February 11, 2012

Wind howling in the dark outside.

The vet confab about Titus never took place, or they didn’t inform me of their thoughts, if it did. Keats would frown at my resistence to living in uncertainty.

A body shop in Weaverville across from a great slanted cow pasture will be tending to my wounded car next week. Far better scenery than I expected from a body shop. David the owner is buoyant and armed with high tech all about, and very efficient. He kept shaking his head at my car and murmuring, “and it’s brand new.” He is taking his daughter skiing for the first time this weekend.

The faculty reading was entertaining and well-received, I thought. I read from Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers, the part where the boys find the bones. I was happy hearing it aloud, hoping they were too. My susceptibility to typos is almost comic.

The girls of Gamma Phi Delta sorority invited their favorite professors to a pot luck last evening, and I was honored to go. The truth was that only recently did I know we had fraternities and sororities, but we do, and they seem supportive and useful things. The girls were dressed up and radiant.

Reading at Downtown Books and News afterwards-- a full day. The night readings were, on the whole, not very good. The widely-published poet was just plain– plain– and one wondered what there was about her lack of inspiration which attracted reputable publishers. Maybe I’ve answered my own question. “With this we can fulfill our poetry quota with arousing any emotions at all.” The widely published novelist was an engaged wordsmith, but scarcely allowed us any sympathy for, or any sure understanding of, what she was saying. All manner and no matter. Maybe there should be a temporary moratorium of books with the word “Girl” in their titles. The students were better far.

I’m all the time speculating on where the line draws between the competent and the excellent. Yesterday there were some readers who did nothing wrong–if they were in a class with you, you’d have nothing to correct, no precise objection to register– and yet also hadn’t done it right. How to explain this? My impulse is to say that there is a temptation to exert too much control, and those in question succumbed to that temptation– but how much control is too much? My answer at this second is, “When the author too clearly knows what’s going to happen in the next line.” I think Proust and Joyce could let the architecture show, but the modern ear–mine, anyway– wishes for at least a simulacrum of discovery.

It is atill dark. I have been up two hours. It is everything I can do not to stagger back to bed, already spent.