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“... Twenty-eight years after his death, Marcel Duchamp continues to generate new readings of his life and work. Jerrold Seigel has absorbed eighty years’ worth of commentary and come forward with a reinterpretation in terms of Duchamp’s personal history. Noting that Duchamp ‘has become a kind of mythic presence in modern culture, a hero whose story we tell and retell for the sake of its exemplary lessons’, Seigel remarks that he ‘is said not only to have undermined the goal of seeking meaning through artistic activity, but also to have dissolved his own subjectivity as an artist ...”

“... The literary career of Isidore Ducasse, successor to Sade, Byron and Baudelaire and a model for Rimbaud, Jarry and the Surrealists, has been virtually a posthumous one. It has been chronically complicated furthermore by obsessions with the lacunae of his biography, as well as with the interpretation of the two names, Lautréamont and Maldoror, the first of which is a mystery and the second an enigma ...”

“... In 1973, the American writer Harry Mathews, who was then in his mid-forties, was living in Paris. He had been divorced by his first wife, Niki de Saint Phalle; the editor Maxine Groffsky, with whom he had spent the last 12 years, had recently left him to go back to New York; his two children had also gone. It was, he later wrote, a time when his life was ‘at an ebb, professionally and privately ...”

“... When​ Harry Mathews died in Key West in 2017, just shy of his 87th birthday, he was remembered as the first American member of Oulipo, the expatriate author of several experimental novels: The Conversions (1962), Tlooth (1966), The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1975), Cigarettes (1987), The Journalist (1994) and My Life in CIA (2005 ...”

“... OuLiPian author is a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape.’ Harry Mathews is the only American member of the OuLiPo, to which he was introduced by Georges Perec in 1972. He soon invented what came to be known as ‘Mathews’s algorithm’, a formula for arranging material based on ...”

“... to the Compendium (very gracefully translated by the Oulipo’s senior foreign member, Harry Mathews): ‘An Oulipian author is a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape.’ A year after sharing in the foundation of the Oulipo, Raymond Queneau published what remains to this day the purest example of its intentions, a ...”

“... act’. (The school insisted she see a psychiatrist or leave.)At eighteen, she eloped with Harry Mathews, later known as the only American writer in Oulipo, and they played a bohemian version of house: seeing two or three movies a day, eating crummy Chinese food, reading in bed and singing Edith Piaf in the shower together. They moved to ...”

“... square for the composition of his recursive novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller; a ‘Mathews algorithm’, named for its inventor Harry Mathews, consists of generating content by moving sets of words, sentences or paragraphs through serial permutations (a technique he used to derive the Montagnard ...”

“... He’s now in Spain with his wife and two sons. I don’t know under what circumstances they left. Harry Mathews, the first American member of the French writers’ group OuLiPo, is at the party. Harry confirms that a mutual friend of ours, an American writer, was wounded at being described in my book The Diary of a ...”

“... I tried to do an oil painting using my dick as a brush. Obviously the textbooks omit that one. Harry Mathews, a friend of Brainard’s, explained the concept to his fellow Oulipian Georges Perec, who composed his own Je me souviens (dedicated to Brainard), which was published in 1978, and the genre took off in France too. When Perec died five years ...”

“... Thomas Pynchon (whose interest in entropy, not to mention proclivity for paranoia, he shares), Harry Mathews, Joseph McElroy, Robert Coover and Don DeLillo. Often this distinction between Modernists and Postmodernists is artificial, and Gaddis seems to write in the gap between the two dispensations, between different orders of linguistic ...”

“... at its core himself, Ashbery, Koch and Schuyler; orbiting them were their friends Barbara Guest, Harry Mathews, Fairfield and Anne Porter, and Edwin Denby. Their social circles overlapped with Abstract Expressionist and New York School painters, and tendrils extended out into the worlds of ballet (it was the Balanchine era), classical music and ...”

“... sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or ...”

“... 1961 as part of a special ‘collaboration’ number of Locus Solus, a magazine they edited with Harry Mathews and James Schuyler. (It was here that I first came across Malley’s poems, nestled up against an audacious collaboration between Frank O’Hara and the French language.) Both Ashbery and Koch have included Malley in the curricula of their ...”

“... Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie Jacques, not to mention the pre-teen Julie Andrews – without ever being upstaged. In performance he would always hit the spot. The secret of his extraordinary popularity was his voice. His high-pitched giggles ...”