Klaus Kertess

The story’s “contents” are spun from actual events: in August 1973, Klaus flies to Los Angeles to meet his then-partner, Lynda Benglis (referred to as “Her”), who was to drive cross-country with him back to New York. Instead, he drives back alone, lost in a disputatious reverie circling around language, Gertrude Stein, modernist literature, mapmaking, and the act of writing.

What I loved most about Klaus was his old-world elegance. 

You may have heard the sad news that John Chamberlain passed away last Wednesday morning. 

Michael Goldberg was our hero. Larger than life, he sauntered up to the plate and took on the mantle as our all-American myth because we needed a hero.

There is a lushness to Kertess’s prose, a soft belly that belies its toughness.

1) Pindar, 12th Pythian Ode (ca 490 BC). The specific flute Athena is credited with inventing, here, is called the Phrygian flute; it is a double flute thought to have been formed by her out of stag’s bones or horns.

He was sitting in the steam room of the gym; he had one left finger up the ass of the guy next to him. No, two fingers. 

The letters looped lackadaisically, loosely tumbling into and out of configurations of words, some times legibly, some times not. 

Maybe this time he would find it. Then he could be through.

Daily the city became more difficult to imagine. 

“My escape is to some kind of unexpected place that’s magic; and I think painting can make that magic place.”

Had he seen it, or was it merely a smear on the windows momentarily claiming form?

When his father died, he became more capable of controlling his name.

He was at a crowded airport, in July of the year 1970.

Dream. Dream. Dream machine. Air plane. Vector of suspended animation. Planes. Plane images. Transport of the paradise present.