Columnists

    The talk of Montauk last week was that Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News political commentator and best-selling author, had come to town. Not only was it news that he had bought a spectacular property on the oceanfront, but that he had torn down two small houses that longtime Montaukers considered part of the community’s heritage.

    The house at the end of the block, where Madeline Bastis, a Zen priest, once told me that when it came to reporting on the New York marathon, I should write about all the finishers from here, not just the top ones — to wit, that attention should be paid — is being torn down.

    At first I thought how sad, but now, having got out her file and reading through it a bit, I imagine her saying, in Zen fashion, “Let it go, Jack, let it go.”

    It is too late to stop: The top-secret project is under way. A group of East Hampton residents ages 11 to 17 are cloning the mayor of East Hampton Village located in the State of New York, United States of America.

    Forget about turkey, this is the time of the year that our thoughts turn to shellfish. That is, if you are inclined, as I am, toward such things and did not get quite enough of the fall striper run.

    Shellfish news from local waters has been mixed. Most disturbing was a report this week that the East Hampton Town Trustees’ scallop sanctuary in Napeague Harbor was illegally dredged and sustained considerable damage to its eelgrass beds. One of the trustees filed a police report; there is no word on suspects.

    Going to Buffalo, of all places, wasn’t my idea. But my husband’s notion of trying to see every house Frank Lloyd Wright ever designed is infectious. Chris had learned that Buffalo was the site of a number of Wright houses and other buildings, so going there had been in the cards for some time. It turned out to be a fascinating few days.

    I have sometimes cast a gimlet eye on pieces sent to The Star as “Guestwords” by travelers who write, as if with authority, about places with which they have only a nodding acquaintance. But, if you’ll excuse me, here I go.

    I’ve just been afforded a welcome opportunity to listen to a concerned, and perceptive, citizen regarding the recent election — he making a good case that one-party rule, whether Democrat or Republican, often doesn’t make for good governance.

    After he’d delivered himself of his considered opinions, I suggested he put himself up for office some day, but he, as I thought he would, demurred. He was retired, he said, and therefore doing only things he wanted to do. Being baited by the opposition at town board meetings, I gathered, wasn’t one of them.

    I have a nose, but it doesn’t work. Actually, my nose works; it’s my brain that doesn’t. Nine years ago, visiting my sister-in-law in rural Pennsylvania, I fell down a flight of stone steps to the cement floor of her basement. A six-pack of Rolling Rock cushioned my fall. When I picture how it must have looked, I see a hilarious pratfall. But to my wife, son, in-laws, and nephews looking on, it wasn’t funny.

    As I have admitted before in these pages, I have found it difficult to open my wallet for weekday lunch ever since Bucket’s Deli closed and the Griffiths moved away.

    My friend A.J. has a mission. As a leader of an organization called Solar Cookers International, which encourages the use of solar thermal cooking in sunny parts of the world, she has proposed that the United Nations make solar cooking — as a  “renewable, freely replaceable fuel for the daily preparation of food and safe water, without contaminating the environment” — a basic human right. “All people should have access to that right,” a document she recently submitted to the U.N. states.

    “I hadn’t known there were real people in Palm Springs,” I said to Mary after we’d seen the Hampton Theatre Company’s riveting production of “Other Desert Cities.”

    There’s still much to learn no matter how old you get.

    This time, despite not one but two unscheduled stops on the Expressway, the Jitney arrives right on time. I alight and walk in the sunshine toward the meeting place, just as on the previous Saturday.

    The November afternoon is surprisingly, wonderfully warm, and at Park Avenue I turn south. It was a good idea to leave the jacket behind, unburdened by the unnecessary, the better to roam freely.

    Back on my feet again / I’m back on the street again / I’m back on the top again.

    Shortly before last week’s issue went to press, something came in over the transom that transformed an ordinary pre-election week into a full-blown, viral Internet frenzy.

    A call came at about lunchtime on Oct. 30 about our placing something in the paper from Laurie Anderson about the death on the previous Sunday of her husband, the rock mold-breaker Lou Reed. Eventually, we received an e-mail, and I also fielded phone calls, one from Ms. Anderson, several more from a friend of hers, about whether we would put the statement in the paper.

    Let’s hear it for longevity. I’ve been at The Star for more than 50 years. Yikes. At least I haven’t been at the same desk or even in the same room in the building all these years. And, of course, we work differently now.

    In the old days stories were typed on yellow paper rolled into manual typewriters, and we edited with pencils, although they weren’t necessarily blue. We cut and pasted, and it meant exactly that. Blades were involved. I probably cut and pasted more than others, because I’ve always been the sort of editor that juggles thoughts — paragraphs, quotes.

   That some people find the evidence of tradesmen’s lives in the blue-collar section of town offensive is puzzling.

    We’ll never make Springs Saga­ponack no matter how hard we try, nor should we want to. Uniformity, whether in the form of grandiose mansions or too tidy half-acre lots, seems to me to be the real offense.

    Springs used to be celebrated for its diversity (for its admixture of farmers and clammers and artists). Now apparently it is not, conformity being ever on the march.

    With zombies in the movies, zombies on television, and zombies in print, I’m starting to think we should cool it.

    “If you build it, he will come‚” a voice told Kevin Costner in the movie “Field of Dreams.” And come they did, strolling out from fields of corn and straw. If we don’t stop being so hospitable toward the zombies, they too might come, and then we’re all goners.

    From where I sit, something interesting is happening here in terms of political involvement. This week, The Star ran some 74 letters to the editor — plenty but not quite the record. This is astonishing when you consider that there is no contest at the top of the ballot to gin up excitement and that one party’s majority is already assured.

    At first blush, it was hard to understand why Southampton Town officials would fight a lawsuit brought by a group of churchgoers who claimed their civil rights were violated when they went to Southampton Town Hall on July 26, 2011, to protest against same-sex marriages on the first day such marriages became legal in New York State.

    It has been widely reported that police refused to allow them to remain on the steps of Town Hall because the building had been declared a “Bias Free Zone” in 2008, with a sign posted to that effect.

    I’ve been through hell — as it was envisioned by Dante — and it doesn’t strike me as being too different from much of life as we know it (though there are many arresting phantasmagorical special effects).

    So, I am ready to move on — it seems everybody’s ready to “move on” these days, at least that’s what they say in the newspapers — through purgatory and from there into the light — just as the fly did this morning through the open window in The Star’s upstairs bathroom.

    If you had told me last month that I would be missing a 45-pound bundle of muscle and joy, a “hound mix,” according to ARF, I wouldn’t have believed you.

    With Halloween upon us, a ghost story would seem appropriate, and, as it happens, there is a tale of Congress Hall to be told.

    The house, which stands on Main Street overlooking the East Hampton Village Green, is ancient and storied. It was in the Mulford family from when it was built, sometime after 1680, until 1976.

    Congress Hall got its name somewhat cynically during the mid-19th century to note that it was where many of the men of the village would gather to talk, welcomed by their bachelor host, David Mulford.

    The letters to the editor in The East Hampton Star, to me, are the icing on the cake. I was about to say they are the spice in the stew, but stewing is not only a method of getting a batch of foods together and cooking them, but also means fretting or fussing . . . and maybe making a fuss isn’t quite what some letter writers need to be further encouraged to do.

    I’m in the eighth ditch of the eighth circle of Hell now, with the falsifiers. Today it would probably not be so populous a place, for relatively few of us moderns can claim to know the truth (thus how could we falsify it) enveloped as we are in cosmic molasses.

    Speaking of cosmic molasses, I was glad to see the Nobel Prize winner Dr. Peter W. Higgs, after whom the Higgs boson is named, does not use a cellphone or a computer — a laudable but perhaps inevitably doomed attempt by the so-called God particle’s discoverer to remain disconnected from the madding crowd.

    My first job after moving to Springs in 1985 was as a freelance copy editor, which made sense after years of writing. My second job, taken in 1986, was as prep cook at Bruce’s restaurant in Wainscott, which made sense only because I liked to cook. I had never worked in a restaurant or cooked professionally. Even in my home kitchen, performance anxiety was part of every undertaking. But my idea of prep work was what I did before cooking a meal at home — chopping vegetables, washing salad greens, peeling potatoes. How hard could it be?

    The restaurant economies of Bridgehampton, and to a lesser extent Water Mill, have benefited, albeit ever so slightly, from our eldest daughter’s taking to ballet and other forms of dance in a big way. The greenhouse effect, on the other hand, gives me room for pause.

    I’m just going to throw this out there — I’ve read parts one and three in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy. I skipped part two because how much sex can two people really have? It’s something I tell my husband every week. And considering I’m not a teenager or even young anymore, other people’s sex lives are something I can read about only so much.

    Today, you’d think, as in Keats’s ode, the warm days would never cease, and yet the autumnal sighing — a melancholy beauty — has begun.

    Here’s to the soft-dying day, and to gathering what buddies ye may, for Old Time’s a-flying.

    Enough: “Don’t stop,” Andy Neid­nig, the lifelong runner who was celebrated in a Sag Harbor race Saturday, told me on the occasion of his 90th birthday. “Nature takes care of that. Meanwhile, don’t think about it.”

    Okay, Andy, I won’t, I won’t.

ACT ONE: Boy Meets Candy

fade in: Popcorn, large

cut to: Milk Duds, box

slo-mo: misshapen spheres

cascade onto buttery maize

intimations of endless bounty

hand disappears into bag (MOS)

scoops up a lovely melange

dark balls and white fluff

sweet chocolate and salty corn

match made in casting kitchen

VO: “The journey has begun —

as American as Shinnecocks

as rich as Milton Hershey

as suspenseful as a Damon

and/or Affleck spy thriller.”

    One thing is clear about the East Hampton Town Trustees’ Largest Clam Contest: They are going to need a bigger boat if it gets any more popular. Well, at least a larger place to hold the thing.

    Ever since the 2004 presidential election, when I went to Florida to try to help legitimate voters avoid being turned away from the polls, it feels like every progressive organization in the country has had me on its radar. Perhaps one gave another its database; I certainly haven’t been signing up myself.

   “I’ve only gotten to the second circle of Hell,” I said to my daughter Johnna in an e-mail the other day, “but I like it.”

    My father, who used to teach humanities, said Dante had to be taught, though I’ve found an edition that has plenty of explanatory notes. Somebody ought to try a modern version of “The Inferno.” It would probably sell like hotcakes.

    The fence-sitters, by the way, weren’t even allowed into Hell, being neither sinners nor virtuous.