January 20, 2011

Flamingo dawn.

The department went slightly astray in the time I was gone. I sense tensions and incipient feuds the likes of which never took shape in times past. Maybe it will blow away. The whole university is tense, and trying to address the tension through a fever of micro-managing which cannot but make things exponentially worse.

The show at Avenue M looks good. Not overwhelming as I feared it would be when the pieces were all bunched together. Some hung disadvantageously, some hung very well indeed. Terry seems very pleased, and she was the one to please this time. I even managed not to look at them the whole time we were there drinking.

I asked my class to describe people the knew who were like Shelley, and one student says, “You are the most Shelleyian person I’ve ever met.” I suppose so, except that I have lived too long. Have enjoyed my classes, except that they are enormous, room-filling, will-never-learn-the names monsters, and I am annihilated at the end of the day. Everyone excuses my lethergy by saying “It’s hard coming back.”

Evening: Theater at Magnetic Fields, SS’s adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde. I’m to see it again Saturday night-- it exists in two versions– before I write a review for MNTN X. My heart sank in the first five minutes, moaning, “Oh, no.” It’s camp and I hate camp. It employs that Ludlum-inspired wink-wink-nudge-nudge over-acting that is antithetical to my convictions about theater. Five minutes later I was wondering if it were perhaps brilliant. By the blackout I was certain it was blazingly, jaw-droppingly brilliant, in some ways the best thing I’ve seen in Asheville, and if I were going to write about it I’d need the two days to find a fit vocabulary. Met A and T’s son Zach for the first time since he was a toddler. Friendly and fresh and open, he was the best imaginable company.