Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited: (22)

 On the Saturdays or Sundays when I often went to borrow folk song and pop song music books, containing lyrics and guitar chords diagrams, for free from either the New York Public Library's Lincoln Center branch or from the upstairs Music Department of the Brooklyn Public Library's central library branch at Grand Army Plaza, I also can't recall ever meeting anybody I knew or had known in these library, speaking to anyone else in the library or meeting any new person to talk to inside the library.

One Saturday afternoon, though, while I was walking lpast the fountain in Lincoln Center Plaza, on the way towards the New York Public Library branch there, a mother, who seemed to be in her late 40s and her teenage daughter suddenly approached me. And the white teenage daughter handed me a spare ticket for a rear seat for the last part of some afternoon performance on that day. No longer recall what was being performed on that day, but I did go into the Lincoln Center auditorium for free and watched the last half of the performance for free.

Being able to borrow for free the library songbooks with guitar chord diagrams and song lyrics saved me a lot of money in the 1970s. And much of my time when I was in my apartment while working at the New American Library was spent playing, practicing and singing to myself the songs contained in the various songbooks. In addition, the Music Department at the Brooklyn Public Library's Grand Army Plaza central branch then contained in its vertical files a lot of hard-to-find material that Sing Out! magazine had published or distributed during the 1950s and early 1960s.

So, looking back after so many decades, the time I spent borrowing a lot of songbooks from the pbulic libraries during the 1970s probably helped deepen my ability to later continue to pump out new public domain folk songs during the following decades.

Aside from writing the "Live Like Cinque" folk song around this time and perhaps the melody and first lyrical version of the "I Saw You Today" folk song, I no longer recall any folk songs I may have written while publicity clerkin' at NAL. Could be that I then wrote a song, titled "Stupidity"--which I no longer remember--that attempted to expose the degree to which intellectually and morally "stupid" folks were then ruling and enslaving the majority of people in the USA during the 1970s, around this time?

And it could be that around this time I wrote a love song like "Open Your Arms" for an old womanfriend who was living in the Midwest, while I was living in Brooklyn. And although I did, at times, use my cheap portable cassette tape player to occasionally record some of the songs which I then wrote, within a few years I no longer saved any of these cassette tapes with most of these particular new songs; and neither did I save most of the lyrci sheets for any of these new folk songs I may have written while working at NAL.

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited: (21)

 Because Brooklyn College was still a CUNY 4-year undergraduate college in which most students still lived with their parents or in off-campus apartments and were commuter students, the Brooklyn College Library was usually empty of students whenever I went there on weekday evenings, after a day's work as a New American Library [NAL] publicity clerk, to spend a few hours reading there. And I can't recall ever speaking to any other person inside the Brooklyn College Library during any of the evenings I spent reading and browsing around the open book and magazine stacks while there.

It wasn't until the late 1980s or early 1990s that I realized that if you were then a non-student, like I was in the 1970s, you could now then purchase a guest borrower card for $50 from the Brooklyn College Library check-out desk, which then gave you the privilege of taking the circulating books on the Brooklyn College Library's open stacks home to read.

But during the 1970s I just assumed that any Brooklyn College Library book I ever wished to read could then only be read by me inside the library. So no Brooklyn College Library books were ever brought home by me to read during the time I worked at New American Library in the 1970s.

Of course, even if I had had borrowing privileges at the Brooklyn College Library as a non-student during the 1970s, it's unlikely I would have checked out many books to read in my slum apartment in Red Hook then during my evenings there or on my weekends.

For whenever I was stuck working 9-to-5 during the 1970s, I usually preferred to spend my weekday and evenings, when still awake and alone at home, mostly playing guitar and singing songs to myself, writing new songs and sometimes recording them and old songs on my cheap, portable cassette tape recorder, skimming through some 1970s leftist newspapers or pamphlets or listening to vinyl records on my cheap portable phonograph, rather than using my then limited free time to read many library books at home. And when stuck working 9-to-5, I also preferred to spend my weekend days outside the apartment, rather than sitting at home inside reading books on the weekend.

Because I had pretty much lost any desire to watch the U.S. power elite's corporate media's television programs by the early 1970s, I owned no television set during the time I was spending some weekday evenings after work reading the Old Left journals and magazines from the 1950s in the Brooklyn College Library.

And, in a way, going to the Brooklyn College Library in the evening after work for a few hours was seen by me as a hipper thing for a U.S. worker to do in the 1970s than for a U.S. worker to go directly home after work and sit in front of a television set; to then be manipulated and programmed by the U.S. corporate media's liberal or right-wing anti-communist gatekeepers, newscasters or entertainment show producers, directors, writers and  wealthy celebrity performers. 

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited: (20)

 Besides usually spending most of my lunch hour during th workweek browsing in or taking out books from the New York Public Library's Donnell Library branch on West 53rd Street, across from the Museum of Modern Art, when I was working as a New American Library [NAL] publicity clerk in the 1970s, I also often spent time in the evening during the workweek, after work, taking the IRT Flatbush subway line from work, out to the last stop on that subway line, near Brooklyn College.

And I would then walk onto the Brooklyn College campus and into the Brooklyn College library.  Despite being a non-student, during the 1970s, Brooklyn College, at least, did not--unlike some other U.S. colleges or universities today--instruct any campus security guards to block non-students and "non-affiliates", like I was in the 1970s, from entering buildings like the Brooklyn College library, unless they were profiled in an objectively racist way by the (often even Black) campus security guards as being "suspicious Black males."

Once inside the Brooklyn College library, I would then spend a few hours reading the various Old Left periodicals from the 1950s that were still on the open shelves; before then heading back to my cheap slum partment by the Brooklyn waterfront, near the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel entrance in Red Hook, to eat some food, play a little guitar and sleep.

And often on weekends around this same time, I would spend portions of my Saturday or Sunday afternoons either walking up the hill towards the Brooklyn Public Library's Grand Army Plaza central library building ot taking a subway into Manhattan to the New York Public Library's Lincoln Center library branch, to find some guitar music songbooks that I could borrow and bring home for free.

When you're over 50 years-of-age, historical and political events that happened two decades ago don't feel to you like they happened that long ago; and, to you, such events seemed to have happened in recent years. But when you're only in your 20's in chronological years--like I was during the 1970s--what had happened two decades before then felt to me like it had happened very long ago and was almost like ancient political history.

So on the evenings after work during the 1970s, when I spent some time sitting in the Brooklyn College library reading issues of various Old Left journals like Masses and Mainstream, that had been published during the 1950s McCarthy era, I felt that the 1950s historical situation which the various Old Left writers were analyzing or commenting upon was a historical situation of long ago; and had happened long before the historical situation that the 1960s New Left Movement and Columbia SDS chapter organizers had responded to in the late 1960s or the 1970s historical situation I then found myself trapped in at the time.

And so despite finding it interesting to read what 1950s Old Leftists wrote about and thought about during the then-long ago-seeming decade when I was growing up in Queens, reading the Old Left group journals and magazines from the 1950s did not seem to me to then provide much relevant ideas on what collectively could be done effectively by counter-cultural, bohemian or hippie New Left antiwar revolutionaries from the 1960s, in order to bring about a political and economic Revolution in the USA by the 1980s.  

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited: (19)

The only remaining particular memory I have as a result of publicity-cllerkin' in the then-Times-Mirror corporate media conglomerate-owned New American Library [NAL] paperback publishing skyrcraper office in Midtown Manhattan is an afternoon when the writer of the sexist and macho male-oriented series of Mike Hammer detective pulp novels, Mickey Spillane, stopped by at the office to chat with the NAL publicity director in her office;; about some publicity business matter related to the 1970s marketing of his series of novels.

Spillane was then a beardless, crew-cutted guy, who looked culturally-straight and--in the 1970s--still dressed himself in a sport-jacket and dress shirt when he dropped by his paperback publisher's office.

With some gray spots in whatever hair was left on his crew-cutted head, Spillane looked neither older nor younger than most U.S. men then in their 50s (which was apparently his then age during the 1970s) generally looked like. And in the 1970s, Spillane seemed to look to me more like a middle-aged aging jock in his build and face than much like a middle-aged aging novelist or writer.

The sale of the pulp novels and movie and television adaptations of the novels that Spillane had written, in the decades before he appeared about 8 yards from me inside the NAL office, had likely made Spillane very wealthy and, perhaps, some kind of literary celebrity name for some U.S. readers and movie or television viewers. But--despite smiling in a satisfied way as he left the inner windowed-office of Marge, the NAL publicity director, exited the outer office and headed towards the floor's skyscraper elevator in a rapid way--Spillane didn't seem to expect anybody in the commercially-oriented NAL publishing firm to stop their work and treat him as if he were royalty; 

Perhaps, in part, because Spillane may have realized that, by the 1970s--as a result of the cultural impact of the post-1969 new wave of feminist consciousness on most U.S. readers of novels--most people, especially women who worked within the U.S. publishing world sub-cultural, considered most of his commercially profitable novels to now be old-fashioned and out-of-date in the sexist macho male personal/political consciousness they reflected.

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited: (18)

 It was while I was publicity clerkin' at the New American Library paperback publishing firm that the heiress to the super-rich Hearst Dynasty's excess wealth, Patty Hearst, was taken hostage in Berkeley, California by the Symbionese Liberation Army [SLA[ racially-mixed urban guerrilla group.

Led by an ex-California prisoner named "Cinque" a/k/a Donald DeFreeze, the SLA demanded that the family descendants of 20th-century media baron William Randolph Hearst/"Citizen Kane"--who in the 1970s still controlled many newspapers, magazines and U.S. television stations--both disseminate the SLA's revolutionary communiques and set up a "food-for-the-poor"/"serve the people" program.

Soon after the SLA grabbed Patty Hearst and her then-boyfriend--a guy named Steve Weed (who apparently had previously been somewhat politically sympathetic towards the U.S. antiwar movement as a student), some folks in U.S. left circles and U.S. underground press circles were already speculating that both the Red Brigade urban guerrilla group in 1970s Italy and the SLA were "agent-provocateur" groups set up by police agents to grab headlines and discredit left-wing movements.

But, like Bernardine and the Weather Underground (who issued an open letter to the 1970s underground press which, while criticizing the SLA for previously killing an authoritarian Black school superintendent in Oakland, noted that "for two generations, the Hearst newspapers have wielded their power" and "the guerrillas have kidnapped the daughter of a rich and powerful man in order to provide food to the poor"), I then felt the SLA's "arrest" of the daughter of the then-Hearst Corporation Chairman of the Board Randolph Hearst was morally and politically justified; as well as a creative way to break through the 1970s U.S. corporate mass media's continued denial of free speech rights and equal mass media access to most anti-imperialist revolutionary U.S. political groups who wished to present their political viewpoint to people in the United States.

So using some of the free time during my workdays in the New American Library office to read one of the newspapers that was reprinting the texts of SLA communiques, I actually ended up writing a folk song, titled "Live Like Cinque," which included the lyrics "Live like Cinque, the champion of the poor" around this time. Because in the 1970s I then felt that text like the following reflected my own feelings and political viewpoint in many ways:

"We must first understand who the Hearsts are, who they serve and represent. Randolph A. Hearst is the corporate chairman of the fascist media empire of the ultra-right Hearst Corporation, which is one of the largest propaganda institutions of this oppressive military dictatorship of the militarily armed corporate state that we now live under in this nation..."

And I also then felt that the SLA was justified in making the following demand of Randolph Hearst, as the price for returning his daughter, Patty Hearst:

"Each person with one of the following cards is to be given 70 dollars [equal to around $437 dollars in 2024 U.S. dollars] worth of meats, vegetables, and dairy products: all people with welfare cards, Social Security pension cards, food stamp cards, disabled-veteran cards, medical cards, parole or probation papers, and jail-or-bail release slips."

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library [NAL] Revisited: (17)

 Two other New American Library [NAL] employees I vaguely remember, after so many years, were an elderly couple, seeming to be in their late 50s or early 60s, who--almost in their own outer office world across the aisle from me, worked in another one of the offices with (like the NAL publicity director's office) a skyscraper window , out of which one could see the street below.  The white elderly husband and his white elderly wife had apparently previously made some kind of a deal, with either NAL or with the Times-Mirror media conglomerate, to sell their previously independent Daw paperback-publishing firm to either NAL or Times-Mirror.

So now, their Daw paperback firm, that published science fiction and fantasy paperback books--which apparently had never been able to sell as many copies as the books that Stephen King wrote in the decades after 1970 did--was now just a subsidiary of a mass media conglomerate, in an office surrounded by NAL executives who seemed to rarely interact with them.

I can't recall having exchanged any words with the culturally straight, elderly couple. But during my time as a NAL wage slave, my impressions is that the beardless husband, who wore glasses and always came to work dressed in a suit and tie, and the conventionally-looking wife, who always came to work wearing a dress, were used to working together alone and ignoring everybody else at the office. So they barely noticed or cared that no one at NAL seemed interested in socializing or conversing with them; despite Daw being now distributed and marketed by NAL. 

I had been into reading science fiction paperbacks and watching TV shows like Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But by the time I was publicity clerkin' at NAL in the mid-1970s my reading interests had changed so much that, when I did read fiction, I mainly read fiction that reflected a socialist realism, feminist, African-American, Beat Generation or working-class aesthetic. So I don't recall which science fiction novels were published by NAL with the Daw imprint or whether its science fiction paperbacks were generally considered to be of higher literary quality than what other science fiction paperback publishers were publishing in the 1970s.

What I do recall, though, is that--after I opened for the NAL publicity director some envelopes (which each contained a photocopied clipping of the latest print media reviews of NAL-published/marketed books) and noticed that one of the mailed-in print media reviews included a mean-spirited and personal attack on her husband's qualification to hold his position as NAL's Daw imprint editor/publisher, which I first showed to the Daw woman co-editor/publisher (before letting the NAL publicity director see it), she read it and then quickly tore up the hostile photocopied clipping.

The only other New American Library Library [NAL] worker I still have some memory of so many years later, mainly because I did have a conversation with him alone inside the office in which he worked, was a usually casually-dressed white visual artist in his late 20s, whose job was to create and draw the different illustrated covers that were printed on each of the NAL paperback books.

The NAL visual artist didn't have to work 9-to-5 while dressed in a suit and tie when he came to his skyscraper office "studio"/ private office each day.  And he could pretty much spend the day creating and drawing the illustrations used on the book covers, without having to interact personally with any of the business-oriented NAL executives and higher-up corporate-types.

But my impression, after chatting with him alone in his private office at some length, where I had been told to go to in order to pick up some rush book cover illustrations he had been assigned to complete, was that this NAL paperback book cover illustrator would have preferred to be at home during the day or in a studio, working on his own paintings, rather than being in the skyscraper each day doing what he likely considered to be "hack work." 

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited: (16)

 Within a few weeks after I began publicity clerkin' at New American Library, however, it became obvious that, by the mid-1970s, the most power within its office, in determining which manuscripts were to be published, promoted and publicized most, was held--not by its culturally-straight, white upper-middle-class female editorial director--but by its culturally-straight and less intellectual white upper-middle-class male sales department executives.

And because the manuscripts most likely to be marketed commercially most profitably as paperback books, were those that tied-in to already-produced media conglomerate movies, television shows or to mass media celebrities, or were those manuscripts most likely to be adapted into a Hollywood movie or commercial television show, those were the kind of manuscripts that NAL's sales department executives most wanted to see NAL accept and publish.

So even if the New American Library's editorial director may have wanted NAL/Signet to be into publishing manuscripts of a more enduring and higher literary quality than what it published in the mid-1970s,  it's likely that the intellectually low-brow NAL male sales department exeutives would have blocked her from doing so; since the paperback book publishing firm's male sales department executives had little interest in literature and evaluated writers' manuscripts solely on the basis of whether or not they would increase NAL's annual business revenue.

Among the only four other NAL employees I have vague memories of, after so many years, was a young white woman clerical worker whose desk was around 10 yards to the left from my desk, in some other department of the paperback book publishing office. Looking to be in her early 20s, she still dressed up for work each day in a culturally-straight way; and, despite it being in the mid-1970s, still never came to work casually dressed in slacks, or even less-casually in pant-suits,--unlike most young white women clerical workers her age were then starting to do. But still, this young woman was likely to have been considered the most physically beautiful younger woman in the NAL office, by most men.

Despite her dressing in a culturally-straight way, because she was both a NAL clerical worker, like I was, and a younger woman whom I also considered physically beautiful, after I first noticed her, I, initially, hoped that she would be interested in perhaps occasionally chatting with me or getting to know each other.

But, despite both being stuck in clerical worker wage-slave slots at the same workplace, after I smiled at her and said "hi" one day when she walked passed my desk within the office, and she seemed to turn her head the other way and did not even say "hi" in return, the vibe I got from her was that I was definitely not the kind of guy she would ever be interested in conversing with or dating--even if she didn't already have a boyfriend (which, given her physical beauty, she likely already had).  So no words were ever exchanged between this physically beautiful NAL clerical worker and me during the whole time I was publicity clerkin' at New American Library.