I've been in pain for a couple of days and not very productive. So I was thinking about Cole Porter (1891-1964), one of the very few musical composers who wrote his own lyrics (Irving Berlin was the other famous one). Porter's legs were badly damaged in a horse-riding accident, but not amputated. He lived in pain for the rest of his life and addicted to painkillers, and wrote his masterpiece, "Kiss Me, Kate", which won the first Best Musical Award. Pain doesn't stop genius. I guess I'm just lazy.

And that makes me think of a line by Marcel Proust (1871-1922) who, you remember, lived in a cork-lined room (for a while, maybe about three years) because of his asthma . Proust said, "Art is not forgiving." - or was it allows for no excuses? Oh, dear...wait till I check it out....

And then everything went black. Not in me, but in my computer - the battery died on me. So I plugged it in and now it's 3:40 a.m. and I picked up where I left off, reading about Proust and his life and career and reading wonderful quotations but I couldn't find the one on art. I remember being very dismayed when I first read it. I was trying to write (for a living) and be an artist at the same time and it wasn't working out very well. My "masterpieces" are unproduced, some of them even written but stifling in a filiing cabinet drawer or a box or the time machine attached to my desktop.

I'll write a different blog tomorrow. It's tomorrow already - anyway, tomorrow is another day and I'll think about it then. About what?

Hush.