No. 162. Blazing Cinders Last night he reread Blaise Cendrars' great novel, Moravagine (1926), one of his favourite books--and perhaps the greatest anti-war novel ever written. Cendrars (1887-1961) was born Frederic Sauser, but he soon changed his name to Blaise Cendrars because that entirely invented name seemed to evoke the invigorating, Phoenix-like idea of "blazing cinders." Cendrars' writing is never less than astonishingly inventive and lyrically outrageous: "--Turn your head a little," I would say to her. "There. Thank you. Now don't move, I beg you. You are lovely as a stovepipe, smooth and rounded into yourself, elbowed. Your body is like an egg on the seashore. You are concentrated as rock salt...." (Moravagine, Penguin Modern Classics, 1979, p.41). Early this morning he began a gigantic portrait of Cendrars. Wanting it rough, as the writer would have wished, he made the picture with black house-paint, sweeping and slathering it onto the white canvas using a push-broom.

No. 160: The Polychromed House. It was as rough as a brick. He had come to abhor finish, detail, nuance and restraint. He sought the honesty of disarray, of accident, of the orphaned incident, the unheralded error, the sublime vulnerability of mishap. backlash, crust and crumble, the beauty of that comes to you "like late luggage suddenly placed in your hands" (Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton University Press, 1999, p.16), being at play in the fields of spontaneity and excess. He knew, with a certain skewed joy, that His idol, theoretical architect John Hejduk, and his spiky, hair-raising House of the Suicide (1986) lay somewhere behind this cherished abject object of his. .

No. 159. Minyak. He made himself a toy elephant--only on a gigantic scale. It made him deeply happy, in a surprising, childlike way. He called his elephant Minyak, after his favourite elephant in the movies--the big sweet beast that nearly lowers its huge front foot onto the face of a supine Gloria Graham in Cecil B. De Mille's film about the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus, The Greatest Show on Earth from 1952.

No. 158. Weary Narcissus. He felt slavish. He wanted to make something, but he couldn't bear the the exalted idea of creativity. So he painted the simplest possible self-portrait. It showed him in his monkish mode.