January 3, 2012


My tracks were the only ones in the snow this morning.

Studio too cold to work. Serious cold everywhere, a bracing wind like an oncoming lake of ice.

Visited Marco in his new house on Jefferson Street, overlooking Clingman and what is, from there, clearly a little valley leading into the valley of the French Broad. The house is fantastic, like an article in an architecture book, clean and spacecraft-y. His taste is so austere and modern; mine is bric-a-brac beside. He made me a gift of a cactus that looks a little like a penis and balls.

I can play pieces out of the hymnal on my concertina; that is to say, without the fingering notations. My harmonium arrived today. It is simple and mysterious at once. You don’t really play a tune—

The approach of the new semester is not, at this point, a source of joy for me.