Around Here

W hen Gore Vidal, whose novels, as well as whose iconoclastic views and repartee, I admired and enjoyed, died, I was reminded of the infamous public spats he’d had with William Buckley and Norman Mailer. The witty calm he maintained after provoking such dangerous heads and egos to explode, while he nattily brushed off the debris, was a delight to watch. He once rendered Norman Mailer (whom I also admire, for different reasons) dumbfounded on the Dick Cavett show by calling him “a veal of a man.” How do you answer that? Some reckonings are so striking as to make further discussion impossible. My roommate Bill and I shared a wing of a loft on Vestry Street in the late 70s. During the summer, we had the loft itself to ourselves, when the rest of the tribe took off for Key West and Saratoga. Leo Luchese, a friend of ours, dropped a bunch of furniture off at the loading dock/storage area, stuff that was in transit to his new apartment. When he was finished moving, a couple of weeks lat...

I 'm going to call you Gilly Lillyseed. You could be a character in a fairy tale - tossing seeds, with a graceful swoop, from your magic bag. Then everyone wonders 'where did those flowers come from?' I like your new photos - the pastiche. The yellow throw and the stripey blanket. Your hair has drabbed out nicely. Cool bangles - there's a slightly industrial touch there. No, I haven't taken the Myers Brigg test - which strikes me as being probably gratifying, but the way occult knowledge is. A pretty snare. It's related to my aversion to kingdoms. In my ongoing quest to integrate some more low key athletic activity into my low key life, I started thinking about options featuring more strategy than sweat. I remembered that my neighbor Frank had asked me to join him and his buddies on the local bocce court. So I bought a bocce set and went to the court, after hours, to see if I had any aptitude for the game. I suspected I would. The physics appeals to me. I stayed...

T hanks for inspiring me! I went over to your blog and by then you'd posted something a little bitter (one of the four flavors of meditation, as I once noted somewhere), followed by something sweeter. I like a variety of sensations, don't you? How was the falls? Still there I trust. "...a cottage bug", heh, I like that. It's true - that's where we saw fireflies. I've never seen one in Florida. But I was changing into my shorts this morning as the day began to warm, and noticed that a little green beetle, clinging to my pant leg, had followed me into the house. I transferred it to the fern on the lanai. They closed off a half-mile of the city's downtown main drag for the Independence Day festival. My friend Cathy and I went down for a while, and watched the fireworks. I have a fancy that the reason people are thrilled by fireworks is that they touch off some elemental resonance and deep recall of the Big Bang that started it all... Ooooo!  Aaahhh! It...