Fascists at Mannings Ridge

April 4, 2008

Wondering why I feel so run-down. It’s like flu, but if it is, it’s stalled five days at one moment of its progress.

Cold morning, but still a morning of spring. Jack Batman e-mails to invite me to the gala pre-festival benefit for Gayfest, an evening of jollity starring Leslie Jordan, a campy actor whom I remember from TV shows. I did consider it, but it would be $800 for two days in New York, and I can’t add that to the stack just now. One of the other playwrights in the festival, Brian Dykstra, is billed as "Special Guest," and I hope that’s because he too is a performer and not because he’s suddenly the designated celebrity playwright. In any case, it points out the disadvantage of living in Asheville and trying to have a career of some dimension in New York. You either have to live there or have the means to get there whenever summoned. No one will know you. No one will remember you from the time before. For the moment I must live my life as though that were not true.

Discussing with my students the Black Swan readings of the last two weeks. They preferred E’s, while I preferred H’s. But during the discussion I realized I preferred H’s because it was tight, streamlined, with no problems she was willing to fix, professional, slick, its obvious limitations exhibiting themselves as choices. Exactly the play that would be praised in a graduate school workshop, one, anyway, which leaned toward the professional rather than the experimental. E’s was awkward, raw, too new, intelligent, brilliant, intriguing. I have allowed my judgment in these matters to change from that of the artist to that of the producer, and that was a mistake I mean to reverse as fast as I can.

The Mannings Ridge Homeowners Association, where my sister lives in Alpharetta, has decreed that she must remove the ramp her friends built to get dad and his wheelchair into her house. The ignorance, cruelty, and self-satisfaction of this have been choking me with bile since she told me of it. Even if she had the ramp rebuilt by professions, which is what they say they want, the committee chairman said he’d sit on the proposal with his fat ass for as long as he is allowed. Clearly they must get some satisfaction out of complicating the life of a sick old man. The un-diseased mind will probably never comprehend it. It’s the George Bush model: no need to support the best choice, no need to avoid the worst choice, the only thing being to show who has the power to make the rules. I hate them with a pure and righteous hatred.

I have not been putting things behind me as I should. I have not gotten over the fact that the three stupidest faculty at UNCA were allowed to deprive me of Cambridge, in defiance of their responsibility to their students’ welfare, to the authority of the program, and in grotesque and shrugging defiance of their own application process. One rather expected that from them, but that they should be allowed that power without review and correction still chokes me with disgust. It’s like leaving the house and the baby in the care of the guinea pigs and going on a long vacation. I have not gotten over being at first granted and then denied leave next year on the most transparently dishonest and partial pretext, and Kathy and Sam both either in collusion or without honor enough to change a very bad decision. I have not gotten over being passed over for India in favor of nitwits (some of them) by the authority, I think now, of the same nitwits who presided over the Cambridge selection. That nitwits should prefer nitwits is not surprising, but there should be some system of review and correction. I have not gotten over these issues, and some of them are old. Those slime bags at Mannings Ridge brought it all bubbling back to the surface. I do blame Bush, in part. He gave people the idea that the worst program in the world will be allowed if you swagger enough, if you portray your idiocy as a higher wisdom.