Just before Thanksgiving I decided to vary the menu in my memoir class with a few selections drawing on the experience of two very different African-Americans: James Baldwin’s Notes from a Native Son, orginally published in 1955, and a few chapters from Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler. The reaction from my 15 white students was informative, to say the least.

A few of them were grateful to be reading something that wasn’t by white people. This would probably be unremarkable in any college class today but seeing how this is Eugene Lang, of which Lang alumni Sean Wilsey complained students use to spend entire classes talking about how unfair it was to observe Columbus Day, I was kind of surprised that there wasn’t a greater reaction of that nature. From what I have seen of the syllabi of other classes there, racial diversity is often the number one creiteria for inclusion and I am remiss in not including more minority writers.

At least one other student volunteered the idea that perhaps race wasn’t that important in America anymore. After all, McCall came from a life of street crime and time in prison to become a reporter at the Washington Post and the name of Barack Obama is being floated as a presidential candidate in ’08 with most of the talk focused on the subject of experience rather than skin color. Maybe it’s just not that difficult being black in the USA today, he seemed to be saying.

That’s when I had one of those great teachable moments you hear about. I told my students that my wife had just received an award from the National Breast Cancer Coalition for her work as a magazine editor in covering the topic of breast cancer. Introducing her at the event was one of the anchors of the CBS Early Show, Rene Syler. Talk at our table turned to Ed Bradley’s passing and his role in breaking barriers for black journalists like Syler. Bradley, I mentioned, used to complain about not being able to get a cab in midtown, despite being familiar to the millions who watched 60 Minutes. A white woman said that living in NYC she tended to forget about racial prejudice. “I never forget about it,” said Syler and then offered two tales for our edification.

She described her experiences trying to return a new Mercedes-Benz in White Plains (nice name!) on the weekend, dressed casually in jeans and a sweatshirt, and the sort of attitude she received. No one quite said “Drug money,” but you can bet they were thinking it. (When she complained about it to MB’s corporate offices, her name appeared in a blind item on Page Six, making her sound like one of those haughty TV people.) And when she visited a consignment store in Westchester to see about unloading some of the couture she wears once for work and doesn’t need again, the woman looked at her casual attire and said, “Well, first you have to have clothes people would want to buy.”

And you can bet that even on her days off, she looks a lot better than most of us.

News of Robert Altman’s death was not enough to stop me running today but neither have I been able to stop thinking about him. I first became aware of him about the same time I really became aware of film as an art form, a means of expression that could be shaped by this person called a director. Watching Beth Orton sing Leonard Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy” in I’m Your Man last night I thought of how that song is now inextricably linked to a whorehouse in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, just one of many cultural artifiacts Altman casually appropriated.

Nothing he stole ever stayed that way, though. There was something very lacksadaisical about the look and feel of his films (might have has something to do with all that pot he smoked) and what he borrowed it always felt like he returned. His intentions beneath were of steelier stuff; conned by the easy-going feel of his films, viewers were always surprised when he slapped them back out of the druggy haze. Like the moment when the bad guys shoot sweet Keith Carradine in McCabe. Or when Chris Penn attacks the girls he and Robert Downey picked up at the end of Short Cuts. Or in my favorite of his films, The Long Goodbye, when Mark Rydell as the gangster Marty Augustine ends a loving tribute to his mistress by smashing a Coke bottle against her face.

When I interviewed him in 1993 for Vogue, he was working on the post-production of Short Cuts, talking casually in the editing bay while playing solitaire with a pack of Tarot cards: a game of chance played with the deck of destiny. That was the way The Long Goodbye seemed to me: he took a Phillip Marlowe novel and bent it out of shape in the hippie-dippie West LA of the seventies, added drugs and naked models doing yoga, but at the end it still comes out with the right guy dead, the guy who’d underrated the shamus. Have your fun, the director seemed to be saying. It all ends in the grave.

You’ll hear a lot about how much actors loved him (everyone worked for scale with Bob) and small wonder: He loved them back. I remember Julianne Moore describing how he would follow his actors just off camera, sort of cheering them on as they improvised, like a little kid who just loved to watch. Artists saw things we didn’t see, he believed. His favorite joke that year was about two jazz musicians working a gig on an ocean cruise. They go out on the deck to smoke a joint and one of them says, “Man, look at all that water.”

“Yeah,” says the other, “and that’s just the top.”

Float on, o maestro.

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.