I was a freshman in college when, after a season in the Chicago White Sox minor league system, Michael Jordan returned to professional basketball. A native Milwaukeean – and congenitally partial to the underdog – I had always hated Jordan, and in the years that followed, during which he would win three consecutive championships for the second time in his career, I would continue to hate him lustfully. But every time a Bulls game was televised in the weeks after his 1995 comeback, my best friend Jesse and I would get on our bikes and head over to Jesse’s Uncle TJ’s house, some eight or ten miles from campus, to watch. It takes a lot for a pair of college freshmen preoccupied with forty ouncers they can’t finish and girls they don’t have a chance with – kids whose universe is contained to a collection of dormitories on the shores of a small lake in the middle of southern Wisconsin – to bike ten miles, up hills and through traffic, into the world of houses and regular people with kids and jobs. But that’s how badly we wanted to see Jordan play. Not because we liked him, mind you, but because there would never be another basketball player like him, and we did not need the help of hindsight to know it. That brings us to LeBron James, the one who famously took his talents to South Beach this season, leaving behind the Cleveland Cavaliers team for which he’d played his entire NBA career and, in the process, a state’s worth of historically star-crossed sports fans who, calling themselves “witnesses” (at the encouragement of Nike, LeBron’s earliest and most steadfast sponsor), had supported him with a faith of which he turned out not to...

  Catullus, Poem 64 A wonderfully embroidered cloth sets forth the mythic deeds of various men of old.  It illustrates the wave-loud coast of Naxos, where Theseus and his swift ship vanish from sight, and Ariadne, in most grave distress, awakes deserted on the lonely shore, and gazes after her uncaring lover.  The graceful band is gone from her golden hair, her light dress hangs, her girdle slips from her breasts—all scatter, falling from her in the waves.  Indifferent, the lost girl gazes after Theseus. This warlike man had earlier gone to Crete, where Princess Ariadne, seeing him, had felt a flame burn down into her bones.  And when bold Theseus went to fight the Minotaur, conquering the beast, and laying its body low, it was her wander- ing thread that showed to him the exit from the devious labyrinth.  Then, when Ariadne chose the love of Theseus, he carried her by ship to Naxos’s shore, only to abandon the princess while she slept. Now in her grief she climbs the sudden cliffs, to view the vast ocean, calling out her plaint:  “Theseus, in return for saving you from death, you leave me prey for angry beasts and birds.  No shelter, no escape from the encircling waves, no means of flight, no hope.” But as these words pour from Ariadne’s breast, and as she gazes after Theseus’s ship, the cloth elsewhere portrays the young god Bacchus racing amid a riot of spirits and satyrs, burning with love to give the Cretan girl.   WARBURG                       BACCHUS/VOLCANO                       RUINS                       ARIADNE SCULPTURES                    ...

Dear Nora, It is with no small degree of trepidation that I respond to your query. Not only has it been too long between letters (I’ve not been completely idle…working on the long, literary defense of my love for champagne, cocaine, La Perla lingerie and soccer for you to read at my funeral. Did I leave anything out? I can’t think of a better way to drop the news that I’m completely made up, that I’m nothing. “We cool?”), but written history has all of the helpless tenacity of an insect splayed on a liquid inversion of sky. And if I remember correctly from our last conversation, we were talking about finches, yolks; wondering what we do with all those nuts. You presented a few choices, and here’s what I came up with: I hate Brazil nuts; Gary Busey is too obvious an answer; the lug nut, though unappreciated if not out of fashion (in both expression and thing-ness), I must say, is not a contender. So I’m going to go with what I know and say “Deez Nuts”. To get a jump on the prosecution: so much has been misunderstood about the boy. My condition prohibits a full-scale induction of the past, and neither do I want one. If it is as you say, and your graduate work aims to save Simon from the speculation of cynics, anarchists and other smart sets of perverts and miscreants, then I will help you, as your patience stands upon the digressions of the up-late type. The boy was as much of a brother to me as I will ever be permitted to know, and public record has done nothing but disavow the filiation by making me out to be some lovesick chippie, who dips her quill...

Lost skate-key: Have you put down your copy of Franny and Zooey yet? Remember Nora, exercise restraint with highlighter use; otherwise, others will suspect you of soft thinking. It’s been a long time, maybe I should slow down. So my new place in NYC…there’s an orange wall. There are barking doggies on my answering machine to scare off the unwelcome and the shabby. Well, it’s all part of the installation that is my apartment. The doorman of Sara’s old building is a tiny Cuban man who changes out of his security uniform at the end of his shift into this incredible hat and suit ensemble. Anyway, Sara asked him if there was any discarded furniture in storage: ever since, we’ve been inundated with the sorriest collection of orphaned, wilting lamps, backless embarrassed chairs with only makeshift bungee-back to show for it, a little nightstand that used to be blue, and a wheeling TV stand that groans with old age on its rusted wheels. My posture is starting to show signs of influence. The summer is here, although I still have two papers to write. It looks like I’m going to be here for most of it, since I have no money to go anywhere, and I’m two months behind on my rent. Plus, I’ve got that invigorating job as a copy-editor for Financial Investor. I’m feeling a little bit trapped in every way. I blame Max and the long weekend visit to Paris. She insisted we spend the birthday together. She knows two things, maybe only two things about me: I’m confused about what I’m doing, and that I’ve been visited by the middle-age version of me with a pony-tail and a tropical print t-shirt, a sort of conscious Doonesbury character. She picked me...

Nora, I keep waiting for you to find me…obviously, not the best policy. It is perhaps helpful, if small consolation, to note that I’m someone who has trouble changing his trousers…I’m sorry that things aren’t well, and I’m angry at someone about your trip if it’s truly cancelled. I’ll call you later tonight. Things are fine. Sometimes, when out for a walk, maybe, among muted winter buildings, a gasp! Of indiscriminate longing or loneliness; I’m never sure. I wonder what would happen if your beauty were to settle finally about your shoulders — something you share with Caliphurnia, slipping naked from the Pacific, and turning amniosis out of her tresses. WHEN that song begins to churn forward suddenly I roll my eyes like I’m trying to figure out How all of the air left the room. She smiles like I said something to the contrary; it says study my canines. He says, I did love you once. She tells me about teaching English in Patagonia to anyone who would give a fuck and two-steps her cigarette. You suddenly understand why it might be thrilling to copulate in a graveyard. He fails to bay. The tide turns when you take the cigarette to your forearm. What comes back full force in the moving final motive of the black sail and the white. The song is the promissory note of an absence. I pin myself to it like an airplane’s black box. In spite of everything, someone’s not on the guest list And what sad piano fingers you have (Did you see Penélope at the Oscars? ¡dios mío!)...

Nora, Hi, how are you? I just got off the phone with Simon. Poor dude, Someone-In-Charge has informed him that he has to have a psychological evaluation in order to take time off. (I think he wants to go to Argentina. Did he knock someone up? Do you know anything about this?) That is, he has to demonstrate that he needs a break or else he’ll do something nutty. (I guess he didn’t get the grant?) Can you imagine your own Cuckoo’s Nest audition? There’s no accounting for weariness, I suppose, if that’s what it is. So I helped him rehearse, like any proper older sister would (we are two minutes apart, and that counts, you know). I thought maybe he could talk about his fifteen-inch freckle…in detail. Sort of like the time he convinced the Dean to let him drop Philosophy 8 with ol’ man Wollheim once he covered Plato (we got into a big argument over this one). I liked that guy! Sure, he cringed at taking on my honors thesis on Walter Benjamin (‘Yes, he’s something of a poignant figure, isn’t he?’ back then, that statement totally confused me, but I thought W was cute anyway). Simon claims he persuaded the Dean to acquiesce to the pointlessness of anything after Master P. At the time, I’m not sure I believed him exactly, but he did get out of the class without a blemish on his record. I’m sure the poor old guy just wanted to run off to some terribly collegiate sporting event or to catch Tina Brown at Zellerbach, anything, Anything! Just shut this guy the hell up! How about the time when we were in England and we saw an old woman on a talk show who had a...