Open ended conversations; from 7/14/2008-8/29/2011; from two hemispheres; reflections on male/male, female/female, male/female friendships; banking logarithms as a modern version of Plato’s cave; mass interest in arena sports as mass infatuation with numbers; “village explainer”; Freud and sexual taboos; naked versus erotic; mother tongue, technology, travel and realism found in a library; finished novels followed by the snark of critics; Art of Fugue; Quad Theater; 13th St.; Golden Age of American Poetry, 1950’s and 60’s; our new relation to food; ritualized tradition and ‘Giving Offense’; existential Man On Wire; political paradigms, historical dictators, apolitical ‘revolutions’ without politics; “tangled thoughts”; “make peace, not love”; two aging writers with too much spark remaining to become virulent curmudgeons.