“Did you have any female mentors?” she asks. / “Female what?” / “Like, teachers, or other woman painters you admired.” / “Shouldn’t that be mentresses?” I say nastily. “There weren’t any. My teacher was a man.”

In this scene he seems to generate money out of itself, like Aristotle's exploitative usurer or chrematist.

, New York Review of Books, 2001, p.279: they crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, rivel them up like old apples, make them as so many anatomies […]

Now, look here, my son, I said; you're a kid and a know nothing.