October 4, 2012

Blue day, scorching but still, somehow, autumnal.

Migrating parula warblers in the limbs over the back yard.

Attended my last meeting as a member of the Board of the Friends of the Warren Wilson Library. It was an interesting enterprise, if an anomalous one.

Colossal directory of the alumni of Syracuse University arrives at my door. I must have ordered it thinking I would be in it, or some of the friends I remember, but it is all undergraduates. Too big even for a doorstop.

Committee meeting in the science building. Seven of us were present, representing a commitment of time at 75 minutes x 7. We had each read and considered the applications set for consideration that day, and the submitters had presumably spent many hours meeting our rather precise requirements. We were all serious and honorable. Nevertheless, one recognized that all that expenditure on all sides had no necessary influence on the delivery of curriculum, and was not likely to improve even a single student’s educational experience. It was all, in the basic sense, irrelevant. It was all busywork set up by people with a need to make busywork look like real work. After that revelation came the one whereby I realized that–perhaps accidentally–I have conducted my career correctly, avoiding what I sensed may be irrelevant to education and to art, concentrating on what needed to be done, despite the fact that this choice marginalized me. I may be marginalized, but there are a thousand hours not wasted, and I will take that as a bargain.

Sophie observes that the ancient Greeks in greeting shouted, “Happiness!,” the Romans, “Health!”
“Upon that,” she continues,”turns the whole story of two civilizations.”

Off to Flat Rock to see their new musical, Zelda. I get down there infrequently enough for it to make an impression. It’s clearly more than a venue; it is a destination, with places to eat and lounge, with eager, helpful students waving you into parking places at the edges of the actual flat rock, which is not flat at all but more like a gouged and pitted shield. The boy at the T-shirt cart was practicing his time step as he waited for customers to make their choices. It was nice to be the youngster in the crowd again. Whatever mirth in the campus, the show itself was pretty awful. Flat Rock had poured its considerable resources and expertise into putting over a generic automaton, a show made to look and sound like a Broadway show, but without any soul whatever. The subject was supposed to have some regional flavor–Zelda having suffered and died in Asheville and all– but it could have been about any two glamorous people anywhere, for all the characterization was bad Broadway, telegraphed to the audience by timeworn gestures and signature pieces. It was not about anything but the collaborators’ pride in being able to make a show by collage, without having to bother with imagination, inspiration, an actual melody, or even that much research.  It was not quite dreadful, for the performance was excellent. But I thought overmuch of the long ride home, and gloated overmuch that I had not bought my own ticket.