May 8, 2012

Sinking into a delicious summer routine, productive, energized, never exhausted, almost never assailed by the bad stomach, soothed by essays into the garden and a little paintings and hours without panic over how to get everything done. Stopped in a furniture store, where the salesman needed a course in how to read body language, as I was so feverish to be rid of him and have time to look on my own that I was all but spitting nails. I suppose good salesmanship is not being able to read your customer so much as not caring about reading your customer, just keeping up the sell. Came home and continued the emptying of my house by getting rid of two ghastly, colossal end tables and a shelf full of random vases.

Watched I Could Go on Singing, which advertizes itself as Judy Garland’s last movie. She’s good; she’s really good. She stands up to Dirk Bogarde. It’s a fine film; why had I never heard of it? Tried to watch All the Rage, a gay film, which was gawdawful. I tried to figure out the particulars of its gawdawfulness. For one thing, everything was said through five layers of irony. Boring irony. Every line was delivered by men pretending they were women.. .  not women exactly, but females, bitchy, gossipy, campy, detached. Nobody wanted anything enough to have a chance of getting it. It embodied my objections to gay theater, the idea that simply being gay is sufficient either for life or art. Simply being gay was heroic for, maybe, five years, thirty years ago.

The lupine is purple and five feet tall. I looked at the garden the first thing this morning without my glasses, and it was magical, a smear of colors fluttered over by butterflies.