I'm about to give up on following basketball. After watching about fifteen games of the NCAA tournament, I've seen too many prematurely-hoisted 3-point shots and recklesss body launches into opposing defenses for me to draw any other onclusion than that team ball has died and it's all a televised circus show. What Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan spawned has finally come back to kill the game.

Where those players--and those of their time---delighted crowds with no-look passes and mercurial shots, they did so in the knowledge that they would include teammates when it counted--witness MJ's double-nickle game against the Knicks, which he ended with a dime to--Bill Wennington.

Two dribbles and a jump shot. UConn is up by three over Butler with 15 minutes left, and they worked 5 seconds off the clock before settling for--you got it!--a jump shot!

Man, oh man!

James Joyce--The Dead

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

There is little that is lovelier than this. I am at a loss to think of a greater ending to a story

A Girlfriend's Dog

At what point do you forget the name of an old girlfriend’s dog? Not the one that bit you on the arm (dog, not girlfriend), but just an ordinary dog that occasionally trotted past you in their living room or slept in front of you as you picked her locks on the sofa. I had a girlfriend years ago—when I was nineteen—whom I thought I loved deeply, and I thought of her day and night. We went out for a year before we broke up. For a while after we broke up, I thought of everything about her, including the warmth of her family home, and the faces and names of her family members, and among these I placed her dog, since they treated him like a family member (they even fed him turkey during the holidays).
A few months ago I thought of this girlfriend, and I recalled the holiday meals at her house, and the faces and name of her family. But I could not for the life of me recall the name of her dog. I can picture its size and coloring, and I think that its name began with the letter “C.” But at what moment did I lose the dog’s complete name? There must have been a moment when you might have asked me, “Just what was the name of that dog of an old girlfriend?” And to this I would have replied with full confidence, “Charlie.” But had you waited another moment to pose the same question, I might have answered with, ‘Corky’? or was it ‘Cortense’?” And if you had waited yet another measure of time to ask me, I might have responded with “Callie”, or “Canover.” But more time has passed since those hypothetical questions, and now my answer has been reduced to “C-------.”
Soon, no telling when, I will refer to the dog as “Bernie”, and then soon thereafter I will deny that my old girlfriend even had a dog, or even a name of her own, and then I will forget that I had a girlfriend.
And all those little moments that my old girlfriend and I shared together, like the time we escaped from the rain into an old baseball dugout in a field where I had played little league ball or the time when we got stranded in a snowstorm together on Christmas Eve and missed Christmas with our families---all of that will vanish.

Egyptian Revolution?

The naivete of expectation, well, I've grown accustoned to it. This is what happens when you attain a certain age. This BS in Egypt, all of these gestures to a democratic future...what a joke. This country simply has no history of democracy--the building of the pyramids comes to mind---and never will have. History has certain rules. Egypt will enjoy democracy in the same manner as Russia has done since the heady days of the decline of the USSR. Mubarak has nodded to democracy by transferring authority to, of all institutions, the military. Arab militaries. as everyone knows, represent the long-suppressed voices of the democratic minority in that part of the world. Think Libya.



Democracy?...Democracy? Playoffs?.......Playoffs?

Nina Simone--Princess Noire

Nina Simone was obviously an exceptional talent, and according to Princess Noire, the recent biography by Nadine Cohondas, almost impossible to live with or be around. Trained in classical piano as a young girl in Tryon, North Carolina, Nina Simone (the Eunice Waymon) studied for a while at The Juilliard School, but was afterward rejected for admission by the Curtis Institute, which Simone interpreted as a racial snub. She maintained the dream of becoming a performer of classical music, but eventually backed into playing blues and jazz as a young woman in New York City. All of this, as well as Simone's early career, Cohondas treats with substantial detail. I found the account of Simone's transformation into a protest musician during the Civil Rights period fascinating, and I found myself listening to "Mississippi Goddam" and "Backlash Blues" as I read.

Nina Simone's behavior soon grew erratic, and she would berate audiences or storm off the stage. Beginning in the late 1960s, it appears, one in possession of a ticket to a Nina Simone performance stood only an even chance of watching her perform. Indeed, Cohondas focuses on the tragic trajectory of Simone's life in the book's second half, and the story assumes the form of a series of tales of crude behavior, missing opportunities, and crumbling fortunes. Certainly there was more to Simone than that.

Still, Princess Noire contains vivid descriptions of Simone's music, and that alone makes the book worthwhile.

Seeing or hearing?

Gérôme was perfect, but few care to view his work these days. Once, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, a would-be artist was aping Gérôme’s The Carpet Merchant, and the young imitator somehow upset his easel, which toppled onto Gérôme ’s painting, tearing its canvas. I worked at the museum then, and I remember that Gérôme’s original was quickly whisked off to the catacombs below for restoration. A momentary whirr of excitement about the mishap carried throughout the administrative offices and spilled into the galleries for a spell before it all settled down. I worked there for two years after that episode, and I cannot remember when the restored painting returned to the gallery. All I can recall is that one day, as I was walking the gallery beat, I noticed The Carpet Merchant hanging in its old space on the wall. And I remember wondering about how the return of the painting to its place had escaped my attention, especially as I was rather familiar with the stretch of galleries in the modern Western European wing of it all.
Why had such a furor over the damage to The Carpet Merchant risen and died as quickly as it had? I suspect that the museum staff simply ran a tight ship, and such an affront to any work of art would have been greeted with like thoroughness. I suppose that The Carpet Merchant hadn’t been considered much of a painting after all; it was in its near-exactitude of depiction a virtual photograph. And that’s part of the problem. When painters achieved a skill of depiction nearing verisimilitude, there was nowhere for painters to go, so they veered off into odd directions. And this is exactly what you saw.
What about music, which also began to see odd variations in form at about the same time? One can’t judge Schoenberg and Beethoven with the same ruler, after all. When perfection in music was achieved, what did it resemble? Gérôme painted a photograph, and so painters had to move sideways and yield to the photographers (at least for a time, as photography resembles verisimilitude less and less). Who is the Gérôme of music? Which musician achieved the precise depiction reality? Bach? Mozart? Anyone?
There was no objective reality there. It was impossible to attain because the possibilities of music were infinite. The visual arts regress or move sideways.
It seems to me that I would prefer to retain my hearing to my eyesight if presented with a choice between the two. Hearing simply offers a greater possibility of feeling, sensation, and profundity than sight, for all its obvious practical applications, can ever hope to supply.

Prostitute is an underused term, for it suggests a proffering of something innate and dear to oneself for the prospect of flimsy gain. In its purest sense, the term prostitute defines not a single person, but every single one of them, man and woman alike; it's a common thread, like mammality is. Prostitute is often considered a pejorative term, but I can imagine it settling comfortably upon our shoulders--those angel wing harnesses were troublesome, anyway. I propose that we everywhere replace person with prostitute until further notice. We needn't seek a replacement for prostitute because our nature has reduced the original thrust of the term to a condition of terminal vacuity.

How fascinating it is to speak a living language!