Touching Base

My physical condition and the drugs I take for it have been leaving me bedraggled lately. Feh. I'm hoping to be able to write more in the coming week.

One wonderful (and that is exactly the word I mean) thing did happen this week. A kindly member at the Magic Castle allowed me to examine and even slightly operate what I in my limited experience consider one of the loveliest of modern illusions. The sheer beauty of its mechanism equaled the beauty of its effect. Even my first awkward attempt made me catch my breath. The sheer wonder of the experience is something I would like to put in a box like one of Joseph Cornell's. Delightfully and Cornellianly (?) enough, this encounter took place down in the Museum, the walls of which are full of recessed, *boxlike,* displays.

Yesterday late in the afternoon, with this very thought in the back of my head, I started rallying enough to find my copy of Charles Simic's *Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell.* I had picked it up a while back and looked into it casually, but now I read it and LOVED it. It is a physically lovely book of Simic's poems upon the artist, with photos of some of the works mentioned. I commend it to your attention, especially if you like Joseph Cornell's work. I imagine it would be pretty intriguing if you are not familiar with Cornell too. (And if you are not familiar with Joseph Cornell, then rush off this very instant to look him up and prepare to be intrigued, enchanted and confused. Go! Go!)

A better art scholar than I am could say if what I have just produced in this "New Post" window, that you now read in your own box of flickering light pixellations, is the prose equivalent of some element of how Cornell's boxes work....