A few days ago, I was walking down by the waterfront late in the day, hoping the low dark-gray clouds wouldn’t dump any rain on me. Suddenly the sun, low in the western sky, came through a break in the clouds, and the low clouds began to dissipate, revealing clouds higher up that the sun turned a luscious pink color. Twentieth century American writers and painters taught us to ignore sunsets : we were supposed turn our attention inward to thoughts and emotional processes and small emotional dramas, or turn our attention outwards to signs, or turn our endlessly recursive attention to self-referential mass media. Sunsets were supposed to be trite. But I’m tired of hearing about every single thought Leopold Bloom had in the course of a single day; I’m tired of paintings of soup cans; I’m tired of mass media that is about nothing except mass media. So what if they’re trite by 20th C. standards, I want more luscious pink sunsets.