ABSTRACT
The beasts seem to have begun with the “Octoped” drawn on a concert program from Ames, Iowa, in 1945. The originals are on various scraps of paper and leaves from a loose-leaf notebook. The “Bouldingisms” consist of a stable of a rather different color. They have been collected from the author's writings and from recollections of speeches by the author's old student and friend, Richard Beilock. The “Bouldingisms,” of course, come not out of doodling at meetings, but out of “serious” writing. But the state of mind out of which they come is not perhaps radically different from that which produces the beasts and the ballads. Since 1954 have done most of the author's writing on the dictaphone, and one gets into a frame of mind also out of which phrases emerge from the never-never land of the mind, and are, as it were, discovered rather than contrived.
