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Tonight I will go night shooting. The YMCA locks its doors at 11pm and a night watchman is supposed to answer the door, but I am warned he makes rounds and may not hear the bell (that means he's asleep). My stomach's slightly upset, the restaurant food is awful. I ordered boned breast of chicken for dinner, making the mistake of not inquiring exactly what that was. It is something quite different from what you get in a New York restaurant. I got some twisted pieces of white meat heavily breaded and deep fried, with a side of freeze dried potatoes and gravy, that same canned gravy that must cover every restaurant in America to infinity.

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind; - but when a beginning is made - when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt - it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.

Jane Ausin. Emma. beginning chap. 29

Oct 6 1975 - Chicago

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To share pleasure is to weaken it. De Sade

...a subtle, even offhand insistence on the ordinary, on things otherwise taken for granted. (his work)... invites contemplation, and contemplation induces revelation. Blink, and it all seems ordinary again.

book review of Walker Evans by Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone Nov. 20. 1975

In a work of art, the single event must be seen as an element in a universally significant pattern: the area of the pattern actually illuminated by the artist's vision is lousy, of course, more or less limited, but one is aware of its extending beyond what we see far into time and space.

WH Auden p421 Forwards and Afterwords

Cows are very fond of being photographed, and, unlike architecture, don't move. Ocsar Wilde

Countess: But why drink so much?

Antonio: That's all that distinguishes us from the beasts, Madame - drinking when we aren't thirsty and making love whenever we feel like it...

Beaumarchais: Marriage of Figaro p150 Penguin Trans.