Thomas Beller

New Orleans

@Guggfellows 2024 @Tulane prof. Recent books: Lost In The Game: A Book About Basketball; J.D. Salinger: Escape Artist. Next--Degas At The Gas Station: Essays.

Articles

"The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1984-1994," by Thomas Mallon: Book Review

2 weeks ago | airmail.news | Thomas Beller

The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994 by Thomas Mallon I read the whole thing, all 567 pages of Thomas Mallon’s The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994, which surprised me, because once I got past the parts that I was in some way witness to, as a student of Mallon’s at Vassar College in the 1980s, I had expected to skim. I tried to skim. But the skimming never lasted long.
Game Faces

1 month ago | thomasbeller.substack.com | Thomas Beller

1. It's been a festival of old timers in Madison Square Garden. A living history going back to Walt Frazier and Bill Bradley, the last champions, and including Bernard King and Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Stephon Marbury, Carmelo Anthony, Amare Stoudemire, and so on. At one point they had Patrick and Bernard sitting next to each other. They were teammates very briefly - Bernard missed all of Patrick’s rookie season - and only played in six games together, a blink of an eye in Knicks history.
Martin Amis, Michael Jordan, Mother's Day, and The Knicks.

1 month ago | thomasbeller.substack.com | Thomas Beller

1. I was in the weight room of the 92nd Street Y playing around with the fat jiggling machine when I looked up and saw a tall, elegant black man with a goatee working out with a barbell on his shoulders, doing toe raises. It was 1975, or 1976, or 1977. I was somewhere between 10 and 12 years old.
Searching For Michael Jordan in Wilmington

1 month ago | theassemblync.com | Thomas Beller

In the summer of 2022, I drove to Michael Jordan’s childhood home in Wilmington with my 11-year-old son. It was a balmy, sun-dappled afternoon. We arrived at an unassuming but comfortable two-story house flanked by a green lawn and some trees. The ground floor is pale-brown brick; the second story has white wood siding. The garage doors were open, and a couple of cars were parked in the driveway–nothing fancy. I checked the address to make sure we were in the right place. We were: 4647 Gordon Road.
A Rich Time: New York City in 1975

1 month ago | thomasbeller.substack.com | Thomas Beller

1. Not that long ago, I was chatting with someone who works at my old high school, and a phrase floated by: “It’s great that you were here at such a rich time.”The school’s name is not a secret, but I’d rather set it aside. The relevant details are that it’s located in New York City and I graduated in 1983. “A rich time for the school, or for the city?” I replied. She thought about it for a moment. “Both!”The tone of the exchange was sunny, but the remark felt ambiguous.
The Portal Era

2 months ago | thomasbeller.substack.com | Thomas Beller

A beautiful day in April. I go to Lincoln Center to use the library, but first spend some time sitting outside taking in a the view. I am not usually a person who sits still and takes in the view. So there is something effortful in this gesture of leisure. But it is made easier by the fact that I am sitting in one of my favorite places in the city. I gaze at the Henry Moore sculpture that sits in a shallow pool.
"The Catastrophe Hour," Meghan Daum's New Essay Collection, Reviewed

2 months ago | airmail.news | Thomas Beller

Over five first-rate essay collections and one very good, if underrated, novel, Meghan Daum has written a cohesive, almost novelistic narrative about a character named Meghan Daum. Her first book, My Misspent Youth, from 2001 (which, full disclosure, I published at Open City Books), measured the author’s dream of a Persian throw on a hardwood floor against the cost of a single martini in a New York City bar.
Hands Off/ Face Off

2 months ago | thomasbeller.substack.com | Thomas Beller

The Floating Armoire is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Before I left for the rally, I was drawn into an agitated conversation with my mother about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was outspoken against Hitler in 1933. But he was not outspoken enough, and would later write about how he should have done more. He was executed by the Nazis on April 9th,1945.
The Glory Days of Duke's Coach K (and College Basketball)

Dec 15, 2024 | theassemblync.com | Thomas Beller

Midway through John Feinstein’s Five Banners, I recalled an encounter I had with Ed O’Bannon’s calf muscle in the spring of 1995. O’Bannon was the star of a UCLA team that either had just won, or was about to win, the national championship. He and some teammates were in an ice cream shop in Venice Beach, California. They were all wearing their UCLA jerseys, as though they had just come from a game or, more likely, a photo shoot.
The Sky’s the Limit

Oct 1, 2024 | mrbellersneighborhood.com | Claude Barilleaux |Thomas Beller |Sarah Firisen |Alex Wolf

I was only thirteen years old when I decided that I must live in New York City. Fred Astaire made me do it. Watching his old films in the early 1960s on our local tv station while growing up in the Cajun Country of Southwest Louisiana, I saw a glamorous and sophisticated world far different than the folksy, rural one surrounding me.