Sublime

The colored boys frothed and speculated and stared off in class, slacked off in the sweet potato fields. Mulling the prospect of a black champion: One of them victorious for a change, and those who kept you down whittled to dust, seeing stars.

“‘Turning me into a vulgar Jew,’ Harold said, ‘what have I done to make me so malicious? I’ve boxed with you, played tennis with you, brought you oysters from Prunier, bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé, introduced you to influential people, helped you meet Paris publishers, only to have people everywhere pointing—There goes Harold Loeb, the repulsive Jew i

threat. It was rhetoric on her lips, but in his mind, that library in a bonepit, it took on a dangerous color of agency.

the basis of that most profound expression of the American psyche, the game of baseball, a game whose object is to leave home in order to return to it again, transformed by the time spent circling the bases. And that famous shortstop Odysseus also played this game, propelled around the world by the same dream, of returning home in the end, transfor

The pain of his loss—though he would never have spoken of it in these terms—was always with him in those days, a cold smooth ball lodged in his chest, just behind his sternum. For that half hour spent in the dappled shade of the Douglas firs, reading Betty and Veronica, the icy ball had melted away without him even noticing. That was magic—not the

he reminded me of a mole or some other type of burrowing animal:

swimming pool at night, looking for a place to fuck. The fillip of