Dickens was the greatest novelist in English, War and Peace the greatest novel ever written, Shakespeare the greatest writer, period, Balanchine the greatest choreographer. “Great” was a word that was likely to come up when you talked to Bob, although it was hard to predict to what text, object, or activity it might attach. “ This is really great!”-at which point he began declaiming aloud, beaming, from the opening pages of Cold Noses at the Pearly Gates. I was curled up in a matching loveseat, catercorner to Bob (he would wince when people said or wrote “catty-corner”), poring over a scholarly book about Sappho for a piece I was working on.
Sudoku meaning of word movie#
“We have to do this again next week!” That was the beginning of the Schlock Movie Club, which met pretty much every Saturday or Sunday morning over the next dozen years or so to see the worst movie of the week.) As usual when preparing a major piece for the Review, he was lying stretched out on a faded blue sofa in the “Florida Room”-it has windows shaped like portholes and is decorated with, among other things, a lamp made out of a stuffed alligator-surrounded by piles of books he had ordered, which teetered squishily atop the sofa cushions. “That was so fabulous!” he chortled, with a gleam in his eye that, over the next thirty years, I learned to recognize.
When the movie was over, we were shell-shocked, but Bob was elated. (We had met in November 1994, when he was part of a group of people who gathered at a pizza parlor before seeing a preposterous sci-fi movie called Stargate. This was in 2014 I’d known him for twenty years by that point.
I happened to be staying with Bob at his home in Miami Beach when he was working on the near-death experiences piece. His dozens of contributions to the Review alone include essays on Bruno Bettelheim, Anna May Wong, and Ethel Waters some evangelical proselytizing for foreign writers past and present who he felt were insufficiently known here (Ivo Andrić, Sebastian Barry) a not insignificant number of pieces on classical ballet (the greatest passion of his life, after reading) and often gleeful assessments of entire genres, such as a two-part article about books on near-death experiences, including one called Cold Noses at the Pearly Gates: A Book of Hope for Those Who Have Lost a Pet. But late that afternoon the eminent Knopf and New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb died, at the age of ninety-two, and within an hour obituaries and tributes began appearing online-none of which, as far as I could tell, was able to resist an at least en passant nod to the dizzying oscillation between high refinement and utter kitsch that was the hallmark of his taste.Ī source of constant amusement (and, it must be said, a secret, ongoing puzzlement) to many of us who knew him, the vast and unpredictable range of Bob’s enthusiasms was, nonetheless, a boon to readers of The New York Review and the handful of other publications for which he began writing in his early seventies, after he had left The New Yorker and embarked on an energetic new life as a writer and critic. It is probably safe to say that until the early evening of June 14, readers of serious newspapers and intellectual journals such as this one were unlikely to come across references to Vasily Grossman and 3D dog posters, George Balanchine and plastic women’s handbags, Yasujiro Ozu, macramé owls, Lauren Bacall, and Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life in a single article.
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