As a Reed College student, Whalen lived in a rooming house with Gary Snyder and Lou Welch, making for a trio of fine poets. There, through Snyder, he was introduced to Zen Buddhism after earlier dabbling in Vedanta yoga and Tibetan Buddhism. In time, he would emerge as an ordained priest at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Although suicide cut Welch’s life short, Whalen and Snyder remained close friends for life. I had no idea just how close until coming across David Schneider’s biography of Whalen, where the appear as complementary opposites – little brother helping bigger brother through key shifts in survival.

They were considered Beat poets from the start of the movement but soon moved away from its poetic conventions. Whalen, preoccupied with the movements of the human mind and awareness, blended mundane details immediately before him with timeless, erudite quotations from a world of sources. The results were a unique and absorbing mental dance on an unseen energy field.

I also enjoyed his novel, You Didn’t Even Try, dealing with a failed marriage.

He came a long way from the Dalles, a village along the Columbia River in Oregon where the eastern desert begins.

Blame Susan Sontag for the introduction, but she was right in lauding the erotic achievement of the pseudonym French author only recently revealed to be Anne Cecile Desclos.

While many of the once shocking practices in The Story of O and its companion volume have become common knowledge in the years since publication, other parts remain contentious. I’ll leave the subject matter there.

What fascinates me as a writer is the spare, even lacy, language that develops the story. O herself says very little and next to nothing is revealed about her background – there’s nothing at all about her family – yet everything is shown as if we’re inside her head. Somehow, Reage skirts being prescient in the mater-of-fact telling. We learn more background about other characters’ families, in fact. When it comes to scurrilous events, she avoids dwelling in detail but hints briefly and quite effectively moves on. As for cliché? Minimal.

Let that be a reminder to some of us who would otherwise produce too much information for our readers at certain points of our own drafting.

You can add Baker to my elite circle of treasured novelists who began publishing after I graduated from college.

Start with his ability to look in depth where others haven’t gone – the phrase “literary microscopy” fits him to a T. Sometimes what he investigates is right in front of us, perhaps an escalator in an office building or a thermometer for a daughter’s baby bottle or a common book of matches on a sequence of icy winter mornings. Other times his focus is on portent issues in world affairs like Human Smoke in the buildup to World War II, the outbreak of Covid-19, where he was the first, in “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis,” to argue the coronavirus was manmade and spread by accident, or the destruction of paper archives in major libraries.

I like the way he generally alternates a volume of fiction with another of nonfiction before returning to fiction, works of originality and high quality in either vein. As a craftsman, he’s impeccable, whether with 250-word sentences that flow seamlessly or fiction that’s footnoted. He writes with cool passion and an irrepressible conscience, even in the three volumes of erotica that led the New York Times magazine to dub him the Mad Scientist of Smut.

My favorite novel is The Everlasting Story of Nory, where nothing seems to happen in the first 50 pages, befitting the thoughts and expectations of a nine-year-old girl spending a year with her parents in England. Brace yourself for the tension that follows, though.

The first I became aware of Rorem was, I believe, through the Paris Review, possibly set as some very wild topography. Oh, the possibilities it presented!

Over the years, Rorem became a classical music composer I knew of vaguely rather than directly. I may have even heard a few of his songs in recital. And then, in Dover, I was gifted his Paris Diaries one Christmas.

Baring his private scribblings to the public did lead to some notoriety for their candor, even snideness, much of it about celebrities in the contemporary fine arts world, yet the gossip also reveals much about himself, intentionally and otherwise.

Wandering through the broken pedestals in Rorem’s pages has been a guilty pleasure for many. These days it can be seen as a history, too.

A spree of reading this Peruvian winner of a Nobel Prize was highlighted by the novels Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and In Praise of the Stepmother, but what I value more is his nonfiction A Writer’s Reality, especially his sense that Spanish literature veers toward its unique lines of fantasy surrealism rather than fact as a consequence of the Inquisition.