I stayed inside for most of today because I was waiting for the 

Big Rain to begin.  I am writing this at 4 o'clock, 

and the rain hasn't begun yet.  I made one trip

out of the house, to the airport, and stopped

on the way home for the pictures below.

SOMETHING BIG… The title of the piece in this month’s Harpers by Geoff Dyer is about the legend of the Watts Towers, that mysterious, gigantic sculpture about five miles south of Los Angeles.  I was a teenager growing up California when Sabato Rodia was fiinishing his work on the sculpture that became known as The Watts Towers.  He was a crazy old Italian man everybody around him thought… but he was actually an artist who went on working by himself on his sculpture even when people thought he was crazy… even when the city began to wonder what to do with the “thing.”  The city of L.A. tried to take it down, but the cables broke which they were using to try to pull it over.  Dyer says, “Rodia produced “something big” (Rodia’s own word) by dint of his own effort that went far beyond the scope of ordinary human achievement. When I was very young, I didn’t know what to think of Rodia’s towers.  Now I view them as a work of art, and I hope the towers are saved from destruction as they grow older.

I especially like the way Dyer ends his essay:  “Progress was made— incrementally as to have been imperceptible—as each day he climbed what he had built in order to build the as yet unmade.  Every day (the contrast with Sisyphus is crucial). it took a little more effort to ascend to the point where he could start work.  So his purpose was perhaps similar to that of people who climb mountains.  Maybe the only answer to the question of why Rodia build his monument is a negative version of Edmund’s famous answer to why he had climbed Everest: because it wasn’t there.”