Dear Gorham: I have been in a house up in “Little Italy,” a section of Sicilian immigrants very near our house where one can get good three-year Chianti,--and incidentally am feeling very fine as Sunday evenings go. _There_ is the place to enjoy oneself, in the family parlour of a pickslinger’s family with chromos on the walls that are right in style of Derain and Vlaminck. Bitch dogs and the rest of the family wander in while the bottle is still half empty and some of the family offspring. _Tristram Shandy_ read to a friend with a Spanish Bolero going on the Victrola sounds good in such a milieu! I never should live without wine! When you come here we shall make many visits to this charming family. You will like my classic, puritan, inhibited friend Sam Loveman who translates Baudelaire charmingly! It is hard to get him to do anything outside the imagination,--but he is charming and has just given me a most charming work on Greek Vases (made in Deutschland) in which satyrs with great erections prance to the ceremonies of Dionysios with all the fervour of de Gourmont’s descriptions of sexual sacrifice in _Physique de L’Amour_, which I am lately reading in trans. I am glad you like Lescaze’s portrait of me. He _has_ an athletic style. Your criticism of painting et al strikes me as very exact and appreciative--at least, as far as I am able to justly criticize it. He hates Cleveland with all the awareness of the recent description of this place accorded in the last _Masses_ or _Liberator_, as I understand. Just now I am in too banal a mood to give sympathy to anything. At times, dear Gorham, I feel an enormous power in me--that seems almost supernatural. If this power is not too dissipated in aggravation and discouragement I may amount to something sometime. I can say this now with perfect equanimity because I am notoriously drunk and the Victrola is still going with that glorious “Bolero.” Did I tell you of that thrilling experience this last winter in the dentist’s chair when under the influence of aether and _amnesia_ my mind spiraled to a kind of seventh heaven of consciousness and egoistic dance among the seven spheres--and something like an objective voice kept saying to me--“You have the higher consciousness--you have the higher consciousness. This is something that very few have. This is what is called genius.”? A happiness, ecstatic such as I have known only twice in “inspirations” came over me. I felt the two worlds. And at once. As the bore went into my tooth I was able to follow its every revolution as detached as a spectator at a funeral. O Gorham, I have known moments in eternity. I tell you this as one who is a brother. I want you to know me as I feel myself to be sometimes. I don’t want you to feel that I am conceited. But since this adventure in the dentist’s chair, I feel a new confidence in myself. At least I had none of the ordinary hallucinations common to this operation. Even that means something. You know I live for