December 30, 2018

Suzzy Sams has died.

Sent a copy of my father’s birthday poem (New Ohio Review) written on the spot to de Sandro’s in Venice. Somehow I can’t imagine mail getting to the right places through that chaos of streets.

Gray now towards evening. Thinking back on the year. One great shadow was the Demon, about which nothing can be said. The other great shadow was anemia, which affected me more than I realized. I didn’t travel in any significant way, and pretty much lost interest in social activities or being on stage. Even resented the art shows because I would have to gather myself to move the art around. Now that is righting itself, and I have some conception of the cost. Glad in any case that it wasn’t “old age,” as I feared it might simply be. Odd that it took so long to get back on course– three years, easy, of periodic debilitation. I think I assumed, in my gloomy way, that it was really something worse and that nothing could be done. Live and learn.

Three art shows in a year came as a surprise. This third will be the best.

My first novel, maybe my first two novels. No way of knowing how all that will turn out.

Two women singled me out as anathema in their lives, and I’m still trying to fathom why. One of them is simply silly and privileged. The other was– perhaps is this hour–rabid in hatred, gathering temporary allies around her whenever she can spit out her story. I didn’t do any of the things, say, or even think any of the things she accused me of, but I am not so delusional as to think I did nothing at all. But what? My conscience is clear, so enlightenment must come from elsewhere. All could have been amended, perhaps avoided outright, if she had spoken to me of her anger rather than cutting a swath of prevarication and madness through the general world. In my world tattle-tales deserve nothing. Still, whether she tattled or confronted me like a grown woman, there was something I did she found so enraging that she has dedicated untold hours to the (futile) effort to harm me. It is genuinely baffling. Nothing I think of on my own could be sufficient cause. The rest of the issue is that someone has given young women–young people in general-- a program of outrage uncoupled to any process of discernment. Someone has let them think that their perceptions are best when they are immediate and unconsidered, and to imagine that any correction– or, God help us, opposition– is sexist, racist, transphobic, homophobic, etc, according to the banner they are carrying at the moment. Reason has no more place than it does with, say, a religious fundamentalist or an alt-right bigot. Like all dogmatists, they believe the voice of moderation is the voice of Satan. Deliver the Message by rote and expect immediate compliance. They would be horrified by the comparison to the religious Right, but it is point-to-point. Nor do they consider lack of education, experience, discernment, or standing a bar to having their say, even to having their say treated as judgment. Like Mao’s Cultural Revolution, rule by the least prepared. I adore my students. Letting them think they are what they are not is the most repugnant dereliction of our duty toward them. I said earlier than patience is not a virtue. Maybe it is in the case. One must turn aside without striking the blow.

Excellent day painting. Baked butterscotch cookies.

Vivid dreams by night. Last night I gave lectures on terraces overrun with flowers. They lectures were meant to explain–well, I think it was poetry, because I kept quoting Keats-- finally and succinctly, so that everyone could understand. I was dismayed that some still were scratching their heads and stalking away unfulfilled.

December 29, 2018

Baked peanut/chocolate pie. Painted well, though the studio was filled with the smell of gas. Someone had turned on a gas jet and not turned it off. Visitors from Cleveland. Met a new studio neighbor– handsome in a potato-resembling way.

I’m the Featured Poet in the Fall/Winter 2018 Halcyone, as well as having supplied the cover art, a hovering halcyon. Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers is listed as a “new release,” though I’ve seen no trace of it. Patience is not one of my virtue. I’m not even sure it IS a virtue, though it is clearly a strategy. 

December 28, 2018

Note from Colorado:
Hello Uncle David,
Thanks so much for the gift for Clara. This is her first teddy bear! She really likes it, we already named him “ Bamse” - Danish for teddy bear. Hope you are well and thanks again.
Best,
Beka

Bigger floods today than on the says we were warned about flooding. The river roads were closed and I had to find a circuitous route to the studio. Painting on Daniel’s fish picture  in the rain-dark. A family from Paris paid a visit.

December 27, 2018

With the worst of my anemia goes my long-standing, and otherwise inexplicable, craving for radishes. The last bag sits slowly dwindling in the fridge.

Rose early (for vacation) in the rain and went to the High 5, determined to read Charlie’s book. I read one page then set it aside and began a play about reading Charlie’s book. This is why I get so little reading done. The café is peopled largely by incredibly good-looking men, often by themselves.

This day has been a paragon of days. After coffee and writing, I went to the studio and painted rather heroically. I will be ready for Perimeters I think Jhierry was mistaken to say we’ll need 30 paintings, unless I’m misremembering the space. He may get 20. Also many errands completed, diving toward the new year. I was happy all the day. I felt useful and fulfilled.

After putting me through days of quite despair, the stock market jumped the most it ever has in history. My retirement is back on.

December 26, 2018

Home from the darting sojourn to Atlanta. Things mostly well there. The eldest is reportedly going awry, though I don’t see it- the two or three times a year I lay eyes on him. The rest go from strength to strength. Have promised to paint a wilderness scene including a fish for Daniel’s cubicle. Brown trout, most likely, which we agree is a natural masterpiece. Two of my nephews have become cubicle jockeys. Daniel mentioned that in his whole family, any way you look, I was the only one who turned to art. I reflected silently that I may have overdone it a bit. Bekka sent me a framed portrait of my grandniece. When the festivities were over and people scattered, I went back to my home-away-from-home Hyatt, walked across the parking lot and saw Aquaman. I liked it. It brought back a simpler, more brightly colored time. As I walked back across the parking lot to the hotel I thought, “this is the least turbulent Christmas, the one least fraught with regrets and bitter memories, in what of life I remember.” I took a satisfying piss in the shrubs just outside the windows. The two men running the hotel on Christmas night could barely be torn from their cell phones to check me in.  But, there was chilled lemon water, and no canned carols. All was well.

December 25, 2018

Stupendous moon as I hit the road, then, upon Beaver Lake, three Canadas floating in motionless state.

December 24, 2018

The music is done. The ears still ring with it. Christ gave himself a radiant, if imperfect moon, for the eve of His birth. It surprised me to sit on the sofa for a moment before bed thinking “all is well.”

December 23, 2018

Bright winter day. The moon in brilliance last night. Party at Jack’s, where I was unusually sociable.. Steeleye Span’s “Thomas the Rhymer” from You Tube. Sitting at the computer still wearing my Santa hat.

December 22, 2018

Rose and ran at the Y, determined to get everything back. It was snowing when I went out into the morning dark. Baked fudge pie for Jack’s party. Rehearsal of the Vivaldi with strings. Bought Maud her own litter box, to see if that will solve our recent bathroom problems. Giant Mexican lunch annihilated me. Discovered the “If You Grew Up in Ellet” Facebook page, which featured a video of a car driving down Goodview to Pilgrim to East Park, part of the route I walked to school for five years. Someone asked “Whatever happened to Jeff Oxley?” something I have wondered about too. We played under the big strange tree in his yard. He invited me to a birthday party where we ate at Burger King and then saw Swiss Family Robinson. I looked over my shoulder the whole time, thinking his inviting me was a joke, because I treated him so badly most of the time. He locked me in his toolshed once, and I determined to beat it to pieces if he didn’t let me out. His grandfather heard the din and let me out, scolding me rather than Jeff for the event. He followed me to Boy Scouts. A Twitter feed insists I have an interest in the Iowa Hawkeyes. Daniel wants me to paint him a picture of wilderness to look at in his depressing accountant’s cubicle.

December 21, 2018

Driving gray rain for the Solstice, dark, so that the Longest Night be even longer.

Merry AGMC party at All Soul’s, light and loving. The degree to which my increasing strength leads to increasing interest in social things is quite remarkable. My cookies were a hit. Among the gratifications little talked of is that of a cook seeing people gobbling up his wares. Hungry Milly joined us, and we got to slam Trump for the latest atrocities.

Good workout at the Y in the darker dark of the morning. Talked briefly with godlike Nat. Merely shaking his hand sent electricity through my body. I wonder if people who have that effect on others know that they do.

Ladybug on my lamp. I wish her well, not knowing how her kind pass the furious winter.

Peter Warlock going through my head.

The coffee grew cold as I wrote my Solstice poem.

Evening: dark again, darker still. The rain continues. Baked. Slept. Waiting for the Kindling.

December 20, 2018

Baked cookies for the AGMC party. Ate a steak and nothing else, inspired by my roomy tuxedo pants to go further.

Gave my blackswan.org domain to a women named Calisha Owen, so she could use it for her community arts program in York, PA. Hadn’t touched it in years.

December 19, 2018

Gradual procession through all the grays in the sky outside my window.

Snowed-out Lessons and Carols finally happened Sunday morning. It was sweet, and better, I think, than had it been a special evening service.

The second iteration of the AGMC concert was better than the first, and more richly attended. I believe we offered a real addition to the festivity of the season. High celebration at Avenue M afterwards. We brought the restaurant impressive added business, but also slammed the poor servers who received the wave.  “Just warn us next time,” Terri said.

Ruth said, “You’re the basso continuo that holds the group together."

Jack and Leland and I took down Night Wings and hauled it all back to my studio. Conflicting emotions about that. I was glad to have the work back, having felt a strange anxiety at its being spread across the North. I was glad to have THAT over with and the freedom to get on to something else. Yet, not one thing sold. I can’t believe that’s usual, even for a backwater like the Weizenblatt. NOT ONE THING. Hard not to attribute a sort of cosmic unfairness. I am HE WHO IS NOT MONETIZED. BUT, have painted well (and quite differently) all the mornings of this week. Tuesday an electric outlet in my studio burst into flames. When I pulled out the lamp plug that was in the burning socket, it caused a considerable blue-white explosion. I may have screamed, for the girls came running from their studios. Extremely tall people from Durham wandered through. The spiders one finds lurking behind one’s paintings are the biggest spiders I’ve ever seen which were not outright tarantulas. I try to concentrate on their elegance rather than their size.

Sudden flash to the fifth grade. We had a substitute, and I remember her looking out over the class and saying, “I have seen just about as much nose-picking as I can stand for one day.”  It was hilarious then; it’s hilarious now.

December 16, 2018

First concert went extremely well last night, appreciative crowd, no vocal calamities, festive cocktails at Avenue M afterwards. I think Jon and my commission piece is a true victory. Joy in the entire evening. I have lost considerable weight since I last put on my tuxedo.

December 15, 2018

Jon D attended dress rehearsal last night. We did badly, I think out of anxiety at his presence, but the main criticism he had to make concerned tempo, which was not the singers’ fault. I left my water bottle on the altar. Hope someone thinks it is an offering.

Auditioned as an actor for Magnetic’s upcoming season. As my stamina returns, I want to gain back fragments of my life which I’d had to let go. I was the first audition, it turned out, those who signed up before not appearing. Thought I did well enough, but who knows what’s happening on the other side of the lights.

Circe limps out of her den for food and water. That progresses, anyway.

Sat in High 5 and wrote a poem.   Colossal Cinemascope dreams continue.

December 14, 2018

Circe screamed quite horribly twice in the night. That, or I dreamed it. But in the morning she had stopped moving even to piss, so I lifted her from a pool of her own urine and took her to the Vet. He found a skin infection which might be serious enough to change her behavior. While she was at the Vet’s, she began to limp horribly. Dr Eddie put the limp and the screaming together and wondered if she might have “thrown a clot.” But I brought her home. I had to lift her out of the litter box, where she had taken up residence, twice, and opened a little cave for her in the bathroom cupboard. She was sitting at the edge of the cupboard this morning, looking bewildered. The limp is still bad. Either she did “throw a clot” or she got injured somehow in the car. She head-butted like mad to get comfort from me in the doctor’s office.  A few hours ago she left her cupboard-lair for the first time, to eat and drink. I think that is a good sign.

Stopped by Petco, where a woman asked me to help her in with an aquarium with two sizable bearded dragons. “I’m re-gifting these,” she said, “they’re my son’s, but he hasn’t been taking care of them properly.” I was returning flea bombs, which, I discover from the label, would have exploded once they hit my several pilot lights.

Rehearsal at Grace Presbyterian for the GMC concert. We probably did well enough for having another rehearsal before the Big Night. Jon will be here tonight to hear our piece for the first time. Mike the Australian stood beside me; he sounds really good. The men on either side of me are well over six feet tall. It must look ridiculous. Avenue M for cocktails after rehearsal.

Drove to Waynesville to go to a Christmas store I remembered there. Turns out it has been closed for two years. Nevertheless I bought a few things here and there. When I walked into one store someone shouted “Hamlet’s Father!” It was Polonius, recovered from his wounds. 

I have a reading in Los Angeles in September for The Falls of the Wyona.

Massive, vivid, complicated, narrative dreams. Last night– well, I’ve lost most of it, but I was in love and living with a handsome blond man. We lived in a sprawling sci-fi mansion stretched around a fabulous garden. Our life was perfect, even after someone suggested he was probably a robot. He admitted he was a robot, and though I didn’t care, he did, and, I think, faded away. Comforters came to me and tried to get me to write an opera, which they said would take my mind off the loss. I knew, but they didn’t, that he had turned into a sort of ghost, and we would laugh together at my comforters once we were alone.

Trump a step closer to prison, where he would be already were he anybody else. One tries not to rejoice in the misfortune of others.

December 11, 2018

Intricate dream. I’d been doing some important job, and needed a rest, so I decided to go home, to Akron. My father was still alive, but not home, so I’d have the place to myself. When I got to Akron it was gigantic and complicated, like a European city, and I didn’t recognize any of the landmarks. I’d decided to walk home, at night, through the snowy streets, and only with reluctance shifted over to public transportation– a kind of train that was like a strip mall moving. But I realized I didn’t know what stop to take. I also realized that I had not brought my keys, and my father was not the kind to hide a key under the welcome mat. I considered the possibility of breaking a window to get in, but it was winter. I decided to get a hotel room. I looked out the window of the street-train and saw nothing resembling a hotel as far as eye could see. Then I woke, cold, convinced that the furnace was off. It wasn’t.

Before light I re-excavated the car, and bashed my way through the ice wall to get it on the road. Drove it to Starbucks, which was not open. Drove it back, and, needing two tries, bashed it through the wall at the other end of the drive. Walked to the bank, and it had not opened. There was not that much snow.

December 10, 2018

As I foretold, the Armageddon of snow did not, here, come to pass, though other people are bereft of power. My bamboos bent to the ground, and a great hemlock branch from the neighbors’ fell across my drive. I emerged this morning to dig the car out, and felt the incredible weight of the snow. Could hardly lift the trash can lid. Could hardly lift the hatchback. I am amazed that any tree or roof stands up under that. Dug the car out, but as the plows had left a wall of ice at the end of the drive, I didn’t bother to move it. One hears an afternoon thaw all around, and I’ll try again at the end of it.

Threw bread out to the crows in the height of the snowfall. Were they grateful? They ate it.

Listening to “Speaking in Tongues” on You Tube. One wishes that all available examples weren’t so clearly gibberish.

I have not made much of the time the blizzard has given me.

December 7, 2018

Pearl Harbor. Last exam. All but two isolated grades in.

Dabbling on Ancestory.com– my great grandparents had two sons named Jasper, each of whom lived not quite a year. Guess they stopped trying for Jasper. Another son who died young and six daughters who lived forever, many of whom I new.  There is a door a long way behind me. I want to go backward, walk through it, and this time try to remember everything.

The Christmas cacti in my university office are blooming, one flamingo, one magenta. Just as I leave for a month.

Probably New Year’s Resolutions

1. Stop wasting time on manufactured outrage. Purge it from yourself, have no patience with it in others.

2. You know after an exchange or two what discussions are trivial and time-wasting. Sign off.

3. Ignore the non-life-threatening errors of others as you would have them ignore yours.

4. Clarity straightens and smooths all roads. Practice it.

5. You’d love to allow emotion to overwhelm reason, conviction to trump evidence. In public matters, though, this is the root of cruelty. Don’t do it. Don’t countenance it.

6. Don’t assign blame in situations where your own understanding is imperfect.

7. Don’t worry about working outside the box. The box is an illusion.

8. Never be ashamed to nap.

9. Kindness rewards the kind and baffles the cruel. Practice it.

10. It is an odd truth the giving almost never impoverishes you, however much you fear it might. Keep this in mind. Keep your hand open. 

In the world of surprises: Ramsey Library wants to give me a show in February, and John Crutchfield will be directing Father Abraham for Sublime. Saw neither of those coming. Look behind for looming shadows. See none at the moment. Rejoice.

December 6, 2018

Gave one exam, finished off one class. Cooked a pot roast against the possibility of oncoming blizzard. My guess is that it will never happen, or be less awesome than is foretold, but if it is its worst, I have a cooked meal that will last at least three days. Bush buried with the absolute maximum of maudlin sentiment in broadcast media, bitter reaction and revulsion in social media. Crows behaving oddly in the sky overhead.

December 5, 2018

Back to the Racquet Club in the dark of the morning. Ran 1/3 of a mile and did my weights. I could have done more. And still I rise. Sat in the café and wrote on Jason. Fluffy snow flew into my headlights as I drove.

The department sailed through a potentially acrimonious meeting yesterday. Nothing much was agreed upon, but incipient grievances were aired and dissipated. I am proud of us. We may be the only department on campus in which there has not been, in my tenure, inner upheaval. 

The news headlines on television have been 1) the death of George H W Bush and 2) a big snowfall which is not expected until Saturday night. North Buncombe schools closed today because it is cold. The gleeful TV weathermen revel in having, for once, the headline. 

As for Bush, most of my Facebook contact revile him and gag at the chorus of praise heaped on him officially at his death. I tend to forget how evil people are. What I remember about the first Gulf War was that on the night it was declared I was listening to it on the radio while driving to Fletcher to spend the night with Carol. He had a tiny kitten then who found places to join in while we made love. I suppose that will never be in the history books.

December 4, 2018

Easing into vacation mode, though the semester is not nearly done.

Each time I receive a letter from Red Hen Press, I initially dread that it’s a letter canceling my contract, because of the libel on Wikipedia. Has not been so far.

High Five writing early this morning. I was able to break through blockages in poetry and in Jason of the Apes. 

December 3, 2018

A mood came upon me, and when it was over, I had erected and decorated TWO Christmas trees. One has only ornaments in the shape of animals. Energy held through it all.  Most places are sold out of trees that are not gigantic, a shortage cause by I forget what. Forest fires? The recession too deep in 2008 for people to plant the trees they’d need ten years later? The Magnetic published its schedule, and In the Assassins’ Garden is set for June.

December 2, 2018

Chanukah. First Sunday of Advent, a day of spring in mid-winter, quite lovely, quite a tease in the midst of the Hibernian days to come. Did a little writing in the morning, but some energy in the air is not conducive to prolonged application.

Considering Miss Z B-S’s accusations. Once I dig beneath the hysterical and insane, the pure libel, I find fury at my taste in theater. I research and see I gave her a B in playwriting. I believe that is the root of it. Otherwise, there is no root at all.

December 1, 2018

Minor discouragement: publication date for The Falls of the Wyona set back to May.

Drove to Biltmore Village last night to see Simone’s chapeaux. Traffic insane. Landed in the middle of the annual Dickens Festival. Cold rain, but sweet nevertheless. I remembered wandering alone through night streets, absorbing that magic of Christmas, happy as a little god. I’m glad I can still do this, but I didn’t imagine I would be alone forever.

November 30, 2018

Some time given over each day to locating the new place the cats have chosen to defecate. This is a disorder I didn’t expect so soon.

Tumultuous days. J with Title IX proves an unexpected ally, or rather proves that justice is her goal rather than the automatic preferment of females. She helps me rebuff my “anonymous” attackers (they were never anonymous to her) and advises me that legal action may be the best recourse. I assume, as I always do, that the attack is over, and legal action may not be necessary, however much it is deserved. Both sides revile her, one for doing too little, the other for doing too much. That I’m not fired–or even inconvenienced–infuriates one side. That I am bothered by this at all infuriates me. I told her I understood how she could not win, and will not add to her afflictions. Attacked also by a local Trans woman (and former student, whom I evidently failed) who took correction of a personal error on her part as an attack on transgendered people everywhere. I told her she should learn the meaning of “transphobic” before she used it in a discussion that had already left her in the dust. She went ballistic. She has the charming idea that she can get me in trouble, get me fired, end my reign of terror over those in my power, and that it won’t matter that everything is a lie, because it is the age of Me Too and the woman must be believed.

Sang for World Aids Day and the hanging of the Quilt at the Masonic Lodge. Sparse, dedicated crowd. Useful chorus rehearsal, Barry in the next seat furiously refusing to acknowledge my existence. People don’t realize how quickly determination becomes absurdity.

I’m fighting with too many people. I’d let it be a lesson to me if I had been the active agent in any of the encounters. I merely turn and strike back after repeated blows. Something I do infuriates people. Certain people. An onlooker may see me doing it on purpose. I don’t think so.

Semester coming to a close faster than I anticipated. I have met with my last class. I think it is all well and everyone learned joyfully, but wait for the complaints to come in from one who was looked at funny or thought she heard a wrong tone from the front of the class. It is like China’s Cultural Revolution, Rule by Those with the Least Understanding. I do sort of see the attraction. How wonderful to explain away starvation because the dish was not set before you in the way you had imagined.

November 26, 2018

Ancient personal messages popping up on my Face Book account. That it, too, should be haunted would be no surprise. Hours spent in High Five reading Robert Penn Warren.

November 25, 2018

Naomi Tutu, our latest addition to the clergy, gave the benediction in Tswana. She said, “You may not understand, but God will.”

November 24, 2018

Bright and dingy alternation.

On the drive from Georgia I tormented myself for a while thinking of all the clothes my mother made me– knitted sweaters, shirts, jackets– which I scorned and which I would give anything to wear now. Many of them were quite terrible. I should have praised them and worn them anyhow. I was too young. I didn’t know what I would one day wish I had done. If I had only not squirmed when she tried to measure me. If I had not wept with embarrassment when she tried to get me to wear them to school. One does everything wrong.

Freddie Mercury died today.

Tremendous full moon in the morning light. Long talk with Colin at High Five. He is the one earnestly writing and reading Proust and Rilke in the mornings at the café. I gave him a book, and so he knows me a little. He is writing a Proustian epic wherein he turns his unpublished  poems into fiction. He wants to found a Press when he gets his finances in order. He is both very sweet and socially maladroit–probably somewhere on the autism spectrum. He is more attractive than you think when you’re brushing by with your coffee, trying not to be noticed. I was grateful, after all, for his company.

Actually got some writing done in the hotel room. Transcribing now. . . .

November 23, 2018

Gray day after Thanksgiving, Maud sitting on the keyboard, making it hard to type. Lived in the Hyatt Place in Alpharetta for two nights. I like it there, feel vaguely at home. There’s a stair at the back that leads to a cinema, which I used one evening to see Bohemian Rhapsody, to which I was looking forward but which turned out to be mildly boring. Tried another evening to see the new Harry Potter spin-off, but the guy behind the counter (who looked like he loved everything Potter) said it was horrible and not to waste my money. Thanksgiving merry. Saw the new fire pit, the new pond, beat all three nephews in their turn at chess. Trying to remember the last time I’d played chess. We played on the set I got one Christmas when I was a child. Caught up on lives and projects. D & D have girlfriends who seem right for them, and careers taking shape more conventional than their uncle might have wished for them.  I was a pretty conventional kid moving secretly toward the Wild. The stories of most are the other way around. Daniel has a dog, who lingers in memory as a dumb, sweet kid, down near the floor. The story is that Daniel wanted to move with Michaela to Colorado, but David could not live without him, and told him so, so now they’re all getting a house together. What a beautiful story! I hope all the ends of that are joy and mercy.  Thought more than I needed to about my blackguard student, considering how one determined liar can do a lot of damage. I believe I am almost finished thinking about that now. Time is short, and must be used only for the best.

November 21, 2018

Calm Wednesday, preparing for the drive to Atlanta.

It’s pretty certain my attacker is Z, from many classes, who, ironically, I thought of as a kind of pet, whose always-radical but not always adept poetry I fostered and encouraged. Completely blindsided. I knew it was she beating on my house, but I’d put that down to an undergraduate prank, essentially endearing. Before all the gods I do not know how I settled in her mind like this. Never having done or said or thought any of the things I’m accused of doing or saying or thinking, I search my conscience for some crumb that might have led to this disastrous road. Emotional imbalance on her part is the explanation, but there is still the question of how it chose me as its obsession. I make the mistake of placing these things, for a little while, at the center of my life. I’ll have 4 hours on the road to Atlanta to mull it over. Lori confides that the same thing happened when Trans students invented a campaign against her, which someone, for a while, had to take seriously. How much energy are we meant to spend dealing with our students’ emotional imbalances? Are these accusations ever legitimate? Perhaps I need to hear of a legitimate one, to leaven the mocking anger in my heart. I still must deal with the observation that a handful of people hated or hate me to the point of public demonstration, and I do not know exactly why. Or even approximately why, other than that I have spoken the truth to them. On the other hand, I do not recall a very public or very vehement demonstration of love. Maybe the lovers are subtler. Maybe the fault is in me, in which case it is also hidden from me.

But I feel better this morning than I did last night.

November 20, 2018

Four bears, one big and three adolescent, tumbling through garbage cans on Graceland as I drove home from choir. They were cute, but I might not have thought so had I been a pedestrian. Some crisis approaches with the bears, and I will be sad when it happens.

Unexpected ally in my sadly renewed fight with the harpy from my former class, Jill, the Title IX director, who is on my side. It is just for her to be so, but I didn’t expect it, and so I revise my attitude. I can understand being vilified for a stand one actually has taken, but to be vilified for statements never made, for attitudes and convictions antithetical to those one actually possesses is strange indeed. All could have been avoided through inquiry and patient dialog, but something in the present atmosphere makes it seem better to explode in instant indignation– whether righteous or absurd doesn’t seem to matter. To be indignant is itself righteous. Reason and Truth have a hard time maneuvering around Indignation. Had to block my first friend on Facebook, who based an extended tirade against me on a misreading of a sentence. Suggesting she go back and understand the sentence didn’t help, somehow. Some of us do not have time for this. Some of us have work to do. On a note: I realize that the woman who was running up to my house at night and beating on the window is the same one who cannot give up her baseless hatred of me. Hope her wasted time never comes back to her. But, I myself have hated with a pure white flame. I believed my hatred based on fact, but perhaps it didn’t look that way from all sides. So, I am not going to pretend to too much innocence. 

November 19, 2018

Student reading Sunday afternoon. Dreary, Unrehearsed, and therefore inaudible. Terrible self-indulgent fantasies, with two invigorating exceptions. Sigh. Are we proud of this?

Tobi at Red Hen alerted me that someone had “edited” my Wikipedia page. I found there the most shocking and insane libels, practically hysterical in the level of vilification. Of course I know who wrote it, riding the same hobbyhorse that failed her last year. Just don’t know what to do about it. The charges in some cases are extreme enough to be funny. I am trying to laugh it off. But if even one person thinks this of me, however insane, I am perplexed.

Went early to the Racquet Club to lift weights, reconfirming my gradual return to vitality. Prayed last night to relieved of some of the old harassments. Maybe that prayer was answered. But, then there is the big new one. Does it never end?

November 18, 2018

Gleaming winter morning, Maud rumbling beside me like a little vanilla thundercloud..

Saturday was mostly given over to the 74th Annual  Asheville Christmas Parade. I’ve dodged such things in the past as devourers of time, but I have felt a slow return of vitality, and I wanted to put that to the test. It was, in fact, a devourer of time, but also fun, me waving from our float at the crowd, many of whom I knew, many of whom called my name. Arrived early to help decorate the float, but the men who usually take care of that had it so under control that all I did was hand them things. The parade was quite long, maybe as many in it as watching it. I ended up walking across downtown, first from north to south, then from west to east, the whole time measuring how much better my stamina is than it had been. In the evening we returned to sing for the Treelighting Ceremony. In the past the Vance Monument has been the tree, but it’s too phallic and too Confederate, so the spindly deciduous trees of the Square joined a giant plastic Snowflake as The Tree, lit elegantly (and rater gaily) in purple.  I hadn’t realized what an honor was given to the Asheville Gay Men’s Chorus in being the official and singular voice of the Treelighting. The city’s recording catches my solid bass on the carols. Sweet day all in all. My soreness in the morning came from working a body that had not been worked very much since Ireland last July. On some days, one fights back on all fronts.

November 16, 2018

Cancelled the morning class because the students had, cheerfully and forthrightly, not looked at the material.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses in a thin adaptation at the Carol Belk on campus. It was student directed, and the direction was actually its strong point, providing passages of humor and, in one case, loveliness. But because of the quality of training they receive once they arrive, or maybe because of the quality of student attracted to the program, UNCA student actors and productions seldom rise even to the level of an outstanding high school. You could see they were doing what they were told to do, and having a good time, but the magic never hits. It’s never theater, though it may have its virtues as pedagogy. It’s always the department showing its stuff, never art. Casey and Cody in the past were exceptions, but they came perfected.  What does the drama faculty think watching it? Do they think they have done their job?

November 15, 2018

Luke Combs, who used to sit beside me in the All Souls choir, won Best Newcomer at the Country Music Awards. Astonishing.

Body covered in deep scratches. Looks like I’ve been fighting with a wildcat, but it must be me, probably in my sleep. Time to look to the fingernails. 

Looks like Magnetic is going to do The Assassins’ Garden. Surprises me (it being complicated) but ooo-rah!

Made it through rehearsal with flying colors and some voice left. What is more, for the first time in a very long time I felt like going out afterward. Went to Little Jumbo for a few cocktails, chatted with Lauren, a former student, who is now a trapeze artist. Liked the atmosphere. Came home and was asleep practically before the door shut behind me.

November 14, 2018

Here’s what the Weizenblatt website says about Night Wings:

David Hopes is an award-winning poet, playwright, novelist, actor, singer, painter, and professor – not necessarily in that order.  He works back and forth between the visual and oral, between narrative and mystical, to create different forms of art that are evocative and compelling.  Weizenblatt Gallery will exhibit a variety of his paintings from November 7 – December 14, with a reception for the artist on Wednesday, November 14, from 6-8 pm.

David Hopes is Professor of English at UNC Asheville.  He holds a Masters degree from Johns Hopkins University, a Masters in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, and a Ph.D. in British and American Literature from Syracuse.  Most would know him as a writer, whose most recent book of poetry, Peniel, is available from Saint Julian Press, and whose first novel, the prize- winning The Falls of the Wyona, is due in the spring of 2019 from Red Hen Press.  His plays have been done locally at the Magnetic Theater as well as in New York, Houston, Lost Angeles, Seattle, Cincinnati, Atlanta, and London.  Hopes’ most recent exhibit of paintings –”Works on Wood”– was held this summer at the Flood Gallery in Black Mountain.

This exhibit, “Night Wings”, are experiments, often rough in appearance.  Hopes combines canvas, plywood, drywall, scraps from torn-apart furniture, and whatever else is handy and appropriate, along with traditional acrylic and oil paints to create multi-layered images.  Several works address themes from the Bible or mythology.  Many use birds as symbols or metaphors.  They reward your long contemplation.

Can’t tell if it damns with faint press, prepares its audience for a mess, what?

On opening night he whole region is under a Winter Storm Watch. The weather is truly awful. I expected no one to appear, but in fact some did, most notably and pleasingly a number of Mars Hill students. SS and the Kostanseks appeared out of the darkness, and one of my Cantaria buddies. Interesting things were said about the paintings. None sold. The prospect of hauling them all back up the winding stair in December is almost unbearable. As soon as I left the building I was struck with agonizing muscle cramps in the chest, which interfered not only with driving but with breathing. Hobbled into the Sunoco for Gatorade. There the clerk suggested bananas, but added that she could eat neither banana nor broccoli anymore because when she was pregnant they made her sick and now she throws up even at the smell of a banana. 

November 13, 2018

Wintery cold, rain continuing. California is afire. Made chili. Suffered several publishing disappointments on each of the last several days. Cable TV doesn’t work. Kitchen faucet leaks. The department has had four retirements and no replacements. The yellow iris is a ghost in the back garden.

November 12, 2018

Maud the Cat has taken to coming upstairs and sitting on the desk as I write. This is a new thing, and sweet. I’ve noticed of these cats more than the others how habits change through time. Maud puts her paw out, reaching toward one, without ever completing the gesture.

Driving dark winter rain.

Triumphant discussion of Cantos LXXXVIII, XC, XCI.

November 11, 2018

Armistice Day. The saddest war of all wars, in some ways. Of course the Orange Abomination declined to stand in the rain to honor our sacrificial dead. He has done six hundred things any one of which would have sunk a politician at any other time. Absolutely unaccountable.

November 10, 2018

Since I couldn’t speak and there was no point in trying to sing, I went to the studio and painted well, inspired by the blank walls occasioned by my show.  Began paintings in a quite new style. Frustrated that the masses arrayed for the Studio Stroll weren’t coming upstairs, I closed up and drove to Mars Hill to take photos of my show. The gallery was, of course, closed, and some sort of dance contest going on in the auditorium. One girl in a gaudy costume carried two gigantic trophies. Ate lunch at the hillbilly sub shop. A different world. She seemed very happy. Worked the last several hours on Poets in Their Youth, which is finally near completion.

A great wind blew open the glass door in the kitchen, and for a while, until I came downstairs and found it, there was a gaping hole into the stormy night. The cats gathered in the living room as far away as they could get. I explored the rooms to make sure nothing of the night had come in.

November 9, 2018

Back to the doctor to get a valise of prescriptions. Got pneumonia vaccine, and my body turned into an ache. Why do they tell you that can’t happen, when it does? The winter hoarseness sets in. Teaching The Cantos this morning was, therefore, interesting.

Somehow photos of Jesse as a soldier made their way into my Facebook account. Heart staggers with, now, irredeemable loss. I have been more loyal–or desired the chance to be more loyal–than anyone ever wanted me to be.

Mitchell County students in an uproar over Parkway’s Shakespeare’s Complete Works: Abridged because it references drinking, suicide, and at one point two men kiss. I doubt that this was a spontaneous demonstration, but part of the Culture Wars, encouraged by parents and teachers. I want to walk on stage and scream, “Have you read the BIBLE lately???”

November 8, 2018

Extra paintings taken off my own wall and to Mars Hill, to fill one great gallery wall, though another is still and permanently black. I do not paint enough. I look like a hobbyist. But the show looks good, I think, distinctive and arresting. I doubt that there will be a review, but I brace myself in case. Praying to the gods that things sell so I don’t have to haul that back up the winding stair.

Jim Nave came yesterday to interview me for WPVM. We spoke first of how we have known each other for at least thirty years. “I know what you were going to say before I asked the questions,” he said, “and I wanted you to say exactly that.” He recited “Prufrock” by heart during the interview– posing, but impressive. Later he said, “I memorized it, but I don’t understand it.” He talked about his friendship with the Hustons, John and Angelica and the lot.  We sat on my picnic table and recorded my crows and my babbling pond for ambiance. I admit that I do not know what will come of anything.

Hoarseness. Sometimes I can speak; sometimes I cannot.

Letter from Blackmore, who’s kept better tabs on my life than I have myself.

The election? Better than one feared, worse than one hoped. It still amazes that, given the choice between a bologna sandwich and a plate of vomit, some people choose the vomit, resentful that no one offered steak.

Students panicky after the second exam. One student with a grade of 51 and some of the most clueless answers I have ever read insists that she was in class and attentive every day. I check the record, and she is right, at least about attending. Why does she then understand nothing? I admit it’s a mystery, and bid her merely to try again.

Picked up my dry cleaning and the dry cleaning lady told me about her son, who had cancer. He recovered, but when he did he was addicted to the opioids they gave him for pain. Eventually she had to evict him. “The drugs were worse than the cancer,” she said. 

November 5, 2018

Gunpowder Plot Day. Doesn’t seem such a bad idea.

The Brahms Requiem went well last evening–well from my seat, and well from all I could hear around me. Kyle seemed content (and spent) at the reception afterwards.

Helped my 8 AM class through “The Waste Land.”

The thing I was sure I could not accomplish–setting up my show at Mars Hill–is accomplished, though I was right in one way: I could not have done it myself. Leland and Jack stepped in and did 95% of the work. My gratitude went feebly expressed because it is inexpressible. The show looks good in that austere room. I didn’t bring enough work, so stuff robbed from my own walls gets run up tomorrow afternoon. I believe this show is more important than I have allowed myself to say. How many artists get shows in the Weizenblatt? I hope somebody goes to see it.

November 4, 2018

Morning spent rehearsing Brahms. It was about as much high culture as I or my voice could stand, but it went well, and our esteemed director had no cause for a melt-down. Sam has come to sit beside me, and his accuracy and my rich low range make a good combination. Spent the afternoon sleeping and working on a play, then out in the evening to see The Misanthrope at the Magnetic. The Moliere was re-written to be about a rock star, Alceste, and his cronies. The actors delivered the couplets admirably, but that sort of thing reduces after a time to seeing how close the adaptation is to the original (maybe because it charted no territory of its own), and waiting for the rhyme, either to applaud or disapprove it. I did enjoy being out, though, and the actors were worth watching. Unfortunately, the hyena was there (she seems to be a volunteer at the theater now) and everyone’s pleasure was compromised. I flirted with a man in the row behind me, but realized I was just too tired for that to have any outcome, so made my way out into the dark. They had Prosecco, but I could hardly stand.

That must have been the right choice, for I slept exquisite sleep and woke feeling sounder than I have in a while. Erotic images at waking, which I have learned to take as a good sign. I do fear tomorrow, for I literally do not have the strength to move my paintings and set up a show, and yet that is what must be done. I don’t often leave things to fate; this I am. I have been taking as much iron as I dare, and mounted the steps of my study this morning without having to pause to catch my breath. 

November 3, 2018

What must be remembered before all is the canary yellow iris now blooming in the back yard. Is it an autumn bloomer, or one bewildered by the weather? In any case, it makes the world go around it like the axle of a wheel. It gleams out there long after the rest is dark.

The flu shot that couldn’t give me the flu has in fact given me the flu.

Staggered out last night. The streets were full because Bob Dylan was at the Civic Center. Driving up the ramp of the parking garage, the van in front of me hit the wall, stopped, tried again, continued hitting it until it had torn its front bumper loose. It drove away in front of me dragging the bumper. Stopped at the Yacht Club. Everything there was festive, happy, Dionysian, and I reminded myself for the hundredth time that I must go out more. Went on to the BeBe for the opening night of the opening production of SS’s new theater. We’d read the play in class, and it is always interesting to see how a production unfolds differently from one’s initial imagining. The staging was right–even the roughness of opening night contributed to the basement-in-Berlin ambiance.When people sang it was at its best. I did enjoy the night. My student Elliott attended with his stunningly beautiful Asian partner. What a couple they made!

November 2, 2018

Yesterday was an interesting day. I was so exhausted after planting the peony (and rooting up some mints) that I was, for once, truly alarmed. Friday morning there came a kind of haze over my eyes, and every gesture sapped my strength. It was difficult to draw a complete breath. I went to school, and while I was lecturing (on theater after Webster) I kept losing my thought, losing the word, and twice had to grip the desk to keep from collapsing. In my mind were Mike Herhold, who told me of the by-pass surgery he had to have, and Mark, the nurse in Cantaria, who said exhaustion like mine (I briefly referred to it once) is likely linked with heart problems. I cancelled my afternoon class. I convinced myself that I would go into the hospital and have a risky surgery and get some sort of horrible hospital infection and the surgery wouldn’t work and I’d been a slow decline and there would be no one to take care of me. . . . even came home before going to MAHEC and got my phone charger, trying to think of whom to call to take care of the cats, etc.  Of course, it was the least of all things it could be. My circulatory system is fine. My hemoglobin is dramatically low. Had I stopped taking the iron pills? Yes, because I thought they were doing no good. Apparently they were. My self-inflicted terror came to nothing and I sat in my car weeping with relief. I did get a flu shot (they were very insistent) and though they assured me the critters were dead, I got, for an evening, the muscle ache associated with flu. But I took iron pills and made it to rehearsal, which I had almost decided not to do. I was watching the evening news when the haze fell from my eyes. 

We read through “At the Creche” by Jon David and me. It is beautiful.

October 31, 2018

Maud pissed on the desk in the living room, wetting the work list for my show and the pile of bills I had laid out for paying. Out comes a step ladder to drape them on to dry until they can be written on, sealed, paid. I hope the recipients can’t guess what happened, why the ink is smeared and the paper wrinkled..

Made the appointment to see about my never-ending exhaustion. My conviction is that most things just go away: this hasn’t. I realize that part of my postponement was anxiety. If I need surgery and convalescence, there is no one to look after me, no one to look after the house or the sick cats during whatever absence might be necessary.  I did not make this bed; nevertheless, I must lie in it.

Read Frost’s witch poems in class for Halloween. Planted one final scarlet tree peony.

October 29, 2018

The trees around the studio parking lot twitter with greenish-yellowish autumn warblers.

October 28, 2018

The choir of Holy Communion, Charleston, joined us today. The basses around me were magnificent, one vast and rumbling- like me but bigger–one high and clear and silvery, like a tenor with a baritone range. It was enlightening to sing with people doing it right. Simone clutched my hand as she went to communion. Maud is confused and goes to the bathroom in the wrong place. I screamed at her, and her dismay and confusion were palpable. Then I held her in my arms and wept bitterly. I prayed to Artemis, who gives the innocent painless death in good time.

October 27, 2018

Waiting for the people who wanted to use my office down by the river, I opened old notebooks– 1969-1971– and read the poems I’d written then. They were, by and large, terrible. I wondered why I went so long without much improvement. Then I realized that I wasn’t interested in working on craft. I’d hit upon a workable tone of wonder, and with it I wanted to celebrate and memorialize all that happened in my life. I took the concept of Bard seriously, and a bard, I thought, opens his mouth and sings praises. The sort of exultant, semi-biblical vein I mined almost from the first was perfect for that. When did I decide I wanted to write poems which were actually good on their own, without reference to the elevation of their subject matter? My guests arrived before I read that far, but the image that comes into my mind now is me sitting in my upstairs apartment in Baltimore, reading a rejection slip–from I forget whom–that finally told me what I was doing wrong. I’d been such a prodigy all through high school and college that no one ventured to correct me. I think now with wonder on the patience of Hale Chatfield and others who praised and encouraged what they much surely have recognized as, at best, overreaching,

Gary Dodd is dead. He was my hero when we lived at his family’s house when my mother was ill.

October 26, 2018

Students bring Rice Krisipies treats studded with Froot Loops for breakfast. 

Had anticipated all week and prepared much of the day for Jason’s visit this afternoon. Bought a variety of teas, assuming that his recent rehab experiences would make wine a bad choice. Sat downstairs waiting. Of course he didn’t come, didn’t indicate that he wasn’t coming. That is such an invariable in my life I have to explain to myself why it takes me by surprise every single time. That I am simply not regarded by others seems a fairly scientific conclusion. Afterwards I was too disheartened even to climb the stairs and try to do some work. Too much TV, sitting in the wrong position on the couch.

A comment on Facebook about pizza made me remember going to the drive-in in the 50's, seeing and smelling pizza there for the first time and asking dad if we could have some. “No,” said he, “that’s low class. It’s only for Italians.”

October 25, 2018

Only the men showed up for playwriting, and not all of them. Curiously, they had plays in the voices of women. Brahms in the evening, our director irritated that we not only did not make progress but seem to have backslided. Mirth afterwards at the Wayside. A police cruiser followed me out of Biltmore, followed me to my driveway, but kept on going when I veered in. Maybe he saw me leave the bar and was checking for signs of intoxication. The last time a cop followed me like that it was a refused lover who was about to change my life.

October 24, 2018

When I rose in darkness the moon rode low in the sky, but was with me everywhere I stopped, finally cut by the tips of trees over the university parking lot.

October 23, 2018

Inspecting my haircut in the mirror, my eyes happen to take in the whole picture. Physically, there’s not much left to me now but old and ugly. This is a phase that might last a long time. . . .

My playwrights are lagging, so I cancelled class today to give them time to catch up. I said I wasn’t feeling well, and I wasn’t.

Freeze warnings, and yet the flowers bloom, a little exhausted, as if looking forward finally to the razor night. 

October 22, 2018

Woke with an almost absurd sensation of well being, partially, but by no means fully, eroded by the day. Taught Yeats. Got the first haircut I’ve liked in maybe five years. Ate lamb chops, which I seldom think to do. Went to the Mall and bought a shirt. . . novelty after novelty. . . .The shirt guy looked at me and said ”Did you mean to. . . uh. .  get slim fit?” Indeed I did not.  All the clerks were bitching about what a slow day it was.  Circe gives up on the litterbox. And so it goes.

October 21, 2018

Om mani padme hum chant the monks on my You Tube station. Soothing, a golden light, just as promised. Put together Limerick Station. Great wind last night. My biggest dogwood lost its biggest limb.  None of my flowers was touched by the frost.

October 20, 2018

Dark Saturday morning, silent but for the cats crunching their breakfast downstairs.

Went to the Magnetic last night to see Ghost Lullaby, maybe the most satisfying thing I’ve seen there that I hadn’t written myself, shapely and, as it intended to be, deeply creepy.

Mike T sat in my office testifying to a new life, which involved a conversion, breaking up with his girlfriend (one of those was apparently contingent upon the other), and a fresh view of Creation. Such exuberance, one thought at one moment. Such near-hysteria, one thought at another moment. But part of the confession was to tell me he loved me because I had done good in his life, so I shall let it all ride on that. It must have built up for a while, as he talked very fast for more than an hour. I hope I retain what I was meant to retain. I couldn’t quite figure out what was the matter with his girlfriend, since she is a Christian too. It was clear in is mind. He quotes his religious advisers. They seem very stringent to me, like prophets or Apostles rather than modern people. He believes it is what he needs right now. More than once I have thought it– some focused and unyielding path-- was what I need right now. Never found a master I could follow who wanted to be followed.

Good day in the studio. Painted a picture I didn’t expect to paint. Lost my temper when no visitors made it into my studio, came home.

October 19, 2018

All contracts for At the Creche are signed and JD is hard at work finishing the music. Will there be a blow-up from the Vast Infant when this one is passed out? Does everyone who might blow up already know, and there will be peace for Christmas? My students, after we slogged dutifully through the Enlightenment, still believe that some passionately held prejudices should trump the truth. One settles back, decides, like Satan, to skirmish at the periphery.

October 18, 2018

The Vast Infant carries on his program of ignoring me. Is there someone on his side? If so, it would be well to know why. Voted on the first day I could, blue from top to bottom. I wonder if I’ve become a sort of fanatic, but when I look at what the Republicans actually do and declare themselves to stand for, I think that whatever level of fanaticism leveled against them can’t quite be enough. Everything that America has proudly stood for, they do not. The argument in their favor from a voice at once moral and intelligent cannot be imagined.

October 17, 2018

I watch the society of the department whirl around me. I am now the old man, and the kids respect me without including me. It’s lonely, but so to be expected that nothing can be said. They are more corporate and attentive to the rules than we used to be, climbing their way up the committee ladders. This does not seem to have paved our way within the institution.  We’re seriously underhanded and can teach no electives, but our hiring requests keep getting turned down. I think sometimes I did everything wrong in connection to the university. In this I seem to have been following a plan laid for me when I arrived. “This one is special.” Perhaps I was. Perhaps I wasn’t.

October 16, 2018

Take what I believe to be the last elements of my show to the framers. If I ever actually expected to have a show I might have been more provident in this area. Writing well and steadily on short fiction, having to fight off the angels of futility to get back to the novels.

October 15, 2018

I write a short story as my students take their 8 AM exam.

October 14, 2018

Arrive in my study to hear a tremendous skein of geese flying and honking over the roof. The squirrels are in a frenzy of activity trying to get all the walnuts into the ground, which they will forget, which will sprout and require me to dig them out next summer.

Sadness over my life. I lie down and sleep it away. That I do lie down and sleep it away seems one of the greater gifts.

October 13, 2018

I never know for sure what has interceded when I look and days have passed since I last recorded. It’s not as though there’s not time. . . though, perhaps, there’s no time.

Gave Tennyson a triumph in class on Friday. 

Most of my students though A was a “jackass” when he came to the workshop. This surprised me because I didn’t see that at all. I thought he was candid and maybe a bit heroic. Maybe those qualities read as “jackass” to the young.

Impressed myself by getting the work done that finishes off the garden in preparation for winter. All the bulbs are planted, and what is not finished can wait for a day or a season. The terrible exhaustion abates measurably, a contributing factor to my success.

AW, our colleague, is caught by the police removing political signs. The local Republicans are in a froth about it, of course. Both AW and our chairman have received death threats, and people solemnly ask “is THAT what they’re teaching at that university?” It’s all so petty it’s probably old news even as I remark on it. It’s mostly a matter of bad luck that she got caught. You do perhaps wonder what possessed a grown woman. . . . Me, I would have tried to incite my students to do it. . . .

Proofing done for The Falls of the Wyona. There was less of it than might be expected, fewer mistakes, fewer passages of questionable taste. I respected and was grateful for their punctiliousness.

I believe I have enough paintings for the show. Took the last to be framed today. What will people think of it? I don’t know, and since there has been no reviewing apparatus since I was fired from the CT, I probably will never know.  I am painting what I like the way I like it, so perhaps the main thins is accomplished. 

Downtown to see Frost/Nixon and have a drink at Zambra’s. The play requires impersonation, and impersonation is hard to judge except as to believability, and in that realm, Michael was magnificent. Nixon was always the smartest person on stage. I remember the real thing, but I was young, and remember it mostly for being boring.

Blue jays in the blue sky, the remnant of the orange zinnias buzzing in the clash of light.

October 8, 2018

Day of almost comic productivity. Rose with a sense of vast well-being. In the last dream I had been playing in bed with my sons. Went for the first time since August to High-5, where I wrote an ending to the poem about Ireland. Tom was sitting with Wind, gnawing the edges of their screenplay. Most of my adult life was spent pursuing two relationships that would never bear fruit. Nothing to be done about that except to acknowledge.Then I went to the studio where I repainted the landscape that’s been hanging in my dining room. Dabbled, repainted, detailed, varnished. Came home and prepared the second raised bed. The edited version of The Falls of the Wyona arrived in email; that will be the great task of the week. Precision which so far exceeds mine is a wonder and a tribulation.

Trying not to listen to the news.

October 7, 2018

Turned off all electric media and sat with my fingers arched over the keys until I had made a poem. The poem is about my Irish lovers, a subject never dealt with fully, or in a way even I might call comprehensive. It is a beginning. It was beautiful, and then I slept.

October 6, 2018

Two excellent studio days in a row, preparing for the show in November. Skip emails to ask what pieces I’ll be exhibiting, and I want to fire back, “I don’t know. I haven’t made them yet.” People who manage to make it to the second floor barely stick their heads into my studio, or come in and do a tight little turn in the entranceway. My studio may have more of the feel of an exhibit than a studio. I try to be friendly. . . I have been unable to monetize any of my endeavors.

October 5, 2018


Andrew spoke to our playwrights, and was unexpectedly brilliant. John comes before his show opens. One of my students said to me, “If I go by what you say I’d think you hated the theater.” I stopped dead in my tracks, thinking about that. Am still thinking about it. I THINK that I love the theater and am pretty much pleased by everything, but that’s not the witness I give, apparently. Am I envious? If so, is my envy so sharp that it leaks through without my knowing?

October 4, 2018

Bear on the roof and then the lawn of All Souls, very black and very bewildered. The Dean stood in the doorway hollering, “Everyone into the Parish Hall!” Much singing of Brahms, which I understood at the time and later to be a great blessing. Gossip over red wine afterward.

October 3, 2018

One golden persimmon hangs from my persimmon tree.

Spectacular class on Shelley. 

Heroic gardening– Mount Hood daffodils planted, one raised bed fully prepared.

Thoughts on the massage table: the boy who took me to a sleazy hotel in Syracuse. I lied when I told him my name. He was very sweet and beautiful. On the way home I plucked a louse from my hair.

I was incredibly young. It was my bedroom on Goodview Avenue. Mt little lamp was on and I kneeling at my bedside. Mom and dad stood in the doorway, looking at me. They were teaching me how to pray, “Now I lay me down to sleep. . . God bless mommy and daddy and grandma and. . .” But the thought in my mind, clear and hard at that very hour was, “How odd these people are, and what an odd thing they’re asking me to do. But, if I’m here, I have to get along, so I will do what they ask, and smile and be child-like, for that is how it is done.”  How early is the recollection? Impossible to tell. But all my earliest recollections share the conviction that I had been cast among strangers, and had to conceal and adapt cunningly in order to survive.

October 2, 2018

Circe on the keyboard makes for interesting typing. Raft of rejections all in one day. Is there enough contempt to be spread so thin? We discussed the horrendous comprehensive exams, decided that their horrendousness was not our fault. Students don’t believe they have to know anything. Someone has led them to think a general aura of understanding is enough. Crushed a flea on white paper, where it looks exactly like a flea.

October 1, 2018

After class, gardening, heroic gardening. Bought a truckload of dirt from Reems Creek, dug out of its summer of weeds a chunk of the east garden and planted a stand of Japanese iris. Chopped out of the ground great lengths of invasive bamboo– what is it?– it looks like stems boring underground.  Shoulders ache with digging and carrying.

Women will be disappointed when the patriarchy doesn’t fall. For us there is no other natural option. It may be modified but not replaced. I’m not celebrating, merely observing. This is a moment in time when this cannot be said in any public forum.

September 30, 2018

Rose and took a brisk walk around the block, being only slightly winded on the slope in front of the donut shop–which I passed by. I did this to test my suspicion that a certain measure of my vitality is returning. I noticed first while gardening, that I could heave the great bags of mulch around without having to sit on the porch to catch my breath. Half moon above me. Energetic crying of birds, as if it were spring. Homeless sleep in the gazebo near the Fresh Market. Many of them. I was too embarrassed to count.

A volunteer mimosa grows too close to my serviceberry. Which do I save?

Never want to hear the name Brett Kavanaugh again.  He’s not a man at all, but a symptom of the careless corruption of the Republican party.

Oh, on the day after Pride, I’m thinking how I will praise the gods if I never have to sing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” again.

September 29, 2018

Morning was given over to poetry. Then downtown to perform for Pride. The day was glorious, and the performance not so painful as it might have been. We couldn’t be heard. We can never be heard. Tenors in the front row with the mics against their mouths can be heard. I did hear a recording of my solo, and I have a shocking big voice. The plaza was full of happy people in extravagant costume. I complain at the prospect of it, but the thing itself is sweet and good. Bought the best lemonade that there ever was in the world. Tried to buy a parking sticker at the hotel, but the man gave it to me free.

Home to gardening, and now, in darkness, back to poetry again. Tried to put together a book of travel poems, except that it will not cohere. My Irish poems are song-like, simple, unlike my other work. Not only that, they name the names of lovers, something I had forgotten, so long has it been since I looked at them. I was a different man in Ireland. That’s what I wanted.

September 28, 2018

Beethoven from the radio downstairs. My students are giving their class presentations, and they’re by and large horrible, superficial, disorganized. Every year someone does Gesamtkunstwerk without bothering to take even a stab at German pronunciation. I blame their high school teachers for instilling in them the notion that the least is enough, without really knowing if they’re at fault. Perhaps I’m at fault for not exploding in their direction.

Evening, returning from the garden covered with dirt and scratching mosquito bites, but having done yeomanly. Every year I think I’m going to plant an ocean of daffodils.  My big handsome bullfrog gave me full sight of himself at the pond’s edge, disappearing only when I turned my eyes away.

September 27, 2018

Trip to Eden brothers, hungry to buy all the seeds, all the bulbs.

Meet-and-greet with our majors yesterday. Festive. It’s always surprising to hear oneself praised.

Last Men’s Chorus rehearsal before Pride. We forget that in that din no one will hear us at all, let alone the little nuances we try to put into the music. All I want to do is put on a tuxedo, stand in a line and sing the best music in the world. We’re donning diamond tiaras and singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” doing a kick line, waving flags. I’ve managed single-handedly to hold off the burning batons and evening gowns, but how long will that last?

September 26, 2018

Woke from a strange dream. I wanted to include a new element in my painting– wind. Wind made visible. I gathered from the air tiny bits of tornadoes and hurricane and attached them to my canvas and incorporated them into the composition. Sometimes they whirled and sometimes they were just gray cloudy masses. As I painted, an old fashioned gypsy-like caravan rolled up on the lawn nearby. The caravan was occupied by a pretty young girl. She invited me inside, and her caravan was filled with books and clouds, the same bits of clouds I had been collecting. She offered me tea. One thing led to another, and soon we were having sex. I did not forget who I was even in the dream. I reached down to see if I were really aroused, and I was. We made love four times, it being important to her to do it in four different positions, facing the four cardinal directions, which seemed significant to her. When I woke my body was still–notably–aroused.

September 25, 2018

Bill Cosby, the symbol of wise manhood once, sentenced to jail at the age of 81. Nothing better illustrates Fortune’s inexorable wheel.

Kavanaugh, who looked like a sure thing behind the shield of monsters such as McConnell, may have to withdraw from consideration for the Supreme Court. One would think even corrupt men could choose a guiltless one and avoid the sturm und drang, but like will cleave to like no matter what.

The President is laughed at in the UN General Assembly. At least publically he is too stupid to comprehend the humiliation. I want to live to hear him say the words “I am a failure. I am a buffoon whom the whole world either laughs at or reviles.”  Any variation on that would do.

Continued miraculous enthusiasm in my playwriting course.

This semester’s comprehensive exams the worst I’ve ever seen. Someone let them think they needn’t even try. It’s partially our fault. Lazy and irresponsible programs such as Humanities cynically allege that they are teaching “skills” rather than “knowledge.”  This gives students the idea that if they answer correctly the question “do you feel that you have a sense of the history and significance of (fill in the blank)” they actually have mastered that subject. That they have mastered anything. What I wrote to my colleagues:

OK, for what it’s worth, here is my take on the badness of the comps this semester. Part of it is rhythmic and passing; it was just an off semester. Part of it is we don’t get to transfer students quick enough to prepare them. Part of it is an attitude that has crept into education (not us, so much, but so prevalent all around us that it is hard not to be tainted) that we should be teaching skills rather than “things.” Theoretically, this is fine, but it is almost never what happens. When lazy or irresponsible programs (such as the current iteration of Humanities) say “we’re teaching skills” what is meant is that they have given up on teaching actual subject matter and are satisfied if the student can answer positively a set of vague and useless queries such “do you feel you have a general understanding of the course and significance of” whatever the issue is. “Teaching skills” sounds excellent in conversation, but as it manifests in this university at this time, it is an admission that one has given up on–or failed at–teaching subject matter. Of course we are tempted by the current assessment culture into framing things exactly that way. Since there is no real way to assess the value of writing, or understanding, a poem, for instance, a rickety fiction grows up in which the student is encouraged to assess her own feelings about her progress as a scholar. Do you have the skills necessary to understand “Leaves of Grass”? God forbid if she should ever be asked actually to EXPRESS or PROVE her understand or appreciation of it.  Details, facts, names and passages are thought of as being fussy or elite in some way, and to be done without if a student can be confident in an abstract air of attainment. To me, this is the deliberate avoidance of academic principles, wherein the general is ALWAYS founded upon and derived from the specific. You do not have a general feel for the Harlem Renaissance unless you can quote Langston Hughes. You have no general knowledge of the Roman Empire if you can’t speak specifically about at least a few emperors. You have no useful general understand of literature if you don’t know what century Tennyson wrote in or what a dactyl is. There is no skill without application. There is no understanding without specific analysis. I do not mean to be excoriating US, because I think we’re as blameless in this as you can be in a community given over to it. I mean to say it is our task to hold the line and teach the way we ought to, and not be dismayed if we are, from time to time, a shock to our students. That’s what we ought to be: a shock and a correction and an open door.  

September 24, 2018

Wordsworth this AM, maybe the best I’ve done on him. Mike Oppenhein took photos of me in the Botanical Garden in light rain. He said the gray soft light was perfect for a portrait. I couldn’t take my eyes of the infinity of native flowers.  Terror House magazine in Budapest takes my Budapest poems– which I submitted by email last night.

September 23, 2018

One of my favorite days of the year. Who knows why? Maybe something wonderful happened on September 23rd.  Cleaned the pond filter, released a pinkish-goldish fish that had come out with the gunk. Hacked bamboo. Weeded a little. Dug holes for daffodil bulbs, not accomplishing what I meant to. Progress on Sam-sam. Regretted something with all my heart, but was unable to pin down exactly what it was. Miss Sam. I hope things are going as he planned. Watching Jason on Face Book. When I knew him he wanted to be a better-and-better artist. Now he has become a professional VET, nursing a never-ending grievance, which though genuine will not uphold him. One shrugs where only God can see.

September 22, 2018

Rose yet again in darkness, drove through the end-of-summer farmlands to Lake Logan and sang as much at choir camp as I could. Almost fell asleep during the round after lunch. Must see about this. The trees around the lodge are familiar to me, almost old friends. If they move, you look for an animal, but either the animal is invisible or it is only the wind.

September 21, 2018

Equinox. Nevertheless, sweet summer evening. Good class this AM, saying goodbye to Blake. I mean to write a little and then go put the tools away that I left strewn over the lawn after today’s gardening. Much digging and mulching, much mulching of what was dug and planted earlier. The only new things into the ground are daffodils.

Jon and Simone and I seem to have got the commission lined up in a way that profits all. It always surprises me when working with composers that they will not start a piece until the funding is in place. I go ahead and write it, assuming I can use it for something else if the commission goes awry. My friendship with Frank Ferko almost ended because I didn’t understand this. I have paid too little attention to getting paid, and it has had consequences.

Choir camp tomorrow. I’d weep if I thought too much about it.

I leave for school when it s still fully dark. This morning there were odd sounds in the black mass of trees between me and the next house. I thought it might be a bear. If it was, it never came out of the trees. Seeing a bear in your yard is the end of a kind of innocence.

September 16, 2018

Though it rained gently through the night, no sign of anything like unto a hurricane. Quite silent outside, except for the night insects. As I write dawn pales greenish gray.

September 15, 2018

The sky just before dusk is gray and gray and darker gray. Rained some, though whether that was part of the hurricane I doubt. We’re meant to be getting it full-on tonight. Did good work at the studio. Revised two plays. In a nap dream, Robert Mueller was anxious for me to try a recipe he had just made. One mishap after another kept me from ever tasting it.

September 14, 2018

One evening I looked out the back window and saw a cloud of dragonflies hovering and towering over the lawn. They seemed not to be interested in the pond. I had never seen such a thing– like a vertical migration.

Fleas on me, but not, so far as I can find, on the cats. I spray and they’re gone for a day or so. I check every twinge, every tickle on me to see if it’s a hated black speck. Almost never is, but often enough to keep the energy up.

Not very productive days–much napping, much achievement of minor chores. Good classes, I think, though what are they thinking behind their smiles or blank visages? One girl sleeps through most of class, misses the exam (for no particular reason), then can’t make up the exam because every moment she’s not in class she’s practicing with the track team. I say, “skip something.” She says, “I’ll talk to my coach.” She’s sweet, and her sweetness deflects wrath. You get into trouble if you say, “drop now; you can’t possibly succeed,” though it is the truth. Neither class remembers being told that “amount” is for measurable things and “number” for countable.

Hurricane Florence already hammering the Carolina coast. It’s dead calm here at this hour, but everyone prepares for the worst, buys out the grocery stores. I have liquor, mixers, radishes, cabbage, bratwurst, consider myself prepared.

Evening: after class I engaged in deep gardening, finally getting the round garden in the back dug up, ready to be mulched. No more exhausted than I would have been had I done nothing at all–maybe less. Planted allium and iris. The sky to the north– what I can see from the study window– is flamingo and azure.

September 9, 2018

Strange howling or shrieking before morning, like a screech-owl, but unwavering, and very much louder.

September 8, 2018

Moderate success in the studio. Finished a major work, until I look at it again and see what must be redone. Tony came and not only mowed the lawn but filled up the air in my truck tires. The strange holes dug in the lawn were not a mutant mole, as I’d thought, but him digging out yellow jacket hives. He failed, I guess, and the one I finally destroyed was the same one resurrected. The clumps of grass he left around the blue spruce were not neglect, but fear of the hive. The cats barely move. Maud will go to the shower to lap up water. Circe goes to the litter box and the food bowl, but spends the rest of her time on the green cushioned chair. Circe climbed to the study to me today, and I made much of her for extending what must have been tremendous effort. Old age is one thing that cannot be cured. I must be patient. Maud purrs when I hold her, and I sob.

Blundered upon the news that Pilgrim Hills is to be sold. My spiritual life began there.

September 7, 2018

Crashing like a runaway diesel into the weekend. I believe my classes so far have been successful. Not many sleepers even at 8 AM. The playwrights are unexpectedly eager. I stand and present the things that delight me, hoping they too will take delight.  Because of Miss Jill one replays one’s statements after class, weighing them to see if by some remote chance something maybe be distorted so as to seem sexist or exclusionary. The Inquisition comes to Academia, and we dare not even call it by that name. What complicates that issue is that one agrees with and upholds the stated goals of the very apparatus that torments one. But it goes too far, and takes “you’re going too far” as an admission of guilt.

Bought mass quantities of bulbs to force myself to reduce the outside of the fence to order.

One of the cleaning ladies stops me and says “Thank you for reporting the broken elevator. We reported it every morning, but they never listened to us.”

Sat beside the canoe-expedition-leading giant who just joined Cantaria. He is one of our straight men. He asked, “Why did you throw away all the good will and recognition built up by Cantaria and change the name?” I did my best not to say, “THAT, my friend, is the $64,000 question.” He has a magnificent deep speaking voice, but I didn’t hear a single note out of him during rehearsal. Maybe getting ready– Wanted to skip rehearsal, but ended up having a good time.

Thoughts rush through the head. At night dreaming dreams of astonishing vividness. Have not written in any systematic way since school began. Maybe tonight. I am sitting in the writing chair right now, so if I can just keep sitting--

Every day of lingering summer I bless. The moon last night was the thinnest possible crescent hung over Merrimon Avenue.  Late summer roses in bloom.

September 6, 2018

Joined AAUP after all these years. Why? 1) Because it is right, 2) Because I’m from Akron and have never been comfortable not belonging to a union, 3) Because the spokesman for the group is our absurdly handsome German political science prof, across from whom I sat all through the informational meeting.  You think these things recede with time; they do not, but merely become more subterranean.

September 3, 2018

Labor Day of intense and rewarding labor in the garden– nothing planted, much cleared. The shoulder-wrench which makes it difficult to lift a teapot simply ignores heavy garden work. Moved the raised beds out into the light, thinking of annuals next year.

September 2, 2018

Thunder in the distance, the sky yellow and gray nearby. We could use a drenching. Wrenched my shoulder loading the last of twelve bags of mulch. Had to leave the store to vent my fury– get the gout cleared up enough to function and something else goes wrong, the universe not being content if you go through an ouchless day. Got nothing planted, nothing weeded, not even the mulch unloaded from the truck. The rain will be my excuse. Headed for the studio, but forgot my wallet and turned around and gave up. Did nap. Did achieve that.

The shoulder pain seems to be worst when I’m typing. Of course. That’s what I need to do the most of.

Is it just me, or is it universal to spend one’s maturity looking back and wondering if there was a single moment when one wasn’t goofy or selfish or awkward or petulant or disappointing? I barely have a memory not tainted by the suspicion that I could have–probably did–look like an ass to every other participant. My poor parents. . .

September 1, 2018

Half way through my birthday. Spent it, so far, because the gout had left my toe, gardening. I’ve been opening up the patch against fence, which had been under the great pine and is a morass of tangled ivy and honeysuckle vines and roots: much labor, little progress. Did get yellow native hibiscus into the ground, and a few iris.

August 31, 2018

Illicitly took the day off at the end of the first two weeks of class. My excuse is to have free days around my birthday, if anybody asks, which they have not. Went to High 5 to kick-start one or the other of the novels. Did manage to move Sam-sam along, all the while fighting urgent, copious, inexplicable, and repetitive diarrhea, which eventually put an end to the morning’s writing. All’s well. Sat beside a man and his Jack Russell, who were beautiful together.

Return to the Asheville Gay Men’s Chorus, nee Cantaria, after a summer off. Was in despair the first few moments– the same pop tunes which I hated before, the same turbulent and self-indulgent individualism on the part of the choristers, with our well-established personalities. But, my spirits turned a corner, realizing that I could lament and fade away or I could manage to have fun, if I really put my mind to it. So, we’ll have fun. C has dementia, and comes to rehearsal anyway. What do I think of that? What’s the line between patience and ruinous indulgence? Not my call, thank God. A beautiful, young, and giant baritone gives me something to look at. Amazing what difference that makes.

I said to Circe curled up on the kitchen chair, “I’ve taken care of you for fifteen years, and do you send me a birthday card?”

I said to Maud curled up on the bathroom counter, “I’ve taken care of you for fifteen years, and do you send me a birthday card?”

I said to the frogs on the pond, “I made a world for you, and do you send me a birthday card?”

No sufficient answer from any.

I do receive a letter from Grey, which before the end has me weeping silently in the café in relief and gratitude, for his testimony that I did some good at one time. “I think I’m going to miss your literature classes more than I realized. They were truly one of a kind. I truly feel that you, along with the Western canon  which you wielded, saved me from self-induced drowning.” He’s at the MFA program at Alabama, which is not living up to his expectations, but which seems exactly to mirror my remembrance of the MA at Syracuse. He remembers when I said, “A false argument shrinks the world; a true argument enlarges it.” I am glad now to be reminded of that. He says, “I hope you find your lone, annual devotee.” To be fair, sometimes there are more than one.

Agonizing leg cramps last night, still sore this morning. Hurled invective at God between gulps of Gatorade.

August 30, 2018

Grievance Committee meeting. Luckily nobody has had a grievance (which came to us) in several years, so we mostly sat around warning each other against revealing emails and communications. Big Sam my veteran explains that he has had a headache for three years. My feminists in the back row harden their countenances against Donne’s “Song.” I wonder if they forgave him thereafter, or if one trespass is damnation? I wonder what the term “misogynist” applied to a man of the 17th Century could actually mean?

August 29, 2018

Little birthday gathering after choir, drinks and silly gifts from the bartenders.

August 28, 2018

I will bow and be simple; I will bow and be free; I will bow and be humble, yea bow like the willow tree.

August 27, 2018

Gentle Face Book exchange with Angie and Terry and some of my high school friends about Trump. Nobly, I neither fought nor lectured, but assured them I had noted their perspectives and hoped it would be well for all of us one day. But it is hard confronting a stand that is all assertion and no fact without saying so. Angie says it’s a shame that Trump hasn’t been left alone to do the important work of the people, that he has been thwarted at every turn. I want to point out that the Presidential decrees–things he can do and did do without input from everybody–have been uniformly disastrous. Would he suddenly veer to virtue of the whole world did his bidding? Terry says “somebody” must lead America in the “right direction,” and I want to ask “what is the right direction,” but I am afraid of what I may hear. You want to be gentle. . . you want to be reasonable. . . especially with old folks set in their ways. I remember when Angie was a doe, arguably the prettiest girl in the class. Yeats wrote about this all the time. . . “an intellectual hatred is the worst/so let her think all opinion is accursed.”

Evening spent listening to shape note singing and working on Jason.

August 26, 2018

Summer Sunday. Returned to church, sang Brahms and Tallis. It was the first Sunday DJ could not climb the steps into church. One doesn’t know what to say. Should some transitions be met with silent support? Maybe the right words or the right deeds will be given to me.

Me at the café: I’d like an everything bagel with cream cheese, and a black tea lemonade with no added sugar.
Her: What kind of bagel?
Me: Everything.
Her: Would you like cream cheese?
Me: Yes.
Her: Anything to drink?
Me: Black tea lemonade with no added sugar.
Her: Would you like green or black tea?
Me: Black.
Her: Would you like that sweetened?