Richard Elman

If you're famous and supposedly wise, it's always a good idea to have a tape recorder in the room. Never can tell when you might spew out a line or two worth printing somewhere.

Now, past middle age, with so many books written I still care about and only a few still in print, I know the feeling of being overlooked.

I can recall photographs of Comrade Ulbricht being embraced by Comrade Brezhnev, which must have been like putting your arms around Grant's Tomb.

If I wanted to be Rimbaud, what was I doing in graduate school? Trying to stay out of the army, of course. Graduate study gave me a draft deferment. But I also knew I lacked erudition and polish and was often sunk in forlorn reveries.

My own father used to boast to me of biting off a man's ear in a street fight.

I jabbered too much in class about all the Russian writers whom I admired for being, among other things, uncouth and somewhat humorously melodramatic, such as Gogol and Dostoyevsky, just as it was in my own household when I was growing up.