December 8, 2013

Squalls of tremendous dark rain. I would have thought it too cold to rain.

Working hard on a revision of Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers. How much time needs to pass before it is fully evident what needs to come out?

The purchase of the new house tosses over and over in my mind. Adventure is on one side, repose on the other. I think, though, it is full steam ahead, so much so that I’m impatient with “due diligence” and the leisurely course of monies from one account into another.

Lessons and Carols last evening. I felt strangely disengaged, perhaps because my stomach was perilously upset. I know what causes it, and yet I do it anyway. There must be a word for that. Anyway, I sang distractedly, and made mistakes I’d not made before. Rushed home, got relief, thought I’d spend the rest of the evening writing. Instead, obeyed the call to Avenue M, where the gang was gathered. Drank delicious cider. In bed monstrous early, up now monstrous early, which is the way I like it.

Finally read the essay– it’s a courtesy to call it that– against Apothecary in the latest Metabolism. Before I’d read it I’d advised Frank to leave it be, as it was likely so trifling nobody would pay it heed. I was right. It allowed undergraduate white boys to strut their liberal credentials, and nothing much else. The entire magazine was pretty awful, badly designed, the pieces badly chosen, the poetry unreadable, the editorial attitude manifestly snotty. I know the editors enough to know they’re still in their “anything goes and all things are equal” phase, but it’s a shame to waste resources like that. Will anybody pick up the next Metabolism? As an educator I want to get my hands on those boys and make sure they understand that groupspeak– the uncritical mouthing of the truisms of your clan– is just as bad in your mouth as in your enemy’s. Your thoughtless piety is not necessarily any better than Michele Bachman’s or Ted Cruz’s The essay was a compendium of unconsidered dogma picked up in a social science class and never digested, never, as it should, have been, spat out. I would point out that the “science” part of “social science” or “political science” is but a bitter courtesy. They got everything wrong, counting on the piously nodding heads of their compatriots to conceal that fact until it all got into print. Finally, if they worked themselves into a lather over Apothecary’s being a white inroad into a black neighborhood, it’s well that their research was too shoddy to uncover that the Lyric Opera has it headquarters in the same building, surely the whitest organization in the city. That would have made them apoplectic– if the end had been arguing for racial justice. The honest end was to take down visionary and energetic young men who did something worthwhile as they sat around doing nothing. Can’t let that go without a visit to the woodshed.