149

Anyway the circus is much more interesting than all that--it was from North Korea. Lighted figures looping and doing things that emphasized my feelings of stiffness and sterility, occupied as I am with the project of describing something even as I do it. That's the switch *I* can't turn off.

You should have seen the hair on the guys in the box seats! The performers did all sorts of things, human catapults, trapeze, balancing on several rolling around canisters, a tower of them--for that stint even the other performers came out to watch.

The children all had glow-sticks and glow-rings and between acts when it darkened they looked like fireflies. This is the thing, I have it in museums too--I saw the Mona Lisa in 2005 and was more amazed by the spectacle of humanity, jostling and flashing their gadgets, then the smallish painting inside the glass box. I have trouble getting psyched about things in glass boxes for very long, mainly because it all seems arbitrary and rehearsed. It' a privileged object. It happens to have been preserved. It's interesting, I guess, but I'm too aware, as someone who writes, of how full of shit anything written is, and this includes historiography. Writing is something crafted regardless of forum, I truly believe this. And if all writing is crafted then all writers, not least historiographers, can be described as "crafty" maybe.