Elkin Quotes

If someone told me that I could live my life again free of depression provided I was willing to give up the gifts depression has given me--the depth of awareness, the expanded consciousness, the increased sensitivity, the awareness of limitation, the tenderness of love, the meaning of friendship, the apreciation of life, the joy of a passionate heart--I would say, 'This is a Faustian bargain! Give me my depressions. Let the darkness descend. But do not take away the gifts that depression, with the help of some unseen hand, has dredged up from the deep ocean of my soul and strewn along the shores of my life. I can endure darkness if I must; but I cannot lie without these gifts. I cannot live without my soul.' (p. 188)

I have a black belt in sarcasm, and my wit is like lightning.

The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people--including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh--struggled with depression, anxiety, and despair. They paid a heavy price to wrest their gifts from the clutches of non-Being. But this is what true artists do: they make their own frayed lives the cable for the surges of power generated in the creative force fields of Being and non-Being. (Beyond Religion, p. 124)

Julian, I need you. Not in ways you can see. But in ways that I feel. If I’m your life raft, we’re in trouble—because you’re mine.

The guy you’ve been seeing, the one you were all so secret-squirrel about, was my dad?” Cooper nodded. “Yes.” “Oh, fucking hell,” Ryan squeaked. “The one you said sucked dick like a Dyson?

I don't believe less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough.

Perhaps the day will come where the validity of one's spirituality will be judged not by the correctness of one's theology but by the authenticity of one's spiritual life. When that day comes, an authentically spiritual Buddhist and an authentically spiritual Christian may find that they have more in common with each other than they do with those in their respective religions who have failed to develop their spirituality. (Beyond Religion, p. 98)

It’s like everything else. The price of Torahs is higher in Alaska.

I rest my head against him when our mouths break apart, and breathe him in. I love the smell of him, that mysterious, perfect, warm, delicious taste that is him.

You know what a sense of place is?” Cooper nodded. “It’s when the place you’re in feels like home. Where you’re at peace.” I nodded. “That’s exactly right.” Cooper looked around. “This place?” I shook my head. “No.” His voice kind of squeaked. “Me?” I nodded and grinned. “You’re my sense of place, Cooper.

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Do you have some tough-guy persona I haven’t seen yet?” “Absolutely,” he said brightly. “I have a black belt in sarcasm, and my wit is like lightning.

Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.

Later came the hard knowledge that no one can save you from yourself.

We all have our own signals we're listening for, or trying not to hear.

I walk because it confers- or restores- a feeling of placeness...I walk because, somehow, it's like reading. You're privy to these lives and conversations that have nothing to do with yours, but you can eavesdrop on them. Sometimes it's overcrowded; sometimes the voices are too loud. But there is always companionship. You are not alone. You walk in the city side by side with the living and the dead.

Can you feel it? I asked her... my heart beating so hard, so strong that wants to get out of my chest, and travel trough the distance just to feel your heart beating so close to join on a single rhythm.

Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighborhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home.

In my more rebellious days I tried to doubt the existence of the sacred, but the universe kept dancing and life kept writing poetry across my life. (Beyond Religion, p. 81)

To truly grow, you have to be ready to leave the version of you behind that you once celebrated growing into.

My eyes close as his hands smear mud across my stomach. 'There,' he says. 'Now your innie's a little mud pit.' His hands trail across my middle. I squirm slightly, and his eyes meet mine. They're darker now, heavier. 'Where next?

In my living room there are two large bookcases, each one eight feet tall, and they have about five hundred books between them. If I step up to a shelf and look at the books one by one, I can remember something about each. As a historian once said, some stare at me reproachfully, grumbling that I have never read them. One may remind me vaguely of a time when I was interested in romantic novels. An old college text will elicit a pang of unhappiness about studying. Each book has its character, and even books I know very well also have this kind of wordless flavor. Now if I step back from the shelf and look quickly across both bookcases I speed up that same process a hundredfold. Impressions wash across my awareness. But each book still looks back in its own way, answering the rude brevity of my gaze, calling faintly to me out of the corner of my eye. At that speed many books remain wrapped in the shadows of my awareness--I know I have looked past them and I know they are there, but I refuse to call them to mind.

He won't talk about the ordeal he's been through, either in the war or over the last few months. He won't tell me where he's headed, and I don't know where I'm headed, either. All I know is I'll remember this night--me in his arms and the lake behind me, the dance up there waiting, and the music filtering down to us. 'Dance with me?' I ask. And he does. Right there on the sand.

Let it be known: I did not fall from grace. I leapt to freedom.

While art should never become exclusionary and elitist, any culture which fails to support its artists is only contributing to its own impoverishment. (Beyond Religion, p. 122)

Not just the celibacy thing but because he has God’s ear, a line on the mysteries. That’s impressive to girls.

Environments inhabit us,' Varda said. These places that we take into ourselves and make part of us, so that we made of all the places we've loved, or of all the places where we've changed. We pick up bits and pieces from each of them, and hold them all in ourselves.

Even the sky a hybrid — here clean and black and starred, there roiling with a brusque signature of cloud or piled in strata like folded linen or the interior of rock.

There’s power in humility. It’s one of the toughest lessons I’ve had to learn.

The past was a tricky bastard. It called and called to you—and when you turned around and tried to grasp it, it disappeared.

We want to make choices, and have some agency in getting lost, and getting found. We want to challenge the city, and decipher it, and flourish within its parameters.

So many think we must share the same beliefs to get along. In my experience, sharing the same fear is a far more effective strategy.

The West Virginia Children’s Home. It’s in Elkins. See that they get the balance of the account. And that they know that it came from my father.

So listening carefully is what I was taught all my life. When people don’t listen, it’s not that they don’t learn, they just deny themselves tremendous opportunities and glorious choices.” Steven Spielberg

... Because I never found My audience," said God and annihilated, as Mother Mary and Christ and Lesefario and Flanoy and Quiz in their Y.M.C.A. seafront room in Piraeus and all Hell's troubled sighed, everything.

Walking it mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighborhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home.

Miggy sees me watching the approaching wave of dark clouds. "Maybe it will slow him down." The guy who's been outfitted by Survivalists "R" Us? No, he probably has some waterproof supersuit that repels lightning. I hate him so much.

Because all books ARE the Book of Job -- man in the crucible like Jack in the Box....

forests are like churches, hallowed places. There's a stillness about them, a sort of reverence.

What’s PSA?” “Prostate test.” “Prostate?” Cooper asked, looking a little miffed. “I hope he bought you dinner first.

How terrible to lose a child most of the world never knew was missing.

You’d better be thinking of me when you smile like that,” Cooper said, now standing beside me. I hadn’t heard him come into the kitchen. I bumped his hip with mine. “Of course I’m thinking about you.” “Then why aren’t you hard?” he asked, looking pointedly at my crotch. Before I could say anything, he said, “They have pills now, for old guys who can’t get hard.

I can't claim that I came out of it the winner. But I felt a lot like a kid who has finally found the guts to stand up to the schoolyard bully and tell him to take his best shot: bruised and bloody and thinking maybe that it hadn't been such a hot idea, but - what do you know? - still standing.

There’s something comforting, almost soothing, about realism, and it’s nothing to do with shocks of recognition — well it wouldn’t, since shocks never console — or even with the familiarity that breeds content, so as much as with the fact that the realistic world, in literature, at least, is one that, from a certain perspective, always makes sense, even in its bum deals and tragedies, inasmuch as it plays — even showboats and grandstands — to our passion for reason. The realistic tradition presumes to deal, I mean, with cause and effect, with some deep need in readers — in all of us — for justice, with the demand for the explicable reap/sow benefits (or punishments), with the law of just desserts — with all God’s and Nature’s organic bookkeeping. And since form fits and follows function, style is instructed not to make waves but merely to tag along, easy as pie, taking in everything that can be seen along the way but not much more and nothing at all of what isn’t immediately available to the naked eye.

I say “every so often” but it’s more frequent than that.

The living and dead were thrown together, and the dead looked away first. -Description of Doomsday

I do not do schtick. What I do are organized routines and connected schtick— schtick upon schtick upon schtick until we have a piece of carpentry

Love, I think, is by necessity constructed of a ladder of lies you climb together.

Maybe the question shouldn’t be why am I doing this, but why isn’t everyone looking?

They told you that you were safe. They told you lies. You are weak and defeated. For the price of one helicopter, we have brought you to your knees.

A picture will leave me unmoved if I don't take time with it, but if I stop, and let myself get a little lost, there's no telling what might happen

I don’t speak. In this day and age, we all talk too much and hear too little. Listening has become a forgotten art that the world is sorely missing.

You can go three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water, and three weeks without food.

Affluence is always relative, depending on where you are on the food chain.

Plans give you a list of tasks to keep you from drowning in your own fear. Plans give you a feeling of control, even if it’s just an illusion at the time.

When I walk into a house and see good paintings on the wall, I can smell money. But when I see tatty old carpets on the floor under them, I smell real money.

Feel your feels, as the saying goes. Except so many feelings are hard to take.

So why do they do it? Simple. Just ask the families of Michele Wallace, Diane Keidel, Cher Elder; Lois Kleber, Ike Hampton, Gerry Boggs, Heather Ikard, Heather Dawn Church, and Christine Elkins. No one could replace the lives lost, but neither were their loved ones left wondering what had happened to them. There is no statute of limitations on grief, and the truth does matter.

It’s about time I spent time on what’s really important.” “Well, work, then dinner, then you can do what’s really important.” Then he added, “You know I’m what’s important, don’t you? I meant that you can do me.

Thus we see protection being very simple. Give thanksgiving for each moment. See the self and the other-self as Creator. Open the heart. Always know the light and praise it. This is all the protection necessary.

We get to know our cities on hoot, and when we leave, the topography shifts. We're no longer as surefooted. But maybe that's a good thing. It's just a question of looking, and of not hoping to see something else when we do. Maybe it's good to keep some distance from the things we know well, to always be slightly out of sync with them, not to pretend mastery. Beneath the cities we don't recognize are stacked all the cities we do.

There may be something genuinely evil in the idea of an N.F.L. Maybe the Miami Dolphins is an evil concept, the Houston Astros, Burger King, the American League. Franchises like some screwy version of Manifest Destiny.

When it comes to basic survival, you want to remember the rule of threes: You can go three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water, and three weeks without food. Prioritize accordingly.

Oh, shut up,” I grumbled. “I suck at cooking and you know it.” He got a glazed, dreamy look on his face and after a while, he said, “I’m sorry, you mentioned sucking and I got distracted. I didn’t hear a word after that.” I rolled my eyes and walked into the kitchen, but he called out, “Your cooking is fine, Tom. But your sucking skills are your true talent.

Then the higher self operates from the future, as we understand things. In other words, my higher self would operate from what I consider to be my future? Is this correct? Ra I am Ra. From the standpoint of your space/time, this is correct.

I walk because it confers — or restores — a feeling of placeness. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says a space becomes a place when through movement we invest it with meaning, when we see it as something to be perceived, apprehended, experienced.

The thing is, women try to look slim-hipped like men, and they can’t. Not if they have any female hormones. The very thing that makes a woman so lovely is exactly what you have: a big, beautiful trochanteric subcutaneous adipose tissue deposit.

What does our neighborhood say about us? What is the value of a neighborhood? Mine is a mirror of my past choices. Pick your path and see where it goes. Pick a subject and see where it leads. Most assuredly you won't be able to predict anything along the way.

originally walked away from material possessions because I felt the weight of them dragging me down. Now I don’t own anything I can’t afford to lose because I don’t want to die one day trying to protect something I never should’ve cared about in the first place.

Life is precious; we must not defer to tomorrow the love we can give or receive today. All the love that has been given to you is yours, yours to keep, yours to grow, yours to share fully with others, so that it lives forever. Energy does not die in this universe. Neither does love.

We need the mass movements, we need people to get together and march, or even just stand in one place, not only for those in power to see what the people want, but for people who are decidedly not empowered to see you out there, and to shift, just a little bit, the pebbles of thought in their minds. The protest is not only to show the government that you disagree, but to show your fellow citizens- even the smallest ones- that official policies can and should be disagreed with. To provoke a change. To disrupt easy assumptions. You show yourself. You toss in your chips. You walk.

Most people don’t realize what a financial luxury privacy is. An individual bedroom, time alone, designated workspace: These things cost money. Angelique got to sleep in a shared family room, while probably doing homework on the kitchen table on a refurbished laptop after her brother had his turn.

The streets of Paris had a way of making me stop in my tracks, my heart suspended. They seemed saturated with presence, even if there was no one there but me. These were places where something could happen, or had happened, or both; a feeling I could never have had at home in New York, where life is inflected with the future tense.

Mike said they were gale force winds, which must mean strong. He grew up in the Upper Peninsula and said he’d never seen the bridge rocking like that. He told me the story of a woman who was driving over the bridge in wind like this when her little car went out of control and flipped over the side and fell down, down into the water.

Living between cities, we are abandoned by them as much as they are by us, because if they gave us all we needed, we wouldn't have to leave.

The gods of yesterday become the devils of tomorrow.

father might have been my favorite playmate, but she was my hero,

Slow down: it’s the only way to guarantee your immortality.

They have to get through each day, which makes truth a fickle companion.

It’s a popular trick among the streetwise to appear richer than they are.

Growth isn't a mindset, it's an ever changing set of heuristic experiments. Sometimes you soar, sometimes you stumble through.

You don't grow through successes, you grow through what you go through.

May the world enjoy a year that is free of hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, drought, and political speeches, which produce the most wind of all.

Man can progress as much as we want. Mother Nature still owns our ass.

...at the end of the day, the people left behind matter as much as the ones who are missing. We mourn the ones we've lost, but we agonize over the pieces of ourselves they took with them. The identities we'll never have again. The emotions we're certain we'll never feel again. The sense of our own selves, becoming undone and disappearing just as completely and suddenly as those who vanished.

The Osage ward Mary Elkins was considered the wealthiest member of the tribe because she had inherited more than seven headrights. On May 3, 1923, when Elkins was twenty-one, she married a second-rate white boxer. According to a report from an official at the Office of Indian Affairs, her new husband proceeded to lock her in their house, whip her, and give her “drugs, opiates, and liquor in an attempt to hasten her death so that he could claim her huge inheritance.” In her case, the government official interceded, and she survived. An investigation uncovered evidence that the boxer had not acted alone but had been part of a conspiracy orchestrated by a band of local citizens. Though the government official pushed for their prosecution, no one was ever charged, and the identities of the citizens were never revealed.

The state legislatures, as Madison and many another viewed them, had become a babel of narrow-minded parochial concerns, their members men of selfish interests and untutored understanding, oblivious of minority rights, passing unjust laws (such as legal tender acts whereby debts people owed each other could be paid in worthless currency), and all unchecked by any overriding vision of the public good or what it might consist of.

What worries me is that I am not sure any of the Republicans, or any Democrat, is ready to 'go to the mats.' And, ergo, I am concerned that our current leaders are simply incapable of creating a winning war strategy.

We get to know our cities on foot, and when we leave, the topography shifts. We're no longer as surefooted. But maybe that's a good thing. It's just a question of looking, and of not hoping to see something else when we do. Maybe it's good to keep some distance from the things we know well, to always be slightly out of sync with them, not to pretend mastery. Beneath the cities we don't recognize are stacked all the cities we do.

She and Don were taken to a hangar where a pair of F-15 fighter jets were waiting: his and hers, as it turned out. “Why?” Don asked uneasily. “We’re taking you to the U.S.S. William Jefferson Clinton.” “An aircraft carrier?

The premise that America’s power and influence was rooted in its wealth was wrong to begin with. To the contrary, our strength comes from America’s magical stuff. It is something intangible, something invulnerable, something no measure of evil, no amount of violence or bloodshed can destroy.

In truth there is no right or wrong. There is no polarity, for all will be, as you would say, reconciled at some point in your dance through the mind/body/spirit complex which you amuse yourself by distorting in various ways at this time. This distortion is not in any case necessary. It is chosen by each of you as an alternative to understanding the complete unity of thought which binds all things. You are not speaking of similar or somewhat like entities or things. You are every thing, every being, every emotion, every event, every situation. You are unity. You are infinity. You are love/light, light/love. You are. This is the Law of One.

I walk because, somehow, it’s like reading. You’re privy to these lives and conversations that have nothing to do with yours, but you can eavesdrop on them. Sometimes it’s overcrowded; sometimes the voices are too loud. But there is always companionship. You are not alone. You walk in the city side by side with the living and the dead.

The red energy center often is in the shape of the spoked wheel. The orange energy center in the flower shape containing three petals. The yellow center again in a rounded shape, many faceted, as a star. The green energy center sometimes called the lotus-shape, the number of points of crystalline structure dependent upon the strength of this center. The blue energy center capable of having perhaps one hundred facets and capable of great flashing brilliance. The indigo center a more quiet center which has the basic triangular, or three-petaled, shape in many, although some adepts who have balanced the lower energies may create more faceted forms. The violet energy center is the least variable and is sometimes described in your philosophy as thousand-petaled, as it is the sum of the mind/body/spirit complex distortion

I am Ra. Let us give the example of the man who sees all the poker hands. He then knows the game. It is but child’s play to gamble, for it is no risk. The other hands are known. The possibilities are known and the hand will be played correctly but with no interest. In time/space and in the true-color green density, the hands of all are open to the eye. The thoughts, the feelings, the troubles: all these may be seen. There is no deception and no desire for deception. Thus much may be accomplished in harmony, but the mind/body/spirit gains little polarity from this interaction. Let us re-examine this metaphor and multiply it into the longest poker game you can imagine: a lifetime. The cards are love, dislike, limitation, unhappiness, pleasure, etc. They are dealt, and re-dealt, and re-dealt continuously. You may, during this incarnation begin—and we stress begin—to know your own cards. You may begin to find the love within you. You may begin to balance your pleasure, your limitations, etc. However, your only indication of other-selves’ cards is to look into the eyes. You cannot remember your hand, their hands, perhaps even the rules of this game. This game can only be won by those who lose their cards in the melting influence of love; can only be won by those who lay their pleasures, their limitations, their all upon the table face up and say inwardly: “All, all of you players, each other-self, whatever your hand, I love you.” This is the game: to know, to accept, to forgive, to balance, and to open the self in love. This cannot be done without the forgetting, for it would carry no weight in the life of the mind/body/spirit beingness totality.

I read a heap of books to prepare to write my own. Valuable works about art crime include The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick, Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian, The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser, Possession by Erin Thompson, Crimes of the Art World by Thomas D. Bazley, Stealing Rembrandts by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg, Crime and the Art Market by Riah Pryor, The Art Stealers by Milton Esterow, Rogues in the Gallery by Hugh McLeave, Art Crime by John E. Conklin, The Art Crisis by Bonnie Burnham, Museum of the Missing by Simon Houpt, The History of Loot and Stolen Art from Antiquity Until the Present Day by Ivan Lindsay, Vanished Smile by R. A. Scotti, Priceless by Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman, and Hot Art by Joshua Knelman. Books on aesthetic theory that were most helpful to me include The Power of Images by David Freedberg, Art as Experience by John Dewey, The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee, Pictures & Tears by James Elkins, Experiencing Art by Arthur P. Shimamura, How Art Works by Ellen Winner, The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton, and Collecting: An Unruly Passion by Werner Muensterberger. Other fascinating art-related reads include So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgaard, What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy, History of Beauty edited by Umberto Eco, On Ugliness also edited by Umberto Eco, A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar, Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art by Clive Bell, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, and Intentions by Oscar Wilde—which includes the essay “The Critic as Artist,” written in 1891, from which this book’s epigraph was lifted.

At some point the listener will lose track of the words altogether and it is then—especially when a single note is held for an impossibly long time, until finally there is a break just before the end, when the singer gasps silently for breath—that Poizat says people start to cry. Listeners sense that the singer’s voice had almost broken free of language, and at the same time they know that the voice can never break out of language. After the soprano catches her breath and sings the tonic note, the opera goes on in ordinary human language. Poizat thinks only angels can sing and still not make sense; if human singers could actually move outside of language the result would be a wild scream ing, something dangerously close to insanity. According to Poizat, all true opera lovers feel this, even if it’s unconscious, and all true opera lovers cry. Ordinary pole-faced opera fans do not understand that when the coloratura sings, it’s not a human voice they are hearing, but “the angel’s cry.

Because it was the fate of the damned to run of course, not jog, run, their piss on fire and their shit molten, boiling sperm and their ovaries frying; what they were permitted of body sprinting at full throttle, wounded gallop, burning not fat—fat sizzled off in the first seconds, bubbled like bacon and disappeared, evaporate as steam, though the weight was still there, still with you, its frictive drag subversive as a tear in a kite and not even muscle, which blazed like wick, but the organs themselves, the liver scorching and the heart and brains at flash point, combusting the chemistries, the irons and phosphates, the atoms and elements, conflagrating vitamin, essence, soul, yet somehow everything still within the limits if not of endurance then of existence. Damnation strictly physical, nothing personal, Hell’s lawless marathon removed from character. ‘Sure,’ someone had said, ‘we hit the Wall with every step. It’s all Wall down here. It’s wall-to-wall Wall. What, did you think Hell would be like some old-time baker’s oven? That all you had to do was lie down on a pan like dough, the insignificant heat bringing you out, fluffing you up like bread or oatmeal cookies? You think we’re birthday cake? We’re fucking stars. Damnation is hard work, eternity lousy hours.

(50.7) Questioner Thank you. Can you expand on the concept which is this: that it is necessary for an entity to, during incarnation in the physical, as we call it, become polarized or interact properly with other entities, and why this isn’t possible in between incarnations when he is aware of what he wants to do, but why must he come into an incarnation and lose memory, conscious memory, of what he wants to do and then act in a way that he hopes to act? Could you expand on that please? Ra I am Ra. Let us give the example of the man who sees all the poker hands. He then knows the game. It is but child’s play to gamble, for it is no risk. The other hands are known. The possibilities are known and the hand will be played correctly but with no interest. In time/ space and in the true-color green density, the hands of all are open to the eye. The thoughts, the feelings, the troubles: all these may be seen. There is no deception and no desire for deception. Thus much may be accomplished in harmony, but the mind/ body/ spirit gains little polarity from this interaction. Let us re-examine this metaphor and multiply it into the longest poker game you can imagine: a lifetime. The cards are love, dislike, limitation, unhappiness, pleasure, etc. They are dealt, and re-dealt, and re-dealt continuously. You may, during this incarnation begin—and we stress begin—to know your own cards. You may begin to find the love within you. You may begin to balance your pleasure, your limitations, etc. However, your only indication of other-selves’ cards is to look into the eyes. You cannot remember your hand, their hands, perhaps even the rules of this game. This game can only be won by those who lose their cards in the melting influence of love; can only be won by those who lay their pleasures, their limitations, their all upon the table face up and say inwardly: “All, all of you players, each other-self, whatever your hand, I love you.” This is the game: to know, to accept, to forgive, to balance, and to open the self in love. This cannot be done without the forgetting, for it would carry no weight in the life of the mind/ body/ spirit beingness totality.

With the motto “do what you will,” Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau’s Alector, Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda’s Justina, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville’s Fantastic Tales, Sorel’s Francion, Burton’s Anatomy, Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Amory’s John Buncle, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett’s Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann’s Tomcat Murr, Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey’s Doctor, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe’s ornate novels, Bely’s Petersburg, Joyce’s Ulysses, Witkiewicz’s Polish jokes, Flann O’Brien’s Irish farces, Philip Wylie’s Finnley Wren, Patchen’s tender novels, Burroughs’s and Kerouac’s mad ones, Nabokov’s later works, Schmidt’s fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard’s later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palinuro of Mexico), the fabulous creations of those gay Cubans Severo Sarduy and Reinaldo Arenas, Markson’s Springer’s Progress, Mano’s Take Five, Ríos’s Larva and otros libros, the novels of Paul West, Tom Robbins, Stanley Elkin, Alexander Theroux, W. M. Spackman, Alasdair Gray, Gaétan Soucy, and Rikki Ducornet (“Lady Rabelais,” as one critic called her), Mark Leyner’s hyperbolic novels, the writings of Magiser Gass, Greer Gilman’s folkloric fictions and Roger Boylan’s Celtic comedies, Vollmann’s voluminous volumes, Wallace’s brainy fictions, Siegel’s Love in a Dead Language, Danielewski’s novels, Jackson’s Half Life, Field’s Ululu, De La Pava’s Naked Singularity, and James McCourt’s ongoing Mawrdew Czgowchwz saga. (p. 331)

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