Manipulation

Reading Mary's letters, how revealed she is in how she manipulates, especially her mother. It's like a game of chess. She should have married either the lawyer or the doctor, Jim or Bob, but instead chose Cartie (as she referred to Clarence) because he was touched with something different. And it is something different, that slight psychosis that drives you to express yourself with paint on canvas or words on a page. You could be out drinking with friends or bowling, or huddled in a tree-stand, waiting to ambush a deer, any one of ten thousand things. It's interesting to me, the way the mind comes to focus. I'm never sure what will draw my attention, fucking top tray of the job-box, I was gone, what can I say? What I said to D, when he was leaving early, to pick up some boards to put up some shelves in the kids' rooms, was that the job-box was now a beautiful thing, so organized that it brought tears to my eyes. Something about everything in its place. Make a note. Make it short, because I hate transcribing. I never learned to type, so transcription is an enormous effort, hunting, and pecking, as I do. A new dusting of snow, everything is white, one shade or another. White is never really just white. It always leans in a particular direction. Warmer or cooler. Why would I call the word white into question, spare me a whale, unless I meant something? Maybe it's just the punctuation, nothing to do with the actual words. You kidding me? I rarely remember what I was thinking, the exact thing, though I can often curl around it. Pull the wagons into a circle, defend the core. I've lost track of what day it is, and I'm not sure I care. Is that Murphy's on draft? With a Paddy back, I'm almost Irish. One more cigaret and one more drink. I'm way into tomorrow and I don't have a plan. Sunday, right, I don't need a plan. Wasily Kandinsky's first abstract paintings (which were musical scores) drove Schonberg to atonality. I happened to be looking at some Kandinsky and that was a footnote, which took me online, and back to a book TR had lent me (and had left on his desk); and that sequence led me back to the essay I was reading last night about the banal, which led back to the museum library where I spent several hours looking at Pop Art, which I don"t even like that much. There was a British guy at Janitor College, Farnsworth, that had a still in the basement of the laundry building, on the leeward side of campus. Mostly he made an apple brandy, from the local ciders, that he would push through a second fermentation to around 14% alcohol, then distill several times to around 100 proof. He aged this stuff for thirty days in used wine barrels and sold it in whatever canning jars he could find. Everyone knew he did this, he was a legend: he took twelve years to finish his degree, then retired to the Keys. He loved Pop Art, had several Kandinsky's, and a Warhol in the front hall of his underground house. This was back when 'being green' meant you had a hell of a hangover. He died in a curious explosion that seemed to involve a Tesla coil and a propane tank, the authorities labeled it suicide. Anyway, that's the first place I encountered Pop Art, and it struck me as stupid even then. I read back over this post, trying to pick up the thread. I'm afraid I lost it.