Drop cloth

Just back from the labyrinthine Hillside Hardware with neighbors Wendy and Alisa getting paint and accessories for our back-porch painting/barbecue tomorrow. Stopping off at Wild Oats on the way home, I bought some greens and the checkout person asked “How are you?” I hesitated before saying “OK.” Actually I’m sick and immediately went into a hacking fit.

It looks like rain.

I read Emilie Clark’s Letters to Mary Ward the other day. What sticks in my mind now is her preference for rankness and decay in nature. A dried, curled leaf is more interesting to her than a fresh young one. Perhaps it’s because in the spring the components of nature are more uniform. Each leaf on a tree is virtually like every other leaf. Soon insects eat them into individual designs. At the end of the season, they brown and dry and curl and fall, concluding unique life histories.

Supposing I might as well continue reading about visual art, I began the catalog of the SFMOMA Eva Hesse show from a few years back. I know next to nothing about Hesse. Apparently, however, she was also interested in the transformation of materials, including their decay over time, which has created conservation problems for those caring for her work.

Whole ages are preoccupied with decay.

On the other hand, after the (fine) McSweeney/Lamoureux reading at the Plough and the Stars on Sunday afternoon, during which an intense thunderstorm passed over, Dan Bouchard was struck by the cleanness and freshness of the colors in that post-deluge, afternoon light. I don’t think he would have preferred colors filtered through stagnant chemical smog.

“Two approaches to the same problem,” says Eric Blore in Sullivan’s Travels.