PERFUMED EXEGESIS AND GUILTY BLISS

Within the wide and divisive range of language-based, post-modern hybridized and allegorical works are the metonymical masterpieces of my good friend David Schoffman. Linguistically baroque with ornamental twists and cross-referenced rebus-like projections whose decentered subjectivity are but a sly and ironic ruse, David's work rewards only after extremely close reading.

In fact, his complicated and hermetic practice requires such close analysis and deep intellectual scrutiny few ever bother endeavoring at the task to begin with.

It's perhaps ironic that this skilled stylist of academic English prose is neglected in his own native country yet revered like a saint here in France. It is to the credit of his translator, Chanelle-Clanddi Bara that David's highly nuanced texts with their ingenious puns and double entendres are rendered so fluidly in a foreign tongue.

Nonetheless, my dear friend is embittered. He wants nothing less than the full appreciation of his American peers. He is frustrated at what seems to him as a debilitating opacity and an unhealthy distrust of what he adorably calls "Nietzschean perspectivism." In a recent exhibition at the Palais Fongus de Mer in Limeuil David presented a piece entitled Regressive Desublimation which seemed specifically aimed at his American detractors. Though it dealt primarily with generative schemes of perception and hyperbolic ideological consecrations, the allusions to the sub-sets of unambiguously American interpellates were as clear as they were damning.

And so to make ends meet and to amuse his restless and highly animated visual appetites, David, with chalk, ink, graphite and every other primitive tool of human handiwork, fills countless sketchbooks with lovely lyrical drawings.

He sells these under an assumed name and is rewarded for his efforts quite handsomely. Discretion and tact prevent me from betraying his secret in full but come this October, New York's Meier-Graefe and Meade will devote all of their 2000 square foot gallery to these charming, well-crafted baubles.

ARTIST FOR A NEW AGE

At one point, after reaching the infancy of his impending old age, my good friend David Schoffman decided to collect a compendium of his earlier indiscretions, examine the sum of his comic misadventures (of which there were quite a few), and turn them all, (some might say redeem them) toward some good (dare I say, commercial) use. He felt the need to create some sort of spectacular Gesamtkunstwerk, an extravagant porridge of verse, painting, prose, music, monumental kinetic sculpture and massive, high definition video projection in order to capture the wide range of his experiences and the profound depth his feelings.

Instead he started a blog.

At first it was quite successful, even viral, if I may play upon the theme of pestilence. His short vignettes were full of charming aperçus, self-deprecating ironic observations and tentative conclusions that resembled earlier great essayists like Shestov, Van Yost, Hazlitt and Montaigne.

Then suddenly David went dark. 

His essays, or to use the argot of current currency, his posts, became scurrilous streams of capricious vitriol, score-settling screeds of venomous, calumnous, even libelous invective and at times reached the depraved, rarefied point of menacing, thunderous intimidation. 

Of course, that was the point when they started to become really entertaining.

But alas, it was all so short-lived. After several lifestyle adjustments such as intermittent acupunture, the banishment of lactose, gluten and lard, an aqua-cycling/yoga class and a strict eschewal of Russian literature, David went back to painting his puny, insignificant pictures with their lovely colors and their cheaply thrilling plays of light and illusion.  

THE MYSTERIES OF ARTISTIC INSPIRATION

Los Angeles artist David Schoffman nurses a desperate need for reassurance. His Delphic exterior is merely a mask for his timorous, almost mousy disposition. 

I met my dear friend in Rotterdam a few weeks ago as he was preparing for his most recent exhibition. Even the title of the show betrayed his deep-seated insecurities.

Made up mostly of notebooks, post-its and clumsy sketches drawn on the backs of napkins, fax paper and ATM receipts the show is a case study in reticence.

Replete with elaborate graphic outlines of unconsummated projects, the show is like a dirge to the deferred, the delayed and the under-funded. What emerges is a sad portrait of a fragmented imagination that is more comfortable with failure than with hope.

Sketch for Immorality, 2009 (courtesy of the artist and Te Veel Swerts Gallery)

Dining out on a questionable reputation for clairvoyant genius, David is able to pass off these puny meanderings as nascent seedlings of potential revelation. (It should be noted that though much admired in Europe, Schoffman remains a marginal presence in his native Los Angeles). 

The credulous Dutch critics were duly cowed.

These past few years have seen a flurry of exhibitions both large and small from my over-productive pal David. While the pundits and academics parse through his every nuance, Schoffman consults with his over-taxed accountant, trying to catch up on his child support payments.

MIDDLEBROW IS THE NEW HIGHBROW

Editions Boyaux has recently released
La densité de mensonges, a riveting though often exasperating memoir by my dear friend David Schoffman.

David Schoffman vacationing in Cyprus, 2013

Why he chose to write this loosely chronological picaresque autobiography in French is an interesting question. (He is currently laboring over its English translation).

A private, guarded and openly misanthropic individual, David probably found it easier to be frank in a foreign language. His French is of the plodding and academic variety, more suited for a Citroën owner's manual than for a work of literary non-fiction. Luckily the Belgian screenwriter Brigitte Chimay Straffe (The Fourth Policewoman, Tchaikovsky's Armoire, Devils) worked tirelessly as his editor and walking Larousse. 

 

As the title suggests, much of the text should be taken with more than a grain of kosher salt.  
The frequently cited anecdote concerning the menagerie of pets seems dubious at best. Likewise the story about David's awkward "romance" with Louise Bourgeois. 

All in all the book is an entertaining read, especially for those unfamiliar with the foibles of artistic dissipation. Several European production companies are vying for the rights but David is wisely waiting for the English translation and the book's reception in Hollywood.

A WOMAN SCORNED

After decades of unambiguous unanimity, a fissure, a fracture and an irreconcilable set of bitterly contentious differences has destabilized the academic and critical communities beyond recognition. A new generation of scholars and specialists seem hell bent on reversing years and years of rock-ribbed canonical orthodoxy. Heading the charge is none other than Dahlia Danton whose recent reinvention as an independent critic and curator has left more than a few of her colleagues deeply skeptical if not outright suspicious.

Dahlia Danton in David Schoffman's Culver City studio. 2013

Like many a bolshevik before her, the first privileged targets of her merciless and wrathful revisions have been her closest friends. With hyphenated hyperbole she has called Ximena Lukacs an "anti-philosophical floosie," Moïse St. Pierre a "flat-footed, ham-fisted aesthetic technocrat" and her former protégé Spark Boon an "out-dated and out-numbered dabbler in antique bric-a-brac."

She saved her most venomous and malignant prose for my dear compagnon de route, David Schoffman. Comparing him to Ingres (whom she glibly described as "tight-assed), Danton contends that David dwells in an hermetic bubble where making art masquerades as a noble and ethical enterprise. She challenges what she calls "the metaphysical ballast that constrains his work within an artificial architecture of tact and reason."

She sites his grand project The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings as evidence for what she describes as "the loathsome onanistic artisanship where quality and depth act as embarrassing exercises in pitiable nostalgia." 

from The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings, no.76, 2013, David Schoffman

Danton famously wrote in a 2011 essay in the online journal Art(test) that "errors of regression under the shroud of formal significance are detached but never exempt from modernity." She seems to believe that by separating herself from her former colleagues she can successfully allude, in her own ouevre, the "shroud" of obsolescence.

I just think she's still mad at Schoffman because of his indiscreet dalliance with Orestia Shestov.

´Echec Déchet

My good friend David Schoffman is a wonderful raconteur. In fact, his story telling talents far exceed his limited gifts as an illustrator. This is both fortunate and tragic as evidenced by his latest literary venture, J'accuzzi, a lushly illuminated travelogue of south-central France.

The premise -admittedly, quite novel - is a lush, annotated tour across the vast network of thermal spa resorts of the Massif Central.

from J'accuzzi, by David Schoffman (Librairie Nouveau Déchets), 2013

From the hedge-row valleys of the Bourbonnais to the narrow gorges of Ardèche and Cévennes, Schoffman takes us on a cyclonic junket through the great furrow of the Rhône. From the mesa of Aubrac to the volcanoes of Auvergne, David describes in excruciating detail every resort and every amenity.

In a prose as luxurious as the casinos of Vichy, David captures everything from the optimistic Belle-Époque architecture of Néris to the austere Benedictine abbey of Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul. All along the way, he regales us with small portraits and illuminating vignettes of the eccentric people who frequent these oases of remedy and leisure.

While his watercolored images are in welcome contrast to the typically high definition digital imagery we've grown accustomed to in these types of coffee table publications their obvious aesthetic shortcomings hinder the work's overall effect.
 

from J'accuzzi, by David Schoffman (Librairie Nouveau Déchets), 2013

 Though I'm not entirely sure who the target audience is for this type of "book" it's interesting to note that the publisher, Librairie Nouveau Déchets, has already deleted it from its catalog.

BAMBOOZLED

On a recent trip to St. Petersburg, my good friend David Schoffman had the great good fortune to witness a milestone in modern art history. He was having tea at the Lagoda Rossi Café with the miniaturist Grod Bloch when Daphne Vhrozhinska of the State Russian Museum waltzed through the door. She was arm and arm with Los Angeles painter Dahlia Danton and both, in Schoffman's colorful retelling, looked stunning.

Dahlia Danton, St Petersburg, 2013

It should be remembered that Russian collectors seem to have an insatiable appetite for Danton's kitchy California confections and  her presence in St. Petersburg can hardly seem like an unlikely coincidence. As for her intimacy with the State Russian Museum's senior conservator - that is a different story. It seems that her expert eye and her fluency in Spanish made her a critical collaborator in Vhrozhinska's latest project.

The recently discovered Nido de la Víbora, Micah Carpentier's putative final work was undergoing a thorough cleaning by the nimble Russian restorer and Danton was called upon to verify the great Cuban's signature. My dear friend David asked to see the work - Carpentier and Schoffman had a warm and productive relationship in the late 1970's - though he was skeptical of the works authenticity.

Before you could say русский супрематизм, David was inspecting the 9 foot wide drawing, looking for hints of duplicity and fraud.

David Schoffman inspecting Nido de la Víbora, 2013

He didn't have to look very hard. 

As any art student will tell you Sakura Sensei Manga Markers come in an assortment of vivid, lightfast luminous colors. When they came on the market in 1989, they were an instant favorite among doodlers, Pokémon geeks and professional illustrators. Nido de la Víbora contains whole passages using these versatile markers.

My readers don't need to be reminded that Micah Carpentier was murdered in Havana in 1978.

 

ERROR IS BORN OF SEEMING

You don't have to be John Maynard Keynes to see that the People's Republic Inc. has traded the quaint quotations of Mao's Little Red Book for Gordan Gekkos Reaganite call to arms. And as my readers know all too well, there is no greater gauge of freshly coined arrivisme than an avidly superficial obsession with contemporary art.

Combine these two facts with my good friend's occult sense of opportunity and you get (pace John Adams)

Schoffman In China!

David Schoffman in a recent edition of the New Xinjiang Review

  He recently returned from a three week trip which took him from the far reaches of Shihezi in the northwest to the capital Beijing and finally to the pearl of the Pearl River, Guangzhou.

Officially he was there as an ambassador of sorts. appointed by Veronique Airys, the President's special liaison for international museum and library studies, to represent America at the annual Conference of Sense-Based Intelligence and Rhetoric in Hong Kong. (I kid you not, such a conference exists). In reality he was there pimping his declining career. 

He delivered a paper harmlessly entitled "The Self-Cartographies of Performative and Spatial Praxis," and though in substance it was a boilerplate of starched, salvaged and reconditioned aperçus, it was met with heated, sectarian controversy. Apparently, David's Chinese hosts were none too thrilled by his tiring use of the phrase "post-Marxist" as a lazy euphemism for anything that occurred anywhere in the world after 1989.

Though they basically left him alone during the rest of his trip they did attach to him a small, discreet surveillance team. 

[Note the arrows. The arrow on the upper left of the photograph points to a tiny camera fixed to the sign above a small souvenir shop. The other two arrows point to, what the Chinese lovingly call "undercover spotters."]

Tentative plans for an exhibition of David's work at Beijing's Bee Museum were summarily scraped. 

Pity.

He had already begun work on some pretty decent paintings.

Sleeping Buddha Sleeping, David Schoffman. Oil on Canvas, 2013

  

THE DRY BONES OF ENVY

As most of my readers already know, my native France, glorious Republique, light upon the nations, has just legalized same sex marriage. My personal thoughts on the matter are far from unequivocal. Though I fully support my gay brothers and sisters, I have a deep seated problem with marriage.  Any marriage - same sex, alternate sex, polysex, transubstantiative sex - whatever the configuration, I just don't cotton to the institution in general.

To my good, liberal friend David Schoffman, the issue resides much closer to the bone. David's twin brother Teddy, a Manhattan gynecologist, recently tied the legal knot with his long time partner, the famous Greek painter Zakkai Sophokles.

(from left to right) David Schoffman, Zakkai Sophokles and Dr. Theodore Schoffman

For David this is calamitous.

The inner voices of petty rivalry deafen David's will and leave him raging in a gulf of bottomless despair. His tangled covenant with his fellow artists is fraught with resentment. He compares himself with others and finds himself wanting. He is particularly antagonistic to painters.

Sophokles, to hear David describe him, is a blowhard of the first order. A tall man of average gifts, "the Greek," as David dismissively refers to him has successfully  parleyed a pastische of derivative, third-rate ideas into a respectable international career. 

Erga Kai Hemerai, oil on wood. Zakkai Sophokles, 2010 (Courtesy Danbury Contemporary)

With the diligent help of the D.C. based public relation firm, Ringold, Wringler and Froth (whose clients include Adihd Holbert, the recently disgraced lawmaker from the notorious 5th district of Nevada), Sophokles is packaged as the raucous genius and glittering visionary who parties hard with young, tinseled Hollywood starlets.

Schoffman tries to conceal his viperous envy behind a cloak of fraternal benevolence. His poor brother Teddy, whose practice thrives on fussy middle-aged mommies of New York's upper east side, finds in the Greek the wild exoticism he so sorely lacks.  The truth is, David can't stand seeing his nebbishy brother as a mainstay of the art world's A list.

Dahlia Danton with Dr. Teddy Schoffman at the annual Contemporary Crisis Silent Auction, New York 2012

  I sympathize with David who ever since the wedding has wallowed in a ditch of melancholy and doom.  He has become a hollow stump of inertia, a stagnant pool of lacerating inaction. He is but a third of the man he used to be.

But really, let's be honest ... Teddy and Zakkai do make a pretty cute couple. 

ROCKN' SCHOFFMAN

It may seem unlikely but my good friend David Schoffman was the proud custodian of a highly respectable singing voice. For a time, as a child, he even received professional training from the legendary Austrian voice coach Kira Gammelfleisch. While a student in the 1970's, he earned extra money singing light opera with the New England Chamber Society. He even entertained the possibility of turning professional but saw greater commercial opportunities in painting and drawing.

When I met David over 35 years ago he was the resident tenor in the a capella trio Shirley's Kitchen, a sort of "anti-Ramones" throwback intended as a critical poke at punk rock, the prevailing popular music among artists at that time.

Shirley's Kitchen (from left to right Schoffman, Joey di Sevilla and Armando Khan)

Together with Joey di Sevilla, or Joey D, a childhood friend of David's from the old neighborhood in Brooklyn and Armando Khan who went on to write the outrageous musical theater phenomenon "Khan Khan Boys," Shirley's Kitchen had a small but devoted following.

In 1980 they recorded "The Frolic of your Smile," an EP containing 7 original songs, one of which, "Let's Toss a Bit of Rice," went on to become the theme song of the now forgotten Harold Bisquit Comedy Hour from the Friday night line-up on the old NBC. 

In the land of Serge Gainsbourg and Johnny Hallyday, this would be inconceivable but there appears to be enough middle-aged, sentimental nostalgic interest in some parts of the U.S. to justify a reunion of this pathetic coterie of unembarrassed kitsch peddlers.

Shirley's Kitchen, backstage before their February 14th concert at The Golem Theater, Bakersfield, CA

  

That Schoffman has taken time off from his painting is an oddity in and of itself. That he is subjecting himself to the indignity of coaxing his parched, raspy voice into spirited reprises of minor hits like "It Ain't Fish I'm A Smellin'," "Baby I Got It ... And So Do You" and " I Have High Regard for Baudrillard But Lost My Nerve With Kierkegaard," is a shameful exercise in childish frivolity, acute narcissism and prolonged adolescence.

I just wonder what kind of deranged groupies these guys attract.  

CLOAKED IN COUNTERFEIT VIRTUE

Armenian/American poet Dovar Konerivian (1882 - 1937) who may or not be the author of the famous, now lost epic The Yipsilia Trees, was nonetheless a formidable influence on a generation of like minded visionary writers. His 1925 collection of sonnets, The Buried Bird, is a tour-de-force of Petrarchan innovation.

Dovar Konerivian, Oil on canvas, Faun Roberts, 1928

My friend and omnivorous reader, David Schoffman has taken it upon himself to recast the complete works of this difficult writer in paint. In spite of an already bloated docket of commitments, Schoffman could not help but be tempted by an opportunity to revisit in depth this beloved bard.

After an exhaustive search, Baglama Saz, senior archivist of the Jermuk Kanyon Staatsgemäldesammlungen has chosen 70 well-known international artists and assigned each one a small selection of Konerivian's work to interpret visually.  Dal Verach was matched up with the gorgeous sestina The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Fran Decossa chose the difficult Naked Boys with Poppy Pods and Dahlia Danton, true to form, will struggle with the voluptuously suggestive Vertummus and Pomona.

David Schoffman, another consequence of his (justified) obscurity, was overlooked.

 No matter. Nursing a contemptuous envy and sulking in what appeared to him as a travesty of low-brow misdirection Schoffman has decided to better his colleagues in an act of sheer, compulsive madness. He will apply himself to every single extant poem, including the drafts for the unfinished La Citella Romana.

 Betrothal number 42, David Schoffman, Dovar Konerivian

 As if we needed any more evidence, David Schoffman has once again demonstrated the truth of Andre Breton's famous opening lines from On the Road to San Romano 

La poésie se fait dans un lit comme l'amour
Ses draps défaits sont l'aurore des choses
La poésie se fait dans les bois *

I honestly feel bad for my dear friend David. He lives in a cloud of unrequited devotions. He is sealed in a nonexistent world of superfluous refinement. He is forever burnishing a fossilized ethic of high minded folly. He would truly be better off if read less poetry and watched more television.

 
 
 * Poetry is made in bed like love
Its unmade sheets are the dawn of things
Poetry is made in a forest

THE AVANT-GARDE IS WASTED ON THE YOUNG

I've been criticized lately for what has been perceived by some as a "fixation" (intérêt excessif) regarding the young art critic and curator Spark Boon. One reader, reminding me of an 'intérêt excessif' of recent American vintage called me a "bully," while another incautious subscriber had me publicly baptized as a "post-modern parvenu," (Journal of the Association of Art Editors,  Where the Meek Minds Dwell, Dorothy Pankaj, Spring 2013/ V. xxvi, No. 1). 

Conté crayon and watercolor on paper, Spark Boon, 2013

I feel that I am forced to respond.

The case of Mr. Boon is an interesting and disturbing one. After earning his masters at CalArts, the prestigious southern Californian powder keg of Delphic convolution, Boon made a minor name for himself curating the now justly forgotten New York exhibition Lyotard in Leotards: Transgender Meta-Narratives in an Age of Mechanical Self-Gratification.

His recently published masters thesis, Châtelet, Pandémie and Foucault and the Decline of Imagery in Post-Colonial France argued eloquently if not ponderously in favor of what he called "an imageless ur-art of perpetual subversion". Now, after meeting my good friend, David Schoffman, Boon has supposedly found religion in of all things, figure drawing. His very public Road to Damascus moment is a self-congratulatory mea culpa of titanic narcissism. 

Pastel on paper, Spark Boon, 2013

 His presumption toward continued legitimacy within the very discourse that he currently mocks is based on a slight and feeble group show at Brooklyn's Launch/Red gallery where he exhibited a few collages based on his studies of artistic anatomy. This type of ironic dodge is precisely why I dismiss both Boon and Schoffman as reactionary, recidivist Romantics clinging to the tired values of beauty and craftsmanship.

The Shoulder Girdle: Front View, mixed media on paper. Spark Boon, 2013 (Courtesy of Launch/Red, New York)

 

CARPENT TUA POMA NEPOTES

The apprenticeship of Spark Boon was a long and arduous one. Mentored by my pedagogically parsimonious friend David Schoffman, Boon was held at all times at an impregnable distance.

David Schoffman ( l.) and Spark Boon (r.). Location and date unknown

For his part, Boon's fawning obsequiousness verged on pulpy servility. He even took to emulating Schoffman's sartorial quirks and unmistakable speech patterns, complete with Brooklyn accent.  

And yet the young Boon managed to glean from the recalcitrant recluse many valuable ideas - specifically about drawing.

Mixed media on paper, David Schoffman, 2011

 Despite the obvious weaknesses in both character and native ability, the young man did, at times, eclipse the older artist. In his conceptual daring, his technical inventiveness and in the sheer volume and speed of his production, Spark Boon has shown a unique and disarming originality.

Tar and encaustic on prepared birch plywood, Spark Boon, 2013

It seems fairly evident that in Spark Boon the reluctant David Schoffman created a veritable monster.

IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT (OR THE IMPLANTATION DIP)

Sometimes what seems at first like the gentle surveillance of a curious fan turns out in the end to be an obsessive invasion of one's privacy. I've had my share of adoring followers, those foolish few who, indifferent to the protocols of socially accepted boundries innocently trespassed the exclusive acres of my intimacy. I've dealt with them all in different but similar ways (typically involving my friend Etienne Mendès-Gratin, préfet de police de Montparnasse). My American colleague David Schoffman has a much greater challenge in the wild, wild west of southern California.

David has a midnight stalker who, though still within the precincts of the relatively harmless, might possibly be upgraded to the category of the unhinged. He/she has within him/her the potential of destroying/upending the very foundation of Schoffman's already crumbling/disintegrating way of life.

Irrationally paranoid, David is terrified of the prospect of some third-rate, trust-funded, near-sighted graduate student stealing his hard-earned ideas. Combine that with an equally consuming fear of enclosed spaces and you have a plausible rationale for Schoffman's peculiar work habits.

You see, he paints only in the middle of the night (generally from 11:30 pm to about 4:30 am). He also keeps his ground level industrial studio door wide open regardless of the weather or the time of year. In this way he avoids the bustle of normal working hours with all its unrewarding disturbances. Put another way, he is able to completely evade reality.

Just imagine his astonishment when photographs like the ones reproduced here started appearing on websites like studiosLA.com and Today'sAvant-Garde.com.

Close-ups with telephoto lenses have already captured David concocting his oil painting glazes with their secret recipes. Hazy snapshots have substantiated the long held rumor that Schoffman uses magazine clippings to access images for his work. We now have documented evidence that he uses tracing paper, projectors, grids and graphite transfer sheets in order to compensate for his faulty draftsmanship. There is now incontrovertible proof that Schoffman's claim that all his materials are first-rate, lightfast, archival and ph neutral is patently false and misleading.

What also comes as a slight revelation is that despite his vehement denials, David's nocturnal routines are not confined to the making of art. 

GULLED BY GALLANTRY

It is a mixed blessing for artists well within the fluted straits of mid-career to be suddenly lauded by the young. Panegyric praise tacks a bit too closely to eulogy. Unequivocal valediction is more redolent of ashes and incense than the vital stench of sweat and sperm. I caution my good friend David Schoffman against callow critics bearing gifts.

The young Brooklyn wunderkind Spark Boon was in Los Angeles recently kissing the ring of one of the art world's greatest recluses. Picking paintings as if they were fresh strawberries, the flamboyant critic/curator (is that not a conflict of interest?) is assembling a retrospective of my easily flattered friend's work.

New York critic/curator Spark Boon reviewing work in David Schoffman's Culver City studio, February 2013

I've plowed this fetid field before. A few years back I was seduced by the fetching femme-fatale of academia, Orestia Shestov, into submitting to a week's worth of inquisitorial privacy probing masquerading as 'research.' Sure it was flattering at first to be grilled by a gorgeously bookish intellectual but it didn't take long for the entire ordeal to deteriorate into a catechism of recriminating innuendo.

Orestia Shestov, 2013 (photo courtesy of Plangent Press)

With a voice as commanding as a Cossack, Shestov accused me of all manner of artistic negligence and fraud. She cited the work in my 2004 exhibition, Croquis Salaces at the Musée
de la Ferraille Culturelle in Bordeaux as an example of what she called "classic retreads"- "paraphrases retravaillées de thèmes fatigués" - (Shetov speaks a beautifully nuanced idiomatic French albeit with a Alsatian accent). She latter published a none too subtle hatchet job in the widely read Hors de Propos, costing me innumerable sleepless nights where I plotted elaborate revenge fantasies.

All I'm saying is that Schoffman should be skeptical of the honey tongued flummery of budding, ambitious arts professionals. To them, old fossils like us are merely opportunities - thin pretexts for their own petty, parasitical aggrandizement.

Shestov made sure to feather my loins before she twisted the dagger into my throat. I just don't trust that character Boon. Just look at his moustache!