'At the top-top-top-of everything'

 Yesterday was a day of incessant heavy rain and blustery wind, but at least we made it to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, a visit to which remains one of the greatest experiences even Venice has to offer. It was here that the discovery of the power of Tintoretto's art inspired Ruskin to write The Stones of Venice:
'Tintoret swept me in away into the mare maggiore of the schools of painting which crowned the power and perished in the fall of Venice; so forcing me into the study of Venice herself; and through that into what else I have traced or told of the laws of national strength and virtue.'
His encounter with the paintings in the Scuola exploded Ruskin's former neat classification of the great artists. As he reported at the time,  'I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today – before Tintoret. Just be so good as to take my list of painters and put him in the school of Art at the top-top-top-of everything, with a big black line underneath.'
Unfortunately the Crucifixion, for Ruskin and many others the greatest painting in the world, is currently in restauro, concealed behind a high screen while the conservationists and restorers get to work. The results promise to be spectacular – another good reason to revisit Venice. 
And this morning it is still raining, though mercifully with less force than yesterday.

Rain, Poetry

 It's raining here in Venice – sometimes hard, sometimes gently, but raining most of the time – and I've discovered that it is still possible to get truly, hopelessly lost in at least one part of Venice, the part where our hotel is. We have spent an inordinate amount of time wandering in circles and failing to get any nearer where we want to be – a state of affairs made worse by my having mysteriously lost my one truly useful street map of the city, an unwieldy monster the size of a tablecloth. However, we did find our way to San Sebastiano, Veronese's parish church, and San  Nicolo dei Mendicoli, to Santa Maria dei Carmini (one fine Lotto), and to that great Gothic church full of preposterous monuments, the Frari, where I once again sat in wonder in front of Titian's great, astonishing, endlessly fascinating altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin...
Meanwhile, I note that it's National Poetry Day back in the homeland, where I'm sure the nation is once again given over to wild celebrations to mark the occasion. Here is my contribution, courtesy of an American poet – Marianne Moore, who else? 

Poetry

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.
      Hands that can grasp, eyes
      that can dilate, hair that can rise
         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
   useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
   same thing may be said for all of us—that we
      do not admire what
      we cannot understand. The bat,
         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
   a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base-
   ball fan, the statistician—case after case
      could be cited did
      one wish it; nor is it valid
         to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
   nor till the autocrats among us can be
     “literalists of
      the imagination”—above
         insolence and triviality, and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
   the raw material of poetry in
      all its rawness, and
      that which is on the other hand,
         genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

Asphodel

 The night before flying out to Venice I watched the first two episodes of Kaos, a rather brilliant black comedy reimagining of the lives of the Greek gods and goddesses, set in a kind of phantasmagoric version of modern Greece. Jeff Goldblum – who better? – plays Zeus, a touchy, truculent and insecure king of the gods, whose plans for mankind are imperilled by the activities of certain mortals, notably Orpheus (a rock star) and his girlfriend Eurydice. After her death (run over by a truck), Eurydice finds herself caught up in the vast hordes of the dead being herded around a grim grey processing facility, 'Asphodel' (as in the Fields of Asphodel) – where, having finally reached the Styx, she is unable to cross into the Underworld. The ghastly, dismal Asphodel, filmed in black and white (shades of A Matter of Life and Death), came back to mind the following morning, as my travelling companion and I found ourselves being herded around the modern Asphodel of airport Security for what seemed an eternity. The line I was in came to a total halt for lack of anyone to stare at the screen as the bags went past (the numerous staff all around devoting themselves to cheery badinage and gossip). My companion, meanwhile, had her bags theatrically emptied, one item at a time, and subjected to lengthy scrutiny, so that it took her even longer to emerge from this brilliantly conceived modern form of low-level torture and dehumanising humiliation.
Hell is an endless airport from which no planes ever take off.