I had friends visiting Monday and Tuesday: Dave Barber and Paul Wizynajtys. I have known David since Junior High School (that’s middle school for you younger folk). Now we are both middle aged men and have renewed our acquaintance. He and Paul have been a couple for about as long as Eileen and I and we have kept and lost contact with them over the years. Thankfully we are back in contact and they graciously came to visit. It is such an unusual pleasure for me to have conversation with someone besides my wife in which I can enter into with such ease. Friendship is truly a gift worth gushing about. And rare in my life.

Anyway, their visit was a total gas and all we did was sit around and gab and eat.

On another note, I think I may have found a new writer to follow: Brigid Brophy.

I was placidly reading her “Mozart the Dramatist” and began realizing how much I enjoyed her prose and ideas.

Sample:

“Once we let ourselves disesteem artistic intelligence, we are moving toward a disesteem of art….”

&

“The greatest (the most emotionally effective art) is that which achieves the most rigorously–indeed, ruthlessly–logical and intelligent working out of a germ which the conscious intellect and will can neither create nor justify. The purpose of art, like the purpose of life, is nonexistent (or at least does not declare itself): artist and biologist must respectively accept art and life as activities which are–and have no further justification. Art, in this respect, is aping life. It is setting up to be another instinctual, self-justifying, self-existent activity, an extra life, an organic growth on life.”

Both from “Mozart the Dramatist: the value of his operas to him, to his age and to us”

So this morning I poked around trying to find out more about Brigid Brophy. First of all, she’s dead. Damn. But secondly she wrote a ton of books. I was delighted to find this in one of the excerpts from a novel on Google books:

“History is in the shit tense You have left it behind you. Fiction is piss: a stream of past events but not behind you, because they never really happened.”

from Brigid Brophy’s “In transit: a [sic]heroi-cycle novel”

Brophy was this outrageous brilliant writer and I am very glad to have found her. But now on to cooking!