Notes In The Margin

Also featured in "Vittorio The Vampire", by Ann Rice, is Fra Filippo Lippi, a painter who lived in the first half of the 1400's in Italy. I get the feeling, more and more, from Rice, that she is trapped in this genre by her fans and by her publishers, but that she really wants to write historical fiction about the Renaissance. This book, which I just finished, was really good, except for the parts that were about vampires. Rice is a wonderful writer. It's quite a shame that she has to spoil it by writing about vampires. Her knowledge of the Renaissance is quite extrordinary, and her descriptions of the period painters are sufficient to make me want to go to see these works in person.

Anyways, Filippo winds up being a major character in the book, although he never appears personally in the action, except by way of a recounting of a glimpse of him by a younger Vittorio.

And, by the way, his paintings are indeed beautiful.

And so it goes, and so it goes,
and you're the only one who knows
(Billy Joel, And so it goes)

or, as Vonnegut observed in SH5 ...

... so it goes.

Last night, while leaning over the arm of my chair to reach behind it to get a power cord, I slipped, fell on the arm, and I think I cracked or bruised a rib. It is quite painful, but only when I breathe, or lift something, or stretch. So I'm trying not to do that.

The headlines on CNN this morning are exactly the same ones that were there all day yesterday. This is very comforting, as it means that nothing horrible happened yesterday. No news is, indeed, good news.

After several weeks in which I've received one desired mail message (ie, snail mail) and drifts of undesired, and downright objectionable mail, I am finding, increasingly, that I am glad when I receive junk mail. At least it's not a bill, or a letter from the IRS, or yet another letter from a lawyer. This is in sharp contrast to email, where I am getting increasingly angry with junk email, which has moved from a minor annoyance to a major source of indignation. How dare these folks waste such a huge portion of my bandwidth for their highly objectionable advertising campaigns? And why is the system set up to permit them to do this with impunity. It really steams me. But, of course, you've heard all of this before.

But when I go to the mail box, and can discard every item that I pull out, I sigh with relief that there's nothing more that I have to deal with. Perhaps if I checked my snail mail every 6 minutes instead of once a day, I'd feel differently!