January 27, 2008

Cool dawn. Jocasta limps around on a foot injury she got outside. It’s much better today, and I no longer think I’ll have to take three cats to the vet tomorrow rather than two. Her going outside is the deal we struck between her no longer using the litter boxing and my needing to kill her for not doing so. She seems eager to go out when the time comes, and then vocally eager to get back in. Life runs on compromise.

Attended the monthly meeting of playwrights at the Democratic Headquarters, beside the Court House, in Hendersonville. Hendersonville fascinates me itself because it seems to hover between life and death, empty for blocks and blocks, then livened by a happy family strolling and looking in the windows. The playwrights are a perplexing lot. Like the town they meet in, they hover between one state of being and another, having worked hard enough at their craft seldom to be quite bad, but nowhere and at no time very good. Gina’s dialogue is quite good, often hilarious, and her professional experience makes her seem, to me, a little out of place. There was the one-time professional actor with his unfolding Beowulf musical. When I attended a year ago and a year before that, we were treated to bits of it, and yesterday we heard some of the music. It is by no means inept, which will make it hard to say-- if any one of that group indeed does say-- that it will not be performed anywhere, and if once never twice, being as lifeless and pointless as it is flawless. There is the man with the vague European accent who read with Dana Gioia in New York once, who speaks six languages, who brought with him copies of a magazine in which his poem appears, who presented himself as a cosmopolitan among the rubes, and whose piece was a sort of Continental melodrama, sophomoric and presumptuous in equal measure. One could accept them as hobbyists sharing their hobby if there weren’t such an anxiety of professionalism about them. So much talk of what producers want, of what theaters rejected them, and which with a note that actually mentioned the name of their play; of where one can send and what point in the "process" an ignored submission might be, parsing the silences as a Roman priest the guts of a sheep. Of course I was spoiled in the same way, at first in graduate school with poetry and later, if less direly, with theater, but I have found a way around it, a way to maintain perhaps a little purity. Going to their meeting is like a successful AA member entering a room full of drunks still in love with drunkenness. But they are steadfast and hold to their dreams, and one recoils from the seat of the scoffer.

Afterwards to the Cathedral to see Benjamin Bagby do Beowulf, in Anglo-Saxon, with harp. Bagby is a fine singer and an extraordinarily fine actor, and I had bought a seat where I could note every nuance of his skill. I wish we still spoke that language, which is maybe a little harder than ours to make yourself clear in, but whose essentiality and emotional truth was the greater for it. It was a superb performance. One imagines that the scops were exactly like that, except that in their presences you could move about and drink, which are the things which would have made the evening perfection.

Drove Chris A home afterwards. We detoured for a drink at a new bar on Patton, with a tiki-rich Polynesian theme and heavily tattooed bartenders. I liked it. People I didn’t know were shouting my name at me. There are not nights enough in a week to get in touch with old favorites while still exploring the ever-expanding offerings of even this little town.

This is the day when the auctioneers come and empty out the house on Foxboro. I though ten times of driving back and taking more, taking everything, taking something. Never had a moment. Now it is all gone. I’m not going to forgive something; I’m not sure what. I will probably have the key to the house in my drawer until the day I die.