• fubar (fucked up beyond all recognition)
• She was outrageous! She sat across from a Jackson Pollock for which I had just been offered two million dollars by an anonymous collector in Switzerland, and she said, "I wouldn't give that houseroom!"
  • So I asked her tartly, after a wink in Slazinger's direction, what sort of picture might please her more.
  • She replied that she wasn't on Earth to be pleased but to be instructed. "I need information the way I need vitamins and minerals," she said. "Judging from your pictures, you hate facts like poison."
• "Everybody thinks he or she can be a writer," he said with airy irony.
  • "Don't tell me it's a crime to try," she said.
  • "It's a crime to think it's easy," he said. "But if you're really serious, you'll find out quick enough that it's the hardest thing there is."
  • "Particularly so, if you have absolutely nothing to say," she said. "Don't you think that's the main reason people find it so difficult? If they can write complete sentences and can use a dictionary, isn't that the only reason they find writing hard: they don't know or care about anything?"
• My mother was shrewd about the United States, as my father was not. She had figured out that the most pervasive American disease was loneliness, and that even people at the top often suffered from it, and that they could be surprisingly responsive to attractive strangers who were friendly.
• "That's the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards," said Mrs. Berman. "You don't write for the whole world, and you don't write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person."
• If you looked directly at a Gorgon, supposedly, you were turned to stone. I told that today to the kids around my swimming pool. They had never heard of a Gorgon. I don't think they've heard of anything that wasn't on TV less than a week ago.
• "Which represents good and which represents evil--" he asked me, "the rifle or the rubbery, jiggling, giggling bag of bones we call the body?"
  • I said that the rifle was evil and the body was good.
  • "But don't you know that this rifle was designed to be used by Americans defending their homes and honor against wicked enemies?" he said.
  • So I said a lot depended on whose body and whose rifle we were talking about, that either one of them could be good or evil.
  • "And who renders the final decision on that?" he said.
  • "God?" I said.
  • "I mean here on Earth," he said.
  • "I don't know," I said.
  • "Painters--and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians," he said. "They are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil..."
• "People think we're in love," I said to her on a walk one day.
  • And she said, "They're right."
  • "You know what I mean," I said.
  • "What do you think love is anyway?" she said.
  • "I guess I don't know," I said.
  • "You know the best part--" she said, "walking around like this and feeling good about everything. If you missed the rest of it, I certainly wouldn't cry for you."
• I am touched by how careful he and almost all angry males used to be, when in mixed company, not to use words which might offend women and children, such as shit and fuck.
  • Circe Berman argues that the inclusion of once-taboo words into ordinary conversation is a good thing, since women and children are now free to discuss their bodies without shame, and so to take care of themselves more intelligently.
  • I said to her, "Maybe so. But don't you think all this frankness has also caused a collapse of eloquence?" I reminded her of the cook's daughter's habit of referring to anybody she didn't like as "an asshole." I said: "Never did I hear Celeste give a thoughtful explanation of what it was that such a person might have done to earn that proctological sobriquet."
• Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
• The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn't have to be another county. It can be the past instead--the United States

as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.

• This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?
• Celeste and her friends are back in school, and she asked me this morning what I knew about the Universe. She has to write a theme about it.
  • "Why ask me?" I said.
  • "You read The New York Times every day," she said.
  • So I told her that the Universe began as an eleven-pound strawberry which exploded at seven minutes past midnight three trillion years ago.
  • "I'm serious!" she said.
  • "All I can tell you is what I read in The New York Times," I said.
• For what it is worth: Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.
  • The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise, the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.
  • The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius--a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. "A genius working alone," he says, "is invariably ignored as a lunatic."
  • The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. "A person like that working alone," says Slazinger, "can only yearn out loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be."
  • The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain anything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. "He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting," says Slazinger. "Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey."
• He drowned while in exile in Venice. This was long before the invention of water wings.
• "I can't help it," I said. "My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things."
  • "Your what and your what?" he said.
  • "My soul and my meat," I said.
  • "They're separate?" he said.
  • "I sure hope they are," I said. I laughed. "I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does."
  • I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening to the meat, over which it had no control.
  • "So when people I like do something terrible," I said, "I just flense them and forgive them."
  • "_Flense_?" he said. "What's flense?"
  • "It's what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board," I said. "They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I can do that in my head to people--get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them."
• "And that's not true," she said.
  • "We're having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true," I said. "That's how to act at a party."

Movies

• You're Fired
• The Jazz Singer

(the peaceable kingdom)

Artists

• William Baziotes
• James Brooks
• Willem de Kooning
• Arshile Gorky
• Adolph Gottlieb
• Philip Guston
• Hans Hofmann
• Barnett Newman
• Jackson Pollock
• Ad Reinhardt
• Mark Rothko
• Clyfford Still
• Syd Solomon
• Bradley Walker Tomlin
• Gustav Klimt