July 18, 2012

Overcast as the day leans toward afternoon thunder. In this time of relaxation I must still husband my time, fending off (unsuccessfully) temporal assaults on all sides. The chiropractor– whom I went to heal my shoulder, and who hasn’t touched my shoulder– wants my time, and the cupping therapy guy wants my time and I refrain from saying, “leave me alone, you’re a quack,” because I might be wrong, My doubts about the various therapies offered to me this summer build on the fact that there was a sales pitch before there were any diagnostics, and the one sees problems and the other sees progress where I see none.

Blue Raincoat Theater sent, more or less randomly, notice of Tread Softly, the first annual Yeats festival, to be held in Sligo beginning next week. It took me as long as it took to check the dates to decide to go. So, against my earlier determination, I am off to Ireland next Thursday. I was cautious at first, trying to think of reasons not to do it, but now that I’m committed, I’m glad and excited. I’ll be staying in the Glass House, which replaced the Silver Swan– where I always dreamed of staying but never could–at the pool where the Garavogue tumbles down to become an estuary. I got the very last ticket to the reading by Seamus Heaney at Hawk’s Well. When I hung up the phone I watched “Sold Out” appear on the ticketing screen. I’ve thought of nothing but Sligo since I booked the room and the flight.

First Stage in Los Angeles will be putting on The Future of the Theater on July 27.

Pavel passed Edward the King along to a friend who might produce it at the Celebration Theater in Los Angeles.

Began a play featuring Voltaire and Madame du Pompadour.

Drinks with J to discuss our class. Her aversion to the classics is deep-seated. I mentioned that I was re-reading The Iliad, and she took the news as if I’d confessed to violent crime. I think the reaction has something to do with resentment of authority, of a type seen almost exclusively (according to my experience in the classroom) in women. If a work is likely to be approved by the sort of person by whom one has felt slighted or by whom one was once corrected, then the work must have tyrannical intent. The actual content of the piece makes little difference, only its assumed place on what is supposed to be the hierarchy of the canon. I can see why resigning oneself to the perception that Homer and Shakespeare, etc, really are That Good is enraging. I’m a little enraged by it myself, but seeing is believing. J assumes that all opinions and all achievements are more or less equal, and so the idea of discontinuity between Homer and Jane the Angry Lesbian at Open Mic at the coffee shop infuriates her. I think. Maybe she, as I do sometimes, takes positions in order to support a point with which she does not absolutely concur. I’m championing Homer right now because of the re-reading, and the conviction that no on else has ever written like that, nor will. Book XX is the full Sublime. “Simplicity,” you want to say, is the key, but then you must add, “the Simplicity of Sunrise over All the High Places of the World.” It is not simple at all, but its complexity defeats scrutiny.  I can read one book or two before needing to lie down. Who would I be out of that crew? Odysseus, I think, though I cherish the bit of god-assaulting Diomedes in me.