Topping the list of my personal losses is Jean Simmons, my loyal and cherished friend for 40 years, and a legendary star of the silver screen who truly earned the label. From the good old days when she was married to film director Richard Brooks and we staged canasta parties in their Beverly Hills home every New Year's Eve, collecting money from guests on their way out, to strawberry picking in muddy Connecticut fields and crawling around on our hands and knees trying to find her reading glasses at the re-release of Spartacus, we had some laughs. Earlier this year, I helped her daughter Tracy stage a memorial at London's Covent Garden. The attention she deserved was finally paid in a jam-packed royal send-off, with poems and memories by Claire Bloom, Hayley Mills, Edward Fox and Joss Ackland, among others. When Dame Judi Dench ended the hour singing "Send in the Clowns" with Sir Richard Rodney Bennett at the piano, there wasn't a dry eye in the house. One of the warmest, most elegant and luminous stars of the last half-century, her departure was another nail in the coffin of a movie legacy that will never come again.

I will also miss my friend June Havoc, the equally legendary show business icon and sister of famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee whose early days in vaudeville as Baby June were portrayed in two autobiographies and the Broadway musical Gypsy. Havoc, as she was called by friends, never approved of the way that show inaccurately portrayed her mother, Rose, played by Ethel Merman. During the Depression, she stayed alive by entering dance competitions, which she later chronicled in a brilliant 1963 play, Marathon '33. She died at 97, but never lost her radiant spark right up to the end.

In a diminishing world of first-rate singers whom you can still listen to without an Excedrin, the sadness was overwhelming when Lena Horne died at 92, smoldering through her last eight bars with no reprise. Amid the prejudice that poisoned so many illustrious careers, Lena broke every rule and crashed through every barrier with her supersonic talent and breathtaking beauty. She was an international star in a class by herself, yet she never achieved the respect, happiness or household fame she deserved. Still, Lena became a rabid civil rights activist and proud member of the N.A.A.C.P., getting even with a life well lived in an unenlightened age. I loved my friendship with Lena. She always called Liz Smith and me her "adopted white children," and one of my fondest memories was sitting on her lap at a party where she fed me birthday cake with long, elegant fingers. In the end, unfortunately, she became a bitter recluse, rarely seeing even her own grandchildren. But there was so much to be proud of. Her singing was unparalleled; she smashed stereotypes, made history and inspired hundreds of singers. In 1981, Tom Snyder gave me 90 minutes on NBC because I was the only interviewer she would talk to, and Lena said, "You get into the habit of surviving." If only she had enjoyed it more.

Who could forget Patricia Neal, 1964 Oscar winner for Hud, a model of talent and courage who learned to walk and speak all over again after three paralyzing strokes, then returned to the screen in 1968 in The Subject Was Roses? Later she became a great favorite on the New York social scene, raising millions for her namesake hospital in Kentucky. With a voice like a cello rubbed with rye whiskey, she polished her trademark sarcasm in many unforgettable performances on the stage and screen, but my favorite is the 1950 Hemingway noir, The Breaking Point, in which John Garfield asks her if she's ever been to a cockfight. She curls her lip and snarls, "All that trouble for an egg."

It's been a terrible time for the Redgrave acting dynasty. Following Natasha Richardson, this year marked a final curtain call for her uncle, Corin Redgrave, and her aunt, Lynn Redgrave, who lost her long battle with cancer at age 67. Last year also framed final close-ups for Kathryn Grayson, star of MGM musicals like Show Boat, Anchors Aweigh and Kiss Me Kate, and Bronx-born dese-dem-and-doser Tony Curtis, whose career never amounted to much more than a T-shirt and a tight pair of jeans until Sweet Smell of Success in 1957. He made up for lost time with Spartacus and Some Like It Hot, and somewhere along the way, he learned to act. 

Who will take up the hell-raising reigns surrendered by Dennis Hopper? At 74, the cinema's raunchiest rebel without a cause had long ago overcome his Easy Rider mantle to become a grizzled character actor riddled with repercussions from his excessive early years. He was a mess, but he was also a far cry from his National Enquirer image. (Nervously seated next to him at a lunch a few years ago, I was jarred when he spent the entire time discussing recipes for turkey stuffing). Also: Jill Clayburgh, who lost her 21-year battle with leukemia at 66; Lina Romay, famous "Latin from Manhattan" who sang with Xavier Cugat's orchestra in a series of MGM musicals; Peter Graves, the square-jawed hunk who spoofed his own image in Airplane! as the closeted pedophile pilot; Nan Martin, a character actress who graced every medium; child star Corey Haim (The Lost Boys), who shocked the world when he died of a drug overdose at 38; Betty Lou Keim, who played rebellious teenagers in some excellent '50s films; James Mitchell, the brilliant American Ballet Theatre star who danced with Cyd Charisse in The Bandwagon and later joined the soap opera All My Children; Adele Mara, B-movie actress at Republic studios who co-starred with John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima; Lionel Jeffries, the British comic famous for family flicks like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; Ian Carmichael, Peter Sellers' owlish cohort in comedies like I'm All Right, Jack; and Christopher Cazenove, English star of Dynasty and Masterpiece Theatre who recently toured America in a revival of My Fair Lady (critics pointed out that unlike the original star, Rex Harrison, "Mr. Cazenove could sing.")

The list of sayonaras goes on. Corey Allen was the last surviving member of the ill-fated Rebel Without a Cause cast. Ursula Thiess was a German B-movie siren and the widow of screen legend Robert Taylor. Ilene Woods was the voice of Cinderella in Disney's timeless classic. Have you forgotten Cécile Aubry, the beautiful French actress who co-starred with Orson Welles in The Black Rose? She landed on the cover of Life magazine, then disappeared. It was rumored she was being held captive in a Turkish harem. Turns out she was secretly married to the son of a Moroccan pasha, after which she returned to France and wrote children's books. Also destined for obscurity but saved by the obituaries was 1970s Albanian heartthrob Bekim Fehmiu, the first actor from Yugoslavia to become a Hollywood star and who once romanced Ava Gardner and Brigitte Bardot. What memories remain of Johnny Sheffield, who played Boy in eight Tarzan films, although he could not swim? Later, he dragged his old loincloth out of moth balls for Bomba, the Jungle Boy, retiring in 1955 to import lobsters from Baja. This year marked one last gaze into the crystal ball for Zelda Rubenstein, the diminutive actress who played Tangina the psychic in Poltergeist. Last but not least, let's raise a glass to Shirley Bell Cole, the radio voice of Little Orphan Annie, and to Meinhardt Raabe, the Munchkin coroner, and Olga Hardone, who danced as the center member of the Lullaby League in The Wizard of Oz. That leaves only three remaining Munchkins alive today.

The cameras stopped rolling for Kevin McCarthy, regrettably best known as the panicky doctor in Invasion of the Body Snatchers; James McArthur, forever youthful son of Helen Hayes and star of a string of Disney classics; Simon McCorkindale, who played the suave murderer in the Agatha Christie thriller Death on the Nile; Gloria Stuart, a glamorous blonde in '30s horror flicks who made an Oscar-nominated comeback in the 1997 blockbuster Titanic; and Norman Wisdom, England's beloved slapstick comic who was knighted in 2000. It was one last double take for Leslie Nielsen, a serious actor who never lived up to the potential of his early dramatic work on live TV and films like Ransom! and Forbidden Planet. Sidetracked in dumb Naked Gun farces, he got rich, but the acting career went over the falls in a barrel.

Among the TV pioneers who watched their final test pattern fade in 2010: living-room sitcom favorites Tom Bosley, who went from doorman at Tavern on the Green to Tony-winning Broadway star to Happy Days, and Barbara Billingsley, who, as June Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver was the perfect Eisenhower-era wife and mother, wearing pearls even when vacuuming. No more cable reruns for Pernell Roberts, the eldest Cartwright son on Bonanza, a show he hated, equating his participation with "Isaac Stern playing with Lawrence Welk." No more ratings wars for Art Linkletter, the unpretentious CBS House Party host for 18 years, or for precocious midget Gary Coleman (Diff'rent Strokes), John Forsythe (Dynasty), Robert Culp (I Spy), Harold Gould (Valerie Harper's father on Rhoda) and blond flapper Dorothy Provine (The Roaring 20's). Fess Parker, TV's Davy Crockett, hung up his coonskin cap, and sportscaster Don Meredith called his last shot from the 40-yard line on Monday Night Football. It was a cheerless sign-off for Buff Cobb, a popular staple of TV's "golden age" who co-hosted two of the first "live" talk shows with then-husband Mike Wallace and appeared as a regular panelist on Masquerade Party; for David Wolper, who produced the miniseries Roots and The Thorn Birds; for witty, rumpled and eternally grumpy newscaster and Today show anchor Edwin Newman; for award-winning news analyst Daniel Schorr; for Clay Cole, producer of American Bandstand and the rock guru who gave teens their first look at the Rolling Stones; for crusading 48 Hours news correspondent Harold Dow; and for controversial Mitch Miller, who, as an influential producer at Columbia Records, steered the careers of Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett before becoming a TV star himself with a nauseating crop of corn called Sing Along With Mitch (one critic suggested it would be best watched with the sound off). He turned down contracts with Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly while forcing Frank Sinatra to record a gimmicky horror called "Mama Will Bark," accompanied by a pack of howling dogs. (Sinatra never spoke to him again.) I was devastated by the early exits of my two favorite Southern belles--oversexed Golden Girl Rue McClanahan and honey-dripping Tennessee glamour puss Dixie Carter, who used her languid accent from Designing Women in several seasons of acclaimed cabaret performances at Café Carlyle. I guess I shouldn't overlook Eddie Fisher, who crooned his way off-key through TV shows, hit records, unfathomable marriages and scandalous divorces. It was the mystery career of the century, somewhat explained now in his trashy autobiography and daughter Carrie's one-woman confessionals. But my favorite summation came the night Debbie Reynolds walked onstage at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall and said, to tumultuous applause: "Look at this place. I guess I married the wrong Fisher."

Hard to believe they all passed on in 2010, along with some of the powers behind the scenes. Films won't look the same without cameraman William Fraker, whose images go unchallenged in 45 movies, including Rosemary's Baby and Bullitt. In an industry dominated by cutthroats, gone are the rare gentlemen producers David Brown and Robert Radnitz (Sounder); flamboyant Dino De Laurentiis; and directors Claude Chabrol (labeled "the French Hitchcock"), Clive Donner (when London stopped swinging, so did he), Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde), George Hickenlooper (Casino Jack), Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street), Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back), Blake Edwards (Breakfast at Tiffany's) and Ronald Neame, who, despite distinguished films like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Tunes of Glory, is best known for his least favorite, The Poseidon Adventure. We must also add boring Eric Rohmer. A favorite of many American critics, this overrated French yawn was aptly eulogized in Arthur Penn's thriller Night Moves. Gene Hackman is asked by his wife to go to a Rohmer screening at an L.A. art house. "I don't think so," he replies. "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry." Truer words were never spoken. 

The quality of today's scripts will never be the same after the loss of Irving Ravetch (who, with wife Harriet Frank Jr., turned out Hud, Norma Rae and The Sound and the Fury) and Tom Mankiewicz (who wrote several of the James Bond films). I will also miss reading James Bacon, the veteran syndicated columnist who covered Hollywood royalty for six decades. Joan Crawford could outdrink him; Marilyn Monroe told him first about her love affair with J.F.K.; and when Clark Gable was whisked in secrecy to the hospital following his heart attack, Bacon was waiting. Aghast, Gable grinned and said, "How's the food in this joint?" Those were the days.

Literature will be less readable without my favorite author, J.D. Salinger. One seriously weird dude, he drank his own urine and spoke in tongues, but he also raised the bar for aspiring writers throughout the world. Other men of letters who locked their typewriters and computers and threw away the keys were Erich Segal (they slammed Love Story, but it sold 22 million copies, proving "Success means never having to say you're sorry"); Alan Sillitoe, the British novelist whose Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner were adapted into highly praised movies; Dick Francis, champion steeplechase jockey turned best-selling mystery novelist; Robert B. Parker, who created the popular detective Spenser in more than 60 best sellers; and Robert Katz, who penned Death in Rome and The Cassandra Crossing. Broadway dimmed the marquees for veteran librettist Joseph Stein, who wrote the book for Fiddler on the Roof. He was followed, a few days later, by the great composer Jerry Bock, who wrote music to fit his partner Sheldon Harnick's lyrics for such legendary musicals as Fiddler, She Loves Me and Fiorello!

Music will sound sour without swinging pianist Hank Jones; Oscar Peterson's guitarist Herb Ellis; jazz singer and political activist Abbey Lincoln; harmonica virtuoso Jerry Adler; Duke Ellington vocalist Joya Sherrill; revered West Coast singer-pianist Joyce Collins; jazz drummer Ed Thigpen (called "Mr. Taste" for his sensitive accompaniment of Ella Fitzgerald); soul singer Teddy Pendergrass; John Dankworth, arranger-composer-saxophone wizard and husband of Cleo Laine; Claiborne Cary, zany but dependable cabaret singer-disciple; Art Van Damme, father of the jazz accordion; bebop Benny Goodman piano player John Bunch; Cherie De Castro, last surviving member of the singing De Castro Sisters; ace trombonist and big-band orchestra leader Buddy Morrow; versatile jazz drummer Jake Hanna; Billy Taylor, musician, composer, historian, educator and eloquent voice of NPR; and Canada's Rob McConnell, the last of the great jazz orchestra leaders who wrote and conducted arrangements for Mel Torme's Velvet and Brass album (for which I wrote the liner notes). What a shame we won't be reading about them in the carefully worded erudition of Gene Lees, whose English lyrics for Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Quiet Nights" made history and whose monthly Jazzletter was a blog before the word was invented. No more arias by Blanche Thebom, the mezzo-soprano who sang more than 350 performances at the Metropolitan Opera before appearing in MGM's The Great Caruso, or Met sopranos Shirley Verrett (called "the black Callas") and Dolores Wilson, who moved to Broadway to co-star with David Wayne in the ill-fated musical The Yearling. It was curtains for Cesare Siepi, who, like Ezio Pinza, also appeared on Broadway, and for Joan Sutherland, the diva who, after her 1961 Metropolitan Opera debut was followed by a 12-minute standing ovation, was labeled "La Stupenda." 

Politics won't seem as pithy without Theodore Sorensen, J.F.K.'s main man, or Liz Carpenter, Washington powerhouse during the Lyndon Johnson administration. I ate my last meal at Elaine's, but I'll miss eternally agitated proprietress and genuine New York character Elaine Kaufman, who served inedible food to the rich and famous, threw garbage-can lids at the paparazzi and leaned on the tables of unwanted customers, snarling, "You're gonna hate it here!" It was a year of horrible losses, from Glen Bell, who invented Taco Bell, to Agethe von Trapp, the last of the singing Sound of Music family. She was Liesl in the movie who sang "16 Going on 17," but she died at 97. Time flies when you're humming.

For pure spirit and spunk, I've reserved a special place for Doris Travis, the last living Ziegfeld girl, who lived to 106. Two weeks before she died, she appeared one last time on a New York stage. She did a few kicks, then apologized that she no longer performed cartwheels. It brought down the house. I miss her already--and the others, too. When Boris Karloff died, he said, "I'll be back." In my dreams, so will they all.

rreed@observer.com      

Deitch's posthumous show of Dennis Hopper's photographs and paintings has opened at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and it's "hit the ground with more pre-awareness than a teen vampire sequel," writes Artnet, in an early rave.

In a near-record use of the word "star" in a sentence, Tiff Chalmers writes that it's "a star-powered art show by an art-star and star-artist[Hopper], curated by an artist-director [Julian Schnabel], presided over by the new art-star-Svengali of a revivifying art institution [Deitch] whose hip wing is named for a star-maker [David Geffen], in a town full of artists and stars." [George Clooney, et. al.] The show is "visionary and charming," Chalmers concludes.

New Yorkers can take some comfort in the fact that they could have caught Tony Shafrazi's terrific Hopper show last year.

The museum prepares for all the flak that may come it's way from naysayers who would question treating the actor like an artist by smartly titling the show "Double Standard: Dennis Hopper."

Say about it what you will, but in an election year, you can’t accuse Kevin Costner’s political satire Swing Vote of failing to keep up with current events. With an eye on the box office coffers and a finger on the nation’s nervous pulse, this romp with a conscience, directed by Joshua Michael Stern, who co-wrote the edgy screenplay (with Jason Richman), features the new scruffy, self-deprecating and slightly graying Mr. Costner dispensing oodles of paunchy charm as the unlikeliest American voter who ever turned cynical indifference into civic pride and a nation upside down. He is really engaging as a polecat from Texico, N.M., named Ernest “Bud” Johnson, a divorced single father who is such a lazy loser he can’t even hold down a no-brainer job at the local egg-packing plant. Bud is quite a challenge to his patriotic daughter Molly (newcomer Madeline Carroll, a genuine challenger to Little Miss Sunshine’s Abigail Breslin), who picks up his empty beer bottles and spends an inordinate amount of time trying to get him out of bed. It’s Election Day, and Bud refuses to vote, fretting that it might mean jury duty. Precocious Molly sneaks into the polling place just before it closes and casts her indolent dad’s vote for him, forgetting to pull the lever. The result is that with only five electoral votes, New Mexico turns out to be the swing state and Bud’s irregular ballot is the deciding vote that will throw the election. What follows is the equivalent of a sudden landslide for Ralph Nader.

Before he can recast his vote properly, every political power in Washington descends on Texico to influence the one man who will choose the next president, opening a floodgate for an all-star cast of scenery-chewing comics (Nathan Lane, Stanley Tucci, George Lopez, Willie Nelson) and a circus of gibberish-dispensing media pundits (Chris Matthews, Aaron Brown, Tucker Carlson, Tony Blankley, James Carville, Larry King, Bill Maher, Campbell Brown—even Mary Hart, for chrissake!) to invade Bud’s mobile trailer, competing for more interviews than the press corps trailing Obama in Iraq. Shrieks the manager of the local TV station when they arrive by bus, helicopter, and even Air Force One to put Texico on the national news: “This is bigger than O. J.!”

In the 10 days the Registrar of Voters gives Bud to recast his ballot, every fruitcake in Washington tries to influence his decision, and everything from Planned Parenthood to Outback Steakhouse wants a piece of the action. Both the Republican incumbent (Kelsey Grammer) and his Democratic left-wing rival (Dennis Hopper) appeal to Bud on every issue from immigration to global warming, doing and saying whatever it takes to get elected, and Bud becomes the composite market demographic that all the campaign strategists of Obama, Clinton and McCain have been groveling for all year. Mr. Costner is hilarious as he struts forth from his perch at the local bowling alley to awkwardly declare his views on everything from the environment to gay marriage. Funny, animated, appealing in an aw-shucks sort of way, the star milks maximum impact from a unique body language that is refreshingly knock-kneed and bow-legged at the same time.

It all leads up to a televised presidential debate in which Bud gets to ask questions of both candidates, and you get the horrible feeling you’ve seen and heard it all before on CNN. This is numbingly preposterous, of course, until you realize every joke is based on the crazy-quilt Cuisinart we’ve made of the U.S. Constitution, and the humor comes painfully close to election-year reality. Finally, perennial talking head Arianna Huffington faces the camera and says loftily to the brain-dead American public, “Something tells me Franklin and Jefferson are looking down and smiling.” Moaning in pain and disbelief is more like it. Does this election hurt? Only when we laugh.

rreed@observer.com

What is happening to the leading ladies of the tarnished silver screen? Like hapless Naomi Watts in Funny Games, gorgeous Charlize Theron has produced her own movie, Sleepwalking. It’s a slight improvement, but not enough to write home about. Another depressing tale of the dead-end ennui of disenfranchised Americans with nothing to live for in rural wastelands that specialize in unemployment and suicide, it shows how fascinated filmmakers have become with desperation and despair in a burned-out hick-town landscape where the American dream has turned into the American nightmare. When you see how hopeless the lives of the American people have become in endless independent films that drive the movie audience away in mobs, you understand why the big, dumb action comics and sub-mental, Will Ferrell alleged comedies make all the money. Escape sells.

When her boyfriend is arrested, leaving her homeless, an irresponsible, immature single mother with a reputation as the town tramp named Joleen (a chain-smoking Ms. Theron, working hard to obliterate her beauty with wrinkles, dirt and baggy eyes) moves her 11-year-old daughter, Tara (AnnaSophia Robb), into the small rented flat of Joleen’s 30-year-old brother, James (Nick Stahl), and leaves town with another hoodlum. James is sweet and good-natured but a bit slow upstairs. He cares that the distraught adolescent has been deserted, but is in no way prepared to shoulder the total responsibility of raising a niece who is wise beyond her years and on the threshold of early womanhood. The movie is about how their relationship develops, hits rock walls and finally offers a solution for their compromised lives. The dramatic decision that changes everything comes when James loses his job, Tara faces foster care, and they invent new identities, pretending to be father and daughter, and run away together. The road leads to the rotting horse farm in Utah where James and Joleen spent their miserable childhoods, and the vicious, hard and abusive father they ran away from (played with thorny, snarling and heartless brutality by Dennis Hopper). The conflicts end in violence and bloodshed, of course, with their lives on a detour to hell.

Low-key performances and only minimal facts relayed through bare-bones dialogue by Zac Stanford, who wrote the awful Chumscrubber, give Sleepwalking a calm demeanor so devoid of human experience that it’s hard to stay alert. Whatever small attempts made by debut director William Maher to develop something resembling a plot are diluted by extraneous padding, like prolonged shots of Tara, now called “Nicole,” jumping into a motel swimming pool wearing roller skates. Sleepwalking pretty much accurately describes this movie and everything in it, including Woody Harrelson.

I don’t blame Ms. Theron for playing down and dirty, hiding her natural beauty from prying cameras, but after her turn as a lesbian serial killer in Monster, what else is she trying to prove? A little ugliness and axle grease can give you Oscars. Too much can give you hives.

Yesterday, Brownstoner broke the exhilarating news that the 31-foot beauty at 45 Montgomery Place had been sold for more than $6 million. (Oval rooms! Fireplaces! It's all there.)

According to the website, $6m would be the highest price ever paid for a 1-family townhouse in Park Slope. New Yorkers everywhere asked: who is the lucky, oval-loving owner?

According to our calculations (i.e. according to city records), that would be Gregory Bell, who bought the place for a clean $6,050,000.

But is it the mathematician Greg Bell, who studied the Asymptotic Dimension of Groups? Or is it TV's Gregory Bell? (He played Shakespeare in Dennis Hopper's "Witch Hunt.") Or is it NATO's Assistant Secretary General for Defense Investment, Mr. Robert Gregory Bell?

Probably the actor, no?

- Max Abelson

He’d left his BlackBerry in the cab on the way to lunch. Boy, he really hates that BlackBerry. He’d come from Zabar’s. Outside that shop he’d seen a homeless woman, a really manky, stooped-over one. She had found a ham-and-cheese sandwich on the ground and she was feeding it to a dog, a husky and malamute kind of mutt. The dog was just really thirsty, it was so hot out, and it was just panting and panting. He gave the woman five bucks. And Mr. Columbia thought, “We’re all that dog now, we’re all that dog at the mercy of crazy forces. And the Israelis this, or the Christians that …. God knows, but we don’t.”

The popular attitude, he said, is such that nothing affects anybody anymore. The dog thing bothered him, and then he got in a cab.

On Aug. 1, on his Web site newyorksocialdiary.com, he’d described the anxieties of our time. “Some people crumple. It’s hard to forget about, no matter what you’re doing. It also makes bad news worse. The oil spill in the Mediterranean affected me almost as if it had happened to me. The war is bad but the oil spill in that sea will affect the food chain for millions and millions of people, including all the warring factions.”

Mr. Columbia’s best childhood friend is an astrologer who doesn’t like to be called an astrologer because he’s married to a real astrologer. Still, back in the 1960’s, this friend and amateur told Mr. Columbia about what the future would hold. There would be wars over religion, and privacy as it was then known would not exist, due to technology. He said the children being born in the 60’s would laugh at violence. They’d go to a film and judge the violence. Was it good? Bad? Funny? Everyone would take their cues from the proletariat, and we’d first know that from clothes, because fashion always portends. It would be an extremely creative time, but some people would live in fortresses. And then in December of 2012, something maybe extreme would happen. Not in a place, but in the whole world, something the likes of which had never happened before.

And if we made it through—and why wouldn’t we?—there’d be 2,000 years of peace.

At the supermarkets, Mr. Columbia sees people buying chips and soda with credit cards, and he laughs. When he laughs, he looks like a Kennedy playing Captain Kangaroo. Debt! And real-estate prices, and all those brokers raking in money off the poor and living like warlords. Every day on the way to lunch at Michael’s he passes Abercrombie & Fitch, with its open doors blasting freezing air onto the street, and all the girls running in with their credit cards to buy up the gay scene. He calls them shop-o-terrorists.

He does think about food chains a lot, about how the oceans are dying, and how we can peer down this ladder from up here and watch the source of all life die. And at the same time, he can watch the food chain of Manhattan disintegrate. Where are the Basses? Where is Pat Buckley? (Oh dear, where is Mrs. Buckley?) Brooke Astor has been forgotten, though she is not gone. Now there are publicity girls aiming for the social tops. Fine. This means a little something.

He published something about those girls last Wednesday. He began: “Lloyd Grove in the Daily News went after Melissa Berkelhammer last week for being herself.” He explained her: “Melissa Berkelhammer is one of those girls, plain and simple—a young woman in New York who likes to get around, likes to go to parties, likes to dress up and likes to make friends, and who likes to be photographed.”

People get mad and swear at him, literally, when he talks about the troubles of the world. He stands with people who stand to lose the most when it all comes crashing down. He likes them.

On July 30, a Sunday, Mr. Columbia sat down in his sensibly hot apartment in front of his computer. He didn’t have a column for the next day yet, and so at 7 p.m. he started writing about the Astors. Six thousand words and not quite five hours later, he had written, from memory, without any reference, a pointed history of that family.

“The development of the public persona Brooke Astor was a phenomenon for several reasons,” he wrote. “It was not achieved without the help of others. And that ‘help’ was not accidental: she sought it out. Principal among these advisers was the late George Trescher, the public relations/event planner .… Brooke Astor totally trusted him. It was through his guidance that she built a public image and reputation that she could wear like a suit of clothes.”

Brooke Astor was a consummate actress to the final curtain, Mr. Columbia believes. And now there’s her daughter-in-law, the old preacher’s wife. The bitch comes in—like at the end of Zorba the Greek, they are stripping her of everything, the bedclothes. Now this is the backstage story. Unlike the Rockefellers, unlike the Fords, now the money has left the Astor family proper.

Sometimes people ask Mr. Columbia how he knows so much. He says: For chrissakes, it’s because I read sometimes! Does anyone read? Not in a world where the blogs describe any piece of writing of more than 1,500 words as “long.”

In the early 80’s, a woman said to him: I always wondered what would end the sexual revolution. And I never thought, she said, it’d be disease! And here, sometime very soon, the money’s going to stop. Can you imagine how? It’ll be a surprise. Everyone thinks he’s crazy.

Someone finally asked him not long ago, well, if they have five billion dollars and lose four billion of it, so what?

He asked: Why are we in this lifeboat? The ship is already sunk, or at least is sinking. No one eats at home anymore; they open take-out containers in their $200,000 kitchens. It is 1789 in France. But with the Internet! The Internet is just marking time as history goes by, and on it, documenting nothing but attitude. Not civilization.

I am watching it change the way you watch a river rush by, he said.

And also on Aug. 1, he wrote: “But … have you ever been confronted by the very real possibility of death? I have.” In 1982, on Good Friday, a woman collapsed and was dying. Everything in a person is designed to encourage them to get away, he found out. Sure, we always see that on a global scale. He helped resuscitate her, but couldn’t help but dwell on that impulse of wanting out. Her doctor, in the final check-up, described her condition as “Sudden Death” on her chart, something he said he’d never had occasion to do before for someone still alive.

I think we live in a dangerous time, Mr. Columbia said. I remember when nobody went out at night. And Anna Wintour! Seating movie stars in the middle of the Met Costume Institute Gala, and society by the bathrooms. One day Anna Wintour will walk down her hallway and suddenly it’ll all be over for her, he said.

Well, it’ll all be over soon. Oh, no, it won’t be 15 years! Two, five, something. It’s overdue.

Most people have only debt. People are scratching themselves bloody. But people can survive, Mr. Columbia said. They’re survivors, even the meek and mild. The cab driver came in all the way from Astoria to Swifty’s and returned the BlackBerry. He was dressed nicely and was super-jolly. He had refused to turn on the meter for the trip, so Mr. Columbia pressed on him a wad of bills. The cab driver said that he thought the phone was terribly complicated, and that he himself certainly didn’t need one like it. Mr. Columbia doesn’t think people are bad. Even if everyone does have a complete lack of courtesy—except that cab driver, and he’s an immigrant, from somewhere with manners. In 1944, Mr. Columbia said, during a different war, everyone had a victory garden, everyone grew vegetables for the country and for themselves. Even if all they had was 10 feet square.

Wholphin Sighting

Brent Hoff is the editor of a magazine called Wholphin. It is the latest periodical from McSweeney’s, the boutique San Francisco publishing house founded by writer Dave Eggers and pals. The magazine has no pages, and no readers. It does throw release parties, and, at one of them last Thursday, Mr. Hoff sat in a white-tiled “steam room” in the basement level of Happy Ending, a Chinatown brothel turned lounge, enjoying a quiet moment.

“When you walk in, they show surveillance video of this place when it used to be a working brothel,” he said, surprised by Happy Ending’s futuristic décor. “You see the prostitutes walking in and out. It’s crazy. It’s great!”

Mr. Hoff has curly blond hair. He was dressed in a striped shirt, jeans and flip-flop sandals, and he moved his arms excitedly, somewhat resembling an aged surfer describing a half-remembered wave. He clearly likes videos.

Incidentally, a wholphin is a hybrid marine mammal, formed when a 2,000-pound false killer whale impregnates a 400-pound female bottlenose dolphin. There are presently two wholphins alive in captivity, though legend has it that they also exist in the wild. Likewise, there are presently two issues of Wholphin available, though the party Thursday was for the third, to be released in the fall. It has no pages and no readers, because it is only available on DVD.

“It’s called a ‘DVD magazine’ because we can’t think of anything else,” explained Mr. Hoff. “ Wholphin is a collection of short films that you can’t find anywhere else, that don’t fit in video stores or theaters.”

Mr. Hoff was interrupted by a guest about to leave and looking to congratulate him on the new issue.

“Wait, you’re not going to stay to see Dennis Hopper blow himself up?”

“When’s that?” asked the guest.

“Oh, maybe around 9.”

The rare Hopper footage, from the actor’s 1983 performance of the so-called Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act, is one of the main draws in Wholphin No. 3. Wholphin No. 2 featured an experimental Errol Morris film involving Donald Trump and an “instructional video” titled How To: Poke Pole a Monkey-Faced Eel. Wholphin No. 1 included a Miguel Arteta adaptation of a Miranda July short story, along with a rough documentary about Al Gore directed by Spike Jonze. Everything comes shrink-wrapped in familiar McSweeney’s packaging, with quasi-old-fashioned typesetting and sturdy materials that vaguely smell of gasoline.

In the next steam room over, partygoers discussed the publication.

“ Wholphin’s cool,” observed Mark Dupree, a friend of one of No. 3’s contributors.

Added Chivas Devinck, a sometime music-video director, “There should really be more outlets like this.”

Mr. Hoff would likely agree. After all, the editor’s joie de video extends even to YouTube, to which Wholphin might uncharitably be considered the upscale, self-consciously intellectual older sibling. “It’s great,” he said of the oft-maligned Internet viral-video depot. “There are all these great moments in life, you know, and it’s great to see them, like, all out there now.”

Back upstairs in Happy Ending’s main lounge, dimly lit with pink overhead lights, great moments were being had by creative-looking types in snug, faded T-shirts and loose vintage dresses. Wholphin issues were being projected on the wall, occasionally interrupted by the solemn blue rectangle of the DVD player’s on-screen setup menu. No one complained when that happened; everyone seemed used to A/V mishaps.

But who was this crowd, exactly?

“A friend called me and asked if I wanted to hang out at Happy Ending,” explained John Drady, a foppish fellow who bears more than a passing resemblance to the musician and social truffle pig Moby. “I like this place—I almost had my 40th birthday party here. And my friend said it would be the McSweeney’s crowd. I said, ‘What’s that?’”

Yes, what’s that? The McSweeney’s crowd has suffered its most recent roasting by, of all people, Megan Mullally, the awesome former Karen of the former Will & Grace. In the August issue of Los Angeles magazine, we find Ms. Mullally in a hip store, confronted by the latest McSweeney’s Quarterly. “They think they’re cool,” Ms. Mullally told Los Angeles, “but I don’t know what’s backing it up. The whole thing is overrated. It’s a groovefest.”

Anyway. Mr. Drady remembered once stumbling across a copy of Wholphin No. 1 and loving it, though he knew nothing of its publishers; by the end of the night, the growing McSweeney’s empire—which also includes The Believer—had picked up another professed convert. Room for one more!

In a dark corner, two young women with asymmetrical haircuts turned their backs away from the projection screen to play Boggle. They shook up letters and scribbled down words; it all looked very quaint.

But the sharpest criticism of Wholphin was leveled by a partygoer from a traditional publication—a journal with physical pages that are physically read. Colleen Kane surveyed the scene from against a wall. She was with a plump friend in a black, lacy top who looked particularly out of place. Both held vodka martinis.

“I came looking for some hot literary guys,” said the exasperated Ms. Kane, a senior editor at Playgirl. “But where are they? There’s none here.”

Her friend rolled her eyes. “There are only gay guys here!”

Dennis Hopper blew himself up a few minutes later, and Brent Hoff laughed.

—Jonathan Liu

Sydney Pollack's first documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, will be opening in theaters on May 12th. But Tribeca Film Festival attendees can catch it tonight at the DOLBY screening room, at 7 p.m.

Here's a bit from the release:

Plenty of business and art world big shots appear in the film, including Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Sir Bob Geldof, Dennis Hopper, Michael Ovitz, Julian Schnabel, and Herbert Muschamp.

So will they be attending the screening tonight? Or how about Atlantic Yards opponents that have been known to follow the famous architect?

- Michael Calderone

As for me, I'm counting on my bike. Cars and buses will obviously be useless. And the subways probably won't be running, because the subway often doesn't run even in the best of times.

So what's left? Scooters, skateboards, rollerblades and bicycles. Among those transportation alternatives, the bike is the only choice that, equipped with side saddles, would permit me to take along food, clothing and my prized collection of X-rated comics.

I do realize there are holes in my escape plan: If things ever got to such a surly pass that I'd actually need to flee in a hurry, I'd hardly be alone. And this being the Big Apple, someone bigger and stronger would undoubtedly steal my bike. Then there's the question of what to do with the pets: our dog Mimi and our bunny, Bunny. Not to mention my wife and the kids, whose bikes are up in the country.

I called the New York City Office of Emergency Management to test the efficacy of my exit strategy. But they refused to be drawn into what-if scenarios. "Our evacuation rules would be event-specific," explained Jarrod Bernstein, a spokesman. "We place more of an emphasis on getting up-to-date information, having a battery-operated radio."

In that case I'm covered, since I recently purchased one for my bike from Radio Shack. Frankly, the reception isn't great (for 10 bucks, what do you expect?), but it gets NPR, so I could listen to All Things Considered or Car Talk on my way out of town-or, in a worst-case scenario, get the latest on the radiation cloud drifting toward the city from Indian Point, and perhaps choose my escape route accordingly.

To tell the truth, I'm speaking hypothetically here, because my bike is upstate, too. But that doesn't stop me from dreaming-or, more to the point, accessorizing. Indeed, thinking of my bike fills me with an almost perverse and unfounded sense of well-being, sort of how I felt during the Cuban missile crisis when I fixated on a picture in our Compton's Encyclopedia of a happy family ensconced in its fallout shelter. It looked so clean and cozy and well-lighted, who would ever want to leave?

My passion (for it's nothing short of that) to upgrade my bike started before 9/11, but it has kicked into apocalyptic gear since then. My bike's centerpiece is what I like to think of as the on-board computer: a combination speedometer, odometer, clock and stop watch. Were I ever to need to peddle to my place upstate-a distance of approximately 125 miles-it would be nice to know how far there was left to go.

I also have a horn. I've gone through several horns in my effort to find the one that takes up the least amount of space on my handlebars, since there's only so much room and I have so much equipment that needs to go there. I started with one of those old-fashioned honkers where you squeeze the rubber bulb at the end. It made a handsome noise, but was simply too bulky. It also interfered with my bike's aerodynamics. (By the way, my bike isn't a $2,000 mountain bike; it's something I had rusting in my garage and decided to recondition.)

So I upgraded to a bell, not much larger in diameter than a quarter, that I bought at Paragon. It takes up very little space on my dashboard, but it emits a pathetic little chime, and I don't know how seriously a million or so of my fellow citizens would take it if I were using it to shoo them out of the way. In any case, I've got a back-up horn-battery-operated, no less. It was included with my Radio Shack bike radio.

I'm proudest of my bike's lighting package. During the initial upgrade, I bought a battery-operated beacon, which works just fine. I also have a rear red hazard light that, with the push of a button, will emit either a flashing or steady beam. Last summer in Italy, I purchased a pedal-powered generator that illuminates a second headlight. I'm not exaggerating when I say that after I successfully managed to install the device myself and the light flickered on as I spun the wheel, my sense of exultation surpassed anything I've experienced lately in my career.

I also bought two large rearview mirrors in Europe that eliminate blind spots. Cars have them on both sides of the vehicle-why shouldn't bikes?

In case you're wondering, until recently the handlebars also boasted streamers (pink-and-white ones), a birthday present from my kids. But they proved too much even for me. Our place in the country has its fair share of rednecks, and whenever I rode my bike with the streamers flying, my mind flashed back to that scene in Easy Rider when Dennis Hopper gets blown away for being a hippie. I wasn't willing to tempt fate. Besides, they serve no useful, life-prolonging purpose.

Racking my subconscious and hoping to discover what propelled me to these heights of lunacy (or infancy?), I alighted upon the image of Pee-wee Herman and his various bikes and scooters. You may recall the plot of his 1985 movie, Pee-wee's Big Adventure , which involved his heroic efforts to recover his stolen, beloved and highly accessorized bike.

So I decided to call Pee-wee to talk bikes and what plans, if any, he may have to flee his home in L.A. on a two-wheeler, if need be. Pee-wee, a.k.a. Paul Reubens, who's 50, traced his bike obsession back to his Florida childhood, when he stuck playing cards between the spokes of his wheels and later upgraded to one of those "Vroom" toy bike motors.

"I had the loudest bike on the block," he boasted.

When I mentioned that some New Yorkers were thinking of using their bikes as life preservers, he suggested I consider purchasing a real bike motor. "I've seen them in catalogs," he told me.

But that would defeat my bike's primary purpose in times of peace-to get exercise.

"But not if you're trying to get out of Manhattan," he observed wisely, adding that the engine could be saved for moments of abject terror. "You can switch it over to the motor and leave everyone in the dust."

He confessed that these days, he devotes more time to his treadmill than to his bicycle. "I think now I'd buy a Segway," he said. "I haven't seen anyone riding one, though I'm constantly on the lookout."

So now I'm thinking that a Segway Human Transporter-ignoring for the moment the prohibitive price tag and long waiting list-might be just the thing. The only problem, from what I can tell (apart from the fact that it only gets 15 miles on a battery charge), is that there's precious little room on its handlebars for bells and whistles. I've placed a call to Segway customer support to discuss this important matter. So far, they haven't called me back.

Anyway, we're cruising down Santa Monica Boulevard, I think, heading for the Paramount lot, when the subject of Charles Bukowski comes up.

See, Sean and Dennis had this whole tangled history with the Bukowski film project Barfly . As I recall it, Hopper was dying to direct the film, and Sean was dying to star in it as the Bukowski figure, the Bad-Boy, alcoholic, skid-row poet and novelist, but there was a big hitch: Barbet Schroeder had bought the rights from Bukowski to produce the film, and he wanted Sean Penn to star, but he didn't want Hopper to direct. So he was thinking of directing it himself, but Sean was being loyal to his buddy Den and wasn't going to do the picture unless Den directed. But then Den lost it one night and yelled at Barbet Schroeder, "You direct? You can't fuckin' direct traffic , man." Or something like that; the details are a little hazy, but you get the general idea. As it ended up, Schroeder went ahead and did Barfly with Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, and it was way terrible–a lot of clichéd alcoholic romanticism (although Schroeder completely redeemed himself in my eyes with the brilliant Reversal of Fortune ). It's one of those movies where Mickey Rourke wanders around looking like he's got his smirk surgically implanted, completely obliterating the one genuinely charming aspect of Bukowski's persona: the good-natured self-deprecation beneath the boozy braggadocio.

But in any case what I remember most about the car ride with Sean and Den was this quiet moment after they told me the "You can't direct traffic" story. This moment when Penn quietly and reverentially murmured, "Bukowski, man." And Hopper quietly and reverentially replied, "Yeah, Bukowski, man."

Bukowski, man, or rather Bukowski Man : what stayed with me was not just the tone in which the phrase "Bukowski, man" was uttered, but the idea that there was a kind of entity, Bukowski Man, sort of like our anthropological forebears Peking Man or Piltdown Man, almost a special subspecies of human.

You've probably run into Bukowski Man in one form or another. He's like, you know, a rebel, he's not into conventional literature, man. Because it doesn't tell the truth. The man can't handle The Truth, which of course is all about (and only about) getting drunk and pissing and shitting and puking and fucking and passing out, not necessarily in that order, sometimes virtually simultaneously.

What else do we know about Bukowski Man? He's probably a suburban white boy who's never been more down and out than a collect call to his parents. Usually there's a surfboard or a skateboard or a Frisbee involved. His dog wears a red bandanna around its neck. Oh, and yes, he's likely to be a shoplifter.

Which brings me to the real subject of this column: Shoplifting Lit. It was a concept that first began to dawn on me a couple of years ago when I was thinking of writing something about the killer B's: Bukowski and William Burroughs and the notion of Bukowski Man (who often "graduates" to believing that the other big B, Burroughs, is the B-all and end-all of literature).

But when I called up a Barnes & Noble to see if they had a couple of Bukowski titles I was looking for, one of the clerks told me that in order to check I'd have to call one of the cashiers, because all of the Bukowskis had been removed from the open shelves and were kept on a shelf behind the cashier's desks–out of reach, in other words, of shoplifters.

And guess what? So were all the Burroughs. And then a couple of months ago I wanted to reread The Information , the scabrous Martin Amis comedy of the writing life, but when I went to that same Barnes & Noble Union Square superstore I found that Amis, too, was quarantined with the cashiers. Then a few weeks ago I was looking for a couple of Raymond Chandler novels I wanted to give to my friends Sarah and Nicole. Sarah's a private investigator who likes Chandler but hadn't yet read Trouble Is My Business , the terrific collection of his novella-length fictions, including "Red Wind," which opens with the famous line about the (literally) edgy effect of the Santa Ana wind on the uneasy psyches of the City of Angels. "On nights like that … meek little wives feel the edge of the curving knife and study their husbands' necks."

And Nicole hadn't read The Long Goodbye , which is my favorite, Chandler's last and best novel. But when I got to the C's in the vast fiction and literature shelves on the fourth floor of the Union Square store, where the Chandlers should have been, there was a little glass bookend with a neatly typed sign that said: "Please ask at the first-floor registers for titles by Raymond Chandler." Then a week or so ago I read a James Wolcott Vanity Fair column on Jack Kerouac in which he reports he had to go to the Shoplift Lit section of the same store to find On the Road . And it occurred to me that it might be worthwhile to try to find out just who else was on the Barnes & Noble Five-Finger-Discount Best Seller List, the Shoplift Lit Wall of Fame, or Shame, depending on your point of view. If I could get that list, then perhaps an analysis of it would reveal something about culture and anti-culture, about noble and sleazy visions of liberation, about the evolving tastes of Bukowski Man.

I think what got me into it was my initial mixture of delight and mistrust at finding an artist like Chandler on the same list as Bukowski, delight that people still care about Chandler, distrust that it's for all the wrong Bukowski Man reasons. Not that I think Bukowski is without talent, although I think his poorly read fans get him completely wrong: What makes him marginally interesting as a writer is not the shit, piss and misogyny they think is so daring, but some pure storytelling and story-shaping talent–along with the self-deprecation that Bukowski Man is too self-absorbed to get.

I guess maybe I can see how some Bukowski fans could be misled by Chandler's hard-boiled reputation, or the wisecracking wise guy persona Humphrey Bogart made famous in the film of The Big Sleep . But it's typical of Bukowski Man's pathetic literalness, his ignorant nihilism: They can make out the words, but they can't read . If you really read Chandler, you know that beneath the tough-guy facade the author is an esthete, a genuinely cerebral writer. And beneath the hard-boiled surface his private eye Philip Marlowe is a romantic visionary with a code of honor that is genuinely antinomian and subversive, but one which would look with contempt and disdain upon the petty, small-time, sleazy kind of transgression shoplifting represents. A code of honor that reflects the wisdom in the Bob Dylan line about would-be outlaws: "When you live outside the law you must be honest."

Getting the list proved to be easier than I thought. I told a helpful clerk at the Union Square store that I'd heard Bukowski was on a special shelf for most-shoplifted writers and asked him who else was there. He quickly reeled them off in alphabetical order. In addition to Bukowski there were:

Martin Amis

Paul Auster

Georges Bataille

William Burroughs

Italo Calvino

Raymond Chandler

Michel Foucault

Dashiell Hammett

Jack Kerouac

Jeanette Winterson.

What do we make of this list? To me the big surprise was the two Frenchies. But in a way it shouldn't have been a surprise. They're what Bukowski Man reads when he goes to N.Y.U. or when he slings Frisbees in Washington Square with N.Y.U. types. Bataille and Foucault: darlings of that espresso-bongo downtown deconstructionist sensibility. Foucault, a pessimistic post-Nietzschean, believing all is power, would probably think that a petty transgression like shoplifting was a blow against the internal hegemony of the power structure–just as he somehow may have convinced himself that not telling his lovers he was H.I.V.-positive was a truly liberating act.

And Bataille– Story of the Eye is, like, so surreal, man! It's porno but it's like pomo porno, so, to Bukowski Man, the rape and mutilation stuff is, you know, way cool.

So you could say that petty and debased ideas of liberation could explain the presence of Bukowski, Burroughs, Kerouac, Bataille and Foucault on the list. And ignorant misreading of Chandler and Hammett, even Amis, might explain their appeal to petty-theft types. But what about Calvino? It is true that when I was in college there were certain unscrupulous guys (present company excepted, of course) who felt that reading Calvino aloud to Sarah Lawrence women was, well, a short cut to intimacy, to demonstrating what a sensitive poetic soul one was. So there's that. Perhaps a similar desperate romanticism can account for shoplifters' lust for Ms. Winterson and Mr. Auster.

Still, with some exceptions, it's a fairly insipid list, one that does the literary taste of New York shoplifters no particular credit. The only two authors on the list I could imagine wanting to shoplift were Chandler and Hammett (the latter mainly for Red Harvest ). But it did set me thinking. I'm morally opposed to shoplifting books (it's not the same as a hungry person lifting some food for his starving family). Bookstores are shrines to me, and I suspect most of those who shoplift books are not broke but just lazy and stupid slackers. Still, what if we think of a shoplifting list not as a literary guide to theft, but as a measure of most desperately wanted books, books for which one has a near criminal passion, books for which you'd risk arrest?

What books would make my list? I decided not to think about it in the abstract but to head down to the Union Square Barnes & Noble, to cruise the fourth-floor fiction and literature shelves and see just what I'd really crave, what books I'd hypothetically risk arrest to read. This is not, I should emphasize, a comprehensive list of my all-time-favorite works of literature (nor should it be construed in any way as a recommendation to lift them–as Detective Andy Sipowicz says in the taxi cab tapes, try that and "I will find you.") It's just a record of what I saw there and what I would most crave if I somehow became homeless and bookless.

So here it is, in alphabetical order:

Persuasion , Jane Austen. Her most romantic and most real-world novel. I've argued in this space that Persuasion people are a different breed from other Austen-ites, and I'm proud to count myself as one of them.

The Sot-Weed Factor , John Barth. By far his best. Endless wickedly comic reading pleasure in mock-historical-memoir form.

Labyrinths , Jorge Luis Borges. I know there are newer translations, but I love the New Directions paperback in which I first discovered Borges. The killer opening lineup of stories–"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "The Garden of Forking Paths" and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"–make the world irrevocably strange.

The Heart of a Dog , or The Master and Margarita , Mikhail Bulgakov. I can't decide because I can't do without either of them.

The Wapshot Scandal , John Cheever. It's that or Bullet Park , but I think Scandal , because there was a moment in my youth when reading it suddenly initiated me into a deeper, more complex kind of sadness.

Bleak House , Charles Dickens. Not merely a novel–a universe, whose furthest reaches are yet to be fully explored, as John Sutherland demonstrates in his brilliant new collection of essays, Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? .

Libra , Don Delillo. Still his best, I think. The secret language of America in the inner monologue of Lee Harvey Oswald.

The Dick Gibson Show , Stanley Elkin. The 100-page middle section–the all-night supranatural possession of Dick Gibson's talk show by Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau–is one of the great tour de force comic performances in recent American literature.

Invisible Man , Ralph Ellison. Coming upon this in high school was a transformative experience, as it has been every time I've reread it.

The Heart of the Matter , Graham Greene. A classic of spiritualized self-pity and bitter no-hope romanticism of the sort I sometimes need to wallow in.

Pale Fire , Vladimir Nabokov. I've written four columns so far on the narrator question alone (And that just begins to scratch the surface, and Brian Boyd is coming out with a whole book on it.) The great American-Russian novel.

The Dog of the South , Charles Portis. I've written almost as many columns about this unbelievably brilliant comic masterpiece.

The Crying of Lot 49 , Thomas Pynchon. Still his best, I think, the classic vision of American paranoia as high art.

Shadows on the Hudson , Isaac Bashevis Singer. Reading it was an electrifying experience. See my three-part serialized essay on this originally serialized novel of post-Holocaust theodicy (March 23, 1998; March 30, 1998; April 6, 1998).

Tristram Shandy , Laurence Sterne. The 18th-century comic anti-novel that both anticipates and refutes all postmodernism.

Dog Soldiers , Robert Stone. More icily crystalline a reflection of male self-destructiveness than anything Hemingway could imagine, but still somehow genuinely stirring.

The Eustace Diamonds , Anthony Trollope. An incredibly riveting 900-page read about a daring woman and the cruel web that enmeshes her.

The Custom of the Country , Edith Wharton. A thrilling, racy book that's more raw and bitter than most of her novels, just as Undine Spragg is more raw and bitter than most of her heroines.

Remember, this is a guide for buying, not shoplifting, a list of theoretically criminal passions. Every one of them is worth every last cent you have to spend.