BITS & PIECES OFA MISPLACED LIFE-Book Issue

 
“I speak a lot of time working in saloons… I was a kid… 
They paid you and the checks didn’t bounce. I didn’t 
meet any Nobel Prizewinners in saloons but if Francis 
of Assisi was a singer and worked in saloons he would 
have met the same guys.”
 
Frank Sinatra, quoted by Pete Hamill, reported also in 
“Sinatra’s Song”  by John Lahr in  Profiles (The New Yorker, 
November 3, 1997)
**

NEW BOOK BY ROBERT KARMON

ROBERT KARMON
The Resettlement of Isaac

https://pleasureboatstudio.com/product/the-resettlement-of-isaac/

Order directly from the Publisher, $18.00, 
apple e-book
B&N Nook


ROBERT KARMON
The Resettlement of Isaac
New pub date: August 15th
PRE-ORDER $18
Order both for 25% off with coupon code: Isaac_set
 
A theater script, companion piece and sequel to the historical fiction, 
Isaac, based on the true, incredible story of Isaac Gochman, 
a 17-year old from Rovno, Poland, who, in one horrific night, 
survives a Nazi massacre of his entire family along with 20,000 
other Jews. Thrust alone into the forest and the wilderness of war,
 Isaac finds the courage to fight back as a Russian partisan blowing 
up Nazi trains, and finds the passion to fall deeply in love with Anya, 
a Russian partisan nurse—in love for the first time in his young life.
 It is a tragic love that transcends religious differences. Many years
 later in New York, the elderly Isaac is still haunted by the memory 
of his first love. His only friend, a young German-American woman,
 is tormented herself by doubts about her father’s role as a German 
soldier during the war. Deeply affected by Isaac’s past, she becomes
 the loving caretaker of his memories after he is gone. The play 
confirms what Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead, 
it’s not even past.”
 
ROBERT KARMON is an award winning playwright, published poet, s
short story writer and published screenwriter, who has worked on 
screenplays for Columbia pictures, CBS and Eddie Murphy Production. 
He was a member of Playwrights Horizon and Edward Albee’s 
Playwrights Unit. As a Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, 
he has taught at Temple University, Queens College, Hunter college, and is currently Professor Emeritus of Literature and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College in Garden City, Long Island. His book, Isaac 
was published by Pleasure Boat Studio in 2017. He is married 
with two daughters and three grandchildren.

EXISTENTIALISM

   Having studied existentialism in an offhand way since 1935, 
I become more and more convinced that its meaning can be 
reduced to the following formulation:
      
Existentialism means that no one else take a bath for
      you.
 
  Delmore Schwartz.  “Existentialism: The Inside Story”
 in The Ego is Always at the Wheel.”

**

  J.D. SALINGER
 
 
      He seemed to regard his literary success as a moral stain,
 It would be hard to think of a contemporary American writer 
whose personal life was more true to the ethos of his fiction.
 
      Michael Greenberg. The New York Review of Books 
(March 15, 2010)
**

MY SECOND RECOMMENDATION

There should be annual  literary award for the wildest, most 
outrageously verbal sleigh-ride work of fiction. 
BACK TO THE WINE JUG would win hands-down!
 It takes a brave author to write a novel in rhyming quatrains
 about Diogenes and Victoria Woodhull (yes, that Victoria Woodhull)
 return from the underworld to wander through Birmingham, 
Alabama, to search for an honest man. Lots of luck! As 
Gloria Steinem may or may not have said: "The Truth will 
set you free, but first it will piss you off. "
      With an unscrupulous  and evil  J. Edgar Hoover in 
hot pursuit of our protagonists, the inventive rhyming plot twists 
& turns.  Should we worry whether comic writers are essential
 workers or not? As for the puns  & general word play, 
if' the author had lived in an earlier age  he would have been 
burned at the stake. 
     Oh Hell, burn him at the stake now in Birmingham and 
be done with him.
 **

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A PAGE RIPPED UNTIMELY
FROM THE CALENDAR OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS
 
 
 
When I fall in love with a woman who possesses a Latin face,
Noble carriage, or a figure
Promising, on the calendar of earthly delights
A new holiday,
I  soon discover, unlike  Columbus or Casanova,
She is completely up-to-date,
Contemporaneous with the next century,
Complete with rocket boosters,
Whereas I am wandering, perplexed & lost,
In Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe.

Louis Phillips