Some random thoughts:

-it is never too late to be a great writer but remember Sontag-like you have to be deadly serious and pretend to yourself something or other is important.
- it wasn't till I turned 50 that I realized I was deluding myself and was au fond a proletarian in the Marxist sense of not owning a scrap of the means of production. All that education crap was just that -- obfuscatory bullshit to silence intellectuals...or smart people.
- you can rise above prole financial status if you have Mosbacherian or Pamelaharringtonian focus on turning on men by being a vamp. (How tedious)
- I threw away Alistair Cooke's book in Asheville NC because it was too heavy to carry and the bland rationality of this lucky-focused- man gave me an inferiority complex

Five days in the western Carolinas enough to try the soul of any man. Spartanburg destitute like Dubuque, Iowa. The Biltmore estate in Asheville pure Disneyland as the 'resort', Grove Park where we stayed. More disturbing the observation that segregation still exists in the South; there is no mixing of the races and the blacks understandably hostile to whites. Such a difference from the North!

Reading Adorno always provides some solace for the critical soul. In 1944 he wrote that movies and radio "are just businesses made into an ideology to justify the rubbish they produce." Today the poor man would have been driven to madness.

We really have to get out of Iraq. Hawking: anyone who talks about his IQ is a loser. Turner: Christianity is for losers. Now there's a best seller. The more one thinks of the Jesus myth the more bizarre and sadistic it seems...and that goes for most of Western Art from Duccio (hell before him) right until the Enlightenment, when a few saw the light of reason.

Today's news: Lincoln was queer and a child actor wrinkles his brow and BECOMES Howard Hughes. The media has descended to dumbness unthinkable but have to admit we love the Kerik Scandale. What a buffoon. Actually why blame the media? It's the audience, soooooooooo many of them, that is increasingly barbarous and uneducated.

Much as I try to Like the Observer it defeats me every time with its cute high school approach to culture (hey we're all part of the in-crowd in the locker room). It is rather like Arthur Carter's sculpture which I recently reviewed at Salander's -- all surface, very much the "inspired" amateur's apprehension of form.

Book critics agog at new De Kooning bio. Why would anyone in their right mind want to own or even look at these demented smears? This is not art, not even the art of the naif and amateur, this is madness and pure crystalline social pretension.

I had dinner with a friend from the West Coast who is intensely gullible and swooned over MoMA and DeKooning and all those thoroughly ridiculous post-Duchampian "artworks". She is however a scientist with a desire to be au courant and art is always a part of Herculean social ambition. It has all made me think I should paint again and create objects for barter which is what art largely is. In the absence of Cellini cups collectors must settle for what they can get.

For the record. I have always been fond of saying that collecting is rather like peasants hording potatoes inthe Thirty Years War.

I used to raise funds for The Nature Conservancy, now it seems that it is rather an anti-democratic organization, i.e. alot of too rich people trying to preserve land so their too rich descendants can walk and fish and ride there. The rest of the country or the world, given the new economies, will never have the right to earn a living from that land.

What is the point of Cultural Literacy? I must score in the 99 percentile, but it has contributed little to the quality of my life except some intellectual camaraderie with the famous names of the past, long dead. Shaw: "Your first responsibility in life is not to be poor."

Actually after one minute's rumination I have concluded that the importance of Cultural Literacy is ultimately Marxist; we who have been educated wear it like Montezuma's headdress to flaunt our superior class status.

Does anyone really give a second thought or care about what three critics thought about paintings 100 years ago? It is weirdly obscurantist, which is precisely why I never finished my doctorate a thousand years ago. I am re-reading Vision and Design and Fry the master of the trio. BB a second rate mind and Clark a rung or two above but not thrilling.

One newsreader replaces another newsreader and it is big network and newspaper news, almost as big as the War in Iraq.

Ed Paschke died Sunday in Chicago. I knew him well and often wrote about his astounding paintings. One of the best artists of his generation, had he come to New York he would have been a megastar like that phony baloney Julian Schnable.