I. The Game…What Game? Everyone agrees basketball has changed dramatically over the decades since the NBA began in the 1940’s, but just how do we measure, mark, and comprehend the shock of the new game? Some markers are intrinsic (size, shape of court, basket height, rules to prevent outright domination by the tallest and most … Read more

The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan. Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. University of California Press. 678 pp. $49.95. January 2011. Robert Duncan began writing The H.D. Book in 1959 and finished it except for embellishments in 1961; yet only now, half a century later, has it reached book form. … Read more

What is this phenomenon? This death that comes about? Of course, it is because the artist is not needed, but what has that to do with the artist? Rimbaud, we don’t need you. Hear? Rimbaud! I say we don’t need you! It might have been Lorca who said that literature is dangerous. In Imaginative Qualities … Read more

New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, known as one of David Foster Wallace’s most prominent detractors while he was alive, had — almost — only nice things to say about his latest posthumously published book, Both Flesh and Not. The book cobbles together essays spanning Wallace’s 20-year career that (mostly) have not appeared previously … Read more

Sidney Poitier won his Lilies of the Field Academy Award just before my 11th birthday. That event was part of the world opening up to me and changing for everyone. There had already been the March on Washington featuring Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a hometown civil rights march in The Motor … Read more

“When Marge first told me she was going to the police academy, I thought it was going to be fun and exciting. You know, like that movie Spaceballs. Instead, it’s been painful and disturbing. You know, like that movie Police Academy.” -Homer Simpson There has never been a popular American movie about why someone becomes … Read more

I To Have or Not to Have? So much attention has been paid to the Miami Heat—including myriad analyses of the nature of offenses revolving around a number of stars vs. one or two, what role players are all about, and how much experience/stature a contemporary coach hired (and presumably tutored) by Pat Riley must … Read more