Every other year, I spend Thanksgiving in England with Dave Clark from the Dave Clark Five and a bunch of other people.

We collectively have a special place in our heart for the manned space flight program - Apollo nostalgia is one element, but that is only part of it. American culture worships explorers - look at the fame of Lewis and Clark, for example. The American people want to think of themselves as supporting exploration.

I watched Gene Kelly for his smile, for his energy. Vittorio Gassman for his movement. Clark Gable for his mustache. And I watched Lassie who was happy as a dog.

Dick Clark and I had such a hysterical relationship with each other.

Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.

Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.

When I saw 'Bully' and I was 11 or 12 years old I thought I could do this; I could make movies. Larry Clark's cinematography is very raw. It's also based on a true story. I think a lot of the movies I like are based on true stories.

I think Mr. Clarke had a tendency to interfere too much with the activities of the CIA, and our leadership at the senior level let him interfere too much. So criticism from him I kind of wear as a badge of honor.

The negative cost of Lewis and Clark entering the Garden of Eden is that later expeditions regardless of what they were intended to do, later expeditions did not deal with the native peoples with the intelligence with the almost kindly resolve that Lewis and Clark did.

I'm much better informed than Mr. Clarke ever was about the nature of the intelligence that was available again Osama bin Laden and which was consistently denigrated by himself and Mr. Tenet.

Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.

I think the Lewis and Clark Expedition was the greatest undertaking in American History. I think landing a man on the moon pales next to it.

I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.

The comeback of true green olives was part of a Spanish food revival in the early 2000s. I credit Sam and Sam Clark of Moro Restaurant in London with making them cool again.

One week before my 17th birthday, I had a blind date with June Rose, a television actress on network soap operas, a model, and a regular on the popular Dick Clark's Saturday night 'American Bandstand' show from New York. We were married five years later, one week after my graduation from Columbia.

At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, 'Come down to the water.' It was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look, I see fire: that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, "the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality...for religious liberals and many evangelicals.

"Ms. Wormwood: Calvin, can you tell us what Lewis and Clark did?

I watched Gene Kelly for his smile for his energy. Vittorio Gassman for his movement. Clark Gable for his mustache. And I watched Lassie who was happy as a dog.

Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.

I think Mr. Clarke had a tendency to interfere too much with the activities of the CIA and our leadership at the senior level let him interfere too much. So criticism from him I kind of wear as a badge of honor.

The negative cost of Lewis and Clark entering the Garden of Eden is that later expeditions regardless of what they were intended to do later expeditions did not deal with the native peoples with the intelligence with the almost kindly resolve that Lewis and Clark did.

I'm much better informed than Mr. Clarke ever was about the nature of the intelligence that was available again Osama bin Laden and which was consistently denigrated by himself and Mr. Tenet.

Then there was Clark Ashton Smith who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer but his imagination was wonderful.