Chapel Hill in the 1980s, Part 2

Drawing a little more from a 1984 journal with entries mostly written just before or after an art history class, here's a little about hanging around Franklin Street and the Ackland in Chapel Hill, and something about an apparently homeless dude I nicknamed Zuccone, after Donatello's eerie statue of the prophet Habakkuk pictured below -- there was a resemblance in demeanor and I was, after all, taking an art history class.

July 31st Tuesday [1984]. Still raining, still dreaming. "Can I borrow six cents?" Zuccone asks in a friendly, leisurely Western manner. I offer him thirty-five cents, all the money I have on me, but he declines it politely, counting out four pennies in exchange for two nickels. His weird gray eyes are friendly, respectful. "That's all I need," he says, "Thanks." He huddles within a gray blanket wrapped around his shoulders. We go in opposite directions: he goes down the street, I go up the street.

Now I am just walking around, having finished at the Ackland looking at Rodin's Head of Balzac and two other bronzes for art history. I like the Balzac, it captures his little rat head well. Balzac. I like his novel The Wild Ass's Skin [La Peau de chagrin, 1831], on the whole, better than [Le] Père Goriot [1835], although Goriot has the young Rastignac & villain Vautrin -- what a villain! Rastignac is a cool anti-hero, but he gets his in the end of Chagrin.

 

I probably didn't know it at the time, but this particular journal was nearly done for. There are two more entries, one a sort of existentialist treatise and the other, setting goals for the future -- some kept, some discarded. The existentialist outlook remains. 

Today's Rune Fertility.