June 22, 2015

 Praying for a few random drops from an angry sky to turn into real rain.

 Steve and I were interviewed at WCQS this afternoon, so I went downtown early to renew familiarity with the hometown, a process complicated by the return of plantar fasciitis. Most things you can muscle through or ignore, but this you really can’t. My flat feet! Wanted leather dye, and did not find it. Wandered into the Grove Arcade book exchange, selected Truth and Beauty by Ruskin. When the clerk took my credit card, he said, “Are you local?”
    “Yes,” says I.
    “I have something to show you.”
    He dug around in his backpack and brought out a copy of The Glacier’s Daughters,” which had been recommend by Luke Hankin and which he is reading and which, as a used book expert, he had acquired from the Saint Louis Public Library when they let go of it. I’m sad that St. Louis is doing without, but the rest was a sweet coincidence.

On to Blue Spiral, which has the worst art in it I’ve ever seen there. Sticks and pale shreds of paper. Ugly blocks of clay. One guy cut up old school desks and framed the pieces and charged a couple thou each. I recalled as I climbed the stairs that I was John’s boyfriend when the place opened, was there for the grand opening, either thought of or approved of the name, and predate not only anyone now working there, but three or four of their predecessors back as well. I don’t know why that seemed important at the moment. Maybe because the art was so bad and my foot hurt so I had to find something–.  Bought frozen yogurt that claimed to be blueberry but tasted EXACTLY like the natural gas that comes out of the stove.

Ruskin claims on the first page of my very old new book that the apprehension of beauty is caused by God’s wish to have us react in that way to the things which he has prepared for us to delight in. It is the apprehension of things of which God approves. That view certainly retires the problem of subjectivity– which has falsified the witness of beauty for the last century. I probably believe it, too, in a way, though I would never present it exactly that way in class..