Yesterday, on NPR, a bit about the Kirghiz, & their epic poem (banned under the Soviets) which everyone quotes & many know by heart: their culture & their history... There's a place to be a poet in... [1992]

"...to gain essentially the same powers, the Renaissance mage strove for moral purity (,) but the modern magician embraces the non-rational." --T M Luhrman, Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (1989)

Thought of writing a novel as more like a symphony. Instead of plot, there are themes on which you embroider. This is most apparent when you read several books by one author. The ostensibly different subjects tend to vanish, in recollection. Leaving--motifs.

I am such a creature of words. While prowling around the back room upstairs i came upon a receipt from a Tibetan importer (for B--'s store) & one of the items listed was a "phurba". A magical dagger! It was a real thrill to see the word there, albeit somewhat tarnished by the price (only $22?) he had paid for it.

"I found the software in Assembler, Fortran, and Cobol*, the most ancient of computer languages. Might as well have been classical Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit." --The Cuckoo's Egg
[*3 of the 5 i know.]

Today, free day at the [Seattle] art museum, i watched an hour long video on Francis Bacon. I was appalled to hear how he uses the unprimed side of the canvas--technically unsound--but it suits his brooding sense of mortality (as does his gambling). I still admire his work tremendously. Almost alone it seems to capture our late twencen reality (rather than its myths about itself): & afterwards, as i stood before the one painting of his they have, i reflected that my own paintings would be no real loss to the world, since one of his contains everything i've tried to say in all of mine. ...it occurred to me that Bacon's point of view (if something so visceral & nonintellectual can be so designated) is Jacobean, without the moralistic tone. Whereas most contemporary painters begin frivolously, from theory & career considerations, or from ego's frolics. Bacon identifies with his subjects so completely that it becomes impersonal...--but not in our usual hackneyed sense of "objectivity"; rather, feeling suffering & decay & degradation as the essence of life itself, or what (i would say) life has become for us, in the absence of myth & creative meaning. And the only transcendence, apart from sex, is the fact of the painting itself... My one criticism of Bacon, then, is that he depicts a world in which his paintings are impossible. Or (as he does show them!) a world without art's power. --a mistake all too common since humanism has lost its moral authority-- But after all, that's the world most people do live in!
...one night here they had on TV some show that was like real life cop stories--straight documentary footage--for the entertainment value of its morbid disorder. I can easily imagine, in front of every TV set, a whole tribe of Bacon grotesques, fixated like lampreys on their own imminent ruin.