April 10, 2008

I was having coffee with DJ yesterday morning, and I said, "This is the first day in weeks when I’ve actually felt well." We got in the car and drove to the Arboretum. I had wanted to trudge off into the deep forest and see what was blossoming there, but given my state of exhaustion when we’d finished with the planted beds, I wonder if I would have made it. The day was perfect. We saw a huge anole, like a blister on the bark of a tree. We had excellent blueberry pie. We saw JT, like a figure out of an old story we had never finished reading.

Dug out a patch half in shadow and half in sun for my blue Tibetan poppies. May they prosper and may their homeland prosper.

Last night it was UNCA’s The Tempest Project at the Diana Wortham. It was gawdawful. It was bad as a production can be only when wilfulness is married to incompetence. The costumes were gorgeous. Somehow, the gorgeousness of the costumes, too, seemed a miscalculation, like dressing the tar baby in silk. Cody was good. Part of an actor’s duty is obeying the director, and in that, Cody was good. He could not save a ludicrous interpretation, but he was good.

Temptations afterward, where there is a crowd I don’t normally see. I don’t remember coming home. Glad DJ was driving. I do remember the moon, and insisting that it was rising, though it hung low and bent in the west.

Moments ago I finished the rewrite of Threnodies of Corinth. I sobbed through the last ten pages. To me, at this moment, it seems earth-shattering. But it has lain fallow for– what?– nearly a decade because of mocking voices and criticism which could not have been well-meant. I take other people’s counsel far to seriously. I recoil and retreat rather than considering. I violate every precept I try to give to my students.