Coming Home to Roost

Pub date is December 30 with

simultaneous paperback and hardback

editions. Hardback is destined for

library shelves, maybe even the shelves

of the brand new 271 Mulberry Street

library, which is on the ground floor,

cellar and sub-cellar of the Hawley

Hoops building next to the Puck building

in Little Italy.


That would be coming home to roost, so

to speak, since the sixth floor of the

Hawley Hoops building is where I wrote

most of the non-fiction stories in the

book, and all of the fiction stories

not in the book.


To write the early ones in the late

eighties I used a DEC pro 350 computer

with a clean white screen and a black

Courier font just like this and

absolutely no icons or other visual

claptrap of any kind on the desktop,

just a very simple menu.


The DEC was neither Mac nor IBM

compatible. When the editor at

the New York Times complained that

she personally had to retype

my stories to put into their

data base, that's when a kind

friend gave me a MAC SE and I

would take the floppy disk to

Unique Copy on East 4th Street

and pay for them to e-mail the

first draft to the NYT.

Book, What Book?

It's in the works.

Today I missed the Max Roach memorial

uptown and had lunch with my editor

downtown. It was our first meeting

after 15 months holed up in cyberspace,

if you count the nine months spent

tumbling the contract language.


We met by the Ghandi statue

in Union Square and walked

a couple of blocks in the sun.

It was hot and muggy.

We picked the corner table

in the front porch

of an Italian restaurant

frequented by Ed Koch, certainly

not out of deference to the former Mayor

but because it was the furthest from

the traffic.


Three ceiling fans kept us cool.


It was a working lunch. The editor

brought an Excel chart and I brought

some black and white 4 by 6 prints

of the photos in the book, because

I was quite sure that he knew the

photos only by their file names

and not as glorious images.

The Cow

THE

COW

SAID

MOO, BUT

NOT

MY

COW

SAID

BOW WOW




Poem (c) Jimmy De Sana 1988 published by Pat Hearn Gallery