Tennis is not the only sport with skew angles. Pool has skew angles and spin and backspin. But pool is murk, pool is cramped in the dark.

Before Asya and I were married, we decided to keep a daily record of our lives. Of course we won’t keep it up. I do need a notebook journal record of some sort, and this may be it. Asya is like nothing I ever anticipated or even hoped for. She’s priceless.

I was so used to seeing his name in print that at first the obituaries did not faze me—the only odd feature was that new tag line, “dies at 83.” He had always seemed to me most fully alive, most present, in print. In person, especially in the last years of his life, he was often heartbreakingly unreachable. 

Yukio Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka on January 14, 1925 in uptown Tokyo. His father was the deputy director of the Bureau of Fisheries in the Agriculture Ministry; his mother, from a family of educators and Confucian scholars, was herself well-versed in literature. The family lived in a well-to-do neighborhood in a rented two-floor house with a houseboy and six maids, an unusual extravagance. But for the first twelve years Mishima lived downstairs with his grandmother in her sickroom, leaving the room only with her permission.

Louis Ferdinand-Céline was a general practitioner in the poor quarters of Paris. He was also highly sensitive and actually a kindly doctor according to my instinct as I read his angry accounts of the senseless suffering of some of his clientele. The sweet little boy coughing to death...the beautiful young girl bleeding to death...the old landladies long dead. 

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

The life of the Russian avant-garde author Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was every bit as absurd, as abrupt and as symbolically charged as one of his stories. The son of a populist-radical writer with religious leanings, he began a promising career as a poet in the freewheeling artistic scene of late-twenties Leningrad; he knew the great avant-garde artists Malevich, Tatlin, and Filonov, the formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky and the famous children’s authors Evgenii Shvartz and Samuil Marshak. 

I was almost fifteen. I was working at my first real job at a place called the Spudnut Shop, a doughnut store, in Union Gap, Washington, June of 1955. This very good looking young man walked in with

The sculptor Gustav Seitz has been living and teaching in Hamburg since 1958. He enjoys travelling and docs a lot of it. Seitz paid his first visit to Paris in 1928. At that time he did something which for a young and unknown artist was unusual: he called on Maillol and Despiau. That meeting with the classic modern French sculptors was more than a mere incident for Seitz. It had the effect of clarifying his own position.