why these subjects?

These are things about which I care passionately

BALLET.  I knew nothing about ballet growing up and nothing when I first came to N.Y.  If I thought anything about it I thought it was frilly nonsense.  Then a friend persuaded me to go to the NYC Ballet, I saw Balanchine's  Symphony in C and I was immediately struck by not only its beauty but its elegant complexity.  It was 1970 and Balanchine was in some ways at the height of his creative powers and I started to go to the NYC Ballet regularly, sometimes several times a week.  The NYC Ballet performed at the NY State Theatre, where even the cheap seats had pretty good views.  Balanchine had insisted on that, feeling that the ballet had to be affordable or it would become like Broadway, only available to the well-off and conservative.  Around the same time I started reading Arlene Croce in The New Yorker and she was immensely helpful in helping me to understand ballet and, especially, Balanchine; I strongly recommend Croce's two collections:  After-Images and Going to the Dance (one is still waiting for her long-promised book on Balanchine).  Eventually I started taking ballet classes, which I enjoy not only for helping me to learn about steps and combinations but for pure pleasure.

BASEBALL.  I loved baseball as a kid, rooting for the Red Sox and Ted Williams (my older brother was already a Yankee fan), updating batting averages daily, and playing often in local empty lots.  Then I turned 12 and tried out for the local little league and was rejected, finding out later the selection was fixed, based on the support of fathers (my father had no interest in baseball whatsoever).  I then lost interest in baseball until 1976, when I read Roger Angell's essay in The New Yorker:  On the Ball.  Instantly it became clear to me that I had completely missed out on the beauty of the game, something Angell described in lovely detail.  Then I started to follow the game closely again, rooting neither for the Mets or the Yankees but for the elegant geometry of the game itself.  The beauty of the game is elusive on television, as I quickly found out when I started to go often to games.  At that time the Mets were in some of their worst years so tickets were readily available and at Yankee Stadium the bleachers were $1.50 and available only on the day of the game.

MOVIES.  I was not allowed to go to the movies as a kid unless my parents took me and they had little interest in movies so that was not very often.  My parents claimed that this was because movie theatres were full of perverts (I had no idea what they were talking about!) but basically it was because my parents, from New England, did not believe that anything that gave you pleasure was good, especially if it cost money.  So I had little interest in film until I was in college in New York.  In those days a student membership at the Museum of Modern Art cost $5.00 for a year and as an art history major I spent a great deal of time there.  I knew they showed movies there but never attended until one day I had time to kill and dropped in to see a movie that I knew nothing about but had vaguely heard of, Citizen Kane.  From the beginning, the death and fake newsreel, I was totally entranced by this amazing and complex work of art and struck suddenly by the realization that I was missing out on the whole history of the art form.  Around the same time Andrew Sarris was doing a show on WBAI and I heard him praise Howard Hawks's El Dorado, having to almost apologize for recommending a John Wayne Western; I went to see it immediately and enjoyed it immensely, paying attention to the eye-level camera angles Sarris mentioned.  Around the same time Sarris's book, The American Cinema, came out, as did Robin Wood's books on Hawks and Hitchcock and I started to go to the movies every day and read about them, trying to catch up.

BOOKS.  I grew up in a town that had neither a bookstore nor a library (it has continued to vote against funding a public library) in a home that had few books other than an occasional best-seller.  So when I started earning money with a paper route much of it went to buying books on the rack at the local grocery store.  They did not have much of a selection so I just bought whatever they had, mostly pulp.  But one day they had Orwell's 1984, a book I had never heard of but which totally captivated me with its dystopian vision and compelling style.  I continued to be frustrated in trying to find things to read and was excited to find that as a freshman in high school we would be reading real books, even if they were old chestnuts such as The Microbe Hunters and Death Be Not Proud. Somewhat to my surprise this was not acceptable to many of the freshman parents; they considered that requiring their children to read entire books was oppressive!  PTA meetings were held to discuss the topic and I was pleased that the teachers stood by their guns; some parents had their kids transfer to less demanding English classes. The next year I went off to prep school where there was a wonderful library and I read widely and indiscriminately until I started to develop my own taste and preferences.  My favorite writers now include Richardson, Smollett, Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Trollope, Nabokov, and John D. MacDonald.  I will be writing about them, among many others.