The Back Shop Boys

The next morning—Sunday—I met my friends as always on Cheese Hill, a cliff overlooking what had been a hat factory, but whose scorched walls (after it burned down) were taken over by the Apex Bicycle Saddle Company. The cliff rose out of the earth like the prow of a ship, a limestone ocean liner. At its base, behind the factory, was a shed in which malformed bicycle seats were stored until they could be melted down and formed into new, healthy ones. The shed’s corrugated tin roof offered a perfect target for the “bombs” of pale yellow limestone that broke off in crumbly, cheese-like chunks, hence “Cheese Hill.” We would toss them and wait for the grizzled old factory guard to come out of his wooden hut and shake a trembling fist up at us, which gesture we’d meet with outthrust palms and shouts of “Sieg Heil!” and “Hail Hitler!”

We called ourselves the Back Shop Boys since all our fathers had worked in the back shops of hat factories: Wesley “Pap” Papadopoulos, Victor Szentgyorgyi (pronounced “Saint George”), Wade “Skunky” White (so nicknamed following an unpleasant encounter with a black and white striped member of the Mephitidae family, order Carnivora). . . and Gilbert Slocum, member by proxy through me: Gilbert who spoke only three words, whose thick glasses and shadowy baseball cap visor could not hide a pair of eternally crossed, bulging eyes, Gilbert whose nose never stopped running, whose plaid shirtsleeves when he didn’t roll them up were always stiff with snot, whose skinny forearms (when he did) were glazed with the stuff as if by a coat of shellac. Gilbert who—back in those barbaric pre-p.c. days— wasn’t mentally “challenged” or “disabled” or “deficient” but “retarded”, or, as we said, a retard. And that’s when we felt generous.

Gilbert didn’t care what we called him as long as nothing stood between him and his “hot-dog”—the optical illusion of a floating bullet of flesh formed by touching the tips of his index fingers together and staring at them cross-eyed (easy for Gilbert to do, since his eyes were naturally crossed). The three words were a hot dog. He said them over and over, always with the same bright intonation of amazed discovery, as if witnessing the phenomenon for the very first time. He would try to eat the thing, snapping at it like a crocodile with his nasty overbite, biting his own fingers and crying out in pain. At first we all found this—and the crying fits it inspired—amusing. But like all of Gilbert’s tricks it got old fast. Now, seeing him about to snap at himself, I’d swat his big-eared, crewcut, encephalitic head.

I alone had permission to swat Gilbert; no one else could swat him. That permission was granted to me by myself, a consolation for the loss of privacy and esteem suffered in having Gilbert as an appendage. I did it for my father, the real one, in his memory. He had asked me to befriend Gilbert, or at least pretend to, as a favor for his former boss and friend, Herbert Slocum, back shop foreman at the Caxton-Dumont Hat Works. Following the factory’s closing in 1957, and Mrs. Slocum’s death (three weeks later) of complications from diabetes, Mr. Slocum plunged into a depression so deep he could barely drag himself out of bed. He fed Gilbert bologna sandwiches and oatmeal and drank his way through the weekends. Gilbert’s clothes grew tattered. He started to smell. My mother fed Gilbert and ironed his clothes. My father let him join us in our pursuits, riding the miniature trolly, bearing witness to hat factory fires. I became Gilbert’s de facto brother, a burden I accepted with forbearance, considering.

At first the other Back Shop Boys protested. What are we supposed to do with him? But certain advantages to the situation soon presented themselves. Gilbert was good for an occasional laugh. He was also a perfect target for the barbs that we would otherwise have launched at each other, an inert object to lash out at times of dissonance and strife. The others could say what they liked to him. They could call him “mooncalf” or “lamebrain” or “blubberhead” or any of dozens of other colorful compound pejoratives. They could call him anything they liked.

But they couldn’t touch him. If they touched him I’d be all over them.

We normally got there before the others, who all went to church. To amuse ourselves meanwhile Gilbert had his ever companionable hot-dog, while I’d brought with me in my knapsack my latest space comics, my purple Dunkin Imperial yo-yo, my How and Why Wonder Book of Planets & Interplanetary Travel, my Ruby Ray squirt gun, and my Space Orb Kaleidoscope (“Space Orb, Eye in the Sky!”). The latter offered glimpses of aliens from Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and all the other planets, though the “aliens” were obviously cartoons and more ridiculous than anything.

And I had my binoculars, inherited from my dad, 1943 Bausch & Lomb Army issue 7 x 50’s (leather neck strap, black alligator finish, Serial Number 251908). With or without them, from the top of Cheese Hill I could see all of Bowler. Beyond the bicycle seat factory the central stretch of Main Street unfolded, with (from left to right) the hobby shop, the five and dime, the Empress movie theater (where Birdman of Alcatraz, starring Burt Lancaster, was playing) the hardware, drug and jewelry and other stores, their facades interrupted by clumps of trees. To the far right the view was framed by the railroad tracks and, parallel to them, the Cavanaugh Fuel Oil Storage Tanks, arranged from smallest to largest, like the metal cans my mother stored flour, tea and sugar in; to the left by Bowler Junior High, with its copper topped copula and fierce lightning rod. Winding like a copperhead through the view was the Brim River, whose mercury-laden waters would soon drown half the town.

But of all the landscape’s features none stood out more than the town’s smokestacks, nine in all, brick middle fingers thrust up into the dingy Connecticut sky. With my binoculars I could still read the factory names in faded black and white paint down their ruddy sides: MALLORY, KNOX, SUTTON, BENNET, CROFUS & CORBET, LEE, MERRIMAC, CAVANAUGH, CAXTON-DUMONT. They rose taller than the town’s tallest trees, taller than the junior high school copula, taller than the steeples of the Congregational, the Lutheran, the Episcopal, the Presbyterian—even the Catholic Church. Once those smokestacks darkened the sky with soot and prosperity; now only their shadows darkened the air, thick black shadows stretching across parking lots and playgrounds, bending over rooftops and automobile hoods, reaching into people’s back yards and bedrooms, creeping sullenly, with the hours of each day, like the hands of a gigantic, gloomy clock.

From atop Cheese Hill me and the other Back Shop Boys would inventory the day’s possibilities. We could peddle our bikes into town and guzzle from the town hall water fountain, the coldest on earth. We could rob old man Mulvaney blind in his variety store, with two of us distracting him while the other two pinched Matchbox cars, chewing gum and fudgsicles. We could scamper down to the bank of the Brim River and watch the latest garbage float by (bottles and cans and corn chip bags and formerly bright rubber balls, their cheerful colors dulled to the chalky dullness of a pencil eraser in the river’s alchemical laboratory), or set fire to a model battleship and set it adrift, or catch frogs or, if no frogs were available and pokeberries were in season, start a pokeberry war, or cut down a cattail and twist its brown velvet shaft in our fists and send the cottony seeds flying. We could inspect the latest junk cars behind the Sunoco station, or snatch Pepsi empties from the stacked crates behind the Doughboy Restaurant, collect the deposits at the First National supermarket and treat ourselves to root beer floats at the drug store. Or we could climb a barbed-wire fence, break into the ruins of a hat factory and—with Skunky’s CO2 pellet gun—shoot out some windows, if there were any windows left to shoot out. Failing that we could render alternative judgments on people’s mailboxes by the Postmaster General (whose approval had, so often we felt, been given without due consideration). Among our choice alternatives:

Despised by the Postmaster General
Frowned Upon by the Postmaster General
Cruelly Dismissed by the Postmaster General
Given the Finger by the Postmaster General
Told to Fuck Off by the Postmaster General

In the rare but not unheard of event that words failed to adequately express the Postmaster General’s sentiments Skunky would light an M-80 and toss it in and thus let his feelings be known.

These were but some of the many remarkable ways to be bored in Bowler.

Opening Paragraph

I first saw him on a Sunday morning in June. He was crossing the bicycle seat factory parking lot, walking with a cane, limping. He wore blue coveralls and had blond, crew-cut short hair and a heavy beard. I watched through my binoculars as he kept walking past the factory, into town and out of sight. The other Back Shop Boys, they saw him, too. They thought he was a communist, or maybe a spy, or both, or a homo, or a beatnik, or maybe an escaped prisoner from the federal penitentiary in Danville, one town over, or a nut case from Willoughby Hills, in Newbury, eight miles to the north. I had my own theories about the Man in Blue, inspired by the heavenly body I’d discovered early that same morning, just in time to see it explode to bits and tumble earthward.

I had been looking through my telescope, the one my stepfather, Edward P. Bigelow, bought me for my thirteenth birthday, a mail-order Edmond Scientific Mt. Palomar-type reflecting model, complete with a finder telescope, a hardwood tripod, and something called an “Equitorial mount” that its thirteen-year-olod owner never did quite figure out how to use. I still remember the advertisement that I, or rather, that Leo, using his mother’s haircutting scissors that he wasn’t supposed to use on paper, carefully clipped from the back pages of Science and Mechanics Magazine (or was it Popular Mechanics?). “See the stars, moons, planets up close!” the ad said. The telescope came with a “free” Star Chart and a 272-page “Handbook of the Heavens.” And though its useful magnification was only 180x—barely powerful enough to resolve Jupiter’s moons—at $49.95 it really was a bargain. Even at that price my stepfather, whose retail hat business was failing badly, could scarcely afford it. But weeks of pleading on my part combined with his desire to win my approval (a desire that I did little to encourage) finally wore the man down.

Like the rest of the country I’d gone “space crazy.” Project Mercury had just sent Colonel John H. Glenn Jr. and three other astronauts spinning around the earth, and all I could think about was outer space. Saturday mornings, with mist still shrouding the yard and dawn just starting to poke through the windows, I’d belly up to Mr. Bigelow’s boxy wooden Zenith in the corner of his den (I still thought of it as his house) and—with the carpet itching my bare flesh—stare at the dartboard-like tuning signal while getting my ears pierced by an endless needle of white noise. Through the Star Spangled Banner, with Old Glory snapping in crisp black and white, I’d kick impatient toes against the floor. Finally, with a blast of three orchestral chords as ominous as the death knock that opens Beethoven’s Fifth, the theme music would begin and Fireball XL-5 would begin. Colonel Steve Zodiac, accompanied by the glamorous Doctor Venus, would board their unambiguously phallic spacecraft, off to save this or that corner of the universe. The show was filmed in “Supermarionation,” meaning the characters were puppets. When they caught the light you could easily see the strings. But there were no strings attached to my feelings: Steve Zodiac was my hero, as Colonel John Glenn and all astronauts were heroes of mine.

My stepfather didn’t share my enthusiasm for outer space. Not that he wasn’t proud of his nation’s achievement. Ed Bigelow was nothing if not patriotic. For the brief period during which my mother and I occupied his stately home on Crown Hill Avenue he flew the American flag proudly day by day from a pole screwed into one of the foursquare columns of his imposing porch. He’d even salute the thing on his way to and from his hat store, gray fedora doffed, right hand over his heart. It wasn’t the space program that my stepfather disapproved of but the man behind it, our thirty-fifth president, John F. Kennedy. Ed Bigelow hated JFK’s guts, and had hated them ever since the snowy morning of January 20th, 1961, when—on the same boxy Zenith—he watched him take the oath of office “without so much as a wool beanie” on his hairy, handsome, Irish-Catholic head.

The telescope arrived on a Saturday morning. I’d just finished watching Fireball XL-5 when the front doorbell rang and the UPS man stood there in his sewage-colored uniform, holding the long cardboard box. I sat on the living room floor and tore it open. As advertised the telescope was white with black fixtures and a varnished tripod. There had been no forewarning of its requiring assembly, yet it did. I spent the rest of the morning wrestling with parts and instructions, and the afternoon looking at trees, houses, antennas, chimneys and clouds, impatient for darkness, intent on the planets, moons and stars.

Total darkness fell at seven-thirty, but I decided to wait until after The Twilight Zone before trying out the telescope. In that evening’s episode two astronauts traveling in separate spaceships crashland on a strange, beautiful, uninhabited planet. One astronaut is a man, the other a woman. Each has escaped from a world annihilated by nuclear war. His name is Adam, hers is Eve. (You can work out the rest for yourself.)

When the show ended I carried my telescope upstairs to my adoptive bedroom, whose gabled walls my stepfather, in another attempt to win my affection, had painted over with a tromp l’oeil sky and puffy clouds. Against this cloudy backdrop a trio of P-58 Mustangs, two gull-winged Stukas, one P-47 Thunderbolt and a Messerschmitt banked and soared, held up by lengths of fishing line no more invisible than those animating Steve Zodiac, with whirling propeller blades simulated by discs of clear acetate. Painted bullet holes strafed some planes’ fuselages. From one of the Stuka’s two engines a long gouge of cotton, sprayed-painted gray, curled in a smoky loop toward the ceiling. My stepfather, who had acquired such skills in creating his own hat store window displays, made the model planes and painted the cloudy walls. When he proposed this decorating scheme to my mother she opposed it, saying it would give me nightmares. But Ed Bigelow stuck to his guns,claiming that, on the contrary, it would lull me to sleep.

He and my mom were both right. To the implied roars and splutters of airplane engines combined with the tattattattattattatt of wing-mounted machineguns and the presumptive screams of pilots plummeting earthward in burning parachutes, I’d drift off to re-fight the Battle of Britain, only to bail out of a sweat-soaked, tailspinning bed at approximately two o’clock in the morning, night after night.

Now that I had my telescope, though, I was grateful for these rude awakenings. Without them I might have slept through the one astral event that would distinguish my otherwise completely unremarkable career as an astronomer. This happened early in June, twelve days after my birthday, with seventh grade already over and summer vacation started. By then I’d constructed a small, level platform on the pitched roof of the porch onto which my bedroom window opened. Aside from two trees across the street the porch roof offered an unobstructed view of the night sky. It was a clear, cloudless night, perfect for stargazing. I peered through the aperture, my hopes set as ever on discovering an unknown planet or star or even a measly asteroid. Any fool with a $50 telescope could ogle Jupiter’s stormy red eye or count Saturn’s rings. I wanted more; I needed more. Beyond having a dead father nothing special had ever happened to me, and I was afraid that nothing special ever would happen, that I’d end up stuck in Bowler for the rest of my life, working in some factory or store, when I yearned to conquer the stars, like John Glenn.

At the very least I wanted a secret, to know something that everyone else in the world didn’t already know, to be offered some sign that the mysterious heavens were in some way aware of my mystery, of my existence. Even though I didn’t believe in Him, still, I wanted God to notice me.

That distant, puny, insignificant object seen through the wrong end of the telescope? That was me, Leo Joseph Napoli IV.

Shitty First Drafts vs. Long Walks

There is the philosophy of writing that says, "Don't edit as you write. Turn all censors off. Enter your dionysian self and write with abandon. Eventually you will get in the zone. You will see with the third eye." Which may be true. It goes without saying that the hundreds of pages you write along the way should end up in the trash pail. And who's to say that a long walk wouldn't have gotten you to the same place just as fast or faster and without the waste of paper?

My Heroes & Me

I've always had heroes. As far back as I can remember. At less than four years old I owned a special shirt, blue with red and white stripes. It was my Popeye shirt. I wore it to a frazzle, until there was nothing left of it but blue striped rags and threads. Without saying a word my mother threw it in the bin of rags she accumulated for my father, who used them in the Building, the laboratory at the base of our driveway where my Papa invented machines for measuring thickness and color. When I next saw my shirt I hardly recognized it, its fibers soaked with a muddy gray mixture of solvent and metal dust. I might never have spoken to my mother again, except that I needed her to draw those fat triangular S's onto my T-shirts so I could jump off tree limbs and play Superman—another hero of mine.

We're talking early nineteen-sixties here. Kennedy had just been inaugurated, sworn in hatless on a sunny, cold winter's day. Kruschev had already pounded his shoe and threatened to bury us. In school we practiced our "duck and cover" drills, with me as eager to protect Jill B. from nuclear fallout as Wesley Conklin was eager to have me look up her skirt (she sat at the desk in front of mine) and give him a full report, something I refused to do—though I liked Jill's skirts, peacock blue paisleys that were the perfect foil for her flaming strawberry blond curls.

There was in the air that we breathed a sense of premonition and doom that was its own kind of nuclear fallout. My friends and I would sit on top of Cheese Hill, a limestone cliff overlooking one of the town's many abandoned or converted hat factories. We called it Cheese Hill because the limestone broke off in pale, crumbly, cheesy chunks—like the parmesan cheese my father would bring home to my mother from New York City. There we'd sit, banging our P. F. Flyers into the limestone, debating how long it would take for us to die, and by what exact means. Wesley C. claimed that we would melt from inside out, our bodies turning to water balloons that would finally burst. Chucky S. said our organs would deep fry inside us like ˆgalumkesˆ or chicken livers. Lenny P. said we'd die in layers, with the dead layers falling off one by one, like the skin of a rotten onion.

Out of this radioactive sense of gloom and doom grew the need for heroes. More than ever we needed Supermen to come to our rescue. But to be rescued wasn't good enough. Being rescued was for sissies and girls. The thing to be was the rescuer. At the local swim hole, a two-acre pond dug out of the landlocked wilderness and trimmed with beach sand (officially called Meckhauer Park but for obvious reasons dubbed Muckhauer), I wished nothing more than for Jill B. to drown so I could save her and in the process save myself from being totally inconsequential to her. True, I wasn't much of a swimmer, but I would rise to the occasion—if only she'd give me a chance. I'd search for her golden hair among the throngs, and keep an eye on her every time she splashed into the water, hoping that at long last she would snag a leg on some algae.

Among the many frustrations of boyhood is a near total lack of heroic opportunities. Either the circumstances don't present themselves, or they have to be manufactured—as was the case with Robin Lee Graham, the boy who, as a sweet sixteenth birthday present to himself, sailed around the world alone in a 24-foot fiberglass sloop, and whose story we all devoured in that summer's National Geographic.

But there we were, stuck on dry land in Bethel, Connecticut, with the chimneys of crumbling hat factories the closest things to lighthouses. For a pubescent boy the only way out was sheer fantasy. So I put on my Popeye shirt. And when that turned into a rag, and as the big 'S' faded from my T-shirt, I turned to other heroes. With television they weren't hard to find. To be a hero you needed the right clothes. A leather jacket let you be Steve McQueen in ˆThe Great Escape,ˆ or Colonel Hogan of ˆHogan's Heroes.ˆ For James West a tight brocade vest and cowboy boots would do.

I remember my first pair of cowboy boots—black and tight and pointy enough to jam into a tailpipe. My parents bought them for me at Buster Brown. The store had a merry-go-round in it. The sides came up to my calves and were filigreed with colored stitches and whirls. The heels cut in at a sharp angle and were high enough to make me feel something like tall. The smell of the leather was itself heroic. I wore the boots under my straight-legged Lee's, with a matching wide black belt hung with brass loops serving no purpose but to hook my thumbs into when I felt like it. Into belted jeans I tucked my denim cowboy shirt, with double pockets and steel buttons. Over the denim shirt I wore one of several brocade vests that I had gotten my mother to sew for me.

Those brocade vests—I have to tell you about those.

Generosity

One out of ten books I find unreadable. This formula bore itself out over the past several days, when I attended Book Expo America as the Javits Center. Like everyone else there I collected my share of free galleys, books that have yet to be officially launched, still in their "uncorrected proof" labeled jackets. Some books were thrust on me, others I chose myself based on a quick sampling of their prose (and—I have to confess—on their appearance; I'm a sucker for the look and feel of books. A poorly designed or overaggressive cover, an ill-chosen typeface, or a book that simply defies comfortable reading due to its bulkiness or awkward dimensons, I'll almost always pass up).

Sure enough, I came home with ten books, only one of which I ultimately found readable. By "readable" I mean exactly that, since (more and more as I get older) I can either read books or I can't; there's no in-between. A sampling of an "unreadable" (for me) book:

He wanted to have a party for his birthday, his fiftieth. Given that it was not my own birthday, it was no big deal to me. I can never get excited about other people getting older, but there you are, there is always that distance between them and me. No one can stop my getting old like a hypocrite. I keep no count of the passing years: I just keep looking forward. The only thing that could put me off is death but until further notice, it is not here, it is somewhere else, busy culling other people. I only know it by reputation and I am pretty sure that when we do meet, things will not go well. No chance of sweet-talking it. So I have no intention of sweet-talking up the process.
—The Unforseen, Christian Oster (Other Press)

What makes this unreadable? Part of the answer is of course subjective, and has to do with the character of the narrator, with the kind of person who uses expressions such as "given that" and "there you are." Were this narrative a road, there would be warning signs along it saying, "Pomposity at Work" and "Danger: Pretension Ahead." First-person narratives are always at the mercy of their narrators. One either likes the storyteller (Holden Caufield, The Catcher in the Rye), or finds him/her tantalizingly repulsive (Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier), or dislikes and stops reading.

But the character of the narrator in the above passage is but a symptom, I think, of a deeper problem that rests with the author himself, who must take the blame for slipshod punctuation, non-sequiturs and redundancies, but above all for a passage which at best amounts to weak-tea philosophy (I'm not in a hurry to die but then there's no avoiding it, is there?). The first time I read this passage (I read it for a second time now only to comment on it), I was not even aware of its contents. The passage occurs on page 4 of the book, and by page 2 my eyes had already glazed over. Words and sentences had turned to decorative filigree. Because I enjoy the shapes of paragraphs, it sometimes takes a while for me to realize this disconnect between words and meaning. Then the spell breaks and I put the book down.

Another passage, another book:

All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this. Even when everything was going well, as if often did. I can say that much. That it often did. I have been lucky. But even then, for instance in the middle of an embrace and someone whispering words in my ear I wanted to hear, I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was only silence. Years might go by and I did not think about it, but that does not mean that I did not long to be there. And now I am here, and it is almost exactly as I had imagined it.
—Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson (translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born (Graywolf)

Granted, this is a translation, and a rather awkward one at that (assuming that the errors in tense owe nothing to the original). Still, the style of the writing here can best be described as "chatty." Though I have nothing against writing in the vernacular, or that's driven by character voice and is therefore casual. But chattiness is another matter. Chatting puts no premium on words or content. It is language for its own sake. But it's worse than that. Gertrude Stein, for better or worse, shoves language in our faces, hammers away at the reader with repetitions like a sculptor chiseling away at his marble to get at the form within it. But here there's no groping after form; there's just talk words like packing noodles occupying the empty space between solid things. I feel about this passage roughly the way I feel about the two inches of foam the barrista's invariably dump on my lattes: can't eat it; can't drink it; what to do with it? Now here's a piece of writing that engages me.

My father wanted to show me something, but he wouldn't say what. He only said I should go get my gun, my thirty-six-aught-six, and follow him. This happened just outside Bend, Oregon, where we lived in a ranch house surrounded by ten acres of woods. I was twelve at the time: old enough to shoot a gun, young enough to fear the dark.
—Refresh, Refresh, Benjamin Percy (Graywolf)

In my writing workshops I'm always preaching against withholding information. This passage shows me why. It is nothing if not generous. Look at the amount of information given. The protagonist is a twelve-year old boy who is afraid of the dark and whose father presumably hunts. The setting: Bend, Oregon. The passage is pure information, pure generosity. I think of that frost poem, Provide, Provide. That's what Percy does here: he provides his readers with information. He communicates; he gives. He wastes none of the reader's time. But he is more than just considerate. He is bountiful; he holds nothing back. There is an urgency behind the words that is of a piece with the author's willingness to share them; the impulse to "give" is also an impulse to "get rid of." So different from the authors above who sit back lazily in their padded chairs chatting us to death while swirling the brandy in their snifters.

To be generous and considerate: that's what I want to teach my students, and what I want to practise in my own writing. To give everything and hold nothing back. To create experience for the reader with as much care as you would cook a meal, knowing that it's meant not just to be looked at, or heard, or even tasted—but ingested as life-giving sustenance, to become part of the reader, to add to and not subtract from the reader's own life experience.

Georges Rouault, Sculptor of Color

With no small joy I learned today from a write up by Michael Kimmelman in Art Review of an exhibit of Rouault works at the Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery (“Georges Rouault: Judges, Clowns and Whores”). For too long Rouault's ouvre has been all but ignored, or turned into a footnote in the careers of Matisse, Picasso, and other, more easily categorized, less archaically "religious" artists.

As for Kimmelman's article, I found it good, though of course it misses the point by (as ever) placing the emphasis on Rouault's subject matter and his own proclaimed piety for the poor and martyred and misunderstood. His genius—and his contribution to art history—lies not with his subjects or themes but with his technique, a rapturously sensual grasp of the most humble materials--paint and knife. Square inch by square inch, he could give Rothko and any of the abstract expressionists a run for their money. But unless they have their faces rubbed in them, critics like Kimmelman tend to be too far-sighted. I submit that Rouault's real subject were those textures and colors that produce their own heavenly raptures in viewers, much as Rothko's canvasses would decades later. If only Rouault had abandoned subject matter completely! But that's not always possible, and he did the next best thing: he simply repeated the same subjects over and over, turning them into armatures for sculpted color.

A Surfeit of Choices

Writing is so hard and yet it really shouldn’t be. The problem comes down to too many choices, and the feeling that each choice eliminates rather than propagates others. It’s as if we feel we have a limited number of words, sentences and paragraphs at our disposal (and we do, but only in the sense that our life expectancies are limited). When I used to paint (seldom now), I’d say to myself, “Go ahead and make this choice and let it stand”—on the assumption that, if I made infinite paintings, sooner or later I would be bound to make that choice anyway, so why not make it now and get it over with? With writing I never feel that sort of reckless self-confidence, and each choice feels like the one that may doom me! But as someone—I forget who—said to me not long ago, it’s not so much the choices that one makes that determine his or her quality as an artist, it’s the willingness to MAKE choices and live with them. After all, “unlimited choices” is a contradiction in terms.