Oh, Grandma!; Michael Rosenthal's Different Small Literary Concern; The Latest Cabinet

To me, Eileen Landsman was the classic nice little old lady in my building. I knew she was president of the co-op board for a couple of years, but I'm just a renter. As far as I was concerned, she was just that nice older lady I'd see being sweet with her young grandson, or giving heck to the staff when they weren't picking up the trash out front. We'd chat once in a while in the lobby, share an elevator.

A couple of weeks ago we get on the elevator together, and she tells me she's buying an ad in New York Press. Living on a fixed income in Manhattan is so expensive, she says, that she's decided to start a new business to bring in some extra cash.

I ask her what kind of business. She tells me she's producing CDs and cassettes with stories on them.

I ask her what kind of stories?thinking maybe, oh, Bible stories for kids. Or uplifting life stories for seniors.

"Oh, well," the classic nice little old lady says, watching me closely for my reaction, "it's erotica."

Grandma's a pornographer?

Actually, it's not porn. The stories are sexy, but romantic and softcore. Landsman's company, called Audioerotics, has two tapes/CDs on the market now, with two more in production. Of the first two, one is written by and geared for gay men, the other lesbians. ("Someday I hope to do straight," Landsman tells me. "But living in New York, gay and lesbian just seemed so obvious.") Each has two stories on it, each story 20 to 25 minutes long.

So it's not hardcore triple-X action. Still, it strikes me as an interesting field for a 74-year-old woman to be entering, so I pump Landsman for her life story.

She grew up in St. Louis, MO. Her father was an attorney and judge, her mother did a lot of charity work and, during World War II, organized the city's Jewish community in the war bond drive. Her brother flew "the hump" in the Pacific theater of the war?flew DC-3s from India over the Himalayas to supply Chinese troops fighting the Japanese.

Of herself, she shrugs, "I was just artistic." She walked to Washington University and got her fine-arts degree. Then she married a lawyer from Chicago, where they raised two daughters. She was in her 30s when she decided she needed a job.

"They used to say if you were over 35 you couldn't get a job," she explains. "You had to have a career, be where you were going to be by the time you were 35, or too bad." She'd done some art projects but spent most of her time raising the kids. "It used to be women would have a teaching certificate" they could fall back on if they ever had to work, but she hadn't gotten one. "My husband had no partners. He practiced by himself. What if something happened to him?"

So she cast around and landed herself a job with a New York firm, the Federated Merchandising Group, being a DuPont representative in the Chicago market. It was 1963. She would introduce new DuPont fabrics and fibers at department stores like Marshall Field's and Saks Fifth Avenue. She'd be at fashion shows and trade shows, throw DuPont's money into cooperative advertising with the local retailers.

"I used to give away a fortune," she laughs. "They used to say to me, 'Oh, Mrs. DuPont, come in!' Very few women called on people back then. They didn't have women salespeople going around with products. I went around with money and promotion ideas," so they were happy to see her. "For 10 years I was Mrs. DuPont." She went on numerous tv and radio shows talking about new DuPont products, and even lectured in a continuing education program at Notre Dame for years.

"I had a ball," she recalls. "I remember what I said to my husband when I came home after my first week of working: 'Is this what I've heard men complain about all these years? I've never had so much fun in my life.' I was eating lunch with these men at the [ritzy Chicago hotel] Palmer House, you know... I had a good time."

In 1973, DuPont budget cutbacks killed the position. By the following year she was working for a maker of steel furniture, doing market research, designing showroom displays, developing promotions. "I was busy. I used to be able to invite people on the company plane to go down to the market with us. Had a ball. You name it, I did it." At one point she worked with a man designing "pigskin garments" for an American Farm Bureau fashion show in the Palmer House ballroom. She designed "a line of pigskin blazers and vests to be sold to pork producers. You see, they all wanted garments of pigskin and they weren't so readily available."

Her husband's health began failing in the 1980s. "He had early Alzheimer's. He was still darling and fun, but eventually he could no longer work, and I closed his law practice." She had supervised his practice in its last years. "He had had open heart surgery, and the doctor said he couldn't go outside until summer. We had a big home, so I moved his law office into our basement, which had been my office anyway. I hired a young law student, and his secretary would come in the evening."

The Alzheimer's progressed. "I'd go to the airport with him and I'd worry when he'd go into the washroom?I was afraid he'd look like a victim, because he was a little slow."

At the end of the 1980s she decided they should move east to be near their daughters. One is a clinical psychologist in Newport, RI, the other's an architect in Manhattan. In March 1989, the Landsmans moved into what was then a new building just a few doors down the block from their architect daughter's place on E. 24th St. Her husband passed away that October.

A "recovering caregiver," she got involved in the building's board for a few years. "That whetted my appetite for work again," she says, which, along with the need for more income, eventually led to her founding Audioerotics.

Why erotics?

"I would see women on subways reading Danielle Steel novels," she explains. "I don't read novels. I remember John Steinbeck's East of Eden, which I read for a book club ages ago, and that was the first time I'd ever read anything erotic. So I see these women, and I start thinking..."

She recruited a friend, actor Terry Selbert. He invented the character of The Libertine, who introduces the stories; the series is called "Tales from The Libertine." He also wrote and read the first story. He's since found other writers through ads in the Voice. They record at Little Apple Recording Studio in Astoria. Selbert also came up with and produced some commercials that are running on Barry Z's public access show (Barry lives in our building and is pals with Ms. Landsman).

The little old lady behind it all envisions rolling out ad campaigns in the appropriate markets around the country, and building up a library of 30, 40 tapes or more. For now, the first two are available at $19.95 each plus s&h, 1-800-853-3351.

 

Afterwords

Writer Michael Rosenthal (we've published a few of his short stories in New York Press) launched a different small literary concern recently. It's a literary press called Legible ([www.geocities.com/legible5roses](http://www.geocities.com/legible5roses)). He was inspired by examples like McSweeney's Books, Rosenthal says. "I really would like to find somebody new to me, doing good work." He writes that "it is impossible to believe that what the mainstream publishing houses purvey is all of the best that is now being written."

To that end he's announced the "Legible Open," a call for manuscripts of fiction or poetry. If he gets ones he likes, he'll publish them as print-on-demand books. "This is not a vanity press operation; the resulting books will be something to be proud of," he notes. But he's also candid about the process, writing:

This is an experimental venture... No promises can be made of compensation, monetary or otherwise, for accepted work, other than copies of the published book. If it is at all possible, LEGIBLE hopes to share money and glory with all, many, or some. AUTHORS WILL NOT BE ASKED TO SUBSIDIZE THE COST OF PUBLISHING ANY BOOK. Authors may be asked to defer profits until costs for publicity and advertising are recouped.

Because this is an experimental venture, founded on trust, LEGIBLE makes the following limited-condition money-back GUARANTEE: If out of all material submitted under these guidelines, not one single book-length manuscript of prose or poetry by a single author, or anthology by multiple authors, can be found, shaped, discerned or otherwise fashioned, all reader's fees will be refunded to those who have included an envelope with their submission for that purpose.

That reader's fee is a princely $10. When I tell Rosenthal I admire his straightforward approach, he replies, "All I have is my credibility. I have no track record."

The deadline for submissions is July 15. Rosenthal hopes that by then he'll have found one or two manuscripts he can publish in the fall. When I ask if he's seen anything he likes so far, he says, "Nothing. Zero."

 

The second issue of the Brooklyn-based art and culture quarterly Cabinet is out, and like the first it ranges across an impressive spectrum of topics. I'll mention only a few of my favorite articles.

There's a wonderful story about "hobo nickels." Depression-era itinerants used to carve new images into the coins, chiseling the Indian's head into self-portraits, or transforming the buffalo into other animals. Reworked, the nickel became a unique piece of art, which increased its value even at the time; today, not surprisingly, they're worth thousands at auction.

The chef Sebastian Brecht, grandson of Bertolt, fashions his grandfather's famous snaggletoothed grimace and clamped cigar out of white and dark chocolate, and gives the recipe. Pursuing a different type of alt-comestible, Spanish designer Marti Guixe envisions "breathable food"?nutrients in aerosol form.

And there are a couple of very interesting pieces here in the way of conspiracy theory?the best of which remains effectively an Outsider endeavor, despite the efforts of movies and tv to reduce it all to quotidian cliche. One of the late Mark Lombardi's elegant charts, attempting to trace the Bush family's global reach, is included as a folded insert. Even better, there's a chilling interview with one of the most reviled names in the mind control branch of conspiratology?Dr. Jose M.R. Delgado, who experimented in the 60s and 70s with using implanted electrodes and radio signals to control human behavior.

A year's subscription is $24 (181 Wyckoff St., Brooklyn 11217; [www.immaterial.net/cabinet](http://www.immaterial.net/cabinet)).