November 22, 2010

Days of progress in my writing typically alternate with days when I despair of its coming to anything in the world. This is the worst of all hazards, the worst of all dangers for an artist. Dodging bullets in your study, writing with berries and your own blood on roofing tile is a picnic in comparison. In the East they say you should not be attached to outcomes, but I am so attached, and, in this life, there is no way around it.

Lost half my Thanksgiving diners. . . after I bought the food, of course.

Call from JB on the progress of The Loves of Mr. Lincoln. He talked of everything else first, in his native enthusiasm, but also to imply how much they have on their plates, and how my little serving is pushed to the side. Their time is taken up with the Pink Carpet in London, with The Scottsboro Boys in New York and with a “new comedy” he didn’t tell me the name of, which will feature “real stars” and open on Broadway soon. The plan now is to do my play in London, in the West End. On one level this is fine–cooler than Broadway, even–but on several others it is full midnight. It represents delay. It’s another opportunity for everything to drift into the backwater and be forgotten. I think of Bruce’s smiling face at LJ’s opening “You’re next!” Well, evidently I wasn’t. London is cheaper because there are fewer unions to contend with. “It takes half a million even to load in,” Jack says. Most–by no means all--of what is playing in New York is dreck. People seem to find the odd half million to load in that.

Terrible rehearsal, singing all around as though they were seeing the music for the first time, me waiting for the call from Jack and paying imperfect attention, performances I’d forgotten about looming. Not a good Sunday, all in all. Yet this is Monday morning. All night the moonlight lay with supernatural beauty on my back yard.