"I am a distinguished outcast in American letters — a renegade and recalcitrant, hated and feared by all cliques and snoring phantom celebrities, from ultra-radical to ultra-conservative — an isolated wanderer in the realm of intellect and lithely fantastic emotion, hemmed in by gnawing hostilities and blandly simulating venoms . . ."
“Did the ghost of a grin touch his face a moment, or was I mistaken? If I saw rightly, he was probably having some crude, coarse fun with his audience. If I saw wrongly, then army-recruiting officers—at least some of them—believe that heads must be interminably bared before patriotism is adequately proven.”
“If you sat in Schlogl’s tavern on a Saturday noon and listened to the talk at the round-table you would wonder what had happened to that distinctive spirit of the Middle-West which you had so often read about…”
These accompany an Esquire magazine article by Martin Klonsky titled “Squash and Stretch:
” I seem to be going to pieces.”
“a stunned, hurt youth / And girl, half blind, and in their mouths the taste / Of ashes from the scattered corpses of truth.”
“… it will be absurd to claim that Jewish writers in this country form a unit. They may fuse together in the future but at present they are sadly scattered.”
Transcribing letters for my book on Maxwell Bodenheim, accompanied by Dylan …
“One night they raped / My brother’s girl—frail as a cloud. / Almost a deaf-mute, she escaped / On hands and knees, face twisted, cowed.”
“Old friends predicted ruin when she smoked / In public, roller-skated through the town. “
“Slow Vision is easily Maxwell Bodenheim’s best novel, perhaps because he has now found something worth while writing about.”
