they have a telephone and a martini / one each

Roy R. Behrens, Embattlement (©2026), digital collage

Donald Barthleme in "Brain Damage" in City Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970—

The Wapituil are like us to an extraordinary degree. They have a kinship system which is very similar to our kinship system. They address each other as "Mister," "Mistress," and "Miss." They wear clothes which look very much like our clothes. They have a Fifth Avenue which divides their territory into east and west. They have a Chock Full o' Nuts and a Chevrolet, one of each. They have a Museum of Modern Art and a telephone and a Martini, one of each. The Martini and the telephone are kept in the Museum of Modern Art. In fact they have everything that we have, but only one of each thing...They can conceptualize but they don't follow through. For instance, their week has seven days: Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, and Monday. They have one disease, mononucleosis. The sex life of a Wapituil consists of a single experience, which he thinks about for a long time.

don't go all the way / get off prior to blackpool

Roy R. Behrens, Clockwise (©2026), digital collage

ANON [English woman from the 1920s about preventing pregnancy] We were on the bus and Harold knew the conductor and he asked Harold if we were married. He said "Don't forget, always get off the bus at South Shore, don't go all the way to Blackpool." That was how they kept the family down.

what old age is really like / illusion & despair

Roy R. Behrens, Automaton (©2026), digital collage

Doris Grumbach in "What Old Age Is Really Like" in The New York Times (I November 1998), Op Ed Section—

The most lamentable loss in the elderly spirit is the erosion of hope. The climate of the old country is pessimism. Oscar Wilde's mother wrote: "Life is agony and hope, illusion and despair, all commingled, but despair outlasts all." 

Frank Lloyd Wright / two sets of kitchen tools

Roy R. Behrens (©2026) digital collage

Edgar Tafel, About Wright: An Album of Recollections By Those Who Knew Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: John Wiley, 1993), p. 259—

It was arranged that we [members of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen Fellowship] would arrive [at the home of Wright's cousin, Richard Lloyd Jones, in Tulsa, Oklahoma] in time for early dinner, see the house [which Wright had designed], and camp there in our sleeping bags for the night. After dinner Mrs. Jones took us around in a group, telling about living in the house: its excitement, the flow of spaces, and experiences of each season with light pouring in in different ways. The tour ended in the kitchen, where she made her final pronouncement: "We have two sets of kitchen utensils—one for cooking, of course, and the other to catch the water from the leaks."

Opening spread of chronology in Roy R. Behrens, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mason: Architectural Heart of the Prairie, with photograph by Carol M. Highsmith. 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton on US immigration

Roy R. Behrens, Cloud Seeder (©2026) digital collage 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (diary entry), in Theodore Stanton & Harriot Stanton Blatch, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton As Revealed in Her Letters Diary and Reminiscences, Arno & The New York Times; New York, 1969. (Originally published by Harper & Brothers Publishers in 1922)—

I am much worked over the infamous Geary bill against the admission of the Chinese into the United States. How my blood boils over these persecutions of the Africans, the Jews, the Indians, and the Chinese. I suppose the Japanese will come next. I wonder if these fanatical Christians think that Christ died for these peoples, or confined his self-sacrifice to Saxons, French, Germans, Italians, etc.?

he paced the deck with his bantam swagger…

Digital Montage / Roy R. Behrens © 2012

John Dos Passos, The Best of Times: An Informal Memoir. New York: New American Library, 1966, p. 20—

He was particularly fond of crows. He said their caw-caw was really ha-ha. They were laughing at us. He would dance his little dance and pace the deck of the Gaivota with his bantam swagger and laugh back at the laughing crows: "Ha haha."

more info

pus-tilence / the god of war is drunk with blood

Sherwood Anderson in H.H. Campbell, ed., The Sherwood Anderson Diaries, 1936-1941. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987—

Went with Katy and Mims to a German place in Philadelphia [in 1936]. Danced. It was hot and I took off my coat. They saw my brown shirt and cheered. They thought me a Nazi.

•••

William Blake—

The god of war is drunk with blood,

The earth doth faint and fail;

The stench of blood makes sick the heav'ns;

Ghosts glut the throat of hell!

•••

Anon—

There is a pus on the Presidency.

art prank / replacing old sockets with new ones

Roy R. Behrens, Deplorable Strikes ©2004

Jeffrey Vallance, quoted in Pranks, an edition of Re/Search (February 1988), p. 115—

One day I walked around the Museum looking at paintings and noticed that underneath them were all these wall sockets. So I bought a number of wall sockets and painted stupid little scientific scenes on them, like microscopes and dinosaurs and cows and slabs of butter. I showed up at the Museum in a janitor's outfit, with a name tag and a toolbox, and started replacing the old wall sockets with my new ones. I had friends in the hallway who would whistle every time a guard came near—then I'd go somewhere else. Sometimes I had to move furniture out of the way, and if ladies would be sitting down I'd have to say, "Can you please move? I have to fix this wall socket." Nobody caught me. I sent out a bunch of invitations, just like a real show, and people came down. I made up some nicely illustrated programs, and sent one to the Museum to tell them about my project. I thought I'd get some sort of reaction...but I never heard from them...they hushed the whole thing up, and the wall sockets remained there for about two years.

more info

have shriveled testicle from mumps / can't marry

Roy R. Behrens, Levitation © 2004

Danny Ballow, quoted in Elizabeth Stone, Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us (New York: Times Books 1988) p. 208—

It began with him [my father] telling me about how he had the mumps, and then leaps forward to my parents' courtship by mail when he was in America and she was still in London. He told me that during the course of the correspondence, he wrote, "I think I have to tell you something. I have a shriveled left testicle, and I can't marry you because I'm not able to have children."

He sealed the letter and mailed it, and then he thought, "Oh no, what did I do?" He went to the mailbox but the postman had already come and taken the letter. So he went down to the central mail office in Brooklyn...and they said, "Well it's somewhere in all these sacks." My father said, "I've got to get it." And he went through the sacks. I have this image of my father going through millions of letters. And he found the letter! He tore it up, and he didn't send it.

end of performative writing / writing for voice

Roy R. Behrens © 2005

Above Exhibition flyer for works by Mary Snyder Behrens (2005).

•••

William H. Gass, interviewed in Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, eds., Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 158—

I think contemporary fiction is divided between those who are still writing performatively and those who are not. Writing for voice, in which you imagine a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and old-fashioned and dying. The new mode is not performative and not auditory. It's destined for the printed page, and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you to read in speed reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see it flowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed...By the mouth for the ear: that's the way I'd like to write. I can still admire the other—the way I admire surgeons, broncobusters, and tight ends. As writing, it is that foreign to me.

info online

slow art / deep-running skill and doggedness

Roy R. Behrens (©2011), Barbarian Seville. Digital book montage.

Robert Hughes in "A Bastion Against Cultural Obscenity" [a speech delivered at Burlington House, London] in The Guardian, June 3, 2004—

What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in ten seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks into something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.

See also "Art, Design and Brain Research: Non-Scientific Thoughts about Neuroesthetics" in Gestalt Theory (Vienna), 2013.

I mean the thing you use to rub out mistakes

Altered book montages, Roy R. Behrens © 2004

Bessie Head [South African novelist], "Some Happy Memories of Iowa" in Paul Engle, et al., editor, The World Comes to Iowa (Ames: State University of Iowa Press, 1987), pp. 86-87—

American English isn't the British English that is spoken in southern Africa. I walked into a stationery shop and said to the man behind the counter, "I would like to buy a rubber, please." The man said: "We don't sell them in ones. We sell them in threes." I said: "But I want only one rubber." The man became hostile: "But I told you we only sell them in threes." I said: "All right, I'll take three then." The man walked to the back of the shop and returned with a small packet of prophylactics that he handed to me. He had such a peculiar look in his eyes that I thought he believed I was a prostitute who had suddenly invaded Iowa City. Half fainting with shock I struggled to explain, "I mean the thing you rub mistakes out with." "Oh," he said, "you mean an eraser."

awaiting the shared use of a set of false teeth

Altered book montages, Roy R. Behrens © 2004

Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (New York: Summit Books, 1991), p. 1.—

[My paternal grandfather] was a great teller of jokes, typically without preamble, to trap you into thinking you were hearing about some real event. One of these horrified me so much [as a child] that I have never forgotten it. A Scotsman (I was still so young that I had not heard about Scotsmen being supposed to be mean) took his wife out to dinner. Both order steak. The wife started eating hers at top speed, but the man left his untouched. "Something wrong with the steak, sir?"—" No, no, I'm waiting for my wife's teeth." I had not then heard of false teeth either, and imagined the living teeth being torn from the woman's jaws on the spot and inserted into her husband's.

milkman comes up the walk and pauses to talk

Altered Book Montages / Roy R. Behrens © 2004

Susanah Mayberry, My Amicable Uncle: Recollections About Booth Tarkington (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1983), p. 4—

Early one morning during this period he [Booth Tarkington] went for a walk after an unusually long writing session. He met the milkman coming up the walk and stopped to talk: ''You been up all night?" he [the milkman] asked. ''Yes," I answered. "What you been doin'?" he went on. "Working," said I. "Workin'!" said he. "What at?" "Writing," said I. "How long?" said he. "Since yesterday noon," said I. "About sixteen hours." "My God," said he. ''You must have lots of time to waste!"

i believe in the imaginative life and love to talk

© Mary Snyder Behrens

Above Mary Snyder Behrens, Edo Wan (1988). Textile collage with machine stitching. 38h x 45w. Private collection.

•••

These are the concluding words in Sherwood Anderson’s foreward to his autobiography, as published in Ray Lewis White, ed., Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs: A Critical Edition, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969, p.29—

I am an imaginative man. I believe in the imaginative life, its importance and would like to write of that. My readers, therefore, those who go long with me, will have to be patient…

…I shall tell the tale as though you, the reader, were a personal friend. We are walking together, let’s say, on a country road. The road follows a stream and the day is pleasant. We are unhurried. We stop at times to sit on a rock beside the stream. We arise and walk again and I talk.

I keep talking, love to talk. I am telling you that this thing happened to me, that that thing happened.

Do you wish I would stop talking, let you talk? Why then, dear reader, go write your own book.

we do not first see, we define first and then see

related online video talks

Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922, p. 81—

[In Art as Experience, John Dewey] gives an example of how differently an experienced layman and a chemist might define the word metal. "Smoothness, hardness, glossiness, and brilliancy, heavy weight for its size…the serviceable properties of capacity for being hammered and pulled without breaking, of being softened by heat and hardened by cold, of retaining the shape and form given, of resistance to pressure and decay, would be included" in the layman's definition. But the chemist would likely as not ignore these esthetic and utilitarian qualities, and define a metal as "any chemical element that enters into combination with oxygen so as to form a base."

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

regarding montages and vision

 

new poetry book with Mary Snyder Behrens art

It has been a pleasure to learn today about the upcoming publication of a new book of poetry by American poet J.D. Schraffenberger, titled American Sad. Its projected publication date is February 2024, but copies can be pre-ordered now, at an advance sale discount price. The author is editor of the North American Review and professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. More book information, examples of the author's poems, and ordering information can be found here.

Full disclosure: Personally, I am especially pleased that a major artwork by my wife, Mary Snyder Behrens, as been chosen by the author for use on the cover. I live with this work, since it has been on view in our dining room for years, and I pass it multiple times in the course of a day. It is large, for the scale of a dining room wall (48h x 30w x 4d), encased in a plexiglas cover, and so multi-faceted and visually provocative that one cannot help but be drawn in. Titled American Canvas II, it is one of several comparable-sized, related works that she completed in 2002 (can it really have been 21 years ago?).  All of them are mixed media, dimensional compositions of cast-off detritus from our farm, bits of junk that farmers buried years ago (in the manner of amateur landfills), and which, during heavy rains, rise up again to the surface—and, in some cases, cause us harm. 

I for one could not be more delighted that the writer J.D. Schraffenberger has found some strand of common ground between the art he makes with words, and the visual verse that Mary constructs.

Walter Hamady // book artist and paper maker

Above (and below) Title frame and other single frames from a new 20-minute video talk about Walter Hamady (1940-2019), prominent book artist, paper-maker, and collagist, who was well-known as a teacher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. 

Having earlier taught in Milwaukee for ten years, I had become aware of his work in the 1970s. Because of his liking for Ballast Quarterly Review (which I had founded in 1985), he and I began to exchange spirited letters (along with a mix of enclosures), once or twice or more a month. 

This led to collaborations of one kind or another, eventually resulting in exhibitions, published essays, and an archive of his artist’s books. I saved everything, even all the envelopes and mailing containers, in part because they were always addressed to mutilations of my name, such as Corps du Roy, Rhoidamoto, Trompe L’Roi at Labbast, Royatolla, and so on. This continued for more than a decade, perhaps to the mailman’s amusement.

Looking back on what I have, I have now produced a video talk (a brief memoir-like tribute) titled BOOK ART: Walter Hamady’s Books, Collages and Assemblages, which can be accessed free online on my YouTube channel.

hearst exhibition / pandemic montages / video

Roy R. Behrens / Montage Exhibition

 

exhibition video

Phänomenal / Journal of Gestalt Psychotherapy

I could not be more pleased to find that four of my recent montages (above and below) have been published in the current issue of Phänomenal: The Journal of Gestalt Psychotherapy (2/2021), published in Vienna.