Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

I would make it my own, turn it into a home, a studio, as we used to say, a magic word. I gave the super fifty dollars, bought a sterilized secondhand bed, and moved in. Now, I said to myself, I can start to live. I was always starting to live, another beginning, a final beginning.

Sex was the last thing such a girl gave a man, an ultimate or ultimatum. It was as much a philosophical decision on her part as an emotional one and it had to be justified on ethical and aesthetic grounds. To sleep with a man was the end of a long chain of behavior that began with calling yourself a liberal, with appreciating modern art—sex was a m

I hadn’t yet realized that loneliness was not so much a feeling as a fate. It was loneliness that walked the streets of the Village and filled the bars, loneliness that made it seem such a lively place.

Until we became sophisticated about it, sex was everything Freud said it was.

Schapiro said that when van Gogh loaded his palette with pigment he couldn’t afford, he was praying in color. He put his anxiety into pigment, slapped color into its cheeks. Color was salvation. It had to be thick, and tangible.

To open a bookshop is one of the persistent romances, like living off the land or sailing around the world.

Besides, he talked so well—it would be like punching literature in the mouth.

The closest I can come to it is to say that sex was as much a superstition, or a religious heresy, as it was a pleasure. It was a combination of Halloween and Christmas—guilty, tormented, clumsy, unexamined, and thrilling. It was as much psychological as physical—the idea of sex was often the major part of foreplay. A naked human body was such a ra

In a way I was just as inhibited as they were by my upbringing, which condemned me to a combination of boredom and desire.