"Who is Beachcomber Mike, and why am I getting an email from them?"
The story behind the undoubtedly annoying evolution of my Substack
NOTE: I am resending this email with the correct “Beachcomber Mike” wordmark across the top—It should make more sense now. Apologies for the inconvenience.
A note about why this Substack keeps changing its name. I mean, first it was Indolent Enterprises, then it was Queering Classical Antiquity, and now it is Beachcomber Mike. What’s that about???
So, here’s the deal—It has taken me a while to figure out how Substack works, and how I want to work it. Most people on Substack have one thing they want to write about in their Substack newsletter, like cooking or fashion or politics or whatever it may be. But some writers on Substack have more than one newsletter—Maybe one is about cooking and the other is about sustainable agriculture and a third one is about food insecurity, or whatever the case may be.
It took me a while to learn that I can create multiple newsletters within my Substack account. It works sort of like a magazine publisher with different magazines—you know, like Hearst or Condé Nast. What I mean is, all my different newsletters will shelter under a single umbrella. They will each feature a distinctly different type of content. For example, Queering Classical Antiquity is about queer approaches to studying ancient Greece and Rome, and the intended audience is academics, independent scholars, and other interested parties; Code Gray is for baby boomers (of which I am one) to get a handle on technology and other confusing stuff about life in the 21st century; and so on.
So what is the wing beneath which these topical newsletters will be the wind? (Identify that reference and you get a free trial subscription.) I thought long and hard. The content is going to be quite diverse, so it would not be easy to come up with a “brand name,” so to speak, that would encompass them all. After all, there is a reason why Hearst and Condé Nast have the names they do—They are named for the people who founded them, rather than for the content of their magazines. In effect, the person-as-publisher becomes the publisher-as-brand. Then you get someone like Oprah Winfrey, who named her media company Harpo, Inc. “Harpo” is “Oprah” spelled backwards.
In my case, I wanted to use my name, but, à la Oprah/Harpo, also have a little fun. So I am calling my media conglomerate, aka my Substack account, Beachcomber Mike. Clearly, I am Mike. As for “beachcomber”—I grew up in Coney Island. As I kid, I did not go to summer camp; instead, I went to the beach. My family did not take vacations; instead, we went to the beach. And as often as I strayed—to Morningside Heights, Carroll Gardens, Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, Jerusalem—I always came back to Coney Island, and to the beach.
When I was 28, I moved all of six blocks, from the apartment I grew up in in Coney Island, to an apartment building along the boardwalk in Brighton Beach that had always fascinated me. Imagine living right up against the boardwalk! Imagine having the beach at the end of your block!
My dream of the ideal life back then was to have some simple, sustaining job (I imagined bagging groceries at the now-defunct Met Foods supermarket on Brighton Beach Avenue) that would pay for food, clothing, and shelter, while I spent the days strolling on the beach, reading books, and writing in my journal. The was the dream of living as Beachcomber Mike. Below is a photo of me in Beachcomber Mike mode, taken by my dearly departed friend Chet Elkind around 1990.
I pretty much attained that dream—for a while. Then life got more complicated, and bagging groceries at Met Foods no longer cut it (okay, so I never actually was a bagger at Met Foods; but you get the idea). Now I am reclaiming Beachcomber Mike—At least as the brand name of my Substack.
Okay, that’s enough explanation for now. Just one more thing—Apparently, everything I post via my Substack will have the Beachcomber Mike branding across the top, as well as subordinate branding for whichever publication it is from (Queering Classical Antiquity, Code Gray, or what have you). That would not be my choice, but that’s how the platform currently works.
Yours truly,
Beachcomber Mike
South Georgia. It's a chain common in Southern states.
You may not have done it, but I was in fact a bag boy for one summer at the Winn-Dixie supermarket. Just one of several downscale jobs I've had. But after the books appeared I did go on to teach Creative Writing--at Columbia, Yale, UCLA, and the U. of Cincinnati.