Jupiter, not wanting man's life to be wholly gloomy and grim, has bestowed far more passion than reason--you could reckon the ratio as twenty-four to one. Moreover, he confined reason to a cramped corner of the head and left all the rest of the body to the passions.

I think Arthur Tress had an interesting perspective on the lack of passion in contemporary art:

"Perhaps why so much of today's photography doesn't 'grab us' or mean anything to our personal lives is that it fails to touch upon the hidden life of the imagination and fantasy which is hungry for stimulation. The documentary photographer supplies us with facts or drowns us in humanity, while the pictorialist, avant-garde or conservative, pleases us with mere aesthetically correct compositions--but where are the photographs we can pray to, that will make us well again, or scare the hell out of us? Most of mankind's art for the past 5,000 years was created for just these purposes. It seems absurd to stop now."

I was in a liquor store in a less-than-ideal world when I spotted a bottle of Baron Saint Jean, a cheap French wine. I bought a couple of bottles, which each cost ten pennies more than a bottle of Baron Romero, a cheap Spanish wine.

I drank the wine, then contrasted the two barons' offerings. They were each pleasant in their own way. One tasted like grape-flavored lighter fluid; the other tasted like bad port and kerosene. The trouble is that I can't remember which was which.

I wonder what Baron Romero will make of my experiment?

The other day I was at an art school examining the glass display cases; they were much more interesting than the students' work displayed in them. I saw something I'd never seen before: the cases had no locks at all. I decided to report the lapse in security to the night watchman.

The guard wasn't concerned.

"No one'll steal that shite," he said dismissively. And for emphasis, he added, "It's shite, man, complete and utter student shite."

I had to admit that, unlike the students, the old man hadn't spent years in the art school without learning anything.

"I'm sorry, pal, but it is not a dog-eat-dog world," she declared. "It is, in fact, a gerbil-eat-gerbil world. And you, pal, are such a gerbil."

She reported that her antagonist, befuddled by her superior grasp of biology, then accepted all of her unreasonable demands.

What a great anecdote! It makes me wish I'd paid more attention during my science classes.

What really surprised me, though, was the revelation that Canova originally waxed the statues with a delicate, pink wax to enhance the fleshlike qualities of the stone. It reminded me that Edward Weston and the f64 disciples used to wax their prints. (I think they used automobile wax, but I'm not sure.)

I suggested that Jane carry on both traditions by waxing her Canova prints. I wasted my breath.

"It was a stupid idea then, and it's a stupid idea now," she said. "What is it with you and stupid ideas, anyhow?"

Beats me. I'm just lucky, I guess.

Many bottles of wine and too few hours of sleep later, the only trace of the learned discussion is a confusing diagram.

Is the sky vertical or horizontal? Probably.

"You may be lazy, but you're not getting the full benefit of your inactivity because you're not shirking your duties" she suggested, and then added, "if you have any duties, that is."

"Take Tuesday afternoon, for example," she said. "The entire board of directors was expecting my report on what to do with a medium-sized company that we bought a month ago. The board was waiting for my recommendation, and, of course, every poor schmuck at the company was waiting for even a hint of what might happen. Brilliantly, at the last minute, I phoned in an obviously phony excuse and then went to a baseball game. I savored every beer that afternoon. Now that's sloth."

I suppose she had a point, although I didn't appreciate the bragging that her inactivity was superior to mine. I may be naïve, but in an ideal world there would be no hierarchy of laziness.

"She was generally a decent person, but that never stopped her from being indecent on necessary occasions."

What a tribute!