March 8, 2009

Odd, ugly dream before morning. DJ and I had been disappointed in attending some arts event underground, and when we emerged he said he wanted to have lunch, and wanted to have it in an exceptionally ugly (and remote) hole, which was like a concrete box carved out of acres of dirty concrete. He was furious with me and I didn’t know why. It was a cafeteria, and he got his food and ran to a distant table and sat down beside Amy Doyle. When I tried to join them, he knocked my juice over, staining my clothes purple, then lay down on the bench so I couldn’t share it. After a string of furious accusations, he said that we both suffered from “malevolent diphorism.”

Woke this morning in time to combat an onslaught of gout. Aspirin did the trick (though a second dose was necessary moments ago), but I thought how this has not been an especially good week, health-wise. Going to two services at church was doable, but not a good idea. A couple of times I thought I was going to pass out, and walking to the car I was shaky and bleary, and convinced it had been a bad choice. Besides, the altos stepped on my solo entrance. I needed the sermon. Perhaps that was why there was enough strength. It was about people who put themselves at the center of the universe and then blame God for not confirming the address.

Canceling the New York trip I wondered if I’d regret it, if Monday morning I’d be chipper and ready to have gone. The answer is “no.” I can’t imagine navigating an airport, much less the rest of it.

J blames me for making Titus crumble around his head. I have no defense. I would be thinking the same thing if the tables were reversed.

Daffodils out full. Not a cloud or host, though I must have planted that many.

Watched the DVD of the old movie Teahouse of the August Moon. I was lying on my side on the couch the whole time, so I remember it sort of sideways. Glenn Ford was an unexpectedly able and attractive comedian. Besides that, I was stuck on qualities of the script. The trailer insisted that the play was the most watched comedy of all time, and thought I doubted that, I do remember when Teahouse was fairly standard at dinner theaters and high schools, and was one of the scripts we read while choosing a senior play at Ellet. It was adeptly written and, in an official and saw-it-coming-a-mile-ago way, funny. It dealt with stereotypes, but the stereotypes were not mean. The American officers were a clueless as the natives were picturesque. It was very Plautian, with the wily servant and the bent course of love and all, but what bothered me was the clank of expectation-fulfilling machinery, the smug, tidy, inconsequential squareness of the Well Made Play, which I have always hated without considering very precisely why. Ford soars because he possesses (or successfully affects) innocence of the strings he’s pulling. Brando is mortifying because he is so very knowing–besides being got up as an Okinawan servant boy. That big body, the face that carries almost any emotion better than cunning, should have militated against such casting.

Watched a bit of Reflections in a Golden Eye, but found its pathological circumspection to be as sickening as my staph. One decade’s raw exposed nerve is another’s too-dainty shellac job. One wishes to enter certain dated works of art and scream, “Oh, just do what you want to do. Ten years from now it’ll be in TV comedies.”