“On a frigid, lightly snowing night in late January 1917, Marcel Duchamp, John Sloan, and four other tipsy Villagers climbed to the top of Washington Square Arch and declared Greenwich Village a free and independent republic.”
“Nabokov's reputation as a novelist, scholar, translator, and lepidopterist is unassailable, but not many people know that he was also a great teacher (on the other hand, those of us who took his courses in the early '50s didn't have the vaguest notion he'd written a single word of fiction)”
“Basketball still is the most democratic of all sports — it belongs to the streets and the poor. The only essentials are a hoop, a ball, a pair of sneakers, and another kid who can go 'one on one' with you. And it was these kids that made the evening so beautiful.”
“The reality of the 'mass naked happening' seemed to lie in the media, in the pictures, in the gesture — which meant nothing except insofar as it was reported”
