On My Desk


David Antin: The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 2001
"If I draw on the sense of exile, it's more in the cheerful exilic mode of Marcel Duchamp than in the anguished mode of Kafka. Probably because by now it seems clear nobody has a permanent home on the face of the earth."

Richard Foreman, *No-Body, a novel in parts*, The Overlook Press, 1997
""Oh, Eddie, Eddie-you broke my heart with your stories about a brilliant childhood."

Somerset Maugham, *The Moon and Sixpence*, 1919
"'I think Strickland knew it was a masterpiece. He had achieved what he wanted. His life was complete. He had made a world and saw that it was good. Then, in pride and contempt, he destroyed it.'"

Sharon Mesmer, *Half Angel, Half Lunch*, Hard Press, 1998
"He said, 'I'd like to explore the erotic aspect of this relationship.'
She said, 'Can it wait till the commercial?'
He said,'Have you ever read 'The Wasteland?'
She said, 'My last boyfriend took me to Hoboken for the weekend.'"

Otto Rank, *Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development*, 1932
"Achievement and success are seen to be psychologcally representative of the two basic tendencies that struggle against one another in the artist, the individual and the social. Achivement is ideological, success is personal; and the more the artist achieves in idea, the less disposed he will he be to follow this up by personal success...for success, even when it is won by artistic means, implies a personal success in life and is thus that very life from which the artist had originally fled to art as a refuge."

Wallace Stevens reads (cassette, recorded 1955, digitally remastered 1993), includes, *The Life of a Poet (A Prose Note)*

Arthur Sze, *The Redshifting Web; Poems 1970-1998, Copper Canyon
"Reality /is like a contemporary string/ quartet:/the first violinist puts on a crow's head./ And the cellist/soliloquizes on a white lotus/in the rain./The violinist discusses/love, rage and terror/And the second violinist reports on the latest coup/in Afghanistan"

(All, except the Maugham, found Sunday at Unnameable (formerly Adam's) Books-456 Bergen Street, Brooklyn; 718-789-1534 for $40!)