Notes

Page 28: “The need for the new love …” is from “Wait,” by Galway Kinnell, in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

Page 72: “Not every clocktick needs a martyr” is from the poem “Turning to Look Back,” by John Woods, from Keeping Out of Trouble, Indiana University Press, 1968.

Page 81 and 121-22: The gorilla who uses sign language is Koko. Incidents cited are either from the author’s visit with Koko, or from documented exchanges and observations by Koko’s teacher, Dr. Francine Patterson.

Page 105: The artists referred to are Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar, whose conceptual art piece/poll was titled “The People’s Art.”

Page 112: “He opens a book at random and consults randomness,” is from the poem “Sortilege,” by Eric Pankey, from Apocrypha, Knopf, 1993.

Page 145: “Drawing is a racing yacht …” is from Robert Motherwell in “Thoughts on Drawing,” reprinted in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Stephanie Terenzio, Oxford University Press, 1992.

Page 146: “… to reassert himself in the face of …” is from Robert Motherwell in conversation with the author and in “The Place of the Spiritual in a World of Property” (later titled “The Modern Painter’s World”), and in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ibid.

Catherine Tatge’s film, Robert Motherwell and the New York School: Storming the Citadel, for the PBS series American Masters, was also a valuable reference.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Hempel is the author of Reasons to Live and At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom. Her stories are widely anthologized in the United States and abroad and have appeared in such magazines as Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and The Quarterly. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Bennington College and lives in New York City.