No.132. Blues in the Day. He hadn't totally forsaken his Art Train, though the ambitious project was rather in abeyance. Much of it, his locomotive and several luxurious appointed coaches, sat waiting on a siding. Yesterday, in a railroad reverie, made up of equal parts of regret and remorse, he began carving a chunky reminder-train out of a beautiful length of soft white pine. He hoped it might carry him back, talismanically, to the first hectic joy of his now almost abandoned undertaking.

No, 131. The Big Blow. His presentation of two identical fans in potential confrontation (see Tabletop Studio #130--Fandom) was enough to bring email prompts from alert friends and colleagues, all crying "Newton!" to him and muttering about actions and equal and opposite reactions. But these comments, clearly well-meant, were for him wide of the mark. Here, when the two fans were switched on, there was neither action nor reaction. There was, however, a beautiful mistral symmetry, the splendor of two electro-zephyrs whirring at each other, equal in power and force--a vectoral standoff. He stood watching the the two fans, transfixed by the beauty of their blades now gone to ghostly, angelic, virtual discs. He longed to throw himself between them, wondering whether he'd be blown about like an eddying scrap of paper in a gutter, or whether he'd be pressed into a wholeness hitherto unimaginable.

No. 130. FANDOM. Lately, he had grown interested in modalities of interference, of experiments in sell-cancellation. At one time he was going to hire two giant spotlights and place them facing one another, throwing the full klieg-power of their focused beams directly at one another It seemed to him there'd be a delicious futility to such an engagement. Now he was going to try this same oppositional, standoff idea to two identical fans. He would stand precisely between them and find out something about the sensation of being held, squeezed between two equal and opposite blasts of breeze. He wondered if indeed he'd feel anything at all?

No.129. The Green Fuse. The poem by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) had stayed with him all week. It was the first stanza in particular that he enjoyed so deeply, albeit in his despairing way. There was much in the poem he cherished::the phrase "my green age" for example (though he was no longer in it, chronologically speaking) and "wintry fever" especially (he was deeply into that, no mistake about it) The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever Inevitably, he wanted to act the poem out, build on it,. theatricalize it. So he commissioned a gigantic green vase from a amiable ceramicist he knew, hired a comely model and quickly arranged a little tableau in which the vase was the green fuse through which the "force" (nature rampant)_would drive the flower. The model would be the flower.

No. 128. Peas and Thank You. He was so fucking tired, and there was a lot worse in his heart than the "damp drizzly November" that had entered the soul of Melville's Ishmael, his favourite character in literature. He wanted to paint--sort of--but despised everything he deemed worthy of the act. Then he noticed the fresh peas in the kitchen, They gleamed and beckoned like jade. Afterwards--inevitably--he felt betrayed by his own guilelessness..