A potato as happy as a clam

Almost all I’m thinking of at the moment is making paintings. It’s such a privilege to make paintings the way I make them, a privilege that is also a pleasure—filling up space with the beauty of my mistakes, only having to be responsible to the magical silence of color. When I make a painting the way I make a painting I always feel that I’m the first abstract painter in the history of visual art.

But paint dries up. Words dry up too; the difference between painting and writing is that words either die that way, by drying up, or come to life in everlasting wetness.

The paint is drying on this President of ours; 8 days or until he becomes a cardboard cut-out or words on a banner held by a loyal adherent. The 4 years in which he’s been President have lasted far too long, political light-years, and it seems as if he’s now disappearing in slow-motion, sure however to leave the gum he chewed and stuck in a wad to the underside of the dining room table, to gross out the first one to touch it.

I’ve read “Madame Bovary” once again. I hadn't realized from previous readings what shrewd political commentary it is, a 19c recasting of “The Prince” in the form of fictional realism. It’s neither really a woman’s book or a man’s book; it’s an animal book, the story of inescapable animality. Pigs, cows, oxen, birds, ducks play crucial roles in the telling of the tale. The first time Emma ‘does it’ with the rich landowner Boulanger they’re out riding horses in the woods, and stop for a coital interlude. The rural as milieu; in a speech given by the mayor of the village of Yonville at the region’s annual agricultural fair, he says, “you have realized that the storm of politics are truly more to be feared than the disturbances of the atmosphere.”

The lesson, if there is a lesson—to do things that make you happy and don’t hurt other people.