the hustling, the tap dancing

     Last week -- Two Good Things, one a total surprise, the other a reversal of fortune.

A new Bob Dylan song came out.
"Murder Most Foul"
        about the assassination of President Kennedy

And -- Woody Allen's book came out, after all!
I saw a news story on my android tablet that said another publisher had "quietly" released the book on Monday, March 23.

I had been so annoyed (or -- enraged?) over that whole debacle, I wrote an e-mail to Jeff Bezos and asked him to try and get someone to publish it.  (Not that I imagined anyone would read it, but what else could I do??)

     After I read that Apropos of Nothing was out, it took a little while before I remembered sending that e-mail.
     Hahahahaha -- when I write to Mr. Bezos, he swings into action!  LOL

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----------------- [excerpt, Woody Allen memoir] -------------- I first saw a Broadway show when I was seventeen, and I discovered paintings on my own playing hooky and needing a warm place to hang out, and the museums were free or cheap....

     My father owned one book, The Gangs of New York.  It was the only book I browsed growing up, and it imbued in me a fascination with gangsters, criminals, and crime.  I knew gangsters like most boys knew ball players.  

I knew baseball players, too, but not like I knew Gyp the Blood, Greasy Thumb Jake Guzik, and Tick-Tock Tannenbaum.  Oh, I also knew movie stars, thanks to my cousin Rita, who papered her walls with color portraits from Modern Screen....

In addition to Bogart and Betty Grable and how many wins Cy Young had and how many RBIs Hack Wilson hit in one season and who pitched two consecutive no-hitters for Cincinnati, I knew Abe Reles 



could sing but not fly -- plus where Owney Madden wound up and why an icepick was the weapon of choice for Pittsburgh Phil Strauss.

     In addition to The Gangs of New York, my entire library consisted of comic books.  I read only comic books until I was in my later teens.... 

Folks, you are reading the autobiography of a misanthropic gangster-loving illiterate; an uncultivated loner who sat in front of a three-way mirror practicing with a deck of cards so he could palm off an ace of spades, render it invisible from any angle, and hustle some pots.  

Yes, I eventually got blown away by Cezanne's heavy apples and Pissarro's rainy Parisian boulevards, 



but as I said, only because I would cut school and needed succor on those snowy winter mornings.  

There I was at fifteen, on the hook, confronted by Matisse and Chagall, by Nolde, Kirchner, and Schmidt-Rotluff, by Guernica and the frantic wall-sized Jackson Pollock, by the Beckmann triptych and Louise Nevelson's dark black sculpture.  Then lunch in the MOMA cafeteria, followed by a vintage movie downstairs in the screening room.  Carole Lombard, 



William Powell, Spencer Tracy.  Doesn't it sound like more fun than Miss Schwab's obnoxious picklepuss demanding the date of the Stamp Act or the capital of Wyoming?  

Then the lies at home, the excuses next day at school, the hustling, the tap dancing, the forged notes, caught again, parental exasperation.  "But you have such a high IQ."  And by the way, reader, it's not so high, but you'd think from my mother's cri de coeur I could explain string theory.  You can tell from my movies; while some are entertaining, no idea I ever had is going to start any new religion.

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