CAAF: Loose notes

“Usually his wit was austerely pure, but sometimes he could jolt the more cynical. Once we were looking at a furnished apartment that one of our friends had just rented. It was overbearingly eccentric. Life-size clay lamps like flowerpots remodeled into Matisse nudes by a spastic child. Paintings made from a palette of mud by a blind painter. About the paintings Randall said, ‘Ectoplasm sprinkled with zinc.’ About the apartment, ‘All that’s missing are Mrs. X’s illegitimate children in bottles of formaldehyde.'”
Robert Lowell, “Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965: An Appreciation”