February 26, 2014

Dufay on the CD

Missed first read-through because of my night class. Turned in worse knots, maybe, than I need to be. The conflict was on my audition sheet, but my handwriting is so bad . . . Have been studying the script, though. Shaw leaves no space for the lucky accident, for the unanticipated flight of imagination. All is controlled, ratcheted in, exactly the way some initial plan had wanted it to be. All very brainy. The characters are automatons operated by Shaw’s brain, just the way the characters in his play are automatons operated by the brain of one unavoidable character. Not that it isn’t the same, to some degree, for all playwrights, but some (including myself) would find it difficult to write without some fantasy, at least, of an independent life for the children I had born.

Drive between classes to Mars Hill to lunch with Jonathan David, his wife and brand new son Max, who is charming. People expect me, an old bachelor, to be hesitant around babies, but I’m not at all. One of JD’s pieces was being performed at Mars Hill. Wish I could have heard it, though both he and his wife described it as “not easy listening.”

Conference with Brian. I had misinterpreted what he meant, though not what he had actually said.  In any case, most of my anxiety over the incident seems not to have been a waste of time.

Excellent poets last night.

Flight to Seattle in two hours. I have not looked at the weather, assuming it would be better to let it be a surprise. Everybody hates United, and that’s whose hands into which I have delivered myself. I have already lost track of my duties there.