The Genius of 10th St. Robert Roth

En esta entrega el brother Robert Roth nos cuenta de las vidas y rumores de sus homónimos, y de como por osmosis,  es un experto en varias materias de las cuales solo se ha enterado ligeramente. Hay también unas referencias a un viejo artesano con el cual solía reunirse los domingos a arreglar el mundo frente a un café.

Robert Roth y Fredy Roncalla en Chelsea. Foto: Armando Mejía

                                        

 

 

About twenty years ago Michael Kranish who was a manager at a public housing project in NYC one night saw a security guard recently here from Puerto Rico sitting in his security booth reading my uncle Sandor Voros's book American Commissar. The book is about my uncle fighting in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. It was published in the mid 1950s. There might be only 10 copies of the books left in the world. Somehow he got hold of one of them. And there he was 60 years later reading my long dead uncle's long out of print book. And on top of that meeting a good friend of the author's nephew. 
To have just one person  stumble onto something I wrote and get absorbed in it, argue with it, spin out with it, do whatever they will do with it, is beyond thrilling.  Maybe they'll search for other things I have written, or use it as a key to a universe way in the past.  Embark on an effort to discover something about the  world I inhabited  and people I knew. What if they follow the clues or information or evidence to wherever they lead.  What might they find?
                                   
 
                                          There are Many of Us
There are so many people with the same name as me. People whose politics, whose sensibilities at least from afar or maybe even up close are very similar to mine. All in fact have done impressive things in their lives.
 
The subtle distinctions I make, the choosing of words to express my deepest thoughts/feelings/political perspectives seem totally useless in distinguishing me from the others.
Still there are things I sometimes seriously disagree with, sometimes there are things I know nothing about. And often enough things are said in ways I wish I was the one who had said them. Particularly if sometime way in the future  I am going to get credit for it.
 
How will those differences be reconciled? He said one thing here. Another thing there. He doesn't even acknowledge that he is doing it.
 
 
Robert Roth author
As a working-class queer nerd and author, Roth uses his writing to challenge the status quo and question the capitalist patriarchy. 
 
Robert Roth [artist]  paints idyllic visions of landscapes seen from a distance. Roth's atmospheric works, influenced by Modern luminaries ranging from...
 
Robert Roth (born 1950) was an active member in the anti-war, anti-racism and anti-imperialism movements of the 1960s and 70s, and key member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) political movement in the Columbia University Chapter in New York, where he eventually presided. Later, as a member of the Weatherman/Weather Underground Organization he used militant tactics to oppose the Vietnam War and racism. After the war ended, Roth surfaced from his underground status and has been involved in a variety of social causes to this day.
 
I first learned about this Robert Roth when a woman I met at a movie screening called me and pretty early on in the conversation told me she once had an affair with him. And while not being in the grip of a powerful and rare fetish, she did find the thought intriguing of maybe us having an affair also.
 
Often after seeing my name on a mailing list or a petition, I would get emails, phone calls and letters from people who thought I was him. Talking about some shared experience from the past. I would have to tell them that it wasn't me. 
 
And just a couple of years ago a new neighbor looked me up and was so impressed with what she read that no matter what I said I couldn't convince her that he wasn't me.
 
Robert Roth (born 1966) is a songwriter, vocalist and guitarist of 1990s Sub Pop and Capitol Records band Truly.  He is still touring today.
 
And then there was Robert Roth gay movie critic, as opposed to the novelist, who died a number of years ago. I think he may have also started a film magazine in Chicago.
 
And what about the Robert Roth who wrote an eloquent letter to the NY Post furious at George H.W. Bush for calling someone retarded. He wrote about his two children who had Down syndrome and the wounding ignorance that slurs like that have as well as what they reveal about the person using them.
 
He had at least two children. I see he got acknowledgments in landmark books on disability. Yes. It is very likely he wrote the letter.  As far as I know, he didn't write about his children anywhere else. That doesn't mean it is not true. He has a brother who he rarely mentions also. But I did find a manuscript of scattered typed sheets where he wrote a lot about him.
 
Then there was the Robert Roth who made an anti-war movie. He fought in Vietnam.
 
Now it is possible some of these Robert Roths are actually the same person. What do I know?
 
There was also a person whose name was close to mine who wrote a letter to Seven Days, the radical weekly not the sleek trendy weekly of a few years later,  that a number of friends--yes friends -- complimented me on. 
 
And then there was the Robert Roth fighting for the preservation of landmark buildings on the upper west side of Manhattan. Why not?  
 
Mobilizing support he used all his political organizing skills to convince people who thought there were more pressing problems that it wasn't a question of either/or. It was important as a way to resist the uglificatioin of the city and the desire to erase history and that the huge power of the real estate industry had to be prevented from imposing its will whenever, wherever it pleased. He learned the history of architecture in New York. He became an expert on the social political economic forces at play when the buildings were built. He was very well versed in housing law. All this while touring the world with his band, raising at least two children. He was continually on the front lines of social activism, and while there is no recorded evidence it was rumored that he was the last person to swim the English Channel before it became a stretch of hard dry dirt. 
 
And before I forget there was an article in New York magazine that a Robert Roth and Arnold Sachere opened up a club in lower Manhattan featuring drag performers.
 
That has to be them. Arnie's name is a little off in the spelling. It should be Sachar. But mistakes like that happened all the time.
 
It was mind blowing to stumble across this article. Arnie and I did so much together. We wrote poetry, short stories, public statements and public petitions where we had to gather signatures of as many people as we could. Our politics roughly, anarchist, pacifist, sex radical. We organized discussion groups, writing groups, sometimes gatherings to discuss a particular issue. We started And Then together with Shelley Haven and Marguerite Bunyan.  So in some alternative universe we might have opened up a drag club. Again just reading the article some people might just assume it was us. In addition Arnie one time heard both our fathers discussing what kind of business they could set  us up in.  They were worried about our future. He said it was both funny and moving hearing them trying to grasp who we were and trying to figure if there was anything at all that could be done.
 
Onetime I did meet a Swiss banker at a wedding anniversay and spoke to him for about a half hour discussing the finances of the magazine and what it took for us to break even. “If  lovers  or friends or family members  of the contributers buy copies that is a big plus.” 
 
Dead Friend Press
 
Stephanie's novel 40% done
Muriel's book about her therapist crossing basic sexual boundaries 97% done
Shulamith's novel 100% done
Karen's memoir one chapter short of being done (there are extensive notes of what she might have included in the section)
My mother's dissertation 100% done
 
A writer I greatly admired and was friendly with died and left boxes and boxes of notebooks filled with descriptions of people, interactions of people in various circumstances, descriptions of nature and small-town life. Powerful thoughtful descriptions infused with the full power of his genius. His two literary executors poured through them and selected sections and put them together into a book. Both were fine writers and though half a generation younger shared a similar sensibility. But even though all the words were entirely his, the book itself, how these sections interacted with each other was entirely theirs. It was unsettling. You had absolutely no idea how he might have used each of those sections in some larger work. In the way the sections were arranged, the book seemed much more politically and culturally conservative than any other work of his I had ever read. The executors were very close friends of his. So maybe they remained faithful to how he saw the world at that time. 
I hope not. 
 
One time I read an article by a friend of mine that appeared in Ms. She and I had some political differences over the years. But in the article those differences were taken way beyond anything I had read from her before. I saw her later that week and she was livid. They had changed her ending without telling her. She was very embarrassed and distraught that people would think she would say those things.
 
I ran into another friend sometime later who said The Nation. just published an article under her name where they changed every word of it.
 
In the first issue of And Then Volume One, 1987 we published a conversation between Gary Sheinfeld and James Baldwin.
 
Baldwin: Giovani's Room was one of the most troubling I've written. You know I was warned not to publish it....I'm a Negro writer and I can't afford to alienate an audience...they told me. I don't think any artist can be told who his audience is or what to write. I believe you had a similar problem, with your short story, about a black child on the subway.
 
Sheinfeld: I think so. Yes at Columbia the editors of this journal wanted to publish it, but they said it was a racist story, because a white man is able to calm a black child while her mother remains helpless. They wanted to change a few key words. I asked them not to, I'd rather they not publish the story. They assured me they wouldn't change a word. They published it after changing “white” to “withered.”
 
Baldwin: It was a very beautiful story, very bitter, but very beautiful.”
 
Now my uncle told me that Esquire wanted to change the ending of a short story he wrote. He told them he wouldn't. So they didn't publish the story. He felt he made a grave error. No other opportunity of that magnitude came his way again.
 
So my way-in-the-future biographer sleuth soulmate friend collaborator can't be sure that whatever appeared under my name, assuming it was actually me, really was what I had intended. Also will they have to track down these unpublished works of friends of mine. And follow wherever they lead. Traces of me might be found in at least some of them. 
 
We published the original version of Gary's story in And Then Volume 2, 1989. 
 
 
Acknowledgments  
 
One time in the 1970s a woman came over to me and said I can't read a book about feminism without seeing your name in the acknowledgments. This has been true of many other subjects as well. Jazz, opera, Eastern Europe, cook books, even real estate to name a very few. Books, articles, dissertations, an occasional footnote, being mentioned in the program of concerts and plays. Called out from the stage by a singer in between songs. Is he a critic, does he work for a record label, a producer, a musician, a song writer, a family member, a former lover? There are works that I feel particularity attached to. And then there are poems and prose pieces and music pieces dedicated to me over the years. I feel very appreciative and grateful and deeply moved when that happens. But still it might not be so apparent to someone looking back from the future as to the "why" of some of those acknowledgments. 
 
As the lights went on in the darkened theater, my name was the last to appear in a long list of credits that rolled across the screen of When Two Worlds Collide. a documentary about the struggle over resources in the Peruvian Amazon. The credits disappeared in the Netflix version, eliminating crucial primary source material. Basically my role was to put the filmmakers up in my apartment when they came to NewYork. I also accompanied them to Chinatown where they bought film equipment from the back of a van.
 
How Reputations are Formed
My friend Marvin Schwartz was the official photographer for the Calder exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. The animal sculptures for the mobiles to be assembled were all inside a roped off area. Marvin stepped over the rope and started combing the hair of one of the lions.
 
A higher up in the museum, worried that he would damage the lion, started racing toward him waving her arms frantically yelling for him to stop.
A friend of Marvin who worked there raised his hand and said, "But Marvin is a genius.” She stopped in her tracks and said, "Oh!". 
And that, according to Marvin, is how he became a genius.
 
*
Roth's understanding of the cultural, political and economic forces in Peru was legendary.
 
A friend was doing a dissertation on the political economy of Peru, very detailed very technical work. Different from the more accessible, incisive essays she wrote for various leftwing journals. As we were putting together the first issue of And Then, I asked her if she could write an essay about the clashing economic forces in Peru. Instead she wrote a magnificent poem about Peru and the infliction of economic pain by powerful forces there to plunder the country. One great thing in doing the magazine is that I always have to let go of whatever preconceived idea I have about what the person will do. Usually it does take a couple of days to adjust. And then, Wow!
 
I also remember my friend once did a phone interview with Noam Chomsky. They just couldn't click on anything. Noam said, Let's try again tomorrow. And they did. And it went extremely well.
 
In any case, the dissertation was being written in very technical language. At one point she got totally stuck, I suggested that each month she send me something that she had written, “It will give you a goal, something to shoot for. I won't understand a word but so what.”
 
So each month she sent me a number of pages she had written. And I was right. I couldn't understand one word. Still I read everything she sent. One month she sent me something that somehow made less sense than everything else that made no sense to me. With great hesitation I wrote back and told her that maybe there was something off about that section. Being an exceptionally warm, generous and considerate person, she tried to be as nice about it as possible. Reminding me that my role basically was to be someone to send something to each month to motivate her to keep her on track and to mark her progress. That she very much appreciated what I was doing but there were no expectations beyond that. I loved her even more than before for the care she took in telling me that.
 
Three days later she called and apologized, telling me that her dissertation advisors told her that section was a total mess.
 
Later she submitted an article to a journal where an outside reader wrote a totally ridiculous nitpicking critique. I said why don't we turn this into a poem. And we took the words from the critique and arranged them into a poem. We called it Reader's Comments. It was published in a Socialist newspaper. Previously we had submitted it to Monthly Review. Paul Sweezy, one of the most important Marxian economists of the 20th Century who was both founder and editor of Monthly Review wrote back an absolutely gracious, apologetic rejection letter saying how much he liked our poem but the Review didn't publish poetry. It was such a high being personally rejected by him in this way.
 
Still as rejection letters go it  was a distant second compared to the one another friend once received. When her short story was rejected by a very prestigious literary journal, the editor wrote, “Sorry. I just don't get it.” In a handwritten note underneath, the woman working as his secretary added, “But I do.”
 
In addition to being an adviser for a major documentary and the go to guy when it came to understanding the Peruvian economy, there was his life long friendship and collaboration with Fredy Roncalla, Peruvian writer, poet, musician, literary critic, political analyst that was crucial to the forming of his deep grasp of the subtleties and intricacies and beauties of Peruvian culture. Fredy and Robert wrote poetry together and essays. They would meet every Sunday before the flea market opened where Fredy would sell his jewelry. While they often conversed just with each other, people would gather nearby and try to overhear their conversation. So immersed were they in conversation they barely noticed other people being there. Even though the conversations moved seamlessly back and forth through Quechua, Spanish and English, what they were saying could immediately be understood by anyone who just spoke any one of those languages. It was a vivid example for a discipline started a couple of decades later by someone overhearing them and then using them as the original model to build a whole theory around. It is the study of how through facial expressions, intonations of the voice and an overflowing humanity and intimacy, “understanding” in its rawest and most authentic form, can break free from the confines imposed by spoken language.
 
There was immediate pushback from poets who knew them both and who thought to reduce them into being examples for a new academic discipline was a way to neutralize the actual expansive power of the words themselves.
 
 
No one knows how Robert at 105 or Fredy at 95, who were known to still meet regularly, felt about any of it.
 
*
 
Poet, composer, librettist, economist, cultural critic, map maker, all around troubleshooter
 
Two super close friends of mine who were working on an opera had a bitter falling out. They wanted to complete the opera but because each had taken an order of protection out against the other, they couldn't be in the same room together. I was asked to be the go between.
 
One would say “You go tell her that...” I would answer, “I can't 'you go tell her that.' There must be a better way to say it. "Only to have the other person then say, "You go tell him that..." “I can't 'you go tell him that'...!'”
 
I also received  a phone call from an entertainment lawyer who was beside hereself about what to do. And so on and so forth until the opera was completed.  
 
And what an opera it was! And just for the record they later made peace and went on to do other magnificent things together.
 
There was a reading of the opera in the huge loft of the director. Instruments from the 13th century to the present in one section, posters on the wall from hit shows he had directed on other walls. In the program there was a special mention of how indispensable I was to the completion of the opera.
 
Afterward I was approached by a number of people. They asked if in some way I helped with the libretto.  Or just assuming that I must have some vast knowledge of music did I help get over any rough spots in the composing of the music.
 
So if that program is ever discovered in the directors papers or written about in the biographies of the composer and/or the librettist, or even somehow salvaged from wherever it is in my apartment, it will provide further evidence of my multiple talents as a writer and musician. While my ability as a world class mediator will simply get lost in the shuffle. 
 
*
 
Just as I was completing this section, I received Ahmed Abdullah's memoir A Strange Celestial Road: My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra. In the introduction he described a conversation we had In Prospect Park in 1997 that helped start him on creating this historic work. It felt so good to read. He and his life partner the oh so brilliant poet and singer Monique Ngozi Nri have been a  constant source of validation over the decades.
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What I haven't written about here is how much I like writing acknowledgments myself.
Often when I write acknowledgments I get swept away with pleasure in celebrating people who are vital to my life. If these acknowledgements survive into the future they will provide a treasure trove of clues for My Looking Back into the Past (my present) Companion. They will provide a sense of the people I knew, the environments I was part of. The joys, the terrors, the ferment, the tragedies, the magic and richness of sharing this time on earth with all these wondrous people I love beyond measure.