Sublime

Wendi giggles and suggests that, in addition to his many functions and duties, Gil should be my bodyguard. He already is, I tell her. And yet that word doesn’t cut it. That word isn’t adequate to what he is. Gil guards my body, my head, my game, my heart, my girlfriend. He’s the one immovable object in my life. He’s my life guard. I particularly en

He tells me, “Art is an intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual endeavor.” Before leaving home this morning, Griffin made a couple of calls to Europe, and while traveling down on the subway from Harlem, he read some “galleys” (that is, page proofs). When he arrived at the office, he checked in on the cover, made sure a key article had arrived, a

I don’t believe there was better basketball player and human being than the man I called Norman (his middle name). There was no one I competed with harder and had more respect for than him. Just before Wilt died in October 1999, he and I were having one of our marathon telephone calls. Wilt simply loved to talk, and it was impossible to stop him wh

In Atlanta, a few months after my visit with Walter, I would go to a Bearden exhibition at the High Museum. The pieces depicted his youth in Charlotte, North Carolina, before his family moved north. There was also a video installation showing in the center of the exhibition room. Albert Murray sits alongside Bearden in much of it. They talk about h

I asked Ernest about Harold and Pat and he explained that Harold Loeb was Princeton from a very rich New York family, had been on the boxing and wrestling teams in college. He had literary aspirations, even started a little magazine in Paris called Broom. Fiercely devoted to Duff, very jealous of Pat, who alternated weekends with Duff.

There, among Hubert Humphrey, Vladimir Nabokov, Marianne Moore, Robert Graves, Senator George McGovern, William Safire, Isaac Asimov, Timothy Leary, Muhammad Ali, Bob Hope, Truman Capote, Ayn Rand, W. H. Auden, Marshall McLuhan, Justice William O. Douglas, Ed Koch, Gwendolyn Brooks,

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.