June was rife with visitors from out of town, and if they were coming to say good-bye they kept it to themselves. To us it was all serendipitous. Richard Howard and his friend David Alexander, a painter, came out from New York on the way to comfort a friend in San Francisco, who’d lost his lover after a long fight. Richard read aloud to Rog a new poem, as well as a witty essay on baldness and a graceful obit for Jean Genet. We spent two lively evenings talking, and Richard was especially eloquent about Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor—a bracing caution about the scapegoating and self-blame
...more
