lost paws:

What happens when the writer you admire most becomes your best friend? / David Bezmozgis on Leonard Michaels in Nextbook:

NOTES: FN pointed this out to me -- brilliant... Leonard Michaels Son.

Excerpts: “In the time I knew Lenny we communicated almost exclusively by email. On several occasions we spoke by phone and twice met in person. The first time, in the summer of 2000, I visited him at his house in Kensington, near Berkeley. He looked older than I had expected, rumpled, and he asked me to project since he was hard of hearing in one ear. The effect made me conscious of his mortality in a way I hadn't quite considered before. We spent a few hours together, talking, and Lenny made a tuna salad, which we ate without ceremony. The scale of everything was modest and unpretentious. The house resembled its owner, rustic and benignly disheveled. No exorbitant attention was devoted to furnishings or objects. Here and there, on the walls, I saw the papery husks of spiders. These came from the trees that surrounded the house, Lenny explained. Thus they were natural, harmless, and not worth disturbing. My visit alerted me to the disjunction between reality and my preconceptions. It reminded me of a comment Lenny had recorded in his journals. The comment had been made by his eldest son, who, still a child, had watched his celebrated father sweep the kitchen floor. He'd looked at Lenny "with weary incomprehension" and said: "You're practically famous, and you're sweeping the floor." I suppose I felt a version of that…”

“Another time, he spoke angrily about a critic who had reviewed Time Out of Mind. I had read that review but had been so excited that I hadn't paid very close attention to what the reviewer had actually written. Lenny accused the man of taking things grossly out of context, of misquoting, and, worst of all, of calling Lenny a misogynist. (Now, reading the review again, I see Lenny's point.) Lenny said he knew this man and described him as a Jew who'd converted to Catholicism, an intellectual mediocrity, a cripple with a cane and a limp. He said that he was prepared to go after him. Or if he didn't, he knew that Gore Vidal would. On this point, Lenny said with all seriousness, he and Vidal were in the same camp. The scenario struck me as ludicrously comic. I pictured an irate, septuagenarian Vidal pursuing a terrified, gimpy Jewish convert to Catholicism. When I pointed this out, Lenny laughed.”