Smart Talk

These lunch-hour talks are always good and usually interesting, but they put a hole in my workday. Setting up tables and chairs then putting them away. Sara did a fine job, talking about the Carter painting. She actually had a chance to talk with Carter about it before he died. We got the history of the painting, then an interesting talk about certain compositional similarities with other paintings. The museum has the core of a Carter biography, letters, scrapbooks, photographs. I'm starting to get into it. Took a few minutes today to start reading the history of dolls. There's one in the British Museum, fifth century BC that has articulated arms and legs; another, 2nd century AD, about nine inches tall, carved from ivory, that's an incredible piece of work, also fully articulated. At the very beginning it's difficult to tell where the fetish objects (the various Venus and such) leave off and the dolls begin. The early stuff gets my attention, the rest of it, not so much. Several books ordered on library loan about the change from steam to diesel. Reading that the Fram was the first diesel powered boat, when was that, a couple of weeks ago, still puts a smile on my face. I love stumbling unto cool facts. A really cool fact can make up for an otherwise lousy week. On the weekends I mine for them, the ore is usually non-fiction, when I'm fact-checking something I'd made a note about. I shouldn't exclude fiction, I look up a lot of things that I read in fiction, so I'll know if it's real or not, given that we've circled that tree often enough, about the real. I could almost live within the confines of my library. But the truth is I require social contact, dialogue. The monologue runs full time in my head, a video with Dolby sound; you are, in fact, the most important person in the world. Show business. I'm just saying, I don't have a vested interest. You are. And I respect that, what you choose to believe. I might choose to believe something different, but it's just a matter of opinion. That pesky pink elephant. I don't mind what's not there, but I'm often disappointed when I allow myself to expect anything. The new guy, the volunteer/intern person, TR, is an interesting guy, a music composition major. We talked about bookbinding today, about how scores could be bound so that the pages could be turned and the leaves lay flat. Interesting enough that we went to the pub after work, drank a draft, talked about our past. Barnhart, the music guy, arranged this, you can see him, hanging from the rafters. He's in China now, with a glee club, when he gets back I intend to nail him to the wall. I am not now, and have never been, anything other than what I appear to be. Jeans and a tee-shirt, the guy sitting at the back, a Red Sox cap pulled over his eyes.