My work with Norman Mailer revolved primarily around two things: books and food. While I came aboard principally to assist him with research for his novel The Castle in the Forest, he soon began to appreciate my love of cooking and was delighted that I was fairly adept at it....

I'm weighted down today with a sentiment of loss: loss of a friend who was close, and yet who I never knew beyond his pages. Salinger has left the building and the literary world is all the emptier for it. What makes it doubly difficult is that I am in...

As I resume my drinking career, I sit in front of a sparkling glass of Johnny Red and water and think this: am I being judged? I look around the room and realize that I know two people in the bar on the hill where I used to go often...

As I have nothing better to do this morning but ponder the oddities of pop culture, I'm curious as to why there has not yet been a convergence of crazy with a pairing up of Michael Jackson and Octuplet Mom. Ok it's peculiar, I know, but bear with me. He...

In the early part of the summer of 2007 Esquire magazine called to ask if Norman would consider going on the road for a short period to profile Barack Obama. At the time Norman was in the middle of his 84th year, dogged by arthritic knees, lungs that were cursed...

I watched Ann Coulter spew again yesterday morning on NBC's Today Show. I wonder why it is that she keeps coming back like an angry rash to the skin of my TV. As usual she had nothing to offer but sexy boots and hair color that once lived in a...

Within the election of Mr. Obama resides the reality that he is a man who lives comfortably with his Blackberry and, because of that, inherently understands how the world now works. Clearly he is more in tune with the average American than any of his predecessors and likely those who...

This morning the news features stories of a stressed economy, but that takes second place to the smashing in of a Wal-Mart door by gluttonous Americans seeking deals on X-Box toys. The result was a dead store employee, Jdimytai Damour. Shoppers stampeded and he was trampled for $8.00 an hour....

I never believed I would agree with something Mitt Romney had to say but today I do. For the past two years most statements coming from him were mired in presidential campaign hokum. In today's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, however, we were given the chance to...

I live in the sacred hub of gay marriage, Provincetown, Massachusetts. When the right for gays to marry was granted here in May, 2004 there was a collective cheer. People started flock to our town from all over for more than the usual reason which is getting laid for the...

Norman was loyal and that loyalty extended beyond people; it reached profoundly into his choice of where he called home. When he first came to Provincetown to work on The Naked and the Dead in his early twenties, he was not immune to the town's allure which infects virtually everyone...