“I watch what hovers like genie smoke – the grief –/near ancient tombs of white marble with grey veins,/or gravestones on a desert hill,/images that filter vaguely out of the words we use to mourn./Are you awake?”
“They know something real about the surface of things. I would say that they defy the abstractions, statistics, and agendas of public policy, the academic event of the structure in whose shadow they roughly glide, jump, and fall.”
Many works of art have emerged in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks as part of the collective struggle to commemorate, understand, and situate them within the rapidly coalescing frieze of our shared memory. Thanks to the plethora of novels sprung up in the ashes of disaster, we are now privy to such worthwhile phenomena of universal human interest as the tone-poetic hi-jinks of the chattering classes in the months preceding the big event, as in Claire Messud’s respectable novel The Emperor’s Children, and the annoyingly precious musings of the insufferably earnest, as in Jonathan Safran Foer’s not-so-respectable novella Extremely Loud and Incredible Close.
I haven’t really paid attention to professional basketball since the last time Patrick Ewing sweated all over the Garden’s courtside seats. I used to love the NBA, and almost everything about it, but my fandom lapsed several years ago; as I write this, the All-Star Game is going on, and I’m watching “Patch Adams.” (I love it when Robin Williams cries.) Yet in the last week or so, my attention has returned to roundball, and specifically, to the story of John Amaechi.
Oscar Hyde having provided you, in his nefariously multifarious style, with all the juicy historical context you could possibly desire [see prior article], I find myself relieved of the standard duty to explain that “Newsom has two parents” and “Newsom … Read More
