Some notes, occasionally extended on (to steal Mailer's phrase) the talent in the room. Excluded are Convention program book encomia for friends ("X wields the heaviest glass and the heaviest pen in the business; what a great guy I thought as we shot geese together in the Antarctic"), blurbs for book covers or jackets ("Packed with color and excitement: a moving, terrifying experience, filled with all that wonder that Y has given us over and again starting with the Sunburst Trilogy) or reviews ("The Sunburst Trilogy, unoccupied by wonder, falls and falls like geese shot in the Antarctic"). The essay on Ballard—one of those noted earlier as showing the author clearly writing over his head—was commissioned for an anthology of critical essays on this writer's work. An anonymous reviewer for the University press to whom it was delivered targeted this essay as the worst in a bad collection "and of itself it indicates precisely why we should not publish this book." Which they did not. I am kind of proud of this but I do not know why.
The Asimov-Leonard Bernstein confluence struck me at the time and seems even spookier over the years. Both irreplaceable; I have through the madness of our millennial national adventures felt the absence of those voices as keenly as I would have responded to their presence.