To Pin Your Hopes Upon

Fine Art, That Exists For Itself Alone, Is Art In A Final State Of Impotence. If Nobody, Including The Artist, Acknowledges Art As A Means Of Knowing The World, Then Art Is Relegated To A Kind Of Rumpus Room Of The Mind And The Irresponsibility Of The Artist And The Irrelevance Of Art To Actual Living Becomes Part And Parcel Of The Practice Of Art.

It's Every Woman's Tragedy, That, After A Certain Age, She Looks Like A Female Impersonator. Mind You, We've Known Some Lovely Female Impersonators, In Our Time.

For All Cats Have This Particularity, Each And Every One, From The Meanest Alley Sneaker To The Proudest, Whitest She That Ever Graced A Pontiff's Pillow — We Have Our Smiles, As It Were, Painted On. Those Small, Cool, Quite Mona Lisa Smiles That Smile We Must, No Matter Whether It's Been Fun Or It's Been Not. So All Cats Have A Politician's Air; We Smile And Smile And So They Think We're Villains

And, Oh God, In My Misspent Youth As A Housewife, I, Too, Used To Bake Bread, In Those Hectic And Desolating Days Just Prior To The Woman's Movement, When Middle-class Women Were Supposed To Be Wonderful Wives And Mothers, Gracious Hostesses.... I Used To Feel So Womanly When I Was Baking My Filthy Bread.

My Paternal Grandmother Would Not Light A Fire On The Sabbath And Piled All Sunday's Washing-up In A Bucket, To Be Dealt With On Monday Morning, Because The Sabbath Was A Day Of Rest--a Practice That Made My Paternal Grandfather, The Village Atheist, As Mad As Fire. Nevertheless, He Willed Five Quid To The Minister, Just To Be On The Safe Side.