They were close on. I think when I was going off to college, he signed up, he signed those, you know, recommendation papers for me or something like that. Or something like that. Yeah, well, well, he says such wonderful things about Grandpa, like on that back cover. That's pretty up there. - So what were your memories, your grandfather? - Some of that is like what's in the intro to the book, but he had, which I did not include him there, but he had like a little hollowed out place in his chest that was like the right size for a child's head. It sounds like a weird thing, but I remember like, I remember like being like, currently I'm next and putting my head in the hollow area. It was a child, it was a specific spot that was for that. I remember they had a place in Richfield, Connecticut, and we would go there a lot in the summers. And I just, you know, I just remember strength. He was a big guy, kind of barrel chested. It wasn't like hugely tall, but he was like sturdy. There was a sturdiness like about him. - And family mythology, was there a degree to get your mother and her siblings kind of collected grandfather stories to you? - To patriarch. - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah. He was very much the center of the family, and I wonder, my mother ended up divorced when I was five and my aunt ended up divorced. I wonder if he was such a strong male presence that nobody else was going to be able to measure up to that. My grandfather on the other side is in Wikipedia too, Leonard Dalton Abbott. He was a social anarchist, and not antifa. Back when he was more like libertarian, I guess. He was a social anarchist, and I think he was, who was it? Upton Sinclair, I think his quote was saying that Leonard Abbott taught him everything he knew about socialism, something like that. Yeah, I think he made you be in Wikipedia. So I got it from both sides. (laughing) - There was that sense, I mean, it almost feels like the movie "The Royal Tenon Bounds," when you're sort of describing the artistic, the fact that everybody in the family is pursuing art. - Actually, I love that. - Yeah, a little crazier than my family was. But I thought that was a wonderful movie. - Yeah, but yeah, the sense that your grandparents really pushed the arts, or at least, like you said, let the kids sort of find themselves. - I think it was sort of like the family business. - Yeah. - You know? - But my mom told, when they, in free acres in New Jersey, where, which still exists, and they still have like stuff about mom and the family and so forth. When they used to go there, when they used to go there, summers, Grandma had a little studio across the road, a little house across the road. And my mom remembered, we brought her back and she, it was the room, was the place they'd been in. And she said, "There needs to be a sleeping porch over there, "just unbelievable." She had not seen it in like 70 years. I think that they were like, "Yes, there was." And they walled it in. She totally remembered this. But she also told a story about how she would go over and talk to Grandma during the day while Grandma was painting. And Grandma didn't want to be disturbed, like nobody wants to be disturbed when they were working in the household. And she told, "Mom, you can't just come over here "and just like talk to your mom, it's probably seven. "You can't just come over here and talk to me. "If you're coming over here, you're gonna have to work." And mom remembers the next day she came over to bother her again and Grandma had set up a little easel and a little still life and a little thing for her to work. And it probably is the first painting mom did. It's like, if you're coming here, you can't just bother me. I'm working, this is my studio, that's sacred space. - And that vibe comes through the book too. You have numerous scenes where in particular, you have the writer losing his mind because there's another typewriter going on in the next room and you feel that exact vibe that's what you're describing words. - Yes. - How did that trickle that into you? How do you feel the artistic DNA in the family? - I think there is, I think there really is DNA. It's the nature and nurture thing, I'm not sure. But some stuff just like comes. I mean, I think, I haven't been doing that much photography lately, but I like photography and I see it as the opposite of writing, 'cause writing is a lot of editing involved and photography, I don't like to edit at all. I like to just catch it and it's done. I don't wanna go in the back of the day, the dark rooms. I don't wanna fool around with a Photoshop, I don't even wanna re-crop things rarely. I just wanna avoid it 'cause of an opposite, creative thing, I have after the moment, in form it, I wanted to have just been in its moment. But I think, and I hate technical stuff, but I think what I bring to that is that I have an eye. I see the picture, I like going to demonstrations and I'll see exactly, it's almost like painful 'cause I can't take every single picture, but I see the pictures, I see the street photography, I see where the pictures are, and I think that's, from the time I was born, I saw things and rectangles on the wall, and they hung very louver style. There was a lot of paintings, I would have arguments as an adult with my mother and take things down. Nobody can register any of this, there's too much. And I come back and it will be back up again. And we have fights about hanging on, which most people don't wanna find about, 'cause it's not that important to most people. But I think it affected my visual sense, 'cause I was around things that were framed and composed from the time I could see. I saw her face and I saw paintings, and it's kind of like, it sort of makes sense. And verbally I'm sure the stories that were read to me at night, as a child, were probably not just typical stories, they probably were like gypsy stories and things and stuff like that. So I would imagine a word sense of conflict. In fact, when I was in school, I remember this, 'cause it was kind of traumatic, and it was not the right way to handle it. People at school would think, teachers would think that people at home were writing my stuff. There was a certain amount, because they were aware that there was a lot of writers there. It was on recommended lists in high school still. So they were aware of that, and I was not, sometimes not even showing them the stuff, because I was embarrassed that it wasn't on their level. And so in that third grade in grammar school in New York, they put me in a classroom by myself, closed the door and told me to go write something, which is really like I was, I thought at first I was being punished. Like what did I do wrong? It's 'cause it's horrible for them to do, actually, 'cause I'm still talking about it, it's obviously-- - Oh, I didn't print the decision. - I didn't have a lot of childhood traumas, 'cause nobody hit anybody or yelled at anybody. But, and I remember noticing, I wish I had this thing that I wrote to, I remember noticing that there was a courtyard next to where the classroom was, and there was a plant in the window, and there was a plant in the window across the courtyard, and they were facing each other. And I wrote a piece about the unrequited love that came with two plants across the courtyard, and they never-- - Questioned you again. - Yes, exactly. - Reminds me of the keen paintings, those big eye paintings and how they challenged the husband to paint them. - They'll mean really even the waifu paintings. - Yeah, was the waifu painting. - Did you see that movie? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Ooh, my back, I can't paint, you know, that's-- - I mean, they're questionable paintings. - Yeah, they're, they're been-- - I remember dating-- - I remember dating somebody way, way back when who said, you know, your husband liked keen painting, you know, and I was back in the day when you were doing the dark, circling stuff like that, like they're here, I think we can find them anyway. And he thought it was a compliment when he said that, and I was like, I was like, what? - Yeah. (laughing) - I think I'm a little more artistic on that. - He thought he was saying something nice. - Well, we got keen when I was going at them. - I didn't take it that way. (laughing) - You were raised with a higher brow art? - Yes, exactly. - But yeah, what did art come to mean to you? - Both visual and pursuing the art overall, whether it's again, poetry, music, visual art. - Well, and more, because I was in drama class, an acting class when I was a child, as well as in music classes, and I went to Juilliard for like piano, and I went to music and art in New York as a voice major. So it was, it feels a little bit, and it even does as an adult too. It feels a little bit like, like pick one, like you're putting yourself too thin because you're sort of doing all of them, and should you just be doing one of them and concentrating on one of them more? And I sort of take turns on doing, like I haven't been doing photography lately because I think I've been concentrating more and I'm writing stuff. And I like screenwriting a lot though. I haven't sold anything yet, but I've won some festivals and had some really, really vivid TV series right now that's making the rounds. It's gotten some very, very good notes as the saying goes. They always want you to change something that's the opposite of what somebody, yeah. - Yeah, no, one of my past authors told me off Mike about the Netflix notes for his novel where literally the central premise, everything that's central to it, if you just flip that, make it the exact opposite, we can go forward. And it's like you don't have a book or a project. Okay, you're cutting the check, but yeah, it can be a little weird. - We had a script that won a couple of festivals about Graham's called Fast Friends, about a little boy adopting a race in Greyhound. And an agent wanted us to take everything out that was cruel to the dogs, the whole point. - Yeah, they need to be rescued. - Well, they need to be rescued because Greyhound racing is horrible. And I was part of the great UK movement in Massachusetts to get it banned and all kinds of stuff, which it did. But it was like, well, then it's like-- - Just a happy dog. - Beethoven or Benji or something. I mean, it becomes like a boy adopts a Greyhound from the track and lives with a dog. That wasn't the point. The point was he was going to a prep school. He had its scholarship. He pretended to be something other than he was. He was an underdog, so was the dog. He raced with the dog, a dog around the track to get his soccer playing abilities up. It was a really sweet script. I mean, but they wanted to take that out of it. It's a part of it that's what, it's like if you did Free Willy and The Whale was not in captivity. - Yeah, it's just a whale. - It's just a whale that you happened to meet while you were on a boating afternoon over the weekend. - Just nuts. - Yeah, but yeah, Grandpa's the same thing and it does come off a lot because he'll look and go like, even Anne, when she was major and she's, I don't understand how I don't know who this guy is. How kind of-- - Yeah, he brought any way to his agent. - I will admit, I didn't know his name. - Yeah, that would be-- - I got sent the pitch for the book and I sort of reading them like this could all be made up, but you know, I believe he's real. - And then you look up and you realize-- - Yeah, 40 books and huge reputation and-- - Yeah. - Nothing good today. - Yeah, it doesn't, and he, you know, I'm sure went along with the gypsy thing because he was not a stupid man. He knew this was good marketing. He had like this image, you know? And then at one point, the image wasn't the, they built up the image and then they didn't want it. - The time shows them, didn't they? - Yeah. I mean, it dovetails with a sequence near the end of the book, the whole section on Valentino, Houdini, and what's in Eleanor Wiley, about not exactly fame or celebrity, but the aura, the thing, that weird charisma, that he's, the writing, he writes particularly harshly of Valentino in every single characteristic. - Yes, it is. - And yet he can't explain why-- - Yeah, no. - The world can go all the way up. - He does not like that, yeah. - He does not like that, man. - Yeah. And yet credits him with something that-- - That women go for, he describes him as a jiggalo, you know? - Yeah, and yet, you know, the entire world just loses its mind for this man. And again, it brings up Houdini and Wiley also. They're in a more straightforwardly mystical context where they each had a-- - And Houdini was not gonna, it was part of the show. - Yeah, it's part of the show. And I had a great show years ago, Oh God, The Witch of Lime Street, about a non-fiction book about Houdini's fixation on disproving the afterlife in hopes that he was going to find some sort of proof. And then how he and Arthur Conan Doyle were both straddling that world. - Interesting. - Again, from a negative perspective, trying to find something positive that they would show that there is something after life. And this woman on Society Hill in Boston who was a medium and Houdini's various attempts at disproving that she was what she was. But anyway, yeah, the notion of fame, reputation, and that aura and how it dissipates or how it collects is-- - And how is, when he was more famous, then they were. - Yeah, and yet, you know, we all-- - He'd draw-- - We'd still use Valentino's-- - He brought Hemingway to deliver right. He brought, he, you know, he said this guy's got something, you know? - Yeah, how much research did you have to do in terms of, like the end of the book is the, short biographies, there's a couple of lines on each of the figures he's citing. Because so many of them clearly were very important people in 30s, 40s, 50s, and-- - And you don't know who any of them are. - Yeah, and that's one of those you have to sit there-- - And there's a lot of them. - I know. - And I had to do this. - And it's not a name dropout. - That was part of my editor. I think that's part of my editing, you know? - Yeah, look, that's why they gave it to you. - Yeah, that's why, but now I know one. Yeah, that was endless. Some of them was Wikipedia, some of them were just looking stuff up and then it was just finding what I could find, you know? - And there's so many of these figures. And the way he's writing of them, it sounds like they're household names, but they're at least New York household names. - I think they were. - And yet-- - Depending on the household. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, along those lines, tell me about, tell me about your New York and what this book kind of evoked for an earlier period for it. How did this book maybe change your ideas of New York-- - Um, I mean, I'm born and raised in New York. - Yeah. - So it's almost like pigeons or the no-baby pigeons in New York, but there are children in New York, too. People go like, "Really?" 'Cause a lot of people say New York and it's not. Suburbs or something, even a burrow, but Manhattan, you know, Manhattan shop. End of the universe, the famous New Yorker cartoon with the west coast of New York. - It was reading a New York Post article a couple of weeks ago on some cross town subway that was going to be blocked up. Cross town was Brooklyn and Queens. I was like, well, I mean, yes, that's technically a cross town subway, but it's not a man, it literally doesn't touch Manhattan at any point, so let's not exactly call that cross town. - That's not a cross town. - Somebody was not from the area. - Yeah. - Using the wrong terminology. - You were a Manhattan kid? - Well, as a Manhattan kid, when I was born, I know this I don't remember, but when I was born, I went down Barrow Street, which I wish I'd kept at, but it was the first floor, first floor. And I remember walking past it with my mom one time, and there was a dent in the glass stuff, and she said balls used to go through, one of the reasons that it was balls used to go through the first floor window, and it was almost like that was still the dent from where that ball had been. And then what I remember, it was on East 96th Street, but I don't remember that that much. I remember West 54th Street, which was very theater district. I lived in West 54th for a long time, and the kids I went to school with, they are TS 69, it's all public schools. This kid then went to school with one of my best friends for father was the musical director of the music man, and most happy fellow, and all that kind of stuff. So we used to go to matinees and get to sit in the box. If it was an occupied, and he would put the lights on us and stuff like that. We were so cool. Love that. But I mean, I remember I studied violin in school. I was doing violin and guitar at the same time, one point I dropped guitar and stuck with violin. That was a mistake. Guitar was going to be much more useful on life than starting violin at age nine, which is your ancient already. You need to be playing violin when you're three. You need to be one of those little itty bitty, little tiny. - Yeah, the scaled ones. - Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I was always in special music classes. I was in drama classes. I was in, you know, summers usually were spent in fairly concentrated performance arts kind of classes. Went to the museum a lot. Knew my way around the Metropolitan Museum, for sure. I'd favor knew the Fragonards in the East 70s. You know, and I forget what the name of that. It's not a museum, it's a. - The Frick has a couple. - The Frick, yes. - Yeah, they have the Fragonards that I never dug them in the regular Frick location. They're temporarily over in the old Whitney site now. And when you take those Fragonards out of the, the pale blue Frick, yeah, they actually, for me, they actually resonate more. - Oh, it's interesting. - Yeah, now they're, they're sort of free-floating and it's the Whitney. So everything is just dark around it because it's the old Whitney. But seeing it, I was like, "Oh, well, there's actually ever good paintings." And I was just disgusted by the whole room they were in it. - Because there's the room reflected. It was too much of the time. - Yeah, it was the time. It was the time capsule. - But yeah, it's, they're, they're weirdly beautiful when you see them out of their, their context like that. And that more modern. - But also, there was a lot of French orientation in my household growing up a lot. They spoke French in the house. The grandma dominated there too. They weren't speaking to me, and we were speaking French. And it was French cheese. There was, every France was the best of the best of the best. They were very, very French. And the thought process, I think, was very French. Kind of cerebral and politics and things and stuff like that. And that would make sense that Fragonard would resonate for a little girl who's raised in the French oriented household. I mean, this, yeah. But, but my mom was a vegetarian. I am now, but she raised me and my brother eating meat because my father ate meat. She didn't want to be an us, them kind of situation. And I think Grandpa and Grandma went vegetarian for a while in France, but I'm not sure. I don't think he kept it, I think. He was too much man's name. - I didn't want to say that, that's exactly what I was thinking, the way you framed him is very-- - Yeah, yeah, he robust. - Yeah. - So I think he slipped from that, but he'd raised the kids with that. And they, what do you call it? But we were raised eating meat. But nothing looked whole. I was like, there wasn't a turkey or a chicken or something. That was all ground up and stuff. So it was like not visibly that. What else about being raised in New York? - My loved one, I kind of, I think it's, I haven't been back there in a few years now. When my mom was still alive, I would go back and stay with her and she was, she lived in Westbeth for the last bunch of years. - Really? - Yeah. - Gosh, yeah. - I've always thought someone should do a series about Westbeth and just do a different apartment every time. - Supposedly, there's been a documentary or someone's working on something now, I remember here. - Sure. - 'Cause it is just such a, I was there once to record with someone who was visiting his girlfriend. - It's amazing, right? - It was just this fantastic place. I'd heard about this, but I never knew, it was this wonderful arts apartment. - And it was a bell telephone laboratory where they did the talkies, where they worked on the stuff for the talkies. It's perfect, but they had this false notion that people would just stay there for five years sort of career going on to see if they would leave, nobody would leave. - And once you're in New York and you've got an apartment that's somewhat stable. - Yeah. - You're not leaving, but mom had a couple of gal, who's got a really good gallery, a really nice gallery. My mom had a couple exhibits in there. My brother passed away, we did a memorial exhibit there. It was really cool. There's a theater there. I was there for a couple of thanksgivings in which everybody gathered and one thing, and it was just people were singing, and it was definitely, it was very-- - We throw the island a misfit toys Thanksgiving, and I'm just visualizing that sort of what people were-- - It sort of was. - Well, we don't have our families, let's go with this artistic family. - Yes, but it was all actors and singers and visual artists and musicians. It was very cool. Yeah, it deserves a document. But more, it deserves like a-- - Yeah, you could draw much of that. - It's a different apartment every week, and that's how you're structured. This is the building, just go down. There was a 95 year old choreographer who lived there with bright red hair and stuff like that, and it was cool as shit. And yeah. - Yeah, I could see it. There could be our pitch after this, we'll work on the screenplay. - Yes, yes. - We'll work on the treatment. - Yes, yes. - Do you remember your first solo subway experience? Were you, in retrospect, way too young, the first time your parents said you can go there on the subway on your own? - No, 'cause we weren't really a subway household. We were more of a bus. The number five bus, 'cause Riverside Drive in 72nd Street, the number five bus is this fabulous bus that goes down around Broadway and like in Center, and then it goes all the way down to Fifth Avenue. Even though it took longer, everybody most likely took the bus much more than they grew me out there a lot. - Yeah. - I think, I started taking the subway occasionally, high school days, but I don't think there was much, and my father took the subway. - Yeah, I wasn't sure, 'cause there was always the stories of, you know, I was six years old, my parents let me take the subway to school and all this. - No, but I walked to school, which was maybe seven or eight bucks when I was... - So independent? - I wouldn't, today, I wouldn't, you know, maybe that's in this conception of things getting worse and maybe it hasn't gotten that much worse. - Depends on the neighborhood. - Yeah. - Yeah. - A lot of weed, a lot of weed everywhere. I go in New York, there's a lot of weed. - Well, it's actually okay, 'cause it's the other ones. - Yeah, it's just, it's more okay, but... - The smell of it can just kind of, okay, I get it, but it'd be nice to, we don't smell cigarette smoke anymore. - Yeah. - It makes people a little more mellow though, it's... - Yeah, no, I'm fine with everybody just doing that. - No, it was good, yeah. - With the book, did it get you sort of thinking about those, that whole round table concept, that whole sense of artists coming together of all different stripes and not making art, making conversation instead? What did you get from editing the book, I suppose? You know, what did it bring you in terms of the, that sense of, you know, well, yeah, artists could do this once upon a time. - Oh, in some ways, I thought of it as sort of being the influencers of their day, but more significant as influencers, not like the kind of crappy influencers. - People that have duct lips and different pictures. - Yeah, exactly, exactly. And finding, you know, the best way to open a jar. Not that I haven't looked at those, how do you open up those much a lot? I was going to turn it upside down. But in some ways, on a much higher level, they were influencers, and ideally place influencers, since they were like journalists a lot of, you know, so anything they said was going to automatically go out to the masses. But at the book launch, Kevin Fitzgerald, who you don't care about in this job, he's the founder of the Dorothy Parker Society, and he's actually written eight books about New York. It's an interesting fact. He loved the book, and he was like, de-reflecting that I had taken this to a place and gotten it published, because he understood how difficult it was to make that happen. - But in this case, it happened pretty easily. - Yeah, that's not good enough. How easy it was, but yeah. - But he had all of his Dorothy Parker Society, people buying the book, I'm just loving it. - And the book doesn't lean on Parker too much. - No. - Okay, everything's Algonquin, and the first name that comes up is Dorothy Parker. She's, she figures in a little bit. - But it doesn't go with where, it doesn't tread where everybody else is tread, which is kind of why it's interesting. But what he said, it's the first book in 70 years that could do this, and there will never be another book that can, because everybody else connected with that era is gone. And unless somebody else happens to find a book, but then it happened to be as well written. - Right. - And it's just not gonna happen. So he's like, this is it. This is basically the book to satisfy the people who were in this era. I mean, people love that era. You're saying, that's why Gatsby keeps doing this, and other Gatsby going on Broadway and other Gatsby music. And that's kind of what it is, people like this period of time. And you're not gonna find other stuff from that time. But it isn't that way today, because I think, I mean, I'm sure back then, they didn't think it was perfect. - Well, that's the funny thing, that yeah, I'm sure in the moment they knew it was great, but I don't think anybody was in the moment thinking this is an iconic situation that we're in, as opposed to, let's go actually, I'll go and see what's going on, just hang out with the guys, and not pontificate, exactly, but talk. - Choose a fact. - Yeah, yeah. What do you think accounts for that interest that you were saying, the way people are still fascinated in this? - I think maybe it's a desire for stuff with more substance to it, because I think what's in the medium today and what the writing and everything else, it's like people raised on television, don't necessarily write as well as people raised on books. I think there's an nostalgia for a period of time in which there was a superior intellect involved. There were people doing something new, not necessarily recreating another Marvel comic book hero. It's not my era, and it's not my book really, but so I can only speak from the outside of it, but they just had more substance to them. They were just better at what they did. And maybe, it's funny to say this because they sort of are a committee that decisions aren't being made as a committee back then, but they aren't someone's writing a book, it's not being templated. - Yeah, there wasn't a commission to do this, so it is, they sort of are a committee, but their own individual work isn't being done as a committee, which is sort of different. And they just found the grampuses in the atmosphere section. They just found each other. There was a thing that they needed to be around and they were just more alive when they were around these people than when they were. I found the whole thing in the book about not, people not wanting their room to be changed and coming back to the same place. I just loved that, sneaking the chairs and one of the times- - Legally doing changes at the greater room. - And the new cat in. I just thought that was like, that's a superstitious thing, but this is the room where I wrote this, and maybe I have this fabulous mansion by now with this great study in it. But I'm gonna go to my little room with the shabby chairs and the burn marks in it, and that's why I want it to look. I want it to be the same, 'cause that's my magic lucky spot. - So, you know, there was a section in the book where Peter Altenberg and the Vienna Cafe guys come up and that was, I hadn't made the connection explicitly, but realized, oh, yeah, this was Vienna for New York. And because it's America, it's capitalism center. So much of what Conrad's writing about is the act of making a living in the arts. It's not just how great the conversation was, but there's so much of this is suffused with what it took to get paid, what this guy or that guy's percentage was and how he managed to get a plate of head. - And they're borrowing money from each other. - Yeah, and it hit me, I'm like, oh, this is just like Vienna, except, you know, it's American capitalist style, and they have to hustle in a sense. - I thought, weren't you talked about how actors equity and things like that were actually sort of founded in their own way. They might have happened anyway if the Algonquin didn't exist, but at the same time, everybody was there. - As a catalyst. - And so it was a catalyst for them to discuss it with each other and see each other's problems and say we got to do something about it. And I think, you know, his discussion of what writers pay, I thought that was so much with the writer's strike. And it was like, it's still a problem, it's the same thing as I said many years ago. But he's talking about things that are just so totally true like today in terms of being taken advantage of. - So at the very beginning of it, where, again, it's a very different tone at the beginning, we're sort of talking about those labor, labor in the arts issues. - He wanted to get that in there. - Yeah, and it's real important and it sets a tone for everything because you're getting, again, as wonderful as these people are, you know, that they weren't there free. - Yeah. - They had to work any, any of them. - And some of these wonderful people were making nothing. - Yeah. - Like when he was talking about Edgar Allan Poe or Drieser or people like that with these huge hits and they're sought, huge books and stories and stuff. And they're still working-- - Yeah, but the translators were making more money than they were from the books. - Yeah, and they're still working like day jobs, doing like manual labor and stuff like that. I thought that was very, I said, especially with the strikes, it seemed like a very, the more things change, the more things change, the more they say the same type of territory. - Yeah. - So this being your first, you know, we'll say exploration and prose. You, do you have the bug? Are you looking at long form prose for yourself or, you know, again, you mentioned adapting some of his work. - There's at least two other books of his. One is a novel about gentrifying Greenwich Village in the '50s, brings it up a little closer. And it's these twin sisters, one is an artist and one is a poet and it's about selling out or not selling out and it's sort of superimposed with this other story that the poet's sister wants to write about France in World War II and the church has been bombed and the woman's daughter becomes a hooker, basically, to raise money to rebuild the church, which the church kind of knows and takes the money. - Yeah. - It's kind of, it's interesting over the leads. But it's also about selling out and what you sell out for and what's okay. And that's overlaid. It's almost like a French Lieutenant's woman. It's got a story on top of a story, anything. And so that's when we're looking at to do mini series of and then there's the memoir stories I talked about earlier with Chaplin and Einstein and Mahler and about 20 different people to get out there. But one of the things I'm thinking about is which would involve their work, which is that there is a story in the granddaughter of discovering the grandfather's work in an old trunk. It wasn't this trunk, it's actually the term. - Oh, let me see you upstairs. - It's actually in the bedroom. It's a bunch of the mosaic thing. Though trunk plays better for stage. That somebody inherits it and they're going through it. And as they're going through it and they're reading and stuff, they hear the voice of the person who wrote it. So they're backlit and they come up on the stage. And because in the trunk, I didn't just find grandpa's stuff. My aunt was a really wonderful writer and she left me musical about the more I reached at that era that she wrote with Martin Kalmanoff who was quite a well known composer of the time. And that's never been performed. So, and my mother's poetry, my grandmother's poetry because everybody who painted did also write. And so I see this as potentially being a show called The Legacy in which somebody takes the trunk out and they're going through the stuff and they're hearing in their voice and then it transposes into the person's voice who wrote it one at a time. And all of a sudden, this characters are all on the stage who are all these relatives. And they start potentially interacting with each other. Like, is that supposed to be me and that poem? Excuse me? Is that really the way you saw me? And she finds the musical so that the act of the musical gets performed. And I see interesting potential of the work because there's so much work. Maybe a few months you could change the show. I have them reading different things. There's so much, there's so much for them to read. It could be a different poem. It could be a different story. It could be a different scene from the musical. And I'm trying to shape this into what the whole story is and if the story is also about The Legacy, which is great in some ways, but then you don't necessarily do your own work. And I was going to ask, you know, between that and the pressure just of growing up in this family with this degree of artistic achievement, what that was like for you? You know, and whether this looks like a sort of fulfillment of that as we work on this project. It's a mix. I mean, obviously I'm not going to bitch about growing up in an atmosphere in which, you know, nobody ever hit anybody, nobody ever yelled anybody, no, this was a very supportive and in which, you know, whatever you want it to do, you got to do. But at the same time, like I was saying when I was writing stuff and I wasn't showing it to them, there's a certain amount of, it wasn't that they would criticize me, but if I got 98 on a test, there was in my head, shit, did somebody get 100, you know. There was sort of an awareness of that. And in school, it definitely was an awareness of the family stuff in terms of them questioning whether I did it, in terms of when they would read out marks and stuff, they would say, me, Ron, I have it, of course. You know, if I did it well on something, I'd say, of course, or as to be expected, I'm not a surprise. It's if I didn't really do any work to do that. It just sort of happens. So that entered into it, I feel most at home with people who are in the arts and don't totally understand business people. So, I haven't strayed that far from the family. A day job that sort of-- Well, it's advertising, but I write. Yeah, but I mean, you haven't interacted. I mean, I did trade magazines for 25 years and then became a lobbyist, which is even stranger. I haven't seen anybody else in my family who was-- my father was a professor, but he taught English and public speaking at City College. Arts adjacent. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I haven't really been around that much of it, isn't that-- civilians. Yeah, non-combatments. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it wasn't a sense of-- I hate to use the term pressure, but that sense of having to live up to the family thing, or just a-- you're free to be, you know. I think I went through periods of time in my life, in which I didn't talk about the family at all. Yeah. Because I wanted to be my own separate person. I didn't say anything about it. And there were moments in school and stuff like that when them being-- and they weren't like eccentrics or anything like that. But I remember my mom had this little pair of leopard gloves that I hated, because nobody else was. Then it became cool when I was three. She was punk, feels it. But she-- and I would ask her not to wear them. And of course, she would, yeah, of course. So I remember, you know, in grandpa had longer hair. That was before-- my boyfriend's had longer hair. That was before that. And so that was a little like-- they weren't exactly like everybody else. And my mother would make kind of weird-- again, they weren't eccentric. This was in Harvard. But she'd make kind of like unusual lunches. There would be a hal-vah sandwich or something like that. Imagine two boys raised in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s named Gil and Boaz. You know, we-- again, when your parents are not from here-- Was it really Boaz? My brother's name is Boaz. Mine was supposed to be either Hiram, because of a Masonic thing or you're a king. Gil as a turned out. You got it. I came off OK. Of the three, I think that was the best I could have ended up with. But yeah. Of course, Meerana's my mother made my name up. Yeah. When parents were-- The T.O. Rada named me. Oh, really? We do have that Jewish tradition of doing those little combo names. Yeah. Someone's a combo. Yeah. Your favorite of comrades books, besides the Algonquin Roundtable, which is obviously the greatest book he's ever done. I don't think it is. What's your favorite? I haven't read them all. OK. That wasn't true. There's one that you recommend if there's any. There are four songs really nice about Australian opera singer. I think I like the China class of the new one that we're working on. I don't think I had the favorite. OK. That wasn't true. If I do dive into his work where I should start, but I'll learn. There is main entrance is nice. Yeah. Main entrance is kind of cool. Because he wrote it, because it's got nothing to do with it. Main entrance is about this one. He's sprawling family things. And main entrance starts with a store that's being sold by people. And the small thing in the middle of the block refuses just to sell their store. And they build the store around it. And on opening day, the little store in the middle puts up a sign. Main entrance. Yeah, you still see those in the city, where there's always those ones where they've built an entire hospital complex. But main entrance. And there's just one little spot that's still right there. Main entrance and everybody's going in there waiting. It's all we're going to be doing very well. Last question, which you've listened to some of the shows, so you know this is coming. What have you been reading? I didn't know that was done. Oh, yeah. Last book you read that she was in the day. But I finished the book. I just got a book. I'm not that much of a read. It's a reader as a child. But I got this book, which I'm going to read. I said order the book, because I decided I'm joining the book for all. Yeah, you're now in that book. I really did, but I mean, lots of little pieces of things online and political things. That's kind of a big part of our lives at this point. I started The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger, or Schlanger. I'm not going to go with Schlanger. I saw a little blurb on it. And I started reading. It's fascinating that plants actually do these nervous system-y kind of things, that there are plants that make false pollen to attract the bees, and it's really not that much pollen there, but it's because they want the bee to come there. And then there are other ones that, at a certain point, produce chemicals to kill the bugs when there's because there's going to be too many bugs on it, too many larvae. So they will cling to it. So it becomes like, is there volition involved in this? And what is volition? The plants have this whole little world of their nervous systems doing things and causing things, and having activities that are what we think of as animal and human. But plants will serve the stuff, too. Of course, there'll be nothing left for me to eat, but that's the answer. Well, you know, it can't go too far down that road. We go on a long enough timeline. They're going to eat you, but at the end. So it's OK. They just have a different sense of time than we do, I guess. So that's what I will be reading. Yeah, along with working on the memoir book, so. Yes. After exploring the Algonquin Roundtable and just reveling in his prose, I'm so looking forward to anything else that you guys-- I mean, that one is ready to rock. That's the one I send out as a proposal. And I don't want to name the agent. No. Though he's a big one. He started reading that stuff and he said, my god, he can write. And I thought that was the one that was going to go first. And it's totally ready to go. I will come back when that one comes out, too. I will come right back up to Massachusetts and sit down with you. I found an interesting Hitler one that may go into that, which sounds kind of strange. I found an interesting one. But Grandpa was-- well, first of all, Grandpa is the gypsy in me when I get fit to change it. It's the Roman. It's the gypsy. I know. It's a different time. And it's the gypsy in me. The last thing in that-- and that's-- my mom called that a sort of pop boiler that the publishing house wanted them to write. She didn't consider it to be one of his best written things. But there's so many interesting people and stories in there. It's a tall story in page three. So he had a whole thing in there about-- at the very end of the book, he says, there's only one thing in his life he regrets. And at this point, he's 1939 or 1940. That he was in the sports palace when Hitler was doing one of his early speeches. And he regrets not having brought a gun with him. And knowing Grandpa if he had, he would have killed him. And he wouldn't have cared what he did to him. He understood where that was going and what that was. He got it. I mean, when other people were like, like, they won't think of me as Jewish. They'll think of me as German. No, no. No. I'm just going to that and go to the studio about me. That is not what's going to happen. Was it the pianist who doesn't have a drop of books? Was it a great story? That's a remarkable hemorrhage where he loses all of it. Wasn't that a great story? Oh, I hope you'll do better. What do you mean? I thought that was a great story. It's a fantastic book. And again, I'm looking forward to seeing more comrades work, going back and finding some of the older books. And well, they're used bookstores around. We're in their box. They're not that hard to find because he was so popular. There were a lot of books. These were not rare books when they came out. They were like-- Yeah, popular. He wrote for the masses. He did not like the word intellectual. It all hated it. He basically wrote for people to read it the same way as you do as a journalist. He was not writing esoteric. He works stuff in, like in the beginning of the book, when he works the whole stuff about the Bible and the labor and the thing and all the years before. He works his knowledge in there. But tells it well. But tells it well. No, you've opened a world to me with this book. So I'm awfully happy with that. Well, I'm so glad to see that because there's so much more. I'm looking forward to it. The Marana, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate the time. And like I say, I hope to get back up here for another round since-- OK. And that was Marana Comstock. Go get the Algonquin Roundtable, 25 years with The Legends Who Lunch by Conrad Berkovichi, edited with an introduction by Marana Comstock. That's from Excelsior Editions at SUNY Press. Now, Marana's not on social media, which as we all know is a good thing, but you should check out Conrad Berkovichi.com to learn more about her grandfather and his amazing life and career. I don't know if I've got to cross how good his prose is, but it's phenomenal. It reminds me of some of my favorite nonfiction writers and journalists like Ron Rosenbaum, particularly. Anyway, go to Conrad Berkovichi.com. That's K-O-N-R-A-D-B-E-R-C-O-V-I-C-I.com, just like it sounds. I will have a link to that in the show and episode notes for this one along with a link to the Algonquin Roundtable. Now, you can support the virtual memory show by telling other people about it. Let 'em know there's as podcast comes out every week with really interesting conversations with fascinating people. You can also help out the show by telling me what you like and don't like about it or who you'd like to hear me record with or what movie or TV show or book or comic or piece of music or theater or art exhibition or whatever. You think I should turn listeners on to. You can do that by email and growoff18@gmail.com. By letter or postcard. I put my mailing address at the bottom of the newsletter I send out twice a week, so if you're on that list, you can get my address there and write me, or by DM if we're connected on Instagram or blue sky, or by using my Google voice number. That's 973-869-9659. That goes directly to voicemail, so you don't have to worry about getting stuck in an awkward conversation with me. And messages can be up to three minutes long. So the longer than that, you'll get cut off, just call back and leave another message. And let me know if it'll be okay to include your message in an upcoming episode of the show. Might have something interesting to share with listeners, but I'd never run something like that without the speaker's permission. Now, if you've got money to spare, don't give it to me. I mean, this whole reader con weekend where I recorded with Mirana, as well as two weeks from now as guest, Jess Rulofson and one of October's guests, Sven Berkertz, that ran me some money, but that's why I work for a living. I've got a decently paying job. You, if you've got money, you can make a difference in somebody else's life. You can give to individuals through like GoFundMe, Patreon, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, CrowdFunder, and all those different crowdfunding sort of platforms, where you'll find people who need help making rent or medical bills or vet bills, car payments, getting an artistic project, rolling. There's all sorts of things that people could use a couple of bucks and it might make a real change in their lives, so try and give. I also give to institutions in need. I give to my local food bank every month, as well as World Central Kitchen. Make occasional targeted election contributions. I give to freedom funds, Planned Parenthood. There are a lot of different funds out there that you can give to to try to help make a better world, so I hope you will. Now, music for this episode is "Fella" by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. You should visit my archives to check out my episode with Hal from the summer of 2018, and learn more about his art and painting. And you can listen to his music at soundcloud.com/mayforth. And that's M-A-Y, the number four, T-H. And that's it for this week's episode of "The Virtual Memories Show." Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with another great conversation. You can subscribe to "The Virtual Memories Show" and download past episodes at the iTunes Store. You can also find all our episodes and get on our email list at either of our websites, vmspod.com, or chimeraupsgira.com/vm. You can also follow "The Virtual Memories Show" on Twitter and Instagram at vmspod at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. And on YouTube, Spotify and TuneIn.com by searching for virtual memories show. And if you like this podcast, please tell your pals, talk it up on social media, and go to iTunes, look up the virtual memories show and leave a rating and maybe a review for us. It all goes to helping us build a bigger audience. You've been listening to "The Virtual Memories Show." I'm your host, Gil Roth. Keep reading, keep making art, and keep the conversation going. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]