I used to drive over to New Orleans to see Larry and Hazel.

Mostly, we'd talk.

I remember talking to Larry at the Jazz Fest, 20 years after we both dropped out of the PhD program in anthropology at Tulane, about how we'd been right to question the dogma they were pushing, how they'd been wrong, how the students who went along to get along had been wrong, and how no one but me and him seemed to know that they were wrong and me and him were right.

One year they invited me to the Passionate Visions of the American South show at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where they were members, and we laughed at the text accompanying the paintings. The curators were very serious about the text accompanying the paintings.

In fact, you could have eliminated the art and the text would have gone on with the show. The cattle show would have gone off with great éclat.

That was the first time I saw the work of Howard Finster.

He had painted, in a painting, something like, "The painter Howard Finster is discovered by the dealer and collector Sydney Janis."

The epigraph to UNTITLED: A LIFE UNDER ERASURE (SOUS RATURE) will be:

Postmodernism must be deconstructed.

Motto on sundial.

You don't see mottoes on sundials much anymore. The last one I saw was at The Shadows, in the camellia garden, next to a variety called Lady Hume's Blush.