December 30, 2019

Early dark morning, waiting to take Circe for her procedure. She crawled so gently into bed and up against my chest that I didn’t know she was there until I woke.

Thought about what I should remember of this year. On the good side, I brought out two novels. They have not made much of a splash, or if they have I’m late in hearing about it, but they are good and I am proud of them. That they have made less of a splash than many MANY not as good as they is part of my old argument with the clouds. Not in the mood just now. But, I set them as a seal upon my heart.

Finished Diving into the Moon, Tub, and Jason of the Apes. What their fate may be cannot be imagined, but they too are good. To them I have done justice. Maybe I should summarize all with that: I have done justice.

My garden was excellent.

The sweetness of people extending their time and talents to realize my plays.

Unusual number of testimonials from former students, and friends. Maybe they sensed my need.

Made an important journey to the Holy Land, which I continue to contemplate.

The worst of it was witnessing the death of the university to which I dedicated my academic career. It may continue as a degree-granting apparatus, but its relevance as an institution of higher learning is gone, or at least interrupted. You cannot at once falsify and stand for truth. You cannot serve both authoritarianism and free thought. You cannot reward mediocrity and claim to honor excellence. You cannot move forward with the administration more important than the thing administered. You cannot pretend forever to be something you have stopped being. I have been a voice crying in the wilderness, and I am not good at it. It never occurs to me that anyone hearing the truth might hate it.

December 29, 2019

Saint John, Holy Innocents– I don’ know what today is. Holy Family, I think. Circe goes up and down. Added to her symptoms is ceaseless slobbering. I remember this is what Theseus had when he died. The knot in my chest is anxiety.

Baking, preparations for Tuesday night. Doing some writing.

Why is it I still think lesbians kissing in public are showing off? I started to say, “You don’t see men behaving that way,” but you don’t see men in Asheville publicly displaying physical affection much at all. A difference in culture, I guess. Gay men have gone underground here. We have domesticated. Gay women have not.

Here is the truth of my life, following me into another decade. (--too bleak to share--)I do expect some compensation from this, some gift from the Almighty that would make it all right. It would be hard to imagine what that would be. In any case, it hasn’t come.

December 26, 2019

In some ways the sweetest Christmas in recent memory. Circe was better. I did some baking, but mostly lounged half-asleep with Christmas music from classical stations shimmering on the air. Completely restful, rather magical. I am still able to think pure thoughts.

December 25, 2019

Happy Christmas to all. Circe walked down the steps, ate her pills in a glob of tuna, and does not have her head stuck in a corner. I count that a victory.

Services last night were quite beautiful, I think, and we sang well enough even for the occasion. Gave Sean and Alden the presents I had intended as a joke for David and Daniel, seeing that I will not be driving to Atlanta this morning. 

December 24, 2019

Cloudy Christmas Eve. Circe could be lured out from hiding, gobbled tuna in which I had hidden her pills. She climbed the stairs and tried to be in the study for a while, but Maud, not recognizing her in this state, hissed and growled. I don’t know how lasting her rally will be, but my little cat’s being that much better will allow the spirit of Christmas to reign over me, as it does now, listening to sad Christmas music on my computer. For the divine spirit comes about her body to sustain it in complete cat.

DJ and Russell and I into the masses last night to see the 9th and, as they say, the last of the Star Wars epic. I thought it was a moderately entertaining mess. Some of all those millions could have been spent upon a story.

Toward evening– Circe continues to improve, even wandering a little. I spent the afternoon semi-conscious, in a state of bliss brought on by the flood of unexpected sunlight and carols coming at me from every direction.

December 23, 2019

Bought my altogether too expensive flight to Ireland.

Listening obsessively to “The Christ Child’s Lullaby.”

Andrew Finn McGill and his friends gave a concert at All Souls– Christmas carols on violin and guitar, cello, hurdy-gurdy-- of shining excellence and giving deep satisfaction. I closed my eyes and went elsewhere, praise.

Woke and again had to search for the vanished Circe, who’d found another place to hide, head jammed into a corner. She is now at the All Pets. I have spent $900 on a cat’s infected ear. I expect the same today. As I said, exhausting. You get an infection. You get treatment, the infection gets better. I confess myself baffled.

Depression and uncertainty over Circe made me switch into self-anesthesia mode, and I have slept most of the day. The Lord was just in keeping me from being in charge of any humans in their crisis.

December 22, 2019

Pastyme concert last night. Exquisite, but now and then a little precious, tenuous, the texture stretched a little thin. They need a few more voices. The concert inspired me to return to poetry, which I had abandoned during the great flood of prose. Could I get back? This morning told me, “yes.” Sat in High Five with my face to the wall, weeping with gratitude at having the door of poetry yet open.

The next phase of the day was realizing that Circe had seriously relapsed. Couldn’t find her until I looked in the remotest corner of the house, where her head was jammed into a corner. My vet was closed for Sunday, so took her to REACH. REACH is the only game in town after hours and on holidays, but there is something creepy about them. They charged me $500, and I suspect, from my poor cat’s unchanged condition, that they did none of the procedures they charged me for, but sent me home with amoxicillin to jam down her throat, hoping for the best. The illness of another is as exhausting as one’s own.

December 21, 2019

In the mail:
jennifer@tuliptreepub.com
Attachments
Dec 20, 2019, 3:39 PM (15 hours ago)
to me

Hi David,
I would be honored to include "Approaching Dollywood" in the Fall/Winter issue of TulipTree Review. The payment is $50 and a free copy of the issue. If you agree, please fill out and sign the attached permission form, and I'll also need a bio.

Thanks, and congratulations! :)

Jennifer

Circe’s road to recovery has been detoured. She can’t, or won’t, move. Like a warm rag doll.

December 20, 2019

Back to the studio, with small but correct results. I freeze with rage when somebody remarks on how beautiful the light in the studio is. Realized at the end of the day I had eaten one baked potato.

December 19, 2019

Sold two copies of NSDL from the back of my car after choir last night. They are still apparently unavailable in any normal marketplace. I repeat the old cry to heaven, why can’t anything go right? 

Slowly breaking down my school office is tedious, but bringing the unexpected joy of having some beloved objects around me again. My mother’s ceramic jack o’lantern beams quietly at my back, as it has not done in the thirty years I’ve had it. The book of poems I had when I was a child lies on a shelf in plain sight.  Today, I think, I redeem and repot my Christmas cacti.

The Akron Beacon Journal has this to say about The Falls of the Wyona:

The coming-of-age story of four boys in the High Country of western North Carolina after World War II, “The Falls of the Wyona” is a poignant, lyrical novella by Akron native David Brendan Hopes.

Arden Summers is the narrator but not the main character. In the beginning there are three boys. Arden, his best friend Vince Silvano and new kid Tilden: “We were one person, sometimes.” But then there were four, as another newcomer, Glen, arrived. Instead of the usual mild hazing that new boys had to endure, Glen was immediately accepted when Vince drew him into the group.

Their sacrament was a pilgrimage to the Falls of the Wyona River, a mystical and dangerous place that only a few had seen. Arden says that the “Falls claims one every generation,” so the adults keep its whereabouts a secret. The boys are horsing around at the Falls when Glen does a showy, reckless handstand at the very edge. Afterward, Vince confides to Arden that he “feels funny.”

The boys camp in the winter, sleeping close together for warmth. One night Arden awakens to see Glen and Vince kissing passionately. Tilden, too, is awake. They quietly agree to say nothing. Vince’s father, the football coach, fosters a pervasive attitude of homophobia among his athletes, and decks his son for performing in the school talent show.

Vince becomes the star quarterback recruited by major colleges, and has a glamorous blond girlfriend, but his spirit isn’t the same. In this remote town, which has had electricity only a few years and is just learning about television, it would be easy to say that people hate what they don’t understand. But while Arden and Tilden don’t understand the current that runs between Glen and Vince, their acceptance and loyalty show they don’t need to understand to love.

“The Falls of the Wyona” (203 pages, softcover) costs $15.95 from Red Hen Press. David Brendan Hopes is an alumnus of Ellet High School and Hiram College, and is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina in Asheville.

Steve Williams has died of colon cancer.

December 18, 2019

Circe clawed her way up the comforter to sleep with me last night, so normality is restored.

Dedicating the day to revising Jason of the Apes. Tinkering is a better word, taking out a word there, putting in a bit of explanation there. It is the most exciting time, as page after page rolls away and it is still good, it is still all right.

For a few days, everything below the waist hurt. Today, nothing hurts, spry as a teenager. I see why people developed the theory of evil spirits coming and going as they will.

Deep cold last night. I pitied the wild things huddled beneath the dead leaves.

December 17, 2019

Forty-one people in line when the post office opened. Getting some Christmas tasks done, buying a few gifts, ordering gift certificates on line. The day is warm as summer.

December 16, 2019

Circe has been under the weather for several days. Took her to the Vet. An infection. $400. But I stopped under the dark sky in the vet parking lot and prayed, “Let this little spirit stay with me a little longer,” and the prayer was answered. I’ve never been to that office when they have not been having a computer crisis. Circe is still angry and won’t come out of the corner. But she was so sweet at the office, pushing her forehead against mine, not squirming when the doctor manhandled her.

Exhausted through the day, sleeping mightily. Foot pain joined for a while by gout, though now all of that ebbs away. . . an interesting amalgam of pain.

The day was warm as summer. I was grateful. Cold would have been the last insult.

December 15, 2019

Put on my episcopal regalia and impersonated Saint Nicholas this morning at the Parish breakfast. Word is I did OK. Actually, being Santa is within my skill set, someday.

AGMC concert last night at Grace Covenant, and again this afternoon. I personally did much better this afternoon, but in any case the audiences were at capacity and everyone seemed to have had a good time. For an hour it was truly Christmas, and I was happy.

December 14, 2019

Inexplicable foot pain still crippling me. It’s better with shoes on.

Gathered my gear and went to the Bookfair at Lenoir-Rhyne, where I sold three books and gave two away. There was free iced tea. I suppose the point of it all along for us who remember each other from the literary scene gone by was to reconnect, and that happened. Laura, Keith, and Alan each told me detailed summaries of their novel-in-process. I couldn’t reciprocate (or retaliate) because I never know where my novel-in-process is going beyond the page I ended on. Sometimes I barely think I could tell them the plot of the ones which are finished. There may have been five visitors who were not themselves writers with wares on the table.

December 13, 2019

Pre-dress rehearsal better than I expected from myself. Wonders may be achieved by listening madly.

Foot still tender and inexplicable.

Student phones me at 10 PM (while I was watching “Project Runway”) begging me to rescind the “F” I’d given him for disappearing before midterms and taking exactly one of six exams and not doing the big final project. “You said I could turn things in late,” say he. “Not after the semester is over, not THAT late,” I respond with wonder in my voice. He goes on about what a terrible year he’s been having. This is his last semester and his girlfriend miscarried a baby, and then she left him, and I inquire why none of this could have come out in the last four months, but only just before midnight on the last day the college is open. “I know” he says, accepting all blame, throwing himself on my mercy, but adding, “all my other professors said it was OK,” which I doubt. ANYWAY. . . this morning I petition to change the assigned grade, agreeing with him, finally, that a failure in Arts 310 should not prevent you from going on with your life. I realize “no” was the just answer, but that mercy operates outside of justice. He was always surly. Maybe his surliness arose from having a hard time. Who, finally, knows the truth of anything?

Actual dress rehearsal in two hours. I am not yet having fun.

December 12, 2019

Watched last nights tremendous moon rise before rehearsal, and hit the zenith as I dragged home after cocktails. Beautiful last-month moon, last of the year, last of the decade. I remember lying in bed in my grandmother’s house, hearing from the TV downstairs, “Happy New Year 1960!” knowing that I had lived through a decade, thinking that was a wondrous thing. Now a decade passes and I hardly notice, except to remember a little boy trying to sleep in the bedroom that was his mother’s when she was a little girl.

“Approaching Dollywood” is a finalist for the Tulip Tree Review’s genre contest. Is that a publication? Wait and see.

Actually applied myself to memorizing the music for this concert. Hoping it will make a difference. If my throat is in mucous mode, memory will be no use.

December 11, 2019

Though the pain in my foot diminished almost to nothing during the day, it was back this AM, less than yesterday, but still debilitating. Still mysterious.

Last Fantasy class. The students’ Faeries are hugely matriarchal, and also, I would think, dystopian, unlike the visions of magical perfection I rather expected when I made the assignment. Curious, and better than expectation.

Lin Lifshin has died, apparently of a fall. She was famous in our graduate school days for having poems in e very single magazine anyone had ever heard of.

December 10, 2019

Woke with an injured right foot. It must have happened during the night, as I have no recollection of what I might have done. Feels like someone dropped a piano on it, though there’s no appreciable swelling beyond what is ordinary for me. Dizzy and sick with pain. First trip to the bathroom almost un-achievable. At the edge of what can be muscled through. It was a vision into my future, when, one day, I will wake and not be able to move and there will be no one to help me. Have been awake for two hours, and after a powerful anti-inflammatory and moving about by hanging onto walls and furniture, I am able to walk and climb the stairs to my study. Perhaps gout, but it doesn’t feel “right” and I can’t associate the pain with a joint, but with the whole blade of my foot. Nevertheless, rolled out the garbage and the recycling in the dark rain. In the mailbox was my prize check from Red Hen. My reaction was, not so curiously now that I think of it, grief, at something so small being made to be such an issue in my life, all the unnecessary frustration, all the inexplicable malice that made a small pleasure into a large, dark fury. I remembered weeping with rage and frustration about this same issue back when I was also fighting the Title IX slanders. That was thirteen months ago. Pointless and cruel, the smallness of it increasing rather than diminishing its pointlessness and cruelty.

December 9, 2019

Wrote before dawn at High 5 what might be the beginning of a sequel to NSDL. Off in the bitter rain to the studio, where I painted happily and entertained a trickle of unexpected guests. My painting was triggered by vast, strange dreams before waking. I remembered huge paintings I had done, and hung in galleries that recurred in dreams long ago, but which I had not entered for a very long time. I longed for them. They were like firmaments. They were like Charlie’s paintings in NSDL. I do not know what is to become of me in any passage of my life. I do not know where any of the paths I try will lead. I barely understand where they have led. Bought cheese that the package said I should eat out of the center of itself with a spoon. That is a life lesson, if only I can figure it out.

December 8, 2019

Made $25.70 from the Halloween play. Who says I’m not a professional?
Lessons and Carols in the morning, very sweet, very Anglican.
Circe and I slept heroically in the afternoon sun.

December 7, 2019

Stephen’s invitation for me to stay at his place decided Dublin for me for spring break. The happiness I felt once the decision was made told me it was right. AGMC sang for the Dickens Christmas in Biltmore Village. S had to stop in the middle of the street to rehearse the baritones. One kid said, “Why didn’t they rehearse BEFORE they performed?” His dad put his hand over his mouth, but the kid was right. All part of life’s rich tapestry. Ran into Barry in the bakeshop on the corner. It was a dance of absurdity for us to pretend not to see each other in that little space. Occasionally the tapestry is too rich. Janis said she loved TJ and Linda said the book was a “good read,” but the first detailed response to NSDL comes from Tom. He liked that Charlie dived into the depths. I was happy to have it pointed out to me that he had. Repeatedly I am shown how instinctive my writing is. My theory is that ALL decent writing is instinctive– that’s what I tell my students–but how am I really to know? Organ music from downstairs.

December 6, 2019

Exhausting AGMC rehearsal last night. Everyone came or was soon in a bad mood. My voice was gone at the end.

Gave perhaps my last Enlightenment to Modern exam this AM. Graded it already, and there were grades of 40 out of 100, with only a few doing really well. If you mistake Tennyson for Frost, Yeats for Hopkins, how can you make your way in this subtle world?

The prize check from Red Hen that I’ve been awaiting for two years still had not, after an apparent flurry of activity, arrived. Sent a bitter email. The accountant’s explanation that it had been sent on November 20 to the correct address was unconvincing, but the only explanation I have. For that, of all things, to be lost in the mail is exquisite. I don’t remember anything being lost in the mail before.  Whatever the truth of it, it sounds like an excuse. I wait still.

December 5, 2019

Finding more errors in NSDL. Hatred of circumstance which allows–compels– things to be imperfect,

Getting chores done, some of them left over from the move-in now years back.

Sang quite horribly at a charity estate sale last night. It was all right, as nobody was listening.

December 3, 2019

Rather brilliant presentations of my students’ Faerie Worlds. They say it’s the best assignment they’ve had in college, and what is remarkable is the sheer volume of work and thought they put into their creations. The truth is that we ask too little of our students, rather than too much. Nice to learn that in my last semester. Saw two donuts on the Common Room table, ate them Trying to find the place in my soul that allowed that to happen.

December 2, 2019

Maud purring on my foot.

Day began in blinding snow, none of which stuck, bright for a while, looking like storm again toward afternoon.

Last day of Enlightenment to Modern, probably the last day forever. I lectured while three of them got up and wandered the hall. No one ever smacked their noses and said “No! No!.” Drove one to a commune (just up the road) after class. She had interviewed to join the commune, one of the attractions of which is free love. I refrained from saying, “the last thing you need is another distraction.”

Cleaning out bookshelves I came across four copies of Timothy Liberty, which I thought was lost, and acting scripts for most of the plays I’ve been in since The Man Who Came to Dinner.

My cheesecake was apparently a hit at the senior reception.

December 1, 2019

Advent 1. Calm Italian Baroque in the darkening hours of evening.. A warm summery day that the news says will yield to snow before morning. Anecdotes from Kyle’s Paris sojourn at lunch. Such a ferocious afternoon nap I’m only now recovering from it.

November 30, 2019

Began a new and near-the-end chapter for Sam-sam in High 5. Talked with Alex. Coffee and a bit of breakfast with Tom, who is not yet exhausted by political indignation.  Back to the studio, finding it was warm enough and dry enough. Worked well and happily. The Bosnian neighbors across the hall move out, having sold, essentially, nothing. Those terrible stairs are the difference between solvency and despair.

November 29, 2019

Back from Atlanta Thanksgiving. The Family prospers, the same girlfriends in the holiday pictures two years in a row, which begins to look like commitment. Linda packs up mother’s–quiet extensive– painted ceramics oeuvre and makes sure they make it into my car. Not one person on planet earth would spontaneously imagine me with a collection of large ceramic leprechauns and Easter bunnies.

One observes again the family dynamic in which, when one is answering the questions “What’s up with you?” the answer “I just brought out another book” brings on dead silence.

Daniel feels his honor is redeemed by having beaten me in chess. After last year, I was over-confident.

I remarked to Linda that this is the first time IN MY LIFE that I looked forward to traveling on an important holiday. It was not only all right, it was anticipated and enjoyed. It this all connected to the release of retirement? Am I giving credit to that for too many good things in my life?

Jonathan’s Beagle puppy, with a cone around his head to keep him from nipping at his stitches, was the life of the party.

I was alone for a while with the staff of the Hyatt in the hotel lobby, drinking and buying them drinks, thinking to make up for their missing Thanksgiving with their families. When I got the bill at check-out this morning, the charge for all that was cancelled. It was they who gave me the lovely surprise.

November 27, 2019

Stupendous rain on the roof in the morning dark. Whatever I was planning (like, going for coffee) must wait a while. Vivid, satisfying, narrative dreams.

Finding errors in Night Sleep, errors which I might never have caught (though I do now) but which an actual editor, or any editor at all, would have found. I think with nostalgia of the sometimes annoying thoroughness of the Red Hen ladies.

The lights flicker on and off in the storm. Working on Sam-Sam I have to save after every paragraph.

Tom’s mother dies. Pictures on Facebook of the family, he with the shocking young male beauty I remember from our first meeting.

G publicly fights cancer. She who proclaimed me a racist from the steps of the library and– completely irrelevantly–in a review of Childhood in the Milky Way. Who on earth thought her capable of writing a review anyway? Only the CT. I contemplate this; I make a donation to her medical bills fund. 

November 26, 2019

Woke at 2 AM (the odd Tuesday ritual) took a sip of cold lemonade and was instantly transported to the wonderland of chest pain. Wrong side, breathing unaffected, and in other ways didn’t seem like a heart attack, so I waited, and it went away. Was it a very deep muscle spasm occasioned by the sudden cold? It came again when I rose before 6, and I drove first to the university health center and then to MAHEC, but all the doors were locked, as it was still dark, dark morning. Passed by Mission Emergency because I didn’t want to get into that mess, and was convinced by that time it wasn’t a heart attack. It went away again. Must be spasms. It’s always something new, isn’t it?

Somber day, finally. Listening to Samuel Barber. Deciding what to write.

November 25, 2019

Contemplating the profitability of my vocation, concentrating on The Falls of the Wyona. It took $20 to enter the contest. I won the contest. The prize was a thousand dollars, which, nearly two years later, I have not received. Have twice gone to AWP (Tampa, Portland) to read or sign books at the Red Hen table in support of the book, something over $2000 each time. I went to New York to read in a tiny gay bookstore. Another $2000, I have bought 150 copies of the book (at a reduced price, yes) to aid in publicity and distribution. I sent them more than $400 so they could enter the book into contests. Have they done so? Who knows? I have been given the honor of going to the Virginia Festival of the Book, for which I will need to pay all my own expenses. I know people do make or nearly make their living in such a way, but, I, somehow, got a start down the wrong path.

Made cheesecake for a reception for our seniors.

November 24, 2019

Scarlet and Bill took me out to dinner at Posana, a sweet gesture from former students, who spent an uncomfortable portion of time praising my role in their lives. They told the maitre d’ that they couldn’t believe he didn’t know me. Much talk of former times. They are, in middle age, very much in love. I believe when I look back at my career it will be mostly ripe fruit and very little canker, though, unfortunately, the canker came at the end.  I wish I knew how to assure certain people of their smallness in the world, but even the attempt to do so enlarges them.

Walked into the new art museum, bought a membership, and think I convinced the gift shop lady to carry Night, Sleep.

November 23, 2019

Spectacular rain on the roof. A lullaby. The cats can’t walk ten feet without flopping down for a nap. The torrent will allow us not to march in the Christmas Parade this year, and for that my heart is thankful.

Have been typing for 50 years and still I have to stare at the keyboard.

November 22, 2019

Built bookshelves from a kit. Maybe I have a bit of a sense of accomplishment, but mostly a sense of a lot of time spent.

Yeats in class today. One student observes, “Yeats was a complicated person.”

Passed out copies of NSDL at school.  Carlos’ ordering procedure frustrated a few buyers already.

Received a carton of books from Red Hen, with extreme Evangelical tracts hidden in the bottom.

Fifty years ago part of America ended,

November 21, 2019

Dreamed last night of painting. KK was in the dream. Rose in darkness and went to the Racquet Club, the second time this week I’ve worked out. Millie M was there, preparing for a class. Weakness and anemia have prevented this for a year and more, though I wonder if I could have started back sooner had I pushed myself. Sat in the café with terrible coffee and watched the swimmers and wrote, as I have loved to do.

Have been accepted to the Virginia Festival of the Book. Monica at Red Hen says it’s a great honor. So, Charlottesville in March.

TIAA-CREF calls. My retirement situation will be way less desperate than I feared, slightly less cushy than I hoped.

Drove to Black Mountain and, against expectation, the books were ready. The first thing I noticed was that the book is pretty. The second is that THERE IS AN ERROR IN PUNCTUATION ON THE COVER. Decided to say nothing. What can be done now? Carlos never thought to give the cover over for proofreading; I never thought to request it. I was so exhausted from yesterday’s disappointments that I wasn’t very celebratory. I think this disappointed Carlos. It could not, at the moment, be helped. Pick a copy up every now and then, open a page to find an error or a bad sentence. None yet.

November 20, 2019

Bitter dream last night. It wasn’t bitter at first. Two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, showed up at my door and lured me out into the sunshine to play. They wanted me to follow them, and I did, through a golden wood. As we walked a certain familiarity infused the scene, and I realized they were my unborn children. I could not endure it.

Carlos said Night, Sleep was ready, and asked me when I’d like to pick them up, and I told him. When I got to the gallery in Black Mountain, he was not there and neither were the books. The lady said that she had read it and thought it was wonderful, and I tried to let that mollify me, but it did not. I walked into the parking lot and had a, for me, rare fit of ungoverned rage. Rage turned into exhaustion, and once I was home I lay in bed until it was time for rehearsal. I waited beyond four years since BMP said “yes” to the book, had to use my own money finally to get it printed in my lifetime. Someone might say one more day shouldn’t make a difference, but it made all the difference, an affront calculated,  petty, cruel, mean, gratuitous. God is a bad friend and a bad Father.  I could barely stir from the bed.

Note from Red Hen that my check– for a prize won in 2017– was delayed still further because my address on the W-4 did not match the one they had on file. I think I wrote, “Use any address you want, send the fucking check.” I don’t know if I really wrote that.

November 19, 2019

Today, for instance, I am a horse. Rose in the dark and went to the Y, where I did well and was never breathless. Finished And When He Fell–” Exhausted by my students, who feel that their failures should never be counted as failures, but erased because of circumstance– in one case, “Sorry I missed the exam, but it is very hard for me to get up in the morning.” A girl missed the exam, asked for a make-up, then cheated on that, looking me straight in the eye because she knew I could not prove it to the satisfaction of a spineless administration.

November 18, 2019

Good night with my playwrights. They said they would be sorry when the class was over. If I am interpreting correctly, I had an ulcer episode last night that left me weak and disoriented in the morning. It is painless, so I might be making everything up and my weakness may be a natural rhythm of the body, for on some days I am a horse. Did nothing but go to class and sleep. Delicious sleep.

November 17, 2019

When I come home at night, my headlights illuminate a cat perched on the end of the picnic bench. It stares at me with eyes demonically aglow. It wonders what I’m doing invading its solitude.

November 16, 2019

Theater last night with Jack. We saw Hnath’s A Doll’s House, part 2. Skillfully acted. Jack thought the set distractingly bare. Unfortunately, Nora’s perspective couldn’t be made (or the playwright didn’t want to make it) anything other than self-serving. Drinks at Claddagh afterwards. I had to tell the server what the Claddagh is.

The November moon has been following me, lighting my nights and mornings with extraordinary graciousness.

Invited to the Magnetic for the reading of a play by a former student. She provided champagne with raspberries in it. The play was carefully wrought and exhibited planning and intelligent application at every turn. It was, nevertheless, inert, with all the smooth and confident vices of over-planning. The author is a therapist and had invited mostly her therapist friends, who praised the play in ways that would seem good–or at least correct–only to a therapist. I decided to say nothing and to sneak out, affecting a coughing fit.

November 15, 2019

The last time I wore pajamas: after my first night of college. The only pair of pajamas on 3rd Gray got hidden away at the back of a drawer for the rest of the quarter. Quite good presentations in Lit class. They’ll do anything to get out of a 15 page paper, and sometimes it’s good. .

November 14, 2019

Lovely Thursday, my day off. Wrote an act of a play in High 5. The play is about Title IX absurdities, so the task is to keep it from being absurd. The café gets turbulent long about 9 AM, when late-sleepers arise. Wasted time at the bookstore in the Mall, so as to avoid the housecleaners. Thought I might look for Wyona, but when it wasn’t even under “local authors” I gave up. I will hold your feet to the fire, Almighty, until you allow one thing to come out right.

Have I waited too long to dig up the begonias? One of my Christmas cacti at school bears one magenta flower.

Here is an interesting issue: I’ve noticed before that when I’m fasting, the inflammation seeps out of my body. I’ve had nothing but coffee and a salad today, and though I was achy, stiff, and inflamed when I rose, I’m limber and without pain now, without the use of pills. Is that sufficient experiment? But I’m also grindingly hungry. Will the next issue of my life be finding the ground between inflammation and the distraction of hunger pangs? There are certainly worse things.

November 13, 2019

Tennyson this AM. What did they really think? Were they too submerged in the worries of semester’s end?

Extension of a Tuesday tradition of waking at 2 AM. Why? Woke finally while my character in the dream was holding a toy animal and singing a song called “Piggy, Piggy.”  I may have been singing out loud, for Circe was looking at me.

Went onto a web site for opportunities for playwrights, have been scrolling down for several minutes without finding ONE “opportunity” for which I’m eligible.  Women, yes, yes, and yes; lesbians, yes; rank beginners, yes. So far, not one for me or anyone like me.

Venice underwater. Now that I know that magical place it is a personal tragedy.

November 12, 2019

JC brilliant in playwriting class, using each student question as a plot point in the Great Story. I understand his writing far better now, and look on as a conviction what I had thought to be a deficit.

Discouraging department meeting. The Frost line comes to mind, “what to make of a diminished thing.” I try to tamp down my–is it glee?–at not being present for the coming darkness. The Administration sets this disaster up, and then wrings its hands that nothing can be done.  How trusting I used to be that the Administration had Education’s best interest in mind. Perhaps at one time it had.

November 11, 2019

Veteran’s Day. Filled out my last State Health Insurance questionnaire. I never did know exactly what I was doing, just ramming through to get it out of the way, to satisfy the people in HR. Disastrous exam on the Romantics. Anything of any degree of specificity throws them off. Radiant blue day. Last night annihilated the roses at last. Six messages from the City about boiling water. John comes to class today, and so far as I know, nobody went to see his play. If they read it, we are saved. I suspect they did not read it. They can never do the work at hand because they have so much OTHER work to do. One is patient with that for a very long time.

Second day of the Arts Stroll was like the first, though I did get a little discouraged. Sold two books.

November 10, 2019

Saturday spent at the River Arts District Studio Stroll, with the unusual and unexpected result of never being impatient with it. Did my work for hours and hours. Few people came in, no one bought, but for some reason that did not affect me. Muscles stiff from standing in pretty much one position. I have never received a review of my art work. From anybody. on any level. Experience suggests it has nothing in it to make it popular.

November 9, 2019

Theater last night, enjoying the lively downtown scene. Had disappointing Prosecco at Isa’s on my way, excellent house red and scallops at Zambra’s on the way back. The production of John’s play was about perfect, lively and expressive, utilizing every hidden potential of that sad little space. I admired the play’s heterogeneity, intermingling song and discourse and varying tone without a shred of shame, perhaps intentionally to add interest in lieu of a discernible plot. It would be fun to be in. Ordered my students to see the show. None were there last night.

November 8, 2019

Still-night morning, before class, full of crosses and trials, followed by the kind of bellowing tantrum that makes you grateful, for once, for living alone. Sitting in my office before class I heard footsteps in the hall, and prayed most sincerely, “Please let it not be K with orange juice and an update on her hysterectomy.” It was K with orange juice and an update on her hysterectomy. Gave an exam, Have not read the exam, but, glancing at a few answers, wondered if anyone hears a word I say. Came home and napped, and woke in a blaze of blue winter light. Last night’s cold got the chaste trees. Pricing flights for the March break. Ancestry.com suggests my great-grandmother was Australian (out of Ireland). Did William Keenan go to Australia (from County Clare) before coming to America? More digging. . .

November 7, 2019

Spent the day cleaning up the yard for winter, putting away tools, disconnecting hoses, cleaning the pond, digging little holes for unplanted bulbs or bulbs dug up by squirrels. The roses haul through, defiant of freeze. The official announcement of MT plays for next year hurts me, though I already knew I would not be on the list. The difference was that when K said she wanted to give other people a try, I assumed she meant people who might DESERVE a try. This is not the case. A political rather than an artistic decision. D showed me a play once, which at the time was chaotic but beautiful. If that is his chosen piece, it might be an exception. It’s like someone taking down your painting to put up the third grade drawings she just removed from the refrigerator. You understand it, but have committed to a world in which it cannot be countenanced.

November 6, 2019

What do cats hear when they hear music? Playing Marais, Maud beating her tail against my foot in something resembling the metronome. Holy Stephen comes to my office again to talk. I want to say to him, “don’t you think I can see you texting on your phone during class?” but I don’t, seeing something else is on is mind, him not quite saying what. Janis gives me a giant bag of Mexican sunflower pods.

November 5, 2019

Lunch with Kermit and DJ. Kermit says a second reading of Wyona was even better than the first, because now he’s convinced he knows the characters from his own life. I think of the ways I might have ruined the book had I put it through the last intended revision before it won the prize. Or maybe it would have been better. Who knows now? Got the courage up to ask the second time about my prize money. Monica said she’d look into it.

November 4, 2019

On Facebook from my old school chum Sharon: I recently found some quiet time to sit down and read, The Falls of the Wyona by David Brendan Hopes. It is a wonderful novel, and I enjoyed every single page. One of my favorite passages (and there are many), "The river flows sad sometimes because everything changes and he alone remains the same". It goes on, "Everybody remembers something, and somebody remembers everything, and that's what knits the fibers of the world together." Read this book, and remember how lucky we are to be able to share in David's beautiful creativity. Thank you, "Ancient Friend". Sharon was the hippy girl with the guitar and folk song back in our day.

Good pieces from my playwrights, especially from one who did not present before. He was saving it up.

November 3, 2019

Second stay at church, this time to sing the Faure Requiem. It’s like an old friend now, easy and welcome. My voice is familiar with it, and goes to the right note by long habit. The event was oddly serene, as though we were really singing someone asleep. The change to– or from, I forget which it is–has given me a further hour to wallow in.  Two nights of frost, and the roses fight on.

November 2, 2019

Rehearsal for the Requiem, an extended lunch, then mostly the waste of the rest of the day. Poking around in You Tube got me in a Hollywood mind. I remembered that my mother’s favorite actors were Tyrone Powers and Alice Faye. My father seldom expressed any such preferences, but he did mention several times The Time Machine and Rod Taylor’s performance in it. I contemplate that, trying to derive some understanding. The cold annihilated the last of the zinnias, but the roses made it through. 

November 1, 2019

Had planned to go to the theater, but the certainty of a bad show–not badly done, but badly written, bad in the kernel–allowed me to stay home with a clear conscience. If I were a god, I would insure that good things got better attendance and better publicity than bad things. I’m reading more since I decided to retire, reading for pleasure for the first time in thirty years. Renewed my library card. Bought a book in Los Angeles about the Red Scare and HUAC in Hollywood, noticing that HUAC tactics are indistinguishable from the tactics of Administration relative to Title IX. Lessons are not learned, or learned again and again: don’t know which is worse.

October 31, 2019

Halloween.

Enraged because the housecleaning was taking so long, I let myself in and found Elvis, a sweet Hispanic kid on his first day on the job. He says he loves my house. He says, “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” Didn’t even ask why he thought so. Funny how the rage went away when I saw him. He finds white mold under the dining room table. He says he did the houses of Oprah and the Koch brothers in West Palm Beach. He can’t find my house much of a challenge. He listens only to Christian radio. Very curious about me. . . .

October 30, 2019

Flu shot, and subsequent body ache that everyone says is not the flu. Downpour followed by downpour. I want to go to my studio, but there’s no reason to assume water is not gushing from the ceiling. Rehearsal, drinks, everyone’s problems and victories, drinks, and home.

October 29, 2019

Inexplicable need to be on an airplane, right now, heading out.

Sent Diving into the Moon to a contest in Vermont. Read over the first few pages. Lovely.

Found Ellen. Listened to an interview she did on the radio. She seems to have settled into being a successful location manager for films. She was always meticulous. I miss her. Hearing her voice made me miss her more. Her interviewer was irritating as hell.

So, one time I have felt sorry for Trump: when he was booed at the World Series.

October 28, 2019

Panic about Night, Sleep. Send out a premature and, at the same time, long-delayed announcement. Turns out it’s print-on-demand, and Carlos had allowed his attention to drift elsewhere before the demand was assessed. Believe me, I demanded. To my questions he responds:

David,
We distribute world-wide with Ingram. It will be on Amazon, Abes Books, Barnes & Noble etc etc. Usually about 200 stores will advertise it
and Ingram gives me monthly accounting of where it sold the last quarter, which I will send to you. This takes about one month after publication
to get on all the book store sites. Books, at that point, are print and sent out within two days usually. So for about one month just tell people to
buy from our website, after that let them know they can buy it or order it just about anywhere. We will also provide a sell sheet that is PDF that
you can send to people. Sometimes authors prefer to send us their email list and we will send out the sell sheets and marketing for you. Let me
know how you want to handle that, it doesn't cost you anything for us to do it. Other marketing is up to you, readings at bookstores usually sell
well especially if they people know you there. We arranged a reading at City Lights in Sylva that did well but the author was from WCU. Let me know
if you want us to try to arrange any bookstores. Thanks!
Carlos

Unnecessary sleepless middle hours of the night. But, I didn’t know anything. Communication is key. Read the book over in the night to see if I were going to be embarrassed, and I’m not.

Outstanding playwriting class. Introduced Kabulki and No and Bunraku

October 27, 2019

Went to the Magnetic last night to see Camp and the others for the second time. Liked it all better the second time, except for A's, which was even worse than I thought it was. Serena is now Blair and sailing the tossing seas of gender identity. Sat in a row of gay boys, including K H, who introduced himself as a playwright. I hadn’t revealed which play was mine (maybe they guessed) in order to hear their reactions, which were gratifying. They agreed that mine was the “best written.” That is somehow different from “the best,” but I’ll take it. No one in the room was there because of me. No friends, no followers, no students, no one ever once from UNCA. I make friends there, and they come away thinking my work was the best, but somehow I have not gathered a cadre, or sustained the interest of people who generally seem to be my friends. I suppose I repel, or at least don’t encourage, such a thing, but you’d think people who know me would come out anyhow, if nothing else, out of curiosity. I feel anonymous in my own village. Talked with MP afterwards, who is as sad as I as the direction of NCS. Someone is right now generating new additional (I almost said “fresh”) versions of Jeeves so they’ll have something to stage.

But this has been a blinding brilliant blue autumn day. I let the state of my throat give me an excuse from church, went to High 5, where I got the next section of Sam-sam longhanded out. Then went to the studio and worked long, hard, and well. I worked long, hard, and well despite the fact that my studio was flooded and most of my big finished canvases were ruined, or at least compromised in some way. Maybe they’ll dry without warping. Maybe I’ll toss them in the dumpster without caring too much. Everything is prelude. In the past the flood has seeped in through the walls. This time it poured down from the ceiling. The trash can and other upright vessels were full of brownish water.  Add to that the annual sickening influx of stinkbugs. One of the men whom Stephen describes as drunken frat boys who manage the property came by and promised to fix everything. “That would be nice,” says I, like an idiot. Closed my eyes to all that, and painted, and was happy.

Carlos admits the Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers is delayed (by three years, by my count) by cash flow problems. I promise to write a check. I don’t know if I could sustain the shock of actually once being paid for my work.

October 26, 2019

Dark of the morning. My oldest computer gave up the ghost last night. Went to see From the Red Room, the anthology of horror stories at the Magnetic, of which mine was one. It was quite entertaining. Only one of four plays failed, and mine, Camp, was good enough that I could drive home in the darkness worry-free. I wonder if I’m still capable of the outpouring of energy that’s involved in actually performing a show. Rodney’s play, about a coven of vampires luring victims, was wonderfully inventive, gory and funny at once.

October 25, 2019

Have begun transporting books and cherished objects from my office at the university, to make a heavy task lighter by division. I find satisfaction in it, bring far-faring emotions back home, within reach. The University is going to feel bad if I don’t develop more regrets about retirement than I seem to have now. Chat with WK in the Fresh Market parking lot, remembering when we were the bad boys of Asheville art.

October 24, 2019

Sobering thought: the widely lamented Elijah Cummings was a year younger than I.

Early to High Five, where I added many pages to Sam-sam. I had been feeling weak and breathless, more than usual, and that worried me. But unexpected bulbs arrived, and I had to deal with them. Planted peonies (how many peonies can one possibly desire?), anemone, tiger lily, and tore out the vast stand of cosmos that had taken over the front garden. At the end of all that, I was not exhausted, but rather energized and ebullient. As I worked, a clutch of crows chased a hawk with a pure white belly across my yard.

October 23, 2019

Spent the first chunk of class last night reminding my students that learning should be fun, and that most “causes” of anxiety are chimeras, and that, for most people, reading Tolkien for an academic class would be a gift. I think I eased them down a little from the brinks of their several hysterias. Most people want to be healed, and reach out for the cure. Ethan panicked this AM, wanting to know if he could do his presentation today, having missed it last week. He said, “This is why I need those accommodations.” I was thinking, “You need the accommodations because you have them.” We prevent our children from growing beyond themselves.

October 22, 2019

Sudden stupendous rain as the sun roses.

Lee tells me to put Short & Sweet Hollywood on my resume and not worry about it, that such things are usually put together as showcases for actors. Makes sense. Nothing much in the theater is about the playwright once the curtain goes up.

Donny Boggs died a while ago. For reasons unknown to me, he used to attack me at the swimming pool, Aqua Springs, I think it was called. He waited until I swam in deep water, then came out and jumped on me and tried to hold me under. I never exactly understood his antipathy. A few years later he got a job at the Goodyear mailroom, and I was assigned to teach him the job and the routes. I could see on his face that he remembered everything, but I pretended I didn’t, and by the end I had a good friend who hugged me on my last day. Don Kerr died a year and more ago, and we’re just finding out. For a while he was my best friend and boon companion, a simple and loving boy who let me boss him around in ways that make me uncomfortable now. We would wrestle on the back stoops of the portables. I chipped his tooth in the bathroom once, but didn’t get in trouble because his father remembered pelting my mother with apples and making her fall off her bike, karma closed in a succeeding generation. I wrote to him to try to renew acquaintance, but didn’t hear back. 

October 21, 2019

Class this AM as though the LA adventure had never happened. All in all, a sweet savor in remembrance.

Finished revision on Jason and sent it off with both prayers and confidence before the sun rose.

October 20, 2019

Roamed the city in the perfect summery light. Morning cocktails at Rocco’s. Went to the Museum of Contemporary art, was told by the attendant that it was gone. Near as I can tell, the building is now the sheriff’s office. Wonder if any of the art remains. Watched the dogs in the dog park. Watched the shirtless boys playing tennis and basketball. As the morning ticked on toward the matinee, I realized I was not going to be there for the second performance. It was a long way, and the actual event had been . . . disappointing. . . not fatally disappointing, but the sort of thing one need not go through the second time. I had worn a blister on my foot the night before.. . . etc. . . I messaged Pavel and Jaye that I was regretfully not coming–arthritis in the knee and all (an exaggeration but not a lie) and sat at the Fiesta Cantina drinking a colossal peach Margarita when the curtain came up on the second round. Pavel messaged back that it was 10 times better than the first time through. I was glad for that. Came to the Montrose, managed to nap or sleep from 4 in the afternoon till 2 in the morning, when it was time to take the limo to the Ontario airport, which I had not known existed. Certain players bring their girls to the hotel to use the restrooms at 2 AM, when everyone looks spent and slutty. My driver was an Egyptian with in-depth knowledge of real estate values in the neighborhoods we passed through.

October 19, 2019

Turns out that I have a tiny fan club in LA, made up of directors and actors and the like who have grazed a little on my work, obtaining more nourishment from it than I could have realized. They stopped me at the door as I was trying to get into “Short and Sweet Hollywood” at the Lee Strasberg Theater and talked, for the most part, long enough that I could figure out who they were. It is nice for people to think–or to attest to thinking–one is touched with genius. Doesn’t happen enough back home. The danger is that I might believe it.

Everyone said that the distance from the Montrose to the theater is walkable, and I suppose, since I did walk it, it is, but it was a tribulation. Anemia breathlessness is back, and dogged me at every slight upward incline. The whole of it was along Santa Monica Blvd, which is rainbowy and happy and glorious, a gay Eden, and had I not been anxious about the evening I would have reveled in every sight. Gay men walked their little dogs. Straight women walked their big dogs. Boy trans kids cursed invisible adversaries.

The plays themselves were, for the most part, bad. You come to Hollywood and you expect an elevation in quality in every regard, but my evaluation was that the same show down in Asheville would have been pretty much the same. Some outstanding performances, but you have those here too. The badness of seven of the nine plays is what struck one first. Would LA not be full of playwrights with time on their hands? My bit was one of the not bad bits, but it was also grossly out of place, being serious and “large” in an evening dedicated to what was essentially sketch comedy. On the program when each play had a little blurb written about itself, our space was blank, just my name and Pavel’s. Had he neglected to send something in? Anyway, maybe two or three people on Planet Earth would have known what was going on without that note, and only one of them was in the house. The applause when it ended sounded like it was for a brave effort. Pavel warned me he had Tourette’s, which manifests as uncontrollable sniffing, and there he was beside me sniffing away, sometime muttering “shit” when something went wrong onstage. It was a contest. I can’t imagine that we weren’t eliminated in the first round.

The walk home seemed half as long as the walk out. I must have shed my sheath of anxiety. Stood at the door and looked into the famous Viper Room. The bouncer motioned for me to come in, but I demurred.

October 18, 2019

Supper with Brett on Sunset Boulevard. Haven’t seen him since Dublin. He looks and sounds himself, having invented–so far as I can tell– a unique and engaging career for himself out of bits and pieces of art and technology. Watched everything and everyone pass by on a perfect night. I had forgotten that BD did not graduate from college, tripped up by a technicality that I could not ride over for him, and which he judged–correctly, as it turned out–more bother than it was going to be worth. Gave him a copy of TFW. He seems happy and fulfilled. One of my sheep come fully and fitly to the fold.

Brunch with JWT, who plays Gaveston, a man as elegant and extenuated as his name. He is very young, just graduated from Stella Adler, with beautiful hair and a manner serious and consequential. E&G is his first acting gig after school. I felt frivolous beside him. He studied the history of the play from a book whose every second line he had underlined in red. He loves Edward the King, thinks it’s a masterpiece (as do I) and wants to find some way to produce it fully and to turn it into a film. I have seldom sat through such a flood of praise for myself. Praise is pleasanter than blame, but also harder to respond to. I assured him that anywhere he went, I would follow. He thanked me for lightening him up with my “antics.” I didn’t know I had them, but I’m glad they are amusing. He is indeed a very serious young men, very smart, and if he’s as determined as he sounds, Edward may have a future..  $85 to get from my hotel to the Hollywood Line in Koreatown and back.

October 17, 2019

Asheville Airport. Ann Dunn and her granddaughter– who’s about the age her mother was when I had he in class–await their flight to New York. I am here too early even to have a bloody Mary. Bad omen. Writing little mantras to fill the time.

Montrose West Hollywood. My room is one of the most elegant I’ve ever had, two levels, with a balcony opening onto an elegant street. A school lies just up the hill, and fathers walk by with their children by the hand or on their shoulders. Sat on the plane with a Chinese/American in a rush to get home in time to coach his son’s Little League team. They have to drive 30 miles to get to Mandarin class, which is meant to keep them in touch with their heritage. Passed Rodeo Drive in the taxi, where it is residential and almost indecently elegant. I envy these people their subtropical gardens. Left most of my vital paperwork on my desk–hoping there are ghosts of it somewhere on my phone. Brief nap upon arriving, during which I had a wonderful feeling of well-being.  Email told me that the Clegg Agency wants to see Jason of the Apes. Brett Doar makes a date for supper. At 5 you can get free wine in the hotel lounge. They put on Bon Jovi as accompaniment to the World Series, or whatever it is, on the giant TV.

October 13, 2019

Church, then an afternoon at the Magnetic. The play was a ghost story, by Katie’s sister, well written and well produced. It deserved a larger audience. I think Katie is going to give me the kiss-off at our lunch on Tuesday, which is odd, because I give her the best plays, but not odd, because it is not necessarily the case that anyone cares which plays are best.

A bluejay landed on a tall canna stalk. The stalk bent under his weight, all the way to the ground. The bluejay took flight, waited for the stalk to right itself, landed again, rode the flower down to the ground again. He did this as long as I cared to watch.

October 12, 2019

Planted, and dug beds for, peonies and narcissi. These are the last plantings I can think of. A forgotten box arriving in the mail may change that. Working on The Residency. It enrages and calms at once.

October 11, 2019

I don’t know whether the pity I feel for my colleagues lingering on in a foundering organization is a perception of reality, or a sort of intellectual mechanism to get me out of it with minimal regrets. I have felt no incipient regrets, except for separation from my accustomed supply of youth and energy.

Again, colossal gardening. Staggering to bed for a nap afterward, gobbling iron pills. Off to All Souls in the evening for the NC Baroque Chamber Orchestra’s evening of Scordatura works Heinrich Biber. Remarked to Janis that my whole life has been pretty much scordatura. The moon, almost full.

October 10, 2019

Writing at the café while it was still dark. Then for a haircut, an operation more taxing and grievous to me than it ought to be. I feel that it’s so trivial a thing that it would be wrong to wait for it, but the men in line in front of me seldom agree. My hairdresser was a good actress in high school, lives in Clyde, and being told of HART, supposed that she might get into the action there. She was also very much into “creative writing” and thanked me for inspiring her to get back into it, maybe even to take a course at Haywood Tech. Her English teacher there had commented on her ability to use big, complicated words when little ones would suffice, which she took as praise for an advanced vocabulary. She still carries this misinterpretation in her heart as proof of promise which the events of her life left unfulfilled. Both she and her colleague in the other chair hated the high school boy who came with very precise ideas about how his hair should be. He left looking like an iguana, but it must have been what he wanted.

Strenuous gardening afterward, by which I discovered I am still capable of the most unnatural exhaustion. Napped violently after putting in Asian lilies, peony, allium, digging a new bed for bulbs yet to come, doing some pruning, cleaning out the pond filter.

Renewed my library card, and took out a book on Annabella and Ada Byron. Sick of it already. Tone of 200 year old gossip.

Sultry Jaye Winter de Trujillo (one of my actors in Edward) invites me to supper in Los Angeles. I respond that I might find the time. . . .

Reading L’s book while waiting for my haircut. It could have been a classic of personal narrative, but is prevented from being so by the very quality that probably allowed it to be published: the constant drumbeat reference to the special circumstance of a female alone in the wilderness. We would have deduced everything she felt compelled to say about that from the narrative alone, without the reflexive editorializing.  Yet I can hear her editor nagging her to repeat this theme so it is never for a moment forgotten, and so, over all, the publicity people know how to sell it and to whom. The purity of it is ruined, but it might not have been published otherwise. What remains pure in these latter days? I want to say “me,” but even if true, it’s nothing to boast about.

October 9, 2019

4 in the morning. Woke a while ago and was unable to get back to sleep. Looking for pathology in this, but the truth is I went to bed just after 9 and took tremendous naps yesterday. But, a certain amount of turmoil attends my restlessness. The fate of the University worries me, though I have changed my relationship so that my part in its future is purely symbolic.  It is in fact no longer a university as we understood it. I know the solution, but in all the ways I am powerless, I am probably most powerless in this. You expect the Academy to be holy, and not brought down by the sins of its time.

Coffee with Andrew before he heads off to Richmond. He was in a serious car wreck, after which he re-evaluated his life’s choices, and this journey is the next part of it.

Long talk with sweet-souled Ryan after class. His veteran father is a sheriff in Fayetteville, which is both surprising and not.

Bought tickets to go to LA for Edward and Gaveston. When will I repent of this?

October 5, 2019

Ribbon of silver through my window: that is the North when dawn gathers in the East.

Turbulent few days, the turbulence largely invigorating and positive.

My students over-sharing about their private lives. . .

A single towhee greeting the ribbon of silver. . . .

Back to the studio on Thursday– joy.

Discussion of how to get the Lincoln triptych ready for the stage. The Sublime is willing to put a surprising measure of energy into this. I go back in for a second post-reading revision.

Playwright H messages me that she has been eliminated from the Magnetic line-up for next year, assumes I have been too and wants me to ally with her in indignation. Her phone call was a masterpiece of thoughtlessness, as she spent the time touting what an asset she and she alone was to the theater, how they could not do without her, speaking to another playwright at the same theater. I received no news either nay or yea, and so was able to adopt a tone of patient indifference. I am not indifferent, but doubt things are as she described them.  Indignation must be very careful lest it veer to the irrational and retributive.

Party Thursday night to view the tape of our Stonewall concert. If you want too much excellent food, just whisper “pot-luck” to a group of gay men. I made an elaborate meat pie. Two big red dogs lunged into the library and ate dessert. The tape was Illuminating. Whatever was going on in terms of crowd-pleasing antics, we weren’t very good. We did not sing well, not accurately, not with balance or finesse or real dedication to the music. What were we dedicated to? Our choreography (however minimal) seemed engineered to draw attention from our iffy singing. We can in fact sing beautifully .. . . I think we can, that we have, that we could. This hurt others more than me. DJ was crushed. The faction that wants a “show” rather than a “concert” has taken permanent control. There’s no fighting that, but we can guard against being actually bad musicians? If we want to. Do we want to? S said that it sounded better live. I hope so.

Red Hen is ready to do my audiobook, and wants to know if I want to be the voice of my own book. I thought I was ready to try it, but then realized the voice the book needs is Apollo, not Zeus.

Reading by Lilace at Black Dome, where she worked when she was at Warren Wilson. A sound and lovely book at exactly the right time; it should do well. I bought her book and gave her mine, which is pretty much the way my professional life has gone.

Here I am at Saturday dawn, exploding with the ten things I have to do, with time for maybe two of them. Maud the cat has one tiny paw on my big toe, voting for my staying right here. 

October 1, 2019

Early off to the Racquet Club for a session of weights. From there to High 5 where I worked on a play I’m not sure I’ll ever finish, because it’s about the Title IX incident, the details of which are so absurd I doubt an audience could buy into it. Fasting again, and feeling better again. If only I could continue mindful of this.

September 30, 2019

Katie came to class to talk about the parameters of production. A single student in that class causes there to be two of every message, because she has registered from another program; is startled by every message because she wonders what she personally has done wrong, when in fact everybody in class receives the same message;  she has to be comforted on this matter every time; leaves class for some reason every twenty minutes or so, and sits at the back so she has to plow through everybody to get to the door; has to have the lights a certain way or she hears a disturbing buzz which she can’t ignore; has to have the print on the screen so big that we can see only one line at a time, and can’t move closer to the screen because things get blurry; has taken the course twice; the play she has been writing for two years is about a woman with a host of disabilities who is nevertheless so beloved that people put up with her neediness.

Blessed, if brief, storm of rain.

September 29, 2019

Rose long before dawn and walked, making unsuccessfully for the Starbucks at Ingall’s. Got there all right, but they were not operating. Two men were setting out jogging in black clothing. I thought I’d walk back in the rising light, but it was still dark then and is barely gray now. The season of long nights approaches. Counted on the walk to relieve some anxieties, which it did. The anxieties seem to be centered on the university. My mind says “it’s not your problem anymore,” but does not quite communicate this to the nerves.

Tried to make coffee at home but the Maxwell House had turned into stone at the bottom of the jar. Took Or Did a Sea of Fire out of mothballs and finally found a suitable denouement for Nighthawks. I think I can get The Christmas Count back into shape, my first play ever to appear in New York, on Theater Row while the Twin Towers still loomed over.

September 28, 2019

Stand with hose in hand, trying to help the newest green citizens through this drought. We had a rag of somebody else’s thunderstorm yesterday which barely got the pavement wet.

Having missed too many rehearsals–and being too idle to learn the music on my own-- kept me out of Pride celebrations today, which was a disappointment, but which also gave me a day to my own devices. A mighty sending out of play scripts. Also, I went to the riverside office and prowled around for David Garrison in my Baltimore journals. Found him. Also found that my first Baltimore address was 1615 E Baltimore Street. Google puts this in the middle of the street, in an area I don’t recognize, so maybe urban renewal destroyed it, or I copied the address down wrong. I find that my stipend at Johns Hopkins was $222.22 a month, which was evidently sufficient. I met Rosa Ponsell on October 22, 1972. I sang on National TV before Aaron Copland on November 3, 1972. It was something difficult and not one of his popular pieces. He was kind and very tall.  I also applied to Phillips Exeter to be the Bennett Fellow 10 years before they chose me. But about David:

May 4, 1973: Talked to David, who is Barry’s friend, about Spanish and British poetry of the Seventeenth Century, and about religion. Missed a Journal Club meeting.
May 9, 1973: Socialized with Rangl, Barry, lanky David, Cro-Magnon Jack. David is like a minister you meet at church camp, smiling and calm. He is from Seattle
May 18, 1973: I shut my eyes. There were Titans with their eyes open in their sleep, and their eyes were fire and jewels. David Garrison, the Hispanophile, invited me to supper with him and his wife Sunday evening. He lives in Pumpkin Court Apartments.
May 20, 1973: Went to the Garrisons’ in Laurel for a delicious supper, curried chicken with broccoli afloat on it. A second guest, an Indian woman, was being deported and couldn’t make it. We talked. For a while with them I felt like a regular person.

Also was amazed by my dedication to the journal, pages and pages tightly handwritten, in a hand that was then still quite legible. I recorded everything. I was a vampire, a wolverine, tearing apart Civilization to devour it, to make it my own. I can barely eke out a terse paragraph or two now.

September 27, 2019

Woke too early, in anxiety about the state of the University, only little by little convincing myself that it is no longer my problem, and if it were my problem I wouldn’t know what to do about it. Though the causes are manifold and complicated, the symptoms not always easy to identify, the solution is quite simple: faculty governance. Roll back the size and power of the administration. End administrative oversight of curriculum and faculty affairs, and return it to the material support of education, which is the administrator’s only excuse for existence. All bad things in the university–this university, anyway-- arise from the administration, all bad ideas, all thwarting of good ideas, all unnecessary complications and absurd social enthusiasms. It is really that simple. If this were seriously presented, the Administration would enlarge itself, form a committee made up only of itself, and decide against it, finding jobs for all the new personnel by creating tasks, and therefore oversight, out of thin air. Administration would plead mandates from the Legislature. The Legislature is far away.

September 26, 2019

Partially exquisite, partially infuriating day off. Went looking for bookshelves to store the books I have to remove from my office. A comedy of errors.

Received a note about some students from the “accommodations office,” saying that certain ones have been granted “accommodations” for wandering the halls at class time, coming in late, missing class, not turning in the assignments– things that used simply to be called “bad behavior.” I will not live (or my career as an academic will not live) to see the pendulum swing back toward some notion of discipline and accountability. You want to cry out about it in a story or a play, but the official stance is so spinelessly absurd no one will credit it outside of academia, and no one in the world will credit it in five years.

September 25, 2019

Finally got the classroom computer glitch worked out. Glad it was an actual problem, so I didn’t look like a fool.

Second attack of hives, much less severe, during class last night. Wonder if they caught me scratching my armpits like mad. Did I buy the wrong deodorant?

Thirty six years and I still wonder what the brains behind those eyes out there in the classroom are really thinking.

Forgot lunch with Kermit.

Resurrected an old play, which I’d mothballed because all the characters are lesbians, and I wondered, “do I dare?”

September 23, 2019

Woke this morning with a rather terrible case of– what? Hives, I suppose-- redness over my entire torso, nickel-sized welts in several places, an agony of itching. The attack was over in an hour. The Internet said I had to have contact with something, or have eaten something. I was asleep, so I hadn’t eaten anything. Had something bitten me? Rushed the bedclothes to the washer in case I’d brought something back from New York. Never had hives before in my life. Interesting playwriting class, finding ways to share our work because IT won’t walk across campus to fix our computer. I will be blamed for being insistent; they will be blameless for being dilatory. The lad on the phone says nobody can help us after 4. Their webpage says help is available till 8. One shrugs, looks forward to retirement.

Can nerves bring on hives?

September 22, 2019

Fitful nap arriving home, the downtown to the reading of The Testament of Major Rathbone. The neighborhood was submerged in Goombay, so we didn’t have the conducive ambiance we had for the other plays, though it added a certain richness and cultural interplay. It went well. The triptych stands. There are points where it is so good I can’t credit having written it.

September 21, 2019

Writing in the Delta Sky Lounge at La Guardia.

Battery Park, empty when I got there, later brimmed with environmental protesters led by that Swedish girl who rowed across the ocean (or something). Subway from the Battery to Columbus Circle, where I fell in with the Hare Krishnas. Being in their presence and being, for a while, laved in their chanting was a real comfort. I had a spiritual experience there at the edge of Central Park which is difficult to tell of now. Went to The Great Society at the Vivian Beaumont. I arrived early to take in the evening ambiance of Lincoln Center. One of the things I saw was a man seated near the fountain with a script of The Great Society open to a page heavily highlighted in pink. The man’s eyes were closed and his lips moving. I thought if the actors were still memorizing their lines it was a bad sign. He turned out to be playing General Westmoreland in an ensemble cast, so maybe he was tapped to fill in for that role at the last moment. My seat mate was a young man (three years out of college) named Zach, from Los Angeles, whose mother had given him the money to come to New York to see Sea Wall because he was attempting to write monologs. There’s a supportive mother. I was just wondering why people bring backpacks and giant parcels to the theater when in he walks with a duffel bag, which somehow he manages to get completely under the seats. It crossed my mind that it was a bomb, but there were guards searching every bag at the door. Zach is an intense young man concentrating on writing scripts, who blames Kerouac’s The Subterraneans for infecting him with paranoia. I told him to go see Edward and Gaveston when it opens in his home town. The play was essentially a dramatized documentary concerned with things I remember from when they really happened. Zach had experienced none of it, and was having an altogether different evening at the theater. My history plays are better. I kept imagining the better use they would make of that extraordinary space. Otherwise, my luck held, and I caught a taxi the instant I hit the street.
Lying in bed to catch the 4 hours of sleep left to me before my limo to the airport I thought, “everything this trip has gone well.” One fears to say such things before one is home under one’s own roof.
However liberal my ideas on immigration might be, it’s irritating when your driver speaks only Chinese, and on top of it tries to carry on a conversation. We did finally connect when he turned the radio on and I said “I like that music.” He said, “You young. Only young people like that music.”

September 20, 2019

Sitting in Flanagan’s Bar on 14th Street, having a $6 vodka tonic, and who should walk through the door but Lynda Sarver Gaug, whom I have not seen (though we have corresponded) in forty years? An amazing moment. We caught up as much as we could, then off to the reading at BGSQD on W 13th. There’s a church nearby, and every niche and stairwell was filled with homeless people claiming a place protected on at least one side for the night. The reading was in a little upstairs bookstore, and though I thought I’d come a long way for so small a venue, it proved convivial, and the praise from the Red Hen people for my book was gratifying. I believe I was triumphant. Walked Lynda back to Penn Station, where she caught her train to Babylon. Along the way we filled each other in on mutual friends who have died or otherwise been subtracted. I keep to myself the conviction that I am just now–as my peers retire and fade away–beginning my proper career. Dragged myself to the Marriot lounge, where I sat beside Pat, who is here to start a cruise up the Saint Lawrence. Her family has lived in Florida since the beginning of the 19th century.

Writing in the lounge in the morning. Just now met JP, a dead gorgeous brute of a man who used to work in secret government ops (I guessed that from the look of him before he told me) and who is now an official with the VA, on the phone with urgency in his voice at the crack of dawn. He asked why I was in town, and I told him, and this elicited the information that he, too, was writing a novel, and would I like to look at the first few pages? I did, and somewhat against expectation they were very good, exciting, intriguing, like the opening of a better-than-average best seller. I said, “If I were an editor, I would read on.” I hope that’s what he wanted to hear.  I gave him a copy of Wyona, though his style and mine could hardly be more different.

Subway to the Battery, where I sat under the sycamores at a table where I could see Ellis Island, and could have seen Liberty without the big fat loading cruise ships.

September 19, 2019

Thirty stories above Time Square in The Marriot Marquis, which I long admired without ever thinking I’d be inhabiting. It’s itself a towering city which, in bad weather, one need not ever leave. My customary digs at the Paramount lies just across the street, so this part of town feels firmly like “home.”  Hit the Rum House, a usual haunt. Men have always tended bar before. Women did last night, and the difference was palpable. The men are fully focused on their customers; the women bartenders are intensely protective of and interested in one another. One felt that one was negotiating for a drink, which would be denied of one had not behaved. Wandered half drunk back onto the street, passed the theater where Hadesville was playing, walked in and asked if there were a ticket for half an hour later, and there was. It is a version of Orpheus, and my mind shot back to Peri and Monteverdi. Hadesville is a genuine addition to this succession, over-produced (it is, after all, Broadway) but with genuine sentiment, lively in action, and with one spectacularly god-like boy in the chorus. Its thesis is the O and E were a reflection of the love affair of Hades and Persephone, and the histories of lovers is a long succession of the same beautiful stories over and over. I thought, as I always do, of what I would have done to improve the script. The seats are small and the giant man next to me was conspicuously miserable. Afterwards, a stroll through Times Square, where The Hulk wanted rather aggressively for me to take a picture with him, then to my room to watch the next installment of Ken Burns’ Country Music.

This morning took my necessary walk to Bryant Park, feeding the necessary brown birds. Headed south from there, down Christopher Street, draped in rainbow bunting, but nearly empty. Sit now on Times Square under an umbrella, calm in the midst of all, having walked from the hotel to the Village. I’ve done that before at greater speed, but the doing of the deed is what matters. A kid plays Pachelbel on a little stage at the end of the plot of chairs. Grimy sexy construction workers have their lunches at the next table. Wandered through a beautiful little garden near the corner of 7th and Christopher, where I gave a copy of The Falls of the Wyona to the people collecting donations for the upkeep of the garden. They said they’d come to the reading tonight, but who knows?

September 18, 2019

Asheville Regional Airport, my good luck bloody Mary in front of me. The swelling in my ankle becomes so vast that it is an issue for the TSA, who must probe around on it to see if it is a bomb. They ask if it hurts and I say “yes,” though it doesn’t, just to see how it affects the process. They are probably past noticing contempt by now.

September 15, 2019

The reading of Earthly Power at the Block last night was brilliant. I am gratified by the impression the Lincoln plays seem to be making on their audience. The plays are better than I imagined them to be, and that is a testament coming from the author himself. Jack and DJ and I trundled over to Aloft for refreshment afterward. The burger was disappointing, but after a successful night of theater, how could it even be mentioned? Asheville can be lovely of a Saturday night. Gorgeous Richmond on the balcony with us.

Anemia hits again, after what I feel was two days of an ulcer incident, Hard to breathe roaming the streets last night. Hard to get up out of bed for more than a few hours at a time. Time to build back again– though it is the illness that feels kind of nice, sort of warm and watery, an excuse to lie back and draw the covers around you, nothing else to be done.

September 14, 2019

From an email:

Gita Smith
Fri, Sep 13, 6:48 PM (14 hours ago)
to me

Dear David: Long, long ago (1978) I and several other Atlanta poets published your poem in Daimon, our quarterly broadsheet. I kept every edition, and today pulled one out at random and there was your poem.
Still beautiful.
Still needing to be read.
So on Sept. 17, I am going to forward it to 30 friends who value excellent poetry. Each of us sends out a poem on a given day of the month. The 17th is my day.
Thank you for having written it. I know they will love it.
Gita M. Smith

On some days one draws in, wants to sell or give away anything not directly related to Fulfilling the Vision while one can. On other days one wants to gather, stretch, relax, assuming that there will be time for everything. Today is the second of those; yesterday was the first. I suppose this is the uncertain alternation that moves us forward.

September 13, 2019

Reading for Falls at Malaprop’s last night. Tiny audience, but a choice one. I wanted to bitch about attendance, but I realized I had fun, so what the hell. I believe we sold no books. Tom reverses those many months of– whatever it was-- shows up for Lincoln and for the reading and swears he’ll see me at Lincoln again Saturday night. I am grateful, if in the dark.  We had drinks at the Bier Garden until the Panthers game began and nothing could be heard.

September 12, 2019

Planted the rest of the iris order, putting allium in around them for a pleasing effect. Cleaned the pond drain.

Played tapes of 9-11 for my class yesterday. I suppose it is remote to them, but it was immediate and heartbreaking to me.

Wednesday was also a day of student upheaval.  S came to my office saying she needed me to talk to me, “just keep talking” because she was about to “freak out.” That went on until it was time to go to class. She brought her gear to class, but immediately left. An alarm in her backpack went off every five minutes. After the third student got up to wander around during a 75 minute class, I remarked on it and the response was, “are we really expected to sit that long?” I realized that no one in their lives had suggested to them they ought to do something they did not want to do, that some sacrifice of immediate will might lead to greater reward. Simply not part of the picture. Their parents have been helicoptering over them to insure they are never crossed or rerouted in any way. When class ended, S sat in the office tormenting poor Wren. “I’m afraid something is wrong with my cats!” cries she. “Your cats are fine,” says I. “How can you be sure?” Says I, “I just am.” I offered to drive her home or escort her to the health center, but she preferred to sit there “freaking out.” I am the wrong person to come to when you’re “freaking out,” because after I’ve offered a few solutions and you still intend to take the dive, I hear myself thinking, “Oh, straighten up. Stop it.” Today’s student does not recognize any special place outside of their daily drama, where their daily drama should be suspended or sidelined for an hour or two. Class was holy to us. If you were going to have a fit, you would do so outside, before, after, when the lights were back on you. Am I being unsympathetic? I suppose I am, admitting that, in a life sometimes as terrible as any other’s, I have managed not to disrupt anything important to other peoples’ lives. I feel anyone could achieve that much. We have a generation that does not know how to be told “no.”

September 8, 2019

The reading of The Loves of Mr Lincoln last night at the Block off Biltmore was a larger success than even a greedy heart like mine imagined. Stopped at Daphne’s for vodka and salad, fortifying myself for whatever might come. But, what came was a full, enthusiastic house and a reading that did the work justice. I knew some of the audience, but it was by no means “the usual crowd.” High praise from all sides– though, as ever, one assumes the people who hated it wouldn’t draw you aside to tell you so. There are some playwright-y touches that it’s probably too late to excise. But, all in all, huzzah!

Elijah didn’t show up for the performance. I knew when we were reading a couple Sundays ago that he would not. The vibe came off him like radioactivity. John was a fully ample stand-in.

What with the reading at Malaprop’s Thursday and Earthly Power back downtown Saturday, it looks like my week. Not to mention that “16th and Curtis” opened in Tacoma Thursday night.

Maud lies on the floor at my feet. She is dreaming. It looks like a happy dream. The amazing thought that my little cat’s psychic life is as closed to me as the moons of Jupiter.

September 7, 2019

Bright days continue. A flight of helicopters came over as I was digging room for new iris. The sound of invasion.

My first try at begonias has been a resounding success. Dug a new bed for iris, and then put them somewhere else. The new bed was not murmuring “iris.” 

Dreams last night of theater productions, probably related to the big reading downtown tonight. They were doing one of my plays, and one scene had everybody’s head poking through blue plastic. I asked what the hell that was about, and was shown in the script where I had specified that scene happened in the water.

David Lee Garrison writes that he knew me at Johns Hopkins. I was miserable at Hopkins, and assumed I was as invisible as I felt. Delicious to know that somebody remembered. I do not, in fact, remember him, though I’m going to drive out to my office and delve through the Baltimore journals till I find him.

September 6, 2019

Cashed out most of my stock holdings, for the first time convinced by the talk of Recession. I thank Google for $190,000.

Michael Gill writes from Ohio that his son is now the age he was when we met.

Good presentation, I thought, on Deism and Dryden and that golden/tawdry age.

September 5, 2019

The mystery tree volunteering all over my yard is clerodendron. It’s pretty, and butterflies love it.

Went to the Y and worked out, weights and cardio. Survived it. High 5 afterward, where I finished a chapter of Sam-sam, which now I must type up. Talked with JC about the reading Saturday night. All things seem to align.

Drove to Jesse Israel’s and bought a stone St. Francis for the garden.

September 4, 2019

Tom and I had breakfast beside the sinkhole, without mentioning the–year? Two years? –we had not spoken. He was betrayed by the man for whom he was writing the Christian script, as one knew he must be.

Good class on The Crock of Gold.

Summer returns with sweaty vengeance. Let it.

Finished a revision of Diving into the Moon, woke the next morning and revised the ending again.

Snotty students sending snotty emails. 

Sleeping gigantically.

September 2, 2019

Lovely birthday dinner at Maria and Russell’s, their baby asleep in another room. I realize that I’m not used to much ordinary conversation, have to keep on my toes to participate properly.

Harvested persimmons from my persimmon tree. They’re delicious and strange.

Sat beside the French Broad, listening to family picnics and watching the various bugs make their way across my table.

Tom emails to meet for breakfast tomorrow. That Ice Age may be ended.