No. 148. Speedster. He enjoyed taking breaks from the demands of his epic constructions. A couple of days ago, he sculpted a 1920s racing car from plaster and yesterday he gave it three coats of heavy, midnight blue lacquer. His vintage speedster, which was of his own design, reminded him nevertheless of the photos he had seen as a child of Sir Malcolm Campbell's Blue Bird, which set the land speed record in February of 1927 by attaining an average speed, over two runs, of 174 miles per hour. Sir Malcolm had been one of his childhood heroes.

No. 147. The Slab. Yesterday afternoon, an 18-wheeler huffed hugely into his sculpture-yard and offloaded this prodigious tablet, this horizontal stele of a sculpture--actually, more a faceted crystal than anything as blunt as a slab. It was huge and looked as soft as cheese or salt-water toffee. It was a gift--an extraordinary gift--from the Fredericton, New Brunswick-based artist, Robin Peck--who, in his estimation, was indisputably the finest sculptor in the country. How to repay such kindness? A more difficult and far-reaching question would be how to acknowledge and repay such sustained morphological and metaphysical virtuosity?

No. 146. Measure for Measure. He loved measure and measurement, the idea if it, the doing of it, just the possibility of it. When T.S. Eliot's self-pitying homunculus, J. Alfred Prufrock, complains that he has "measured out his life with coffee spoons," he doesn't get much sympathy from him. He can see JAP's regretting the coffee-spoons business, but the measuring of a life, well that seems all to the good! Know thyself, inch-by-inch, for real accuracy and insight. Waiting to be measured for a coffin is waiting too long.. Remember how, when you were a child, your parents used to measure you and mark your current height on the wall? Well let's have more of that! In his studio, he had a big collection of rulers, meter-sticks, tape-measures and other monitors of shape, direction and duration.. He played among them, like a kid at a playground.

No. 145. Trackless Wastes. After side-trackimg himself for months, he was visited this past week by an inescapable urge to return to the construction of his gleaming, beckoning, exquisitely visionary Art Railroad--upon which he had already lavished vast amounts of time and money. As a way of easing himself back into the project, he built a 1/4 scale model of an British-style double-ended caboose, which he saw as a potential office car, a place for storing his documents., a rolling file cabinet. His wife, Althea--who was frequently alarmed at the cost of her husband's personal railroad in hours and dollars spent--was upset at what she saw as a useless model, an object, however attractive, that was not at all practical. He couldn't make her understand its meaning as a talismanic, edge-of-the-wedge, return to full-scale construction. No matter how he argued the point, Althea continued to think it frivolous.