Dear Mr. George Plimpton, [resend, never received my copy...]

Through a friend of yours, who told me to tell you not to "drop his name," one Michael Newman, I obtained your email address...

As Michael may have emailed you, I'm yet another of the "struggling poet" species; however, I have further "socially redeeming value" in that, yes, I was indeed recruited by Jim Boeheim to play hoop at Syracuse U....

Mr. Boeheim was the coach at a tiny junior college near my even smaller high school in upstate New York (Broome Community College and Tioga Central High School, respectively).  The year was 1971.  He was getting ready to make his move and become the coach at Syracuse. My school, classified as "C," had to travel quite a distance to find other schools the same size for competitive play (76 kids in my graduating class, I kid you not).  The night in question, we were playing Cinncinatus, southwest  from Syracuse twenty or so miles.  As I describe in my "memoir" piece, "My Little Town" (possibly attached, if this antique browser performs, otherwise on my webpage under "Memoirs Past" on the "Silence of Pauses" page with my poetry), I was in that state of "being there" I called "Some Kind of Grace" in a short story that Michael thinks you may be interested in publishing...

That heightened sense of luminosity, beyond time or even space, with everything so radiantly clear, time seemingly slowed to nothing, no sounds to distract, just pure clear open space and mind...

The story, available from my business agent, Mrs. Maxine Hong Kingston (my "angel" who's worked so hard trying to shepherd my works to publication for several years), was written ten or so years ago; the protagonist is a young white pro player, the "sixth man" type whose role on the "New Jersey Nets" (for convenience sake, as I set the piece in Manhattan) is "harrying the star player on the opposing tema for six to ten minutes a game" (the filling of positions a science; too, as the player bitterly notes, after a career-ending thrid knee injury, the doctors all like racehorse handlers at a track, loading you with "butes" until a "hooves-like-knees" injury puts you down, so to speak...).  My protagonist, a "moody Black Irishman" (a wee bit like myself in my younger days), takes the news that he's cut hard and hits an Upper West Side jazz dive where he meets his "nemesis/mirror," an old black jazzman, disdainful of youngsters like him (especially whites) who "all think they got it so hard)...

Since I based the incident on my "real life experience," having had a girlfriend, Ms. Amy Linn, at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, 1980-81; the genesis of the piece being mine own court experiences at the Columbia gym, my source of refuge when she was busy "jumping through the hoops" deemed necessary for scribing (she indeed went on to "Fame," while I languish in obscurity)...

One last note: as I just heard a Dominican woman read from her just-published novel, in which the very first word you read is "the n-word," I feel compelled to explain my state of mind from a decade ago...(At one point, for "dramatic purposes," I have my protagonist a wee bit drunkenly remark (re: the jazz musicians), after being told to "hush up, let them play," that "humph, these [n-words] can't play" ...

If you change that section to "niggas," why, perhaps the piece will be "hip and cool" again, as I became subject to an illegal per se "boycott" when I tried to have it published at "Esquire' a decade ago, Tom Jenks, the Fiction editor then, to whom I also pitched the idea of doing a "Paper Lion" piece about the NBA training camps, a league at which point then I very much could "play da game"...)

Maxine's email address is above ("yinglan," she's a Prof. of English at U.C. Berkeley); my attorneys, Patrick and Terence Hallinan, should be able to get you a copy as well (Terence is the S.F. Dist. Att., Patrick is at "Hallinan and Boro," 703 Market St. 6th Floor, San Francisco, phone # listed, (sorry, don't have at hand)...)

Thank you again for your time and consideration; I have a longish poem that I feel is your type of work, too, when done I will send to your Poetry Editor, Mr. Howard, I believe...










Thomas Francis Noonan, SAKYA LAMA
"Globe of Dharma Enterprises"
2124 Kittredge St. #110, Berkeley, CA 94704
voicemail: (510)-549-8828#540
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DHARMA-IN-EXILE:
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--"...Hence, thou suborned informer, a true soul
  When most impeached, stands least in thy control."
              Sweet Will Shakespeare, *Sonnet 125*

--"Him do I hate who even as the gates of hell who says one thing while he hides another in his heart."
               Achilleus in Homer's *The Iliad*, Book IX

--"Hold not thy peace, O God of my praise;/ For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me with a lying tongue./They compassed me about with words of hatred; and fought against me without a cause./ For my love they are adversaries: *but I give myself unto prayer*./ And they have rewarded me evil for good; and hatred for my love./ Set a wicked man over [them]..."
           *Psalm of David*, 109

--"...Better than brute strength of men, or horses either,
is the wisdom that is mine..."
               Xenophanes (545B.C.) #1, trans. R. Lattimore

--'Petty people imitating others will use this in a perverse and sinister way, even getting to the point where they can destroy families and usurp countries.  Without wisdom and knowledge, you cannot preserve your home with justice and cannot preserve your country with the way.'
        re: *tsung-heng-hsuen from 'The Master of Demon Valley,'
        18,19, a classic Taoist text translated by Thomas Cleary,
        'Thunder in the Sky' (Shambhala, 1993)

--"Those who fail to cultivate the inner meaning and concentrate instead on the outward expression never stop indulging in ignorance, hatred and evil while exhausting  themselves to no avail.  They can deceive others with postures, remain shameless before sages and vain before mortals, but they'll never escape the Wheel, much less achieve any merit."
     Ta Mo (Bodhidharma), "Breakthrough Sermon" (Red Pine trans.)

--'What is gained by tears will go by tears.  In the end, goodness
  Reaps many good things, though it begins with loss.'
              Gurudeva's Vedic Trikurals,Verse 659
Verse 660:

        'Protecting the country by wrongly garnered wealth
         Is like preserving water in an unbaked pot of clay.'

--"I call it praise to suffer Tyrannie"
              Sir Philip Sidney, *Astrophil and Stella*

--"And when he stumbleth striking there his foot,
Fallen on evil days, the tyrant's pride
Shall measure all the miserable length
That parts rule absolute from servitude.'
               Aeschylus, *Prometheus Bound*

--The Bhagavad Gita explains, "As a blazing fire
reduces the wood to ashes, O Arjuna, so does the fire of knowledge reduce all activity to ashes. There is nothing on earth which possesses such power  to cleanse as wisdom. The perfect yogin finds this knowledge in himself by
himself in due time." Aum Namah Sivaya.

--"...principles form[ing] the bright constellation of that which has gone before us, and guided our steps..."
    Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 1801

--"Fierce courage is what they call valor,
And Chivalry to the fallen forms its sharp edge."
         Gurudeva, Trikural Vedas, v.773

--"The intellectual should constantly disturb, should bear
witness to the misery of the world, should be provacative
by being independent, should rebel against all hidden and
open pressures and manipulations,should be the chief doubter of systems...and for this reason, an intellectual cannot fit into any role that might be assigned to him...and essentially doesn't belong anywhere: he stands out as an irritant wherever he is."
  --Vaclav Havel, quoted by Alan Clements, *Aung San Suu Kyi, The Voice of Hope*
      (Seven Stories Press, 1997), p. 121

--"...We will try it out with you, ye that have harried and held,
Ye that have bullied and bribed, tyrants, hypocrites, liars!"
            --Padraic (Patrick Henry) Pearse (1879-1916)

--"If there is one tall pine-tree standing, the forest has not ended..."
         Olde Tibetan saying