The trailer for Fox’s new fall series Revolution--created by J.J. Abrams--depicts a bizarre future world wherein all forms of electricity have ceased to function. Perhaps stranger yet is the show’s prediction of a future sports outcome: a brief shot at 2:26 of an overgrown Wrigley Field features a sign reading “2012 World Series Champions.” Which is more likely--the Cubs winning it all this year or airplanes falling from the sky and our regression to an agrarian society?

Her tiny Blue Rose boutique, which opened this past November, sits at the far edge of Brooklyn Heights’ main drag.

The highly affluent neighborhood, whose renowned longtime resident Norman Mailer popularized the term “hipster” back in the 50’s, isn’t exactly the center of cool these days.

Ms. Charles’ nearest retail competitor is an enormous Ann Taylor Loft.

“The clientele is a little more conservative in general,” said Ms. Charles, 39, comparing the tony Montague-area shoppers to those along trendy Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, where her other stores, Razor and Serene Rose, are located.

But rather than expand her locally designed apparel business to equally hip Smith Street in Carroll Gardens—which already offers a number of chic clothing shops not entirely unlike Blue Rose—Ms. Charles chose to stand out as a sort of “pioneer” along staid Montague Street. “We bring a little bit of the funky element to the strip,” she said.

It’s about time somebody brought the funk. This stuffy nabe could use some of whatever Smith or Fifth is selling.

ONCE REGARDED AS THE BOROUGH'S PREMIER commercial corridor, Montague Street just doesn’t carry the same cachet, amid the retail resurgence taking place south of Atlantic Avenue.

“I don’t just hear that the street’s lost cachet—I’ve heard people say there’s nothing to buy and they don’t go there anymore,” said Judy Stanton, executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association. “The shops on Court Street are a lot more interesting. There’s more variety; there are smaller boutiques. They’re the kind of shops the residents here would say they’d like.”

A historic nesting ground for the families of well-to-do Wall Street types dating back to the 18th century, Brooklyn Heights has long claimed dibs as “America’s First Suburb.” But it might as well be any ol’ suburb in America, with so many of the same chains you see everywhere else taking up precious space along Montague Street’s four short blocks.

Even so, Montague Street remains the gold standard when it comes to Brooklyn retail—at least on paper. According to the latest figures from Massey Knakal Realty Services, shopkeepers and restaurateurs on Montague Street pay the highest retail rents, with rates upward of $100 to $134 per square foot on average, compared to $50 to $74 a square foot on trendy Smith Street and Fifth Avenue.

Of course, prestige from a realtor’s perspective is one thing; from a consumer’s point of view, things can look a lot different. As Smith and Fifth continue to add eclectic new shops and restaurants, boosting their surrounding neighborhoods’ desirability, Montague Street is rapidly losing what few charms it has left. Goodbye, Mr. Souvlaki, after 33 wonderful years of seasoned meat on a stick; hello, Sprint PCS.

If not for the iconic promenade overlooking the East River at Montague Street’s westernmost end, the average visitor strolling past Chipotle, Banana Republic, Häagen-Dazs, Nine West and Starbucks wouldn’t know these hallowed Heights from, say, Shaker Heights, Ohio.

The Middle America comparison is perhaps most noticeable at night, when foot traffic on Montague all but disappears. The scores of nearby Borough Hall–area office workers, college students and occasional tourists who prowl the street during the daytime, seeking lunch or perhaps the latest eyeliner from MAC cosmetics, presumably have less boring places to spend their evenings.

Even on the relatively warm Saturday night of March 10, when diners packed many of nearby Smith Street’s eclectic eateries, the less fashionable joints on Montague offered plenty of empty tables. After 10 p.m., as Smith Street’s youthful masses barhopped among its hotspots, Montague’s more mature (yet far less numerous) loiterers merely window-shopped, browsing the posted real-estate listings among the many brokerage offices lining its four blocks.

It’s a far cry from the café-lined strip with “revolution in the air” that Bob Dylan described in his 1974 tune “Tangled Up in Blue.”

If places like Smith Street and Fifth Avenue are presently experiencing a sort of nightlife renaissance, then Montague Street has clearly hit a recession.

“I’m here till we close at 9 most Saturday nights, and it’s pretty quiet by then,” said Bill, a manager at M.S. Video and DVD, Montague’s last remaining video-rental store, who declined to give his last name. “I’d expect to see the restaurants busy. Everyone’s home, or they’re in Manhattan, or they’re somewhere south of Atlantic Avenue.”

“The thing I miss the most—I would say the biggest change in all of my time on Montague Street, which is approaching 20 years—is the tragic end of the nightlife on Montague Street,” said Mitch Cutler, owner of St. Marks Comics, which has occupied two different addresses along the corridor.

“It used to be full of interesting bars and restaurants,” said Mr. Cutler, who fondly recalled watching the New York Mets clinch the National League Eastern Division pennant against the Chicago Cubs in 1986 at the old Montague Street Saloon. (“The house bought everybody a round,” he said.)

Today, the former saloon has been replaced by a high-end Housing Works thrift shop offering Gucci- and Prada-made goods, with proceeds going to charity. The store closes no later than 7 p.m.

The Irish pub Eamonn’s, which opened in the mid-90’s, is the only true tavern left on the entire strip. Yet its location, surrounded by the cluster of banks between Clinton and Court streets, lends little in the way of retail synergy to businesses farther down the street.

The lack of late-night foot traffic in recent years eventually prompted Mr. Cutler to start sending his comics-shop staff home much earlier.

“When we first started there, we had much later hours, because there were people in the bars all night,” he said. “We were making money all the way up until 11 o’clock. But when there’s no bars, there’s no nightlife, there’s no foot traffic; there’s nobody to buy comics, either. So we shortened our hours.”

Last call for comics is now 9 p.m. at the latest (or as early as 7 p.m. on some nights).

OF COURSE, NOT EVERYONE LIKELY AGREES with Mr. Cutler’s take on the impact of Montague’s nightlife gap. New taverns certainly aren’t included on the family-friendly Brooklyn Heights Association’s Internet-posted wish list of preferred uses for promoting a “more vibrant and balanced” retail scene on Montague Street; kiddies and teen-interest stores are.

“A bar maybe isn’t your first choice, but it draws people to the street,” agreed the association’s Ms. Stanton, who noted that once-beloved Annie’s Blue Moon tavern is now a Prudential Douglas Elliman office. “It’s sad to see how dark Montague Street is at night.”

Ms. Stanton said that her organization is presently lobbying city officials in the hopes of enacting tax incentives or zoning changes to counter the chronic loss of locally owned businesses on Montague and to avoid more banks, real-estate agencies and national chains. (“If we wanted the sameness of malls, we’d move to the suburbs,” mused the so-called First Suburb’s organization newsletter last fall, however ironically.)

Naturally, from a realtor’s perspective, things couldn’t be rosier along the brand-name-logo’d historic strip.

“I don’t think Montague Street has softened up in any way, shape or form,” said Brian Leary, Massey Knakal’s resident downtown Brooklyn expert. “Montague Street will always attract the large nationals and the triple-A tenants.”

And as for those bush-league local shops—well, they can join the retail resurgence elsewhere.

“Where, 10 years ago, Montague Street and Court Street might have been the only viable options for mom-and-pop shops, there are 10 other alternatives in the neighborhood,” Mr. Leary said. “The northern end of Henry Street is a phenomenal location, with terrific mom-and-pops shops. Court Street, once you cross Atlantic, there’s a ton of mom-and-pops—Smith Street, too.

“My feeling is that, in the neighborhood in general, there’s a lot more opportunities for mom-and-pop shops. Maybe not on this immediate corridor, but within the one-mile radius, there’s a lot more opportunity than there was previously, and a lot more inventory.”

But for how long? “I think,” Ms. Stanton said, “it’s only a matter of time before the rents in Cobble Hill and Smith Street push people out, too.”

Met: December 2000

Engaged: Aug. 15, 2006

Projected Wedding Date: Feb. 10, 2007

Michael Ferreter, 32, a production manager for ABC News, is marrying Tina Balazs, 29, an associate project manager for the Publicist Medical Education Group, who is no relation to the boutique hotelier (and Uma Thurman’s boyfriend) Andre—we think. The ceremony and reception will take place at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame, where Mr. Ferreter attended business school.

The groom-to-be proposed outside Gracie Mansion after a postprandial stroll through Carl Schurz Park, handing Ms. Balazs a lyric sheet for “Question,” a song by the Old 97’s. As she read the words—“He took her to the park / She crossed her arms and lowered her eyelids / Someday somebody’s gonna ask you a question that you should say yes to / Once in your life, maybe tonight”—he slipped to one knee and presented her with a one-carat, brilliant-cut, white-gold-set solitaire diamond. “Absolutely!” she said.

The couple was introduced by a former roommate of Mr. Ferreter’s who worked with Ms. Balazs, before a double feature of It’s a Wonderful Life and White Christmas at the Music Box in Chicago. After Ms. Balazs arrived at the apartment nearby, the roommate promptly vamoosed. “Have fun!” he said.

The two sat in shy silence throughout the movies. “I didn’t know a soul when I moved to Chicago,” said the blond, sturdy Ms. Balazs, a native of Bowling Green, Ohio. “It took me a while to go out in general, so I probably didn’t talk to Mike that much.”

Nonetheless, it wasn’t long before they were rooting for the Cubs at Wrigley Field (Mr. Ferreter’s buddies knew it was serious when he left the game to get her hot chocolate) and strolling around the street festivals, which Mr. Ferreter said “are nothing like street festivals in New York. Here, you have a couple of guys selling tube socks, and that’s pretty much it. In Chicago, they have food and beer and music, and you pay $3 to see it.” Yeah, while freezing your butt off!

They moved to New York after he graduated from B-school, finding a two-bedroom place on the Upper West Side. “There are still some things we’re adjusting to,” Ms. Balazs said. “The people, the crowds, the noise, the fact that laundry is difficult,” Mr. Ferreter elaborated. “I had no hot water this morning—stuff like that happens in New York.”

They also have a new baseball allegiance. “We’ve sort of adopted the Mets,” said Ms. Balazs. “We can’t cheer for the Yankees. We’re from the Midwest, and we just can’t do it.”

The fact that there is something inescapably eccentric and nerdy about the adherents to this particular addiction is never glossed over in the various testimonies. The resulting frankness about mental elitism is very much part of the film’s charm, though all the incessant cheering for The New York Times and NPR as the arbiters of the activity does constitute a sophisticated form of product placement.

Still, we learn from the film that the first crossword puzzles appeared in print in 1913, and that the geometrical symmetry of the black-and-white boxes was devised by Margaret Petherbridge Farrar, the first New York Times crossword editor, whose tenure ran from 1942 to 1967. (She was followed by Will Weng from 1967 to 1977, and Eugene T. Maleska from 1977 to 1993.) Mr. Shortz succeeded to the position upon the death of Mr. Maleska in 1993. Previously, Mr. Shortz had achieved a degree of underground fame as NPR’s “Puzzle Master” and had been regaling listeners with a variety of puzzles and word games on the Weekend Edition show since the series began in 1987. Mr. Shortz had been studying, creating and editing puzzles for his entire life, having graduated from Indiana University as the only person in the world with a degree in enigmatology (the study of puzzles), an area of concentration he created under the auspices of the university’s general-studies program.

I believe it was he or some other puzzle enthusiast in the film who joked that when he first recognized his life’s calling, he immediately resigned himself to a life of poverty. This led me to wonder just how much Mr. Shortz earns these days in his range of activities. No such information was provided in the film, for Mr. Shortz or anyone else. But this is usually the case not only in nonfiction films, but also in real life. People are comparatively more willing to reveal all the secrets of their sex lives than they are to provide the slightest clues to their financial standing.

As it happens, in my checkered employment past I worked for a Park Avenue South outfit as an editor of two crossword-puzzle magazines, Easy Crosswords and Quickie Crosswords. As their titles imply, these magazines published puzzles that Times addicts would have hooted at with derision. I never figured out how people were mentally and educationally challenged enough to prefer these low-I.Q. puzzles, and yet ambitious enough to bother with solving word puzzles in the first place. One fact I did realize at the time was that though the puzzles were ridiculously easy to solve, they were devilishly hard to construct.

For example, you couldn’t clean up a bothersome corner with some foreign phrase or arcane cultural tidbit. I noticed in the film that one of the clues was “Lyon Looker,” and the answer turned out to be l’oeil, the French word for “eye.” I couldn’t help wondering why “Lyon” and why “Looker.” These were the kinds of frustrations that got me off the Times crossword puzzles after a few years’ addiction, a period during which I was savvy enough to laugh at a clue that read wearily, in a spasm of self-criticism, “overworked sea eagle.” The answer—which I, of course, knew immediately—was “erne.” You can look it up in the dictionary if you don’t believe me. I wish I could forget it, but that is the way of all addictions: Their after-effects linger long after the disease has been cured.

The last part of Wordplay is centered on the 28th American Crossword Puzzle Tournament at the Marriott Hotel in Stamford, Conn., where the event has been held every March since 1978. This year, almost 500 competitors spent one long, snowy weekend amid a universe of white-and-black boxes to gain the title “Crossword Champ.” I must say that the person I was rooting for did not win, and the person I was rooting against did. Even so, the form of the competition itself was not as compelling as the sheer drama of contemplating the majestic English language as the battlefield in which knights of the dictionary waged war against each other. The magical animation of letters leaping into blank boxes across and down to form startling words and concepts almost transcends the contrasting personalities of the participants, young and old, male and female, amateur and professional.

I must confess that I had never heard of the Indigo Girls before Wordplay, in case you were wondering, but like everyone else in the film, they are legitimized and even ennobled by the nature of their obsession, which, to come right down to it, is best summed up in Hamlet’s “words, words, words.” As was to be expected, Jon Stewart provided the only professionally antic moment when he described his first meeting with Mr. Shortz as something of a pseudo-shock, but also as something symbolically appropriate: “When you imagine ‘crossword guy,’ you imagine he’s 13 or 14 inches tall … someone who doesn’t care to go more than five feet without his inhaler. And yet he’s a giant man.” Gone is Mr. Stewart’s mock fantasy of stealing Mr. Shortz’s lunch money at the eternal playground in which they both toil; gone also is the image of Mr. Shortz standing among the black-and-white boxes that that make up his imperial domain.

An election-night crossword puzzle in 1996 ingeniously provided both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bob Dole with hope of victory in the election by making both C-L-I-N-T-O-N and B-O-B-D-O-L-E the correct answer to the same across clues with a different set of down clues. Mr. Clinton and Mr. Dole, both puzzle addicts, were amused and intrigued by the ingenuity involved.

It’s hard to believe that an entertaining film could be made about crossword puzzles, but Mr. Creadon and Ms. O’Malley have managed the feat, with the help of a creative crew of artists and technicians in the realms of the visual, the verbal and the musical to bring mere letters and words to pulsating life. Even as an ex-addict, I enjoyed this excursion into a world I barely experienced in bygone days. One thing I did learn as an editor of underachieving crossword-puzzle magazines was that the best puzzle makers at this level came from prisons, where, I figured at the time, the inmates didn’t have anything much better to do with their time. But I did feel a sense of social benefaction when I sent the paltry checks to the prescribed prison addresses.

Real Romance

Peyton Reed’s The Break-Up, from a screenplay by Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender, based on a story by Vince Vaughn, Mr. Garelick and Mr. Lavender, more than lives up to its title by spending most of its time demonstrating why its two romantic leads shouldn’t live together rather than why they should. The complete lack of chemistry or even verbal rapport between Jennifer Aniston’s Brooke Meyers and Vince Vaughn’s Gary Grobowski makes the task of depicting disharmony ridiculously easy.

This is not to say that the movie is entirely without interest as a pathological symptom of the times in which we live. At the very least, it can be credited with having the courage of its pessimistic convictions by not springing a contrived happy ending on the audience. Even if you’re not as familiar with the great romantic-movie classics of the past as I am, with all their coupling, uncoupling and recoupling, you may still wonder why anyone ever thought that Ms. Aniston and Mr. Vaughn could be funny enough or touching enough to sustain the genre’s proud traditions, even if they had a better script and more inspired direction than they receive here. Forget about the Golden Age of Leo McCarey and Preston Sturges. Forget about Irene Dunne and Cary Grant. There are supporting players even in the cast of The Break-Up—people like Joey Lauren Adams, Ann-Margret, Vincent D’Onofrio and Judy Davis—who projected a kind of magical passion in more recent, if comparatively leaden, times.

Ms. Aniston’s Brooke and Mr. Vaughn’s Gary meet at Wrigley Field at a Chicago Cubs baseball game, at the conclusion of which he brazenly hijacks her away from her caricaturishly square date, who is attired in a visor and plaid shorts. I mention the Chicago Cubs because, later in the plot, one of the bones of contention is Brooke’s distaste for baseball and Gary’s for ballet as evening-out activities. So what is a supposed high-art maven like Brooke doing on a baseball date in the first place? At any rate, it turns out that she works in an art gallery, while he’s a tour guide on the buses that he and his two brothers operate in Chicago.

After their first frenzied meeting, Brooke and Gary are shown in a montage of wish-you-were-here photos in which they’re generally seen in the midst of varying groups of friends and relatives. So much for the courtship period. When we finally encounter them again in the flesh, so to speak, they are squabbling over some lemons that Brooke asked Gary to get for a dinner-party display. Only Gary forgot to get enough of them, and after a tiring day yakking away on a tourist bus, he is in no mood to rush out to get more lemons. We gather that this is not the first domestic argument they have had in the expensive condo they have purchased together as an unmarried live-in couple, with equal shares for both the purchase price and mortgage and maintenance payments. Needless to say, this situation could never have arisen in the Golden Age of the Production Code, when even married couples couldn’t sleep in the same bed and the sky would fall in if they actually shared an apartment without first getting married. Oh, how enlightened we have become.

The bad marital feelings persist through the dinner party, in which Brooke’s friends and relatives are shown to have little in common with Gary’s. There aren’t even any interesting possibilities of sexual intrigue or betrayal, just a succession of dead-end conversations between people who don’t seem to know the first thing about each other. Gary gets particularly irritated with Brooke’s suspiciously effeminate brother, Richard (John Michael Higgins), who is given to bursting out into ear-splitting song without any provocation. It seems that he leads an a cappella group and needs to practice whenever he can. His sonic aggressions against Gary, always accompanied by Brooke’s beaming approval, are good for a few laughs in the nasty pattern that persists throughout the film.

After dinner, a seemingly trivial argument over Gary not wanting to help Brooke wash and dry the dishes (he’d rather play a video game) leads inexorably to an early and yet final breakup. She tries halfheartedly to make him jealous by going out with other men; he tries belatedly to become a less self-absorbed human being. But nothing works, particularly after they sell the apartment and no longer live in proximity to each other.

One seemingly terminal problem with the casting of Ms. Aniston and Mr. Vaughn is that neither of their careers has featured characters who excelled at one-to-one relationships with the opposite sex. Mr. Vaughn has generally flourished as just “one of the guys” in predatory pursuit of the opposite sex, and Ms. Aniston began her own rise as one of a half-dozen upscale, slightly sassy sitcom Friends, and she has subsequently shined only in strangely oddball, underachieving parts in which she fails to connect with characters who might qualify as soul mates. There is a rumor that the two became an item while they were working on The Break-Up, and the movie itself seems to have become something of a hit. Perhaps someone can write them a more optimistic romance than this one, and then their screen personae will finally escape their solitary ruts.

As the Yanks prepare for the season opener in just a few days, it should be clear why this move ought to be made: A-Rod is the better defensive shortstop, and Mr. Jeter's arm has never completely healed from last season's shoulder injury. Of course, these arguments are not likely to persuade the Yankee captain that he should abdicate his position.

One argument that should appeal to Mr. Jeter, however, is a chance at history. He already has just about anything a professional ballplayer could ever want. If he puts up nine more seasons like the nine he has already posted, he's a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame.

But by moving to second base, he would facilitate the greatest double-play combination ever. No team's infield has even been patrolled by two megastars like Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez. Cincinnati's Joe Morgan and Davey Concepcion monopolized the Gold Glove awards from 1974-77. But of the two, only Mr. Morgan was an offensive threat. The St. Louis Cardinals boasted a succession of Hall of Fame second basemen-Rogers Hornsby, Frankie Frisch and Red Schoendienst-but the team never had a superstar shortstop alongside them. Ernie Banks and Cal Ripken proved that shortstops could be power hitters, but neither one had an equally offensive-minded counterpart at second during their careers.

Four double-play combinations are enshrined in the Hall of Fame. Brooklyn's Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese are the most obvious, but neither player was the home-run threat that A-Rod or even Mr. Jeter is.

Nellie Fox and Luis Aparicio fueled the "go-go" White Sox from 1950 to 1956, capturing 12 Gold Gloves between them. But like Robinson and Reese, they hit like infielders of that era. Mr. Jeter and A-Rod already have more R.B.I.'s combined than Aparicio and Fox; with 15 more R.B.I.'s, they'll surpass the Dodger duo as well.

The best offensive double-play combination was surely Bobby Doerr and Joe Cronin, who overlapped in Boston from 1937 to 1944. Cronin hit .301 and Doerr .288, and they combined for 2,671 R.B.I.'s over their careers. They also hit 393 home runs. Doerr and Cronin played in the era before Gold Gloves were awarded, but Doerr set the record for consecutive chances (414) without an error, and five times led American League second-basemen in double plays.

Finally, there's the 1902-12 Chicago Cubs combination of Joe Tinker and Johnnie Evers. They remain the most famous double-play combination in baseball history, thanks to Franklin Adams' 1910 poem, "Baseball's Sad Lexicon": "These are the saddest of possible words: 'Tinker to Evers to Chance.'" I doubt that anybody will be writing poetry about the current Yankee infield, even if a change was made up the middle: A-Rod to Jeter to Giambi just doesn't have the same ring.

Tinker and Evers played in the dead-ball era, when sportswriters didn't record runs batted in, so their offensive statistics don't measure up to players of later generations. A-Rod averages more homers in a single season than Tinker and Evers had in their careers, combined.

Moving to second base would hardly be a demotion for Mr. Jeter. Sure, every Little League team puts its best player at shortstop, but there is no shortage of Major League teams whose glue came from second base.

Joe Morgan and Bobby Doerr are the most obvious examples. For a perspective closer to home, consider that from 1976 to 1988, the Yankees' Willie Randolph played along a succession of shortstops, ranging from Sandy Alomar to Paul Zuvella, winning four pennants and two World Series. Or that, from 1926 to 1937, it was second baseman Tony Lazzeri, not shortstop Frank Crosetti, who put up the better numbers for those legendary Yankee teams.

While he's studying Yankee history, Mr. Jeter might consider the example of legendary catcher Yogi Berra, who played on 14 pennant winners and 10 World Series champions. A three-time American League M.V.P. and a perennial all-star, Mr. Berra might have balked at switching positions as he got older. But instead, he moved to the outfield, relinquishing the catching duties to the younger Elston Howard in 1960.

Yogi proved himself the ultimate team player, and he has the rings to show for it. As a result of his unselfishness, the Yankees went on to win four more pennants and two more World Series championships.

Throughout his career, Mr. Jeter has always put the team before himself. Moving to second is something he would have done headfirst a few years ago. There's no reason he shouldn't be just as eager today.

It was two days after he'd witnessed the brawl of the fall: the American League'sbest pitcher, Pedro Martinez, taking down 72-year-old Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series followed by a bull-pen skirmish that could result in criminal charges for Yankees pitcher Jeff Nelson and outfielder Karim Garcia.

It takes a lot to surprise Mr. Buck, who since 1996 has been the voice of the Yankees' October championship runs.

"We all looked at each other and asked, 'What in the world did we just witness?'" he said. "It was just weird."

It was also the sourest note in what was otherwise a good, clean, if bare-knuckled fight between, arguably, the only two cities that love to hate each other more than Los Angeles and New York: Boston and New York. Sure, the Red Sox have their fans here-especially disgruntled Mets fans-but in a championship series, a city stakes its reputation on its home team, and neither Boston nor New York is ready to give up its good name without a fight.

Which is why so many New Yorkers felt like they'd gotten a 100-mile-an-hour knuckleball to the head when they read the editorial in The New York Times on Oct. 8. Propitiating the gods of objectivity, the board weighed in with a hopeful essay pining for the defeat of the New York Yankees, so that the Boston Red Sox could advance to play the Chicago Cubs in a tearful, one-of-them- has -to-win-now Boston-Chicago World Series.

"With all due respect to our New York readership-Yankee fans among them-to George Steinbrenner and to the Yankees themselves," the editorial read, "we find it hard to resist the emotional tug and symmetrical possibilities of a series between teams that seem to have been put on earth to tantalize and then crush their zealous fans."

Take it as one more sign that The Times is reaching out to a national audience. For New Yorkers who thought of The Times ' "other" readers as vicarious consumers of New York's politics, culture and ideas, it was a rude awakening. New Yorkers are some of The Times ' readers; in fact, they deserve some special consideration from time to time, whether or not that extends to the economic boon and civic uplift of a World Series championship. If the Yankees don't win, it's a shame-but look at the dramatic possibilities for the national audience!

The Times ' Boston readership is also a consideration. After all-though The Times didn't mention it in the editorial-the Red Sox are the New York Times Company's team, bought (with a consortium of partners) just before last season, and the Sox's cable-television channel became the broadcast outlet for the Times Company's stable of Boston Globe columnists and reporters. ( The Times also owns the Globe .)

"It is our policy to always inform our readers of The Times ' business interests in an issue when we are attempting to actually influence the outcome of something," said Times editorial-page editor Gail Collins when asked about the nondisclosure. "As much as we like to feel that the Times editorial page is influential, I do not think God is planning to decide how this particular series is going to work out based on our editorial."

There's always hope.

Of course, at The Times the editorial page and the newsroom remain as far apart as Metropolis and Krypton. And one might have forgiven The Times , if its coy equanimity and interest in baseball's dramatic possibilities-for other cities-didn't actually spill off the editorial page and onto the dress pages of the Sports section.

There, during these playoffs, Times readers have been treated to "A Boston View" of the series, with different Globe columnists taking top billing to wax poetic or prosaic on the preceding night's events, beneath schoolmarmish headings applauding both sides for keeping their tempers cool during the Oct. 13 match that squared the series between the Yankees and The Times ' home team, the Red Sox.

Michael Holley and Dan Shaughnessy are Red Sox fans and great sportswriters-with all due respect to our Boston readership-for Boston. Writing before former Red Sox hero turned Yankees avatar Roger Clemens' last Fenway appearance, Mr. Shaughnessy (in what was incidentally a great piece of writing) asked in The Times : "Anyone in Boston remember Larry Bird's last game?" Times Sports editor Tom Jolly said he had "heard from people who really enjoy what the Boston view is.

"There's no deeper meaning to this, except this is the Red Sox–Yankees, and it's a great series and, of course, a great standing rivalry, and we thought this would give a fresh twist to our coverage."

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said he wasn't thinking about The Times ' stake in the Red Sox or the Globe when he came up with the idea of the "Boston View" and contacted Globe editor Martin Baron, on vacation in Turkey, to see if it could happen.

"I always forget about that until I read it somewhere," Mr. Keller said. "It's nothing that crosses my mind. It's a kind of bookkeeping oddity."

Whether the owners of The Times would call their considerable stake in Boston a "bookkeeping oddity" seems doubtful.

Mr. Keller said he had been hoping to generate more sparks on the page, and was happy on Monday, Oct. 13, when Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy weighed in with the best and harshest commentary of the series, chiding both Mr. Martinez and the fans that foolishly cheered him on.

"I thought there would be a little more head-banging than there's been," Mr. Keller said, "that the columnists would maybe go at each other a little bit, and I guess I thought the columns would be a little bit feistier."

Sounds like the Boston view. Perhaps in the near-and far-future, any new toy The Times tries out will undergo the Howell test. Under former executive editor Howell Raines, efforts were made to spruce up the sections and offer, as it were, a view from the top; the question was always whether The Times could maintain its identity, its sense of place, and appeal to the hinterland at the same time.

Was Mr. Keller viewing the series from the point of view of his New York readership?

"We can't not be a New York paper," Mr. Keller said. "And some aspects of New York, including our sports franchises, rise above provincial local interest …. If the Yankees are in the World Series, it might be fun to try it in the Series with Chicago or Florida."

But The Times doesn't own the Chicago Sun-Times , the Cubs, the Marlins or the Miami Herald .

Nor is New York or the Yankees locked in the same kind of culture war with Chicago or Miami as it is with Boston or its Red Sox.

All of which makes this an awkward time for The Times to make its most significant public alliance with the Globe since buying the paper from the Taylor family in 1993. Until now, 43rd Street-at least in print-had treated the Globe like The Times ' cousin in Millville, Ohio: a once-every-other-summer kind of affair. Not for long.

"We've talked about whether there's some way for newsroom cooperation for the conventions, because the Democrats are there and the Republicans are here," Mr. Keller said of further projects with the Globe . "But we might find some way to benefit from each other's writers."

For now, though, we're treated to the benefit of mini-Boston invasions, like the one that occurred in The Times ' Sunday Styles section on Oct. 11, where Globe columnist Alex Beam, in a piece called "Who You Calling Quaint? Two Cheers for Boston," lobbed a greased-up grounder at the New York way of life.

"I am home at a decent hour," Mr. Beam wrote. "My children know me well enough to know my many shortcomings."

Well, that's nice. Mr. Keller said he'd been unaware of Mr. Beam's piece until it ran, but said he thought it was "cool": "I don't think The New York Times will die from an excess of playfulness."

Mr. Beam-who said he'd actually gotten the assignment after a Styles editor called someone at The Atlantic Monthly , who in turn recommended that he write the piece-seemed to have the proper prespective.

"It's a little like looking through a telescope," Mr. Beam said. "When we look at them, they seem very big. When they look through our end, we look very small."

Early in the afternoon on Oct. 10, Ed Kosner, the man who has edited the Daily News since March 2000, quietly walked out of the newsroom, presumably for good and forever.

Weeks after announcing his forthcoming retirement in March 2004, Mr. Kosner sent out an e-mail on Oct. 2 telling people that he would be leaving to "clear the decks for the new leadership" of the paper, which-so far, at least-includes former editor in chief Martin Dunn, who returns as editorial director, and Arthur Browne, once the paper's senior managing editor, who'll now be the News ' editorial-page editor.

In his first interview since his departure, Mr. Kosner said he didn't see anything sudden in leaving months earlier than he had originally planned.

"[ News owner Mort Zuckerman] figured out his next arrangement earlier than expected," Mr. Kosner said. "That's all there was to it. There's no way of knowing how long it would take. People knew for about a month that there was going to be a new arrangement. I don't think it's a surprise."

During his last days, Mr. Kosner-who was joined on his way out the door by managing editor Michael Kramer and columnist Pete Hamill-quietly met with staffers, but to the surprise of many within the newsroom, he refused large-scale commemorations or even a punch-and-cookies session around the Xerox machine.

"I decided I'd been to so many of those," said Mr. Kosner, laughing, "I didn't feel like having one. They all wanted me to. They kept coming in and kept pleading with me, and I didn't want it."

Predictably, given recent events, News staffers-whose overall outlook on life ranges between dour and really goddamn depressed-have become weary over a potential return to the kind of turmoil that battered the paper during the late 1990's, when the paper went through four editors in the span of four years. Indeed, the tabloid war with the hated New York Post promises to get even nastier beginning Oct. 15, when Mr. Dunn-who fought off the Post with a series of stunts and near-daily coverage of the British royal family-arrives at the paper.

Mr. Kosner said, for his part, that he didn't fear for his former troops. His thoughts on Mr. Zuckerman's decision to reinstall Messrs. Dunn and Browne?

"I have no thoughts on it at all. It's Mort's prerogative to choose whomever he wants to run the paper."

The Leo Burnett set recently found a pleasant surprise wrapped up in their business-to-business bible, Advertising Age : Tiki Barber! The Giants' running back was smiling at them through clear cellophane from the cover of the current issue of Men's Fitness , which was given away with Ad Age 's Oct. 13 issue. (Advertising "31,722 words inside!", Men's Fitness made a stark contrast to the text-heavy industry newspaper.)

But wait: There's more Tiki. The same Men's Fitness cover was splashed over Ad Age 's back page in an ad for the magazine-part of publisher American Media's campaign, under chief executive David Pecker, to overpower the abs-and-ads dominance of dreamy David Zinczenko's Men's Health .

That Men's Fitness should buy a back-page ad and an insert in Ad Age is not, in itself, a novelty. But the flashy promotion also shipped with an issue in which Ad Age covered the magazine's relaunch in a piece by reporter Jon Fine that, like the advertisement, featured the Men's Fitness cover.

Advertising Age editor Scott Donaton said he first became aware of the promotion when the newspaper showed up at his house on Sunday, Oct. 12. Perhaps surprisingly, he called the matter a "total illustration of church and state" at Advertising Age . He said the piece was run and placed on page 4 of the paper without any knowledge of what the business side of the newspaper had in mind.

"Ideally, as an editor, do you like to see it?" Mr. Donaton asked rhetorically. "Of course not. But to me, it's as much a violation of church-state to make a decision either way, to do something or not do something. We cover the magazine industry, and the magazine industry is part of our ad base. The same goes for the television industry.

"We don't let the sales side know about a negative story," Mr. Donaton continued. "And that's been the case where we do a negative story on a television network or a publishing house and they have an ad in the book. We decided a long time ago that we couldn't let it be a factor, one way or another."

On Wednesday, Oct. 8, the post– Kingdom and the Power crowd-the one that gave form to the vision of The New York Times through the 1970's beneath former executive editor Abe Rosenthal and culture czar Arthur Gelb-came together to mark the publication of Mr. Gelb's memoir, City Room , at Sardi's (of course), in what one attendant described as the "biggest reunion of the old Abe/Arthur New York Times in many, many years."

Indeed, the guest list might have well been a database for the bylines that defined The Times during the Rosenthal-Gelb era. Edith Evans Asbury and John Corry were there. So were Clyde Haberman and Sam Roberts, Gerry Schoenfeld and Marty Segal, Rocco Landesman and Bernard Gersten. Sydney Schanberg made an appearance, as did John Kifner, Richard Reeves, Frank Prial, Fred Ferretti, Lesley Oelsner and Lucinda Franks. And what about Seymour Topping? Yes, dear, he was there, too.

Following remarks by former publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Mr. Rosenthal spoke, eventually leading the ol' gang in a chant of "Gelb! Gelb! Gelb!"

"I was overwhelmed with emotion," Mr. Gelb said later. "There was a lot of affection and warmth, and I felt very, very moved by it."

It was 1995, Mr. Smith said, and Mr. Vidal was making an appearance at Barnes & Noble on Union Square. After waiting in line to meet the author of Myra Breckenridge and Live from Golgotha , Mr. Smith made his move.

"I went up to him and said, 'Hey, you and I are in love with the same man!' And I was serious." Mr. Smith, who says he's 77 though his book has him born in 1921, crinkled his eyes and flashed a sly smile. He wore stylish neo-retro half-rim glasses and, from the neck up, looked like a well-kept Buck Henry. Neck down, he was channeling Ed Grimley, his dark work pants riding high on a reddish-orange, plaid-patterned work shirt. Hanging from a bookshelf behind him was a sash that read "Stonewall Veteran." Next to the window was a telescope pointed, he had said earlier, at the Archives building, where Monica Lewinsky now lives.

"The publisher's representative came running over and all these people were staring at me, wondering 'Is he going to pull out something?'" Instead, Mr. Smith popped the name of his and Mr. Vidal's mutual crush: "Lucretius." The Roman poet and philosopher who wrote "Nothing can be created out of nothing" and "So much wrong could religion induce," and whom Mr. Vidal has cited as an influence.

"He loved it," Mr. Smith said of Mr. Vidal's reaction. And the smile on Mr. Smith's face said that he loved it, too. He had raised a ruckus, gotten some attention.

Mr. Smith should have all the attention he wants once the God-fearing folk of this country and their well-funded organizations get wind of his life's work.

Ever since he received a fateful letter from Magic Mountain author Thomas Mann in 1948, Mr. Smith has toiled away here in the heart of Sodom, compiling reams of research on the people who, like himself, either don't believe in God, question God's existence, or, at very least, are skeptical of all organized religions. The first 50 years or so of Mr. Smith's research constituted a labor of love, of the nontheistic variety, but after getting a computer around 1990, Mr. Smith began to think that maybe he had a book.

Lyle Stuart, longtime nonbeliever and notoriously anti-establishment owner of Barricade Books, agreed, and on July 10 his imprint published Mr. Smith's 1,237-page tome, Who's Who in Hell: A Handbook and International Directory for Humanists, Freethinkers, Naturalists, Rationalists and Non-Theists . The book's list price is $125, which may come as a relief to believers. Then again, Amazon.com is selling it for $100.

The entries in Mr. Smith's encyclopedia-like book, which are a mixture of names and subjects such as "Unitarianism" and "Atheism," appear in a series of font styles and sizes. They are arranged alphabetically, each new section topped with a flame-licked letter. As he writes on the Contents page, "the contents of most interest to freethinkers is in bold face and size 10 font," "that which is of marginal interest to freethinkers is in smaller size 9 font," and "other items of related interest but better researched elsewhere, are in size 7 font."

"The size of the entries is not an indication of a person's or a subject's importance," writes Mr. Smith.

Hence, the writer Christopher Hitchens, who is identified as a "non-theist," gets the boldface, big-type treatment, while, on the same page, Adolf Hitler appears in miniscule type.

"He was a Catholic," Mr. Smith said with a Cheshire grin.

So who else resides in Mr. Smith's Hell ?

More than 10,000 names, according to the author's count, including Manhattan director Woody Allen, a self-described agnostic with "one foot in atheism," according to his entry; humorist Steve Allen; billionaire Warren Buffett, agnostic; Microsoft's Bill Gates; The Silver Chalice co-star Paul Newman; Die Hard franchise Bruce Willis; The Perfect Storm heartthrob George Clooney–doesn't believe in Heaven and Hell, not sure if he believes in God; artists Lucian Freud, "not a believer in the various organized religions"; Frida Kahlo, atheist; Matisse; astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble; writers Samuel Clemens, Charles Dickens, Tony Kushner, Camille Paglia, atheist; Joyce Carol Oates; Harold Pinter; Will Self ; Mr. Vidal; H.G. Wells; New York Times owner Arthur Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger Jr.; Simpsons creator Matt Groening, agnostic; columnists Russell Baker, skeptic, Molly Ivins, non-theist; musicians Billy Joel, atheist; Michael Stipe, doesn't believe in God; Barry Manilow, who once when asked if he believed in God, replied, "Yes. His name is Clive Davis, and he's the head of my record company"; radio talk-show host Howard Stern; director Nora Ephron, who is included, not because she's responsible for You've Got Mail , but because, according to Who's Who in Hell , she told the Daily News in 1997 that she was not a believer in God "in a formal sense."

And there on page 1,026 is an entry for Mr. Smith, where he describes himself as a "roué and a sybarite," a signer of both the Humanist Manifesto II and the Humanist Manifesto 2000, where he recounts how he earned his own place in Hell.

Mr. Smith grew up in the tiny town of Minburn, Iowa, where, he told The Observer , he played basketball with baseball great Bob Feller and listened to Dutch Reagan calling the play-by-play on the local radio station. He said that his Dad owned a grain elevator and played for the Chicago Cubs farm team. Mr. Smith was raised as a Methodist and served as pianist for the local church. "Being a good Methodist, of course, I believed that miracles could occur and God could stop the sun."

But when Mr. Smith was in his mid-teens, the Methodist bishop visited to deliver a homily about miracles, and during a post-sermon lunch, he decided to play a prank on the minister's daughter. Mr. Smith said that he hid a rubber palpitator under the tablecloth and beneath the young girl's table setting, with the intention of making her bowl of oyster stew move.

"Lo and behold, the Methodist bishop sat there," Mr. Smith recalled. "So they were serving oyster stew and I thought what the hell."

Mr. Smith looked flummoxed for a moment. "Heck, not hell," he said, then explained that he usually avoided "swear words" because "they're used by the Christian and the Jewish believers."

Then Mr. Smith continued with his story: When he squeezed the palpitator bulb, the bowl moved and the soup inside it began to ripple.

The Minburn Methodists were amazed. "They were almost believing that a miracle had occurred. They were waiting for an oyster to show its head or something," Mr. Smith said. Eventually the tubing was discovered, and even though the minister's daughter thought it was funny, Mr. Smith said, he was ejected from the lunch.

"Then it occurred to me that one should be skeptical about miracles," he said.

And so began Mr. Smith's 50-year journey through "nihilism, agnosticism, deism, Emersonianism, pantheism, transcendentalism, Unitarian humanism of the John H. Dietrich-Curtis W. Reese vintage, free thought, rationalism, naturalistic humanism" and, most recently, "humanistic naturalism."

Asked to define humanistic naturalism, Mr. Smith said, "To me the important thing is the scientific method of reason. I define things using the physical and natural sciences." But, said Mr. Smith, "I think it was Emerson who said, 'Speak today what today you think, speak tomorrow what tomorrow you think. Even if it's the opposite of what you think today.' So, yeah, I change my viewpoint every day."

A photographer arrived to take Mr. Smith's picture on the building's roof deck. On the way up in the elevator, the photographer asked Mr. Smith if he believes in karma. "That's wishful thinking," he replies. "One of the things about the humanists–we're looking for justice now, because when we die, we become food for the worms."

It's a hard concept to swallow from the roof deck with its spectacular views of Manhattan from a Jane Street perspective. A cool breeze carried the romantic sounds of taxis and buses from the street. "Robert DeNiro used to live next door," he said, pointing to the next penthouse.

Mr. Smith looks darned good for a heathen. Though he's nearing 80, he could pass for someone in his early 60's. "I do think I'm a happy person," said Mr. Smith. "If you're the member of an organized church group, you really have to have a guilt complex. You have to feel guilty about not loving God enough or not contributing enough money or not contributing enough to society."

Mr. Smith first came to New York when he was drafted by the Army and sent here before being shipped off to Europe. He said that on his dog tag, next to the word religion, it read "none."

Released from active duty, he returned to college under the G.I. Bill. He studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and then returned to the University of Northern Iowa to major in English. There, in 1948, he said he founded the first Humanist Club on any college campus.

Mr. Smith hitchhiked to Columbia University, where he entered graduate studies and founded a second Humanist Club, of which intellectual John Dewey was the first member. (He still has Dewey's $1 dues check.) Lionel Trilling was the sponsor of Mr. Smith's master's thesis, which sought to define humanism. Over the course of his research, Mr. Smith wrote to Thomas Mann. The reply he received from the author of Dr. Faustus was dated Dec. 23, 1948.

"In my opinion, I do not belong to any particular philosophical school, and I gladly leave it to you to classify me," Mr. Mann wrote, noting much later in the letter, "I don't believe that I may call myself a classical humanist. This intellectual form seems hardly possible any longer today. You are familiar with my comments on the subject and know that my hopes are aimed at the development of a new humanism which is no longer purely optimistic, but religiously tinted and deeply experienced in all dark aspects of life, a humanism which derives its pride from the unique and mysterious position of man between nature and mind. As I said before, I leave it to you to put a name to this my proud sympathy for the secret of man." The letter would become the beginning of the paper trail that led to Who's Who in Hell .

Around that time, Mr. Smith also met a Costa Rican student named Fernando Vargas, who would become his lover and business partner for over 40 years, until Mr. Vargas' death in 1989. "We became lovers from the first week on," said Mr. Smith, adding that Mr. Vargas was an atheist as well.

When the 1950's arrived "nobody was out," so to speak, "but there was a subculture here that was wild." Mr. Smith and Mr. Vargas were mutually non-monogamous, and Mr. Smith ticked off a number of his lovers by religious identification. "There was the Catholic, there was the Baptist, the Santero," he said with a flirtatious look. "One of Luis Buñuel's stars was so attracted to me that he insisted I go to Mexico City with him."

I asked Mr. Smith if he thought that his homosexuality had anything to do with his nonbelief. "I've really thought about that," he said, "and I don't honestly think so at all. I was in my late 20's before I really knew I was gay, and by that time, I was already a humanist."

In 1961, Mr. Smith and Mr. Vargas opened up an independent recording studio in the Times Square area called the Variety Sound Corporation. Mr. Vargas handled the recording, Mr. Smith took care of the accounting. In the more than 20 years that Variety was open, the customers included Liza Minnelli, whom Marvin Hamlisch brought in to record her first demo, Paul Simon, John Guare, Harold Prince, and for 25 years, cosmic jazzbo Sun Ra. Mr. Smith also taught high school English in New Canaan, Conn., and at the Bentley School in the city.

Composer David Amram, who recorded the sound cues for Joseph Papp's Shakespeare Festival at Variety, remembered that "when you'd go up there it was sometimes like spending New Year's Eve at a mental institution." But, he added, "Warren always had this great professorial Edwardian English gentlemen's calm."

Given the length of Mr. Smith's relationship with Mr. Vargas–a portrait of the two of them hangs in the humanist's apartment next to drawings by Picasso and Cocteau–I ask him how love fits into his humanistic naturalist world view. Love is not a subject explained by science.

"To me, love is a little difficult to explain," he said. "It must be partly chemical. My present lover and I have just been together for one year and two days. And it didn't start out as love. But it definitely is now. And I'm twice as old.

"Love, to me, consists of a variety of degrees …" Mr. Smith was floundering, and then he changed the subject to sex, which certainly does fall under the natural sciences.

"Love consists sometimes of a preponderance of sex," said Mr. Smith. "I mean kinky sex, romantic sex and all different kinds of sex."

In Who's Who's in Hell , Mr. Smith's entry on Napolean includes information on the French emperor's penis size. In H.G. Wells' entry, one of his paramours refers to him as a "naughty boy-man."

"It's about humanity," said Mr. Smith. "To overlook the differences among humans is egregious. I think all these facets of human life should be brought into the open."

I do know that the book can be criticized strongly by the puritans," Mr. Smith said. The wind was kicking up now. "They would be aghast at this concept that you could list all these bad people. What I'm trying to say is that these are not bad people. The bad people are the ones who aren't reflective enough to get themselves into this."

When The Observer called Joe Zwilling, the director of communications for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, to ask if he'd heard of Mr. Smith's book, he replied that he had not.

"I'm not aware of it and, based on your very limited description of it, I'm not sure what its purpose is," Mr. Zwilling said. "If someone writes a book saying that there are people who don't believe in God, I'm not sure that's really news."

So far, Mr. Smith said, no one has protested being included in the book. The humorist Steve Allen–a friend of Mr. Stuart's who has never met Mr. Smith–has already purchased a copy of the book, and although he hasn't read the entire volume yet, he said that his entry is accurate. "I think it ought to be in everyone's library," Mr. Allen said.

Mr. Smith was up on the roof, pointing north again to where the army put him up before shipping him off to the war in Europe. While he was waiting to leave, Mr. Smith remembered going to the Shubert Theater to see Mae West in Catherine Was Great and, after the show, waiting in the rain so he could get her autograph for his father. West, he said, uttered a version of her famous "Come up and see me" line. Mr. Smith stood still for a while, just recalling, replaying the highlights of his life.

"So things came together pretty nicely,'' Mr. Smith said, as if it were further proof that people like him–humanists and atheists and free thinkers–were not the scourge of the Western world.

"Maybe," said Mr. Smith, holding his arms out and looking skyward with a mysterious smile, "there is a God."

And I hope I'll have enough room left to get around to that, after my special appeal to Mr. Murray, who is himself, it occurs to me, like Mr. Petty, an underappreciated savant. That's the point of my appeal to Mr. Murray: recognition, the right kind of recognition, the kind he deserves, the kind two wonderfully imaginative, enthusiastic, charming and devoted women are trying to give him. The kind he has so far inexplicably chosen not to acknowledge.

Dear Mr. Bill Murray:

Please don't stiff my friends Chris and Nancy. I'm speaking of Christine Schomer and Nancy Donahoe, the two founders and directors of the Newport International Film Festival who have been courting you, counting on you to show up at the Bill Murray Retrospective they're staging in your honor at the Newport Film Festival, which runs from June 1 to June 6 at that beautiful resort. Actually, they're not calling it a Bill Murray Retrospective , they're calling it a Bill Murray Introspective , as I am sure you know from the catalogue they sent you (along with the highly prized Emil Verban baseball card which Chris Schomer went to the trouble of snagging from an E-Bay auction on the Internet and sending along to you because she knows the sentimental affection and iconic significance with which you have endowed the famously plodding but consistent Chicago Cubs second baseman from the 40's. Talk about devotion!).

Not Retrospective but Introspective, because "His work deserves more than a Retrospective," as they write in their catalogue, "it deserves a look inward. The Bill Murray Introspective offers a contemplation of Murray's singular capacity for conjuring rich convincing inner lives for his characters. Watch Caddyshack again with an eye to just how much Carl [the groundskeeper] communicates with a blank stare. Read the backstory etched into [Ernie McCracken–Mr. Murray's ecstatically vain bowling champ character] in Kingpin . Understand, somehow, without any explanation, the root of the emotion in so many of his lines in Rushmore ."

And these two women, Chris and Nancy, are not pushovers for fame and name, for mere star power. They're both smart and discriminating and the festival they put on is a highly impressive, hugely enjoyable and professionally run event. I served as a juror on their feature film panel last year and they had the city of Newport, a place I once dismissed as a snotty, standoffish burg, throwing open its fabulous mansions to lavish hospitality on the filmmakers and attendees. Their carefully crafted catalogue descriptions of your work are brilliant, compressed appreciations; the clip reel of your career which their program director Maude Chilton put together is a smash.

They've even scheduled a Bill Murray golf tournament and book signing (if you show up to sign, of course–hey, why not call Chris and Nancy right now and give them the confirmation they've been wishing for so devoutly as the clock ticks down toward the festival opening?). A book-signing for your new opus from Doubleday called Cinderella Story: My Life in Golf , a book which I've come to love despite the fact I've never before been able to stand golf or anything connected with it. Because it's not so much about golf as about life: Bill Murray riffing on Life, on his life (I loved the riff on trying to get cast as Joseph in his grade school nativity pageant). "The daddy of all roles: Joseph … the complexity, the layers … How secure was this guy? Unfazed by Nazarene gossip …") Bill Murray riffing on his goofily eccentric fusion of Westernized Eastern philosophy and show-biz shtick. Bill Murray making a startling revelation about the origin of his crazy Zen-slacker take on things: Towering over the golf course in Wilmette, Ill. where he first caddied was a Bahai temple, the very center of the Bahai faith in the West, set down in Bill Murray's hometown. Why? Because, Bill Murray tells us, his hometown is the obverse navel of the earth in the Bahai faith, a point directly opposite the founding temple of the Bahai sect in Persia. How wild is that?

Now Bahai is a unique religion in that it professes to be a fusion of all religions Eastern and Western, an inclusive spiritual communion that prompts some genuinely heartfelt remarks from the usually mock-everything Mr. Murray: "The faith believes in the unity of all religions, the nine major ones celebrated in the nine sides of the temple. Bahais are the victim of genocide in Persia. Where's the logic? Choose no favorites; believe all faiths are equal in God's eyes. O.K., prepare to die for that belief."

All of which tends to confirm the kind of speculation I indulged in a couple years ago in these pages in a column titled "Bill Murray: Secret Zen Master" [Aug. 12, 1996]. An essay in which I tried to make a case that Bill Murray has been seriously underappreciated, that beneath the goofy deadpan mock sincerity of his usual comic persona there is an intriguing and persistent subtext of cosmic/comic spirituality. It's an essay (reprinted in the Bill Murray Introspective Catalogue of the Newport Film Festival) which argues that, "beneath the spectacularly smarmy, self-subvertingly parodistic insincerity of Bill Murray's signature characters … there's something More going on … beneath the mugging, beneath the deadpan insincerity–the numinous shadow of something Unspoken, which the insincerity is mutely gesturing at–the obverse of it [just as the Bahai temple is the obverse of Wilmette, Ill.], a kind of sublime godlike composure, an almost Buddhalike serenity."

I argued that your "signature characters like the schlockmeister lounge singer you created on Saturday Night Live sketches offer a profound critique of self-serving vanity. That your affectation of show-biz phoniness is your way of making apparent, transparent, the phony Bad Actors our egos are–dramatizing the distance between our acting and our Being. It's a far more devastating critique of the self-aggrandizing performative self–of Self itself–than any of the self-absorbed lit-crit theorists have contrived. And an awful lot funnier, too; an all-too-knowing subversion of Selfishness in the service of a higher Selfless wisdom."

And I meant it. Bill Murray is, as I said back then, the closest thing I'll ever have to a guru. And one of the greatest things about talking with Ms. Schomer and Ms. Donahoe about their Bill Murray Introspective was the discovery that they're on the same wavelength about your work. In fact, Chris Schomer unearthed from Caddyshack a monologue from Carl the Groundskeeper about playing golf with the Dalai Lama that may be the Ur-moment of the subtextual spirituality in the rest of your work, your most explicit disclosure of what's going on beneath the surface. It's a passage I shamefully failed to recall in my "Secret Zen Master" essay, a passage that would have clinched the case. A passage that Chris Schomer, with the loving devotion of a true initiate, has gone to take the trouble of getting printed up, on an engraved card, that serves as the invitation to the golf tournament they've scheduled in your honor. To signal that this is not a mere golf tournament, that a deeper game is being played on the greens. Here's Carl the Groundskeeper's deadpan account:

So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I'm a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald … striking. So I'm on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one–a big hitter, the Lama–long, into a 10,000-foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga Galunga … gunga, gunga galunga. So we finish the 18th and he's gonna stiff me. And I say, "Hey, Lama, hey how about a little something , you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness." So I got that goin' for me. Which is nice.

I don't know, you have to rent the tape to fully appreciate it, but there's something both hilariousandbeautifulinCarlthe Groundskeeper's delivery of the last line. "You will receive Total Consciousness. [Pause] So I got that goin' for me. [Pause] Which is nice." Funny on the surface–the Dalai Lama tips his caddy with total consciousness–but there's more to it. It seems to mock the notion of Total Consciousness, but slyly insinuates the idea that in every game we play, the real prize is total consciousness.

But in some weird way–and I'd say this about no one else in public life–Bill Murray may really have the closest thing to Total Consciousness you can find, at least in Hollywood films. And he just keeps getting better as Rushmore demonstrates.

But the most exciting aspect of the Bill Murray Introspective (aside from the prospect of Bill Murray himself showing up and saying a few words–Hey Bill, why don't you call Chris and Nancy now , if you haven't already) is the prospect of seeing a clip from your forthcoming performance as Polonius in the Miramax Hamlet . It's an inspired piece of casting (although, frankly, someday I'd love to see what Bill Murray would do as the Prince of Denmark himself, say on the "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I" soliloquy). What's most inspired about Bill Murray as Polonius is that the role thematizes, as the lit-crit types say, the two-leveled tension in all Bill Murray's work. A tension I'll attempt to explain by reference to one of his most inspired signature lines, perhaps my favorite Bill Murray riff. It's the one from Tootsie , where, you recall, he plays Dustin Hoffman's roommate Jeff, an Off Off Broadwayplaywright-waiterwho's penned a determinedly grim and depressing opus called Return to Love Canal . He's discoursing at a party to other theater types about the effect he wants his plays to have. In a brilliant Polonian fusion of pomposity and theatrical mock profundity, he tells his hearers:

"I don't want a full house at the Winter Garden. I want 90 people who just came in out of the worst rainstorm in the city's history. These are people who are alone on the planet. I wish I had a theater that was only open when it rains … But after a performance I don't like it when people come up to me and say 'I really dig your message , man' or 'I really dig your play, man. I cried .' I like it when people come up to me the next day or a week later and say 'I saw your play. [Long pause] What happened ?'"

It's a knowing and hilarious sendup of theatrical pretentiousness and sententiousness, yes (in the manner of Polonius describing the traveling players in Hamlet as "the best" actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral …")

But again, as in all Bill Murray's best work, there's something more there, it's comical, but it's comical-spiritual. When he says he wants to hear people say "What happened ?" a week after they see his play, it's a gesture at the notion of transformation by art–of theatrical rapture that verges on loss of a destabilizing identity. The unstated but implicit corollary to "What happened ?" is "Who am I now?" A transformative experience that suggests what happens to Bottom after his night of sudden transformation, in A Midsummer Night's Dream –a dream beyond imagining, of ecstatic sexual union (an extremely hot version of total consciousness) with a higher being, with Titania, queen of fairies.

By the way, I think the new Michael Hoffman A Midsummer Night's Dream has been unappreciated for its ambition, for its distinctive vision of the Dream : that it is, at bottom, Bottom's Dream . It's Bottom, after all, who is the only one in the play whose transformation has been an ascent to a higher realm, rather than a lateral transposition to a different lover in the same realm. Bottom is the visionary who has to deal with the melancholy return to daily life after his momentary glimpse of total consciousness.

This is classic Bill Murray, this "What happened ?" line in Tootsie : to gesture at transcendence, but only through a scrim of mockery, which nonetheless gives an intimation of a genuinely transcendent realm beyond the scrim.

This is what Bill Murray does best, this is why he's, if not unappreciated, then not fully appreciated for what he's done. He doesn't call attention to it, he doesn't explicate it tendentiously the way I do. He only winks and nods–and maybe gives you a little nudge with an elbow–to gesture at it. Carl the Groundskeeper is Bill Murray's Bottom, our Bottom. "Methought I was … Methought I was …" Bottom stammers as he awakens from his rapturous dream of union with a goddess. What happened ? But nothing, no words can recapture his rapture, and "A man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had." To speak of it is to betray it, that evanescent moment granted to a few only on their deathbed: total consciousness, ecstatic union with divinity. "So I got that goin' for me … which is nice."

Which is why I can't wait to see his work as Polonius, and I say this as someone who's spent the past few months communing with Hamlet scholars on two continents. There are those for whom Polonius remains more of an enigma, more complex than he's played on stage. While much of what Polonius says is subverted by his relentless sententiousness, there are flashes, glimpses of truths not utterly ironized by his all-too-evident hypocrisy. What should we make of "To thine own self be true"? Self-subverting in Polonius' mouth, but is it utterly dismissible because of its source?

This is the Polonian paradox, a paradox which Bill Murray was born to play. This is the realm Bill Murray has inhabited with his comic genius and gives voice to: "windy suspirations of breath" that sound merely mock- serious but which might actually be a kind of test : Can you see past the smarmy, even sleazy delivery to the glimpse of a realm of truth beyond the pompous rhetoric?

And speaking of tests, Mr. Murray, I really don't want to think of your decision whether or not to make an appearance at the Newport Film Festival Bill Murray Introspective as a test for you . I'm sure your inability to commit to an appearance with one week left to go, an inability that is torturing the festival organizers, your biggest fans, is probably more a matter of your schedule and your family obligations and all that. But I feel somehow on one of those six days, June 1 to June 6, you could find a way to show up and gladden the hearts of the two women, Chris Schomer and Nancy Donahoe, who have put their hearts and souls into giving you a fitting Introspective. I don't want to bring up Carl the Groundskeeper's riff on the Dalai Lama stiffing him on that round in Tibet. You haven't stiffed them yet. But I think Chris and Nancy and I would trade Total Consciousness for a Newport Introspective appearance by our Lama, Bill Murray.

He must have liked this idea because a few hours later, when he got to the McCormick Place's Grand Ballroom, he flew it once more. With good reason: Almost any writer could see some good fiction material right there at Book Expo America 1998, as Mr. Wolfe stood in a circle of light with his publisher, the white-maned, grand old bull Roger Straus, founder and president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc. Given F.S.G.'s reported $5 million to $7 million investment in Mr. Wolfe's new novel, A Man in Full , F.S.G. had every reason to treat its author like the big-time investment he is. So he was given a full day's tasks: lunch, speech, press conference, dinner after the press conference. And Mr. Wolfe did his work.

Mr. Wolfe didn't disappoint the crowd by showing up in charcoal or taupe: He modeled trademark cream double-breasted Wolfe-wear among the booksellers and fans before delivering the official keynote address of the expo. Mr. Wolfe began by

recasting his North Lake Shore Drive message of the day. He told 800 gathered members of the bookselling and literary mob, "I am convinced that any writer willing to go anywhere in the country and settle in for 30 days is going to come up with material far beyond his wildest dreams.

"I had been taken by some friends to see two plantations in southern Georgia," he said, "and today, plantations are all quail plantations; there are 20,000-, 25,000-acre plantations devoted solely to shooting quail 13 weeks out of the year … and the scale on which people live on these plantations is quite unbelievable.

"There'll be a kennel wagon with pointers and also retrievers. This will be a carefully reconstructed antique kennel wagon; it is quite astonishing. There'll be four or five servants on horseback to hold the horses of the guests when they get off, and there's another team that will bring the table, the tablecloth, the food, drink, all the other things for lunch … it's a marvelous world …

"Who on earth are these people? A great many of them are real estate developers. They have their ups and downs in Georgia just like anybody else …

And it turns into the world of bankruptcy, and banking … I never thought I'd be interested in banking, but I was. I ran across something called the workout session. That's when the big daddy … is brought in … to have his feet turned to the fire, to come up with the money … When these big developers borrow money, they go to the bank, they're usually in a conference room that has oval walnut tables … a carpet that has the bank's logo.… They have little spotlights on the ceiling. Each one picks out a different painting that's so incomprehensible, it's bound to be expensive."

The Chicago audience got a big laugh from this. Mr. Wolfe went on. "The coffee is served in bone china with the bank's logo inside," he said. "When the time comes for a workout session, the surroundings are a little bit different. Instead of a conference room with a walnut table, what you have now is a big table, but it's really made of modular units of a kind of veal-gray laminate. They usually call for 7, 7:30 in the morning, these breakfast meetings. The breakfast consists usually of something like a little Dixie cup of watery orange juice, a cheese danish on a paper plate, the very sight of which strikes terror in the heart.…

"Instead of the artwork, on the walls are enormous 'No Smoking' signs of the kind that you'd expect to see in the … unit of an oil refinery … Instead of the cachepot of carnations, there's the wilted Dracaena marginata whose prongs have turned yellow … and instead of this Edward W. Fields carpet, there's a piece of carpet … that has dug into it the feet of enormous office machinery that apparently was there recently.

"Then the fun begins. And these sessions become quite heated emotionally because the person, the debtor, is beginning to see his whole life go up in smoke. It often happens that the debtor will get on his knees, and say, 'Look, you people are talking about the bottom line, and facts and figures. There's something in my company that cannot be measured in terms of the bottom line and facts and figures. This company represents my lifeblood, my wife's lifeblood … this represents pain and suffering and human cost.' At which point the workout artiste leading the session for the bank says, 'Please, don't talk to me about pain and suffering. I was in a war. I lost four fingers.'" The Chicago audience's reward for Mr. Wolfe was a tremendous laugh for this line.

"I'll just conclude with one of the other of the main players," Mr. Wolfe said. "Real estate developers, like many other entrepreneurs in America, feel that they deserve a trophy wife … In corporate America today, the C.E.O. of a successful corporation receives as one of his perks the right to shuck his old wife of two or three decades' standing and take on a new wife, preferably in her twenties, preferably blond … I happened to be present on many occasions when these mating rituals were taking place, and I offer as a footnote… what is most interesting to me about the discotheque mode of American nightlife–Studio 54, Xenon, Palladium, all those places–is the sight out on the discotheque floor of the 57-year-old CEO and his trophy wife-to-be. They're not married … And he'll be out there in a navy blue chalk stripe … He has on a white shirt with a medium spread … He has his hair pulled back over his ears. There in front of him is the trophy wife-to- be. She's a little tart. She's about 24, 25 years old, and she's wearing something like, oh, a pair of Everlast boxing trunks." This got another big laugh. "She has on a man's strap-style undershirt. Her hair looks as if a snapper lawnmower just went over it. He's beaming at her with red eyes, these walnut shell eyelids …" And on he went into the afternoon, spraying Wolfian prose into the Grand Ballroom.

At the press conference following the presentation, F.S.G. continued to guard Mr. Wolfe tightly. In the din in the Grand Ballroom, it was almost necessary to park directly beneath Mr. Wolfe's chin to hear his responses in their entirety, which is just where 50 or so reporters camped out while Mr. Wolfe murmured into a big, furry TV microphone. He said he was happy to be compared to Richard Price and that he'd like to do a novel about universities. Behind him, F.S.G. vice president and publicity director Jeff Seroy stood, finger stuck in left ear, cell phone pressed to right ear, ordering the getaway stretch limo.

Just as Oliver Platt allowed C-SPAN to tape his candidate in Bulworth , F.S.G. allowed the C-SPAN's Book TV show to tape Mr. Wolfe's comings and goings at the event. But since F.S.G. is still planning on selling their 1.2 million copies of A Man in Full (the title's taken from an old Southern folk song about "Uncle Bud … a man in full/ He had a back like a Jersey bull") on Dateline or 20/20 or some other legitimate network program, Mr. Seroy arranged for C-SPAN to embargo the Wolfe tapes (except for his press conference) until after the networks have had their way with him. Thus, Mr. Wolfe–like Albert Finney in Dennis Potter's Cold Lazarus –could be on ice for a while. Or at least until September.

Ja-Lene Clark came all the way from Tulsa, Okla., to come to Chicago and see just what was what at Book Expo America 1998, the book industry's largest event of the year. Her eyes, a lighter blue than that of the enormous Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. banner suspended overhead, scanned the plush, creamy white carpet, the lit displays, the fleet of men in suits. "With these big publishers," she said, "people don't look at your face. They look at your badge. It makes you feel kind of empty."

Indeed, the 1000-plus feet of B.D.D.'s display was somehow devoid of affect. Bertelsmann A.G.'s book division maybe could have used a few bowls of those Viagra-analogue blue jelly beans they had over at Harper Collins Publishers. Or maybe a few authors. After all, Bertelsmann's May newsletter made much of welcoming the new Random House Inc. authors that it would be adding to its stable once the sale, which the Federal Trade Commission greenlighted on Friday, was complete. But except for Peter Jennings, B.D.D. didn't bring its authors or editors to Book Expo America 1998–only their publishers and subsidiary rights salespeople. Certainly that must have come through loud and clear to B.D.D. author Tim O'Brien, whose editor, John Sterling, was handing out galleys of Mr. O'Brien's upcoming novel Tomcat in Love (B.D.D.'s Broadway Books) every chance he got. "They didn't want me to come," said the National Book Award-winning author ( Going After Cacciato ), baseball cap firmly on head. So he paid his own way.

"We wanted to stay bookseller-focused," explained B.D.D. spokesman Stuart Applebaum. Meanwhile, Random House, whose "postage stamp" size site one Bertlesmann staffer derided, brought some 15 authors to the windy city, eight of them from Alfred A. Knopf Inc. alone. Random House's booth was 10 paces across.

Sonny Mehta, Knopf's president, was asked at a Monday morning panel, Why bring authors to BookExpo America 1998? That is: Sonny, isn't it interesting that you have such a completely different weltanschauung from Knopf's new parent company Bertelsmann, and which brought no authors but only business staff ?

"Because," he said, "it gives us a chance to introduce authors to the largest number of booksellers in the country." Also: "It humanizes the thing."

Case in point: the Library of America's reception for its anthology Reporting Vietnam , when Sydney Schanberg approached the microphone and stilled the room. Even Publishers Weekly editorial director John Baker, who had prodded the poached salmon through speeches by ex-war correspondents Kevin Buckley and Peter Arnett, put down his fork. Mr. Schanberg is a man concerned with the experience of loss–of human lives of newspapers, and even of publishers. Of the impending sale of Random House, Mr. Schanberg said, "It's not evil. It only means that there will eventually be only two and a half companies, and that there will be only two and a half ideas, when actually, there are two and a half million ideas."

Dalkey Archive Press publisher John O'Brien spoke to this very matter. Mr. O'Brien is about to close a paperback deal on William Gass's 651-page The Tunnel , which Knopf published in 1995, and HarperCollins bought for softcover in 1997. Having depleted the 5000 print run, HarperCollins is putting the book out of print. "Now it's time for The Tunnel to take its place in literature and get out of the cycle of how's-it-selling?," Mr. O'Brien said. A professor of English at Illinois State University, he said that it was simply a historical accident that between 1900 and the 1950s New York publishers had once served posterity. But that doesn't mean he doesn't lament the demise of identity among the houses. Could there come a time when a house like Knopf or F.S.G. has no identity? Mr. O'Brien nodded. "Over a period of time, their roles shrink until it's all just product."

At a Monday Book Expo America panel called "The Book Trip," (the "trip" is from author to bookseller), a Random House troika of Sonny Mehta, Knopf director for promotion Paul Bogaards–who had gone through his own version of camera negotiation with C-Span's nosy technology and had its team banned from the room–and author Richard North Patterson spoke directly to the idea of product, the importance of jacket design, launch date, Oprah Winfrey. "At one level, what we're doing is part of the entertainment business," Mr. Mehta, a man whose sixth sense often paved the way for movie contracts. But Mr. Mehta said he still edits, flying to cowtowns like San Francisco to hole up in a room with Richard North Patterson and go over editing notes. "I prefer to meet face-to-face," he said, "so Richard understands what I'm suggesting."

"I'm sure a lot of what we do is insane, but this is how it works at Knopf."

Knopf, Random House, Bertelsmann, what's the difference? According to Bertelsmann itself, you can't find any: Its newsletter carried the headline about the Germany-based company, "Bertelsmann: `As American as Disney.'" It may be, but Mr Bogaards may have not completely ingested that concept. When he began speaking, his first words were, "Guten Tag." Gute Nacht!

At parties in the land of the landed, Ferdinand Mount has the ear of the Prince of Wales, but out here on the American prairie, Mr. Mount on Saturday night primarily had the ear of a bartender assigned to pour for the Times Literary Supplement party at the Palmer House Hilton. An hour and a half into the party, with attendance holding steady at approximately 15, Ferdy Mount–red-faced, barrel-cheated, sentence-challenged–seemed all to happy to give attenuated drinks orders to the barman. Over on the buffet table, silver-plated warming trays proferred whimsical quiche-like creations and dumplings. Copies of the TLS were laid out on a few tables; one university press guest was careful not to muss them.

Possibly Mr. Mount's libation orchestration was helping to loosen up his stiff upper lip. Departing guests fairly sashayed out the door, as if there was constant exit music. "It's like a waiting room in Kosovo," one chap remarked as he gulped the obligatory glass.

"It makes every other party look like something out of the Satyricon," retorted his companion.

Perhaps Saturday was not the night to revel in things either British. Granta's party, at a sprawling, stripped-down industrial-look club called Drink, and serving jam jars of alcohol did not exactly fill to capacity either. The auditory experience was almost as damaging as the one at W.W. Norton & Company Inc.'s 75th anniversary party the night before at the Navy Pier's Crystal Garden. Editor Ian Jack, cigarette ash on his blazer, shouted with the New Yorker's fiction editor Bill Buford, who, with his girlfriend Mary Johnson, had spent a pleasant afternoon at Wrigley Field before buckling down to start on the next round of parties. One book review editor of the London Review of Books was not entirely charmed by drinking a martini out of a "jam pot."

Rea Hederman must really like fresh shrimp, because their plump pink bodies were laid on blocks of spotlit ice at the Granta do, and showed up again the next night–this time on crushed ice and surrounded by tiny bottles of tabasco sauce–at The New York Review of Books bash at Chicago's venerable University Club. Robert Silvers wanted to get the Cliff Dwellers Club, just down the road, but Library of America beat him to it. (Mr. Silvers revealed what he liked about the Cliff Dwellers. "They have stools made of elephant's feet," he said.)

One good thing about the University Club was the disinfectant smell that greeted you at the door. For the hungover, it was certainly as good as smelling salts. Anyway, it was promptly forgotten upon entering the great cathedral of room, beneath whose spectacular vaulted wooden ceiling a hundred people mingled with ghosts of dead alumni. There was the shrimp, and freshly carved roast beef. A pianist and a bassist. Two bar tables. Into the crowd dispersed a group book review editors, fresh from the Library of America's reception. Unfortunately, one of the convention's more unconventional authors, performance artist L.A. Ruocco and her lavender (or parakeet yellow, depending on the day) bob, was nowhere to be found. Might there a friendship be forged between art historian Ingrid Rowland–who linked ice cream history to climate history by way of Walden–and the adventuresome Miss Ruocco, whose new book Document Zippo (Soft Skull Press) dances on the cutting edge with tutu theory, sprout theory, and reflexology theory. The New York Times Book Review editor Chip McGrath experimented with his own form of performance art by donning a clip-on nose ring. Anything goes in Chicago.