Sean Wilsey, the author of Oh the Glory of It All came to speak to my memoir writing class today, much to the delight of the students and their professor. Wilsey’s tale of growing up with rich and crazy parents, and a stepmother out of the Brothers Grimm, was the hit of the syllabus and I think some were surprised to see him in the flesh. Memoirs like his are tales of survival, of people putting themselves back together after having been blown apart, and if the memoir is the testimony, it’s all the more striking to see the living proof.

News to me was the fact that his mother, former SF socialite Pat Montandon, is now slated to publish her own tell-all about her divorce from billionaire Al Wilsey (who married her dear friend Dede) to be titled Oh the Hell of It All. With a cover reminiscent of Sean’s book jacket. But her publisher is that vile brioche Judith Regan who was back in the news today for screwing Bernie Kerik — sorry! — for publishing OJ Simpson’s If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened. (James Frey should have used that title.) Which made Pat want to return the advance and get another publisher.

For his next trick, Sean Wilsey is writing a book about Italy, which he promises won’t be like other Italy books by Americans, in which the authors invariably “sink into a warm olive oil bath.” Love it as he does (it’s where he found his sanity, and he speaks the language) he compares it to San Francisco: a place too nice and self-satisfied to produce much real art anymore. “It’s sort of like writing a memoir,” he says of the endeavor, “I’m doing it out of affection and revenge.”

Glory has been optioned for a film, with a script by Mike White (School of Rock) which Wilsey enjoyed very much. He said his step-brother Todd Traina, a film producer of sorts, accosted White at a party, wanting to know how his mother et al would be characterized. To Sean the irony is that Todd was one of the people in Hollywood who had been had by JT Leroy and spent time on the phone with her, “complaining to a fictional character” about how unfair and one-sided memoirs were.

Oh, the humor of it all.

Nicholas Confessore has written another intelligent piece about the Atlantic Yards Development in today’s Times, this one tackling the thorny issue of race. Developer Bruce Ratner has muddied the waters since day one by giving money in the guise of “community benefit agreements” to local housing and job advocates who in turn have demonized those opposed to the monolith as rich white yuppies. Intemperate comments have been made (and retracted) by both the heads of Build and Acorn and the umbrella group for the opposition, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, of which I am a member.

The wisest words in the story came from an academic (fancy that) who has been studying the potential effects of supersized development. Permit me to quote at length:

“If you live nearby, you have a nice home and you have a job, you’re probably not that excited by the benefits, and you’re swamped by the drawbacks,” said Brad Lander, director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, citing the project’s potential to worsen traffic and overshadow the brownstone communities nearby.

“If you live a little farther away, and you don’t have a job and a nice house, then you probably get a lot more of the benefits,” Mr. Lander added. “None of that is about race per se. But when you layer on that the people who live nearby are more likely to be whiter and wealthier, and the people who live farther out are more likely to be people of color without good jobs or housing, the race elements have become stronger.”

A neighbor asked me, “How could people come into an established community to benefit from what’s here with no regard to the effect it has on the people who live here?” It wasn’t until I had gone all the way around the block with the dog that I thought of a corrolary, of sorts. Anyone who spends any amount of time in the summer in the Hamptons knows the ambivalent relationship some locals have with us tourists. A man told my wife about a townie pulling a knife on him over a parking spot in Sag Harbor. These are the sons of fishermen and day laborers, people who grew up out there who can’t afford to buy a house anymore, and our nods of sympathy, delivered as we load local sweet corn into the back of the Volvo, are lost on them. Just as anyone in Crown Heights who might come to work at the new Nets stadium might be unmoved when I tell him I can’t park in Fort Greene anymore.

The money equation is different, of course. And nearly everyone in the Hamptons is white.

I was up late last night working on an assignment that was due yesterday afternoon. By the time I packed it in it was midnight and my 13-year-old daughter Franny was still making noise in her bedroom, having been working on her own assignments (one paper on Animal Farm, one on the Gettysburg Address) until 11. She had been literally bouncing between floors, trying on fright wigs and singing “Seven Nation Army” when she should have been winding down. By the time I got the recycling to the curb and the coffee pot loaded for the morning there was quiet above. I settled in to watch the Jim Lehrer report that I had tried to Tivo — only to discover the news had been bumped by America’s Top Model. And no, his name is not Rumsfeld.

At one am I heard Franny’s voice — a very animated voice — and went up to find her leaning out her bedroom window, talking on her cell phone. “What the hell are you doing up at one in the morning?” I said. “It’s a school night.” This was followed by some dissembling (“I was checking my voice mail,” she said, branches growing from her nose as little birds flew about) and a stern reprimand from me. But when my wife got up at five to catch a flight to Chicago, she discovered our daughter was wide awake then as well.

“I couldn’t sleep!” she cried and I know there has been much drama in her circle of late. One of her friends is grappling with his sexual persuasion (even though they are all still what we would call pre-sexual) and another friend let his secret be known to the wrong party, which spawned cycles of retribution and phone calls and tears and drama. How to walk this minefield, o lord? I was certainly thinking about sex long before I was 13 and even kissed a girl or two that year. And I’m sure a few of the kids I knew then already knew they were gay, though no one called it that then, or dared to speak its name — it certainly wasn’t playground fodder. Of course there were no cell phones then, no top models. We’re not on the playground anymore.

I just sent her off to school with some lunch money and a promise to meet with me and her track coach after school. She was weeping on the stairs before she left, complaining about invisible love handles as she stood before the mirror. I told her that lack of sleep will cause you to hallucinate and she laughed as I recounted her beautiful attributes most girls (or guys) would die for: her raven hair, her beautiful smile, her luminous eyes. Before she split I heard her trying to pick out the notes to “Seven Nation Army” on my guitar upstairs (“I’m going to Wichita/Far from this opera forever more”). I should have told her that what she was looking at was a funhouse mirror, the kind that distorts your reflection to the world. The image of your real self changes as you grow.

I sometimes wonder if John Kerry is like one of the kids in Half Magic, the children’s book by Edward Eager in which some half-lucky kids get half of what they wish for: instead of landing on a desert island, one of them wishes himself onto a desert etc. (That’s the basic idea behind the old Peter Cook-Dudley Moore comedy Bedazzled as well, except there it is Satan, played deliciously by Cook, who keeps tricking the mortal Moore). Don’t you think Kerry went to bed last week wishing he could be on the front page of the newspapers again? And two years ago, isn’t it possible he wished with all his might that he could be his party’s nominee when faced with the most incompetent president in modern history as an opponent? (No one said that meant winning.)

In the wake of the botched joke scandal a reporter asked him if he should go to joke school. A contrite Kerry answered in the affirmative. Sad to say that this stupid contretemps has made international news. My friend Josh Rushing, who is in Qatar for the launch of Al Jazeera International, was interviewed by his own network about it yesterday. As a former Marine, reporters wanted to know if Kerry had offended the troops. What it offends is our intelligence, he told them; truly stuck in Iraq, our administration is desperate to talk about anything but. Including the Senator from Massachussetts and his unlikely second act as a stand-up.

Josh told me it reminded him of a joke his son Luke tried to make once at a dinner party in West Hollywood. Most of the people at the dinner table were gay and I guess Luke, in that awful age when preadolescent boys feel they must push whatever envelope they can find, thought he would try out some outre material. Josh remembers rescuing him from some lame routine about Christ on the crucifix wearing only a Speedo that must have seemed hilarious in his bedroom. “To this day it is the most embarrassing thing I can mention to him,” says Josh.

I remember my own son, Adam, at that age, throwing out malapropisms and show-stoppers when he most needed a friend. On Block Island one summer, fresh from watching a spate of old crime films with his dad, Adam tried to win some new friends by asking a young boy and his sister where on the face they wanted to be punched. They stared at him agog, even after he said, “That’s from Popeye. Popeye Doyle. The French Connection.” I remember the sound of silence, distant coughing, crickets in the distance as I led him off, suggesting that these kids might now know cop flicks from the seventies…

But would you rather have a president who can’t tell a joke or a president that is one? A college graduate who can at least try and joke about military service because he actually served in active combat, or a college graduate who did everything in his power to avoid going to war but feels no compunction about sending others into what is looking more and more like an endless conflict?

Who’s kidding who?

You can tell when fall has arrived in New York; the last of the air-conditioners come out of the windows, the heat comes on for the first time in six months and both of our city’s baseball teams are absent from the Series. (Can’t say I was excited about the Cardinals’ victory; as Henry Kissinger said of the Iran-Iraq war, “It is a pity that both sides cannot lose.”) Tomorrow we turn the clocks back, hastening the sense that darkness is falling across the land.

Not content with external darkness I went to a matinee of the remarkable — and remarkably painful — film, Half Nelson. There are finally other films in theaters that I want to see, but I had heard great things about Half Nelson and suspected it would be hard to find in the near future. Sure enough, there were four other people at the matinee I attended in the Village — and two of them left before the film was half over.

Ryan Gosling plays an eighth grade public school history teacher in Brooklyn, but that is the least of his character’s problems. He is also a junkie who arrives to class, and the basketball court where he coaches a girls’ team, in a just barely functioning state. Shareeka Epps plays one of his students and best players who knows his secret. She lives by the Red Hook projects and has her own issues: a mother who works constantly, an absent father, a brother in jail for dealing and her brother’s old kingpin who wants her to start working for him…

None of which really does justice to the story. It’s many things beyond that — includiing a surprising indictment of sixties radicalism and the hide-bound public school system — but for anyone who knows addiction it is more painful than a horror film. I saw much of the movie through my fingers, actually saying “No, no,” each time Gosling’s character picked up, each time Epps took a ride with her “friend.” The final scene is as strangely painful and hopeful as any I’ve seen in a movie this year, and recalled for me the children who haunt the great books of Dostoevsky — Crime and Punishment, The Demons, parts of the Brothers K. Their existence, and the existence of innocence itself, is a reminder, a reprimand, an apparition and a goad. When the lights come up, the darkness remains. Don’t see it alone.