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back into their mouth, regenerating it, and then they’d never have to think about buying food or eating it. And they wouldn’t even have to see it—it wouldn’t even be dirty. If they wanted to, they could artificially color it on the way back in. Pink.” (Thus “Pink Sam,” a page from Andy’s homemade book from the 1950s, 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy. Thus his credo of artistic production: expel an image—cut it out—and color it.) He alludes to Mrs. Warhola’s surgery in his Before and After paintings, which show a woman’s face before and after a nose job, a piece of the body cut out. “Cut, cut, cut nice,” as Julia put it, praising the surgeon’s and the son’s art. The seam or slash between before and after—temporal­ division­, severing the woman’s two images—is itself a cut, as, in a film, one image yields to the next.
    Julia’s operation made waste real to Andy. Her surgery gave him the idea for Pop. (Andy’s version of Pop has more to do with Mom’s productions than with Pop’s.) As Warhol and Pat Hackett put it, in POPism : “Pop Art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside.” In the Pop body of Andy and Julia Paperbag, inside made a scarifying emigration to the outside, and then camouflaged itself in another color.
    Andy Paperbag went to Carnegie Tech and majored in pictorial design. During his first year he flunked out, not because a girl hit him, as on his first day of kindergarten, but because of his traumatic relation to the written word.
    The adult Andy Warhol became a prolific author and a memorable aphorist (“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”); these successes have obscured the fact that he could not write. The inability went further than the mere dependence on ghostwriters (unexceptional­ in the annals of celebrity authorship) would suggest: he avoided ever writing anything down. I found virtually no correspondence­ in his hand. There are exceptions—postcards­ he sent to his mother when he was traveling around the world in 1956:
    Hi im alright
    im in Rome now
    its real nice here
    Bye
    me
    im OK
    im in Japan
    Dear mum
    I got you letter
    im OK. everything
    is real nice
    here. i write
    again
    bye
    These are letters to a woman whose command of English was minimal, and so he could have been deliberately using a home language for her sake. But almost every sentence in his hand is full of bizarre spelling errors (as well as an affected, arty predilection for the lowercase i ). Clearly, he was dyslexic, though undiagnosed (I assume dyslexia diagnoses were rare at the time). Some of his errors: “vedio” for “video,” “polorrod” and “poliaroid” for “Polaroid,” “tai-land” for “Thailand,” “scrpit” for “script,” “pastic” for “plastic,” “herion” for “heroin,” and “Leory” for “Leroy.” He had a hard time with simple English. (He was, as well, left-handed, which may have compounded his sense that writing manually—rather than by dictation—was a humiliating obstacle course.) Biographers have suggested that sympathetic female classmates in college helped him compose his papers. But these friendly collaborative efforts weren’t enough to see him through the required course in “Thought and Expression” at Carnegie Tech, and he failed his first year.
    He managed to be let back in, however, and to win art prizes; he was recognized as an eccentric talent. The school’s curriculum was not devoted to helping little Jackson Pollocks discover their ids. Warhol’s most prescient work at that time was the painting The Broad Gave Me My Face, But I Can Pick My Own Nose . A large head on a spindle-thin body receives a pinkie up the left nostril: pleasurable