I can’t bring myself to pick up a paintbrush lately, I don’t know what is wrong with me.

(Old stale paint scraped off a palette and smeared on a white cloth. Sony DSC-HX1.)

As For Violating a Privacy… – page from Moleskine sketchbook. Pencil, collage, etc. 

There’s a quote here from a Leo Steinberg essay (“Objectivity and the Shrinking Self”), where he’s taking another art historian to task for choosing to glide over the issue of Michelangelo’s homosexuality as if it had no bearing on his life or art. The historian’s argument was that some things should be kept private. But societal taboos change and people are private about different things anyway. For some people, sexuality isn’t a big deal but they are reluctant to talk about death or spirituality or money or the teaming of socks with sandals. Example: I feel sleazy about watching people write or sign things, because to me there is something intensely personal about the way someone holds a pen. But I’m fairly ok with other people’s nudity. (Not my own. I shower in the dark.)

In case it’s not legible, the quote reads:

As for violating a privacy, who can say where an ultimate privacy lurks? Centres of privacy shift. 

Found a lovely, horrible, mouldy second-hand book, dating from at least the twenties, which turned out to be a panegyrical biography of Irish revolutionary and poet, Thomas Davis.

I love the strange marks and annotations all over these pages, like the febrile scribblings of a lunatic trying to decipher some imaginary code. And I don’t know why, for example, the word “opinion” was apparently not in the owner’s vocabulary but “temperance” posed no difficulties. A terrifying spectre of oppressive Catholic dogma glimpsed through the veil of time? Or a meaningless quirk of literacy, just a rumple in the fabric of one weirdo’s personal lexicon, who knows.

Poet-revolutionary is one of those occupations that seem to have fallen by the wayside. Like buccaneer, or haberdasher.