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AUTHOR’S NOTE
That was the first I had ever heard of the Emirate of Salibaar, which I can’t find anywhere in my Encyclopaedia Britannica. I can only find a desert town by that name, population eleven thousand, about the population of San Ignacio. Circe Berman says it is time I got a new encyclopedia, and some new neckties, too.
“I’m not sure I do, either,� he said. He screwed up his face, “I think—I think—it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call “personality,� or maybe even “pain.”�
“To anybody who can drawn,� I said, “the idea of putting the appearance of anything into words is like trying to make a Thanksgiving dinner out of ball bearings and broken glass.� “Then perhaps you had better resign from this course,� he said. Which I did.
Slazinger, high as a kite, says that every successful revolution, including Abstract Expressionism, the one I took part in, had that cast of characters at the top—Pollock being the genius in our case, Lenin being the one in Russia’s, Christ being the one in Christianity’s. He says that if you can’t get a cast like that together, you can forget changing anything in a great big way.
