January 28, 2019

Good class on Pepys. They forgave him his boyishness, as some classes have not.

Maud and Circe have returned to their old ways, hiding in the old places, seeking the old indulgences, cuddling the old cuddles. When I think that the changes in their behavior– which made them miserable and me discouraged for months-- were probably brought on by fleas, a condition which I noted but did not dedicate myself to addressing, I become frantic with impatience at myself. It’s true that I associated taking a cat to the vet with being told she had some horrible terminal disease, but it was not so in this case, and I was a coward not to put it to the test. I took Circe to the vet to have her put to sleep, because I couldn’t stand her behavior anymore. The vet saved her. I apologize every day. I think she has forgiven me. I don’t know what lesson is in this, except to try no to assume the worst thing first. Actually, now that I’ve written it, that is good advice for the whole of my life.

The evening is an odd green-gray. Meant to be mortal cold tomorrow.

January 27, 2019

Great progress on Sam-Sam, complete proof-reading and editing of Tub last night. Have not left the house.

January 26, 2019


Des Pres on Spotify.

The many-headed illness lifted in what seemed a single second last night. Suddenly I was light and full of purpose again. That was the exact second when I realized I was sick of the intellectual cowardice of my students, their learned dependency, that a new testament of my life was able to begin. With health comes revelation? It is dark morning and I’m feeling the same.

And I want to report the gush of inspired writing after I thought that might be gone. I was just sick. Maybe one looks back on every bad patch and says, “I was just sick.”


Creepy boy from last semester complains about me for using the word “faggot” in class (reproducing a contemporary Dubliner’s reaction to Hugh Lane) My response:

 Since I came to Asheville, I was a member and, for a while, a leading figure in Asheville’s first gay organization. CLOSER. I was a founding member of SALGA, the Southern Appalachian Lesbian Gay Alliance, a far more activist and political organization, which grew out of CLOSER.  I was SALGA’s Hate Crimes Coordinator, and took calls and made reports when a gay, lesbian, or transgendered person reported crimes or discrimination against themselves. In this capacity I was SALGA’s unofficial liaison to both the police and the Citizen Times. In a time when “gayness” was far less acceptable and far more dangerous than it is now, I was a constant respondent to hate letters in the local media, to the point where the CT or WCQS would actually ask me for a response if I hadn’t volunteered it. For this I received hate mail and death threats. Some came to me and some, embarrassingly, to my chairman or the Vice Chancellors, who were the Provosts of the time. Asheville has had 3 gay print publications and I have written, under my own name, for all of them. I am a founding member of Cantaria, now called the Gay Men’s Chorus of Asheville, with which I have performed publically for twenty years. I performed with “Asheville on Broadway”, a gay theater enterprise seeking to raise money for AIDS patients. This lasted, I think, about four years. It was pretty much expected that everyone on stage was gay.  Twice I won the Gay Playwrights Prize given by Sunnyspot Productions, and had my –yes, gay– plays produced successfully in New York City. The next year my gay take on Abraham Lincoln– The Loves of Mr Lincoln–was produced in New York. It is likely this will be done in Asheville in the coming year. My gay play Anna Livia, Lucky in Her Bridges opened the Chicago Theater season one year. I was Board Member of the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, a national group based in New York which doled out money to gay theater projects. A collection of gay poetry, A Dream of Adonis, was published by Pecan Grove Press in 2012. I have TWO gay novels coming out this year. Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers springs from the artistic life of Asheville in the ‘80's and early ‘90's. The Falls of the Wyona won the prestigious Quill Prize for Queer Writing and appears in May from Red Hen Press. The cover features two boys holding hands in a forest. Have I made my point? I have earned the right use the word “faggot” whenever and however I see fit. 

Yet one wonders how long the Adolescent Inquisition will go on. Probably until someone says, “You know, your feelings are not actually the most important things in the world.”

Cold mostly gone, but lingering is a titanic cough that sometimes doesn’t allow you to inhale, so you cough again and again, hard, without any breath in you. It’s horrible.

Forgot to mention the purple eyes of crocus opened in my yard a week ago.

My God! I don’t love my students anymore. Not blindly and corporately, as I always have. I’ve stopped making excuses for them in my heart. It is the turning of a great tide.

January 25, 2019

Red Hen sends me a draft of the cover of The Falls of the Wyona. It’s pretty. Very green. I was expecting something not quite so on-the-nose. The book is about boys holding hands in the forest, and the cover features boys holding hands in the forest. But, I’m sure they know their business.  If someone wants a book about boys holding hands in the forest, they will buy this. Actually, I am just so happy to be part of a process, any process, moving forward.

Urgent digestive issues send me to the bathroom after class. While seated, I was seized by muscle cramps, which grew into side and chest spasms so tight I could barely breathe. It’s agonizing. I can neither move nor stay still. I’m crying out, but there is no one else in the room. Cannot move. I’m a pretzel of quivering agony, unable to clean myself, unable to breathe or stand or move my arms. Finally, in terrific pain, I do manage to get myself together and out of the room, sucking down water at the fountain. This morning I go to leave a prescription at the drug store, and a cough in the car convulses me again at the same muscle in the stomach. I stagger into the store, seize a Gatorade and down it, walking through the aisles, gripping my stomach and groaning. When I get to the checkout I hand the lady the empty Gatorade and she says, “Do you want me just to thrown this away?” I come in later to pick the pills up, and the clerk says, “Are you feeling better?”

 My students, finally, are cowards. They must have learned this somewhere. Their entire support system encourages them in it, makes them think that cowardice is a kind of right.. I don’t think I can overcome it. Finally it is time to back away.

 

January 23, 2019

First meeting with Ann’s class went well. About half of them have had me before, so took the bump gracefully. Gratifying flood of my old students to my office, wanting me back.

Cancelled class today because of a grueling cold that, because of a variety of other ailments-- and because of not having had a cold in living memory– I ignored or mis-diagnosed. I’d schedule a dinner party for last night, and getting ready for that was a study in will and concentration. Was asleep on my bed when the door announced the first guest. The Moseleys and our new Visiting Assistant Rachel. Rachel learned more about the past of the university and the department than, I bet, she could take in. Everyone knows more gossip and personal detail than I do. Served coq us vin (overcooked) and mushroom casserole (perfection) and a lemon cheesecake.  At the end I did something I had never done in my life: I left the clean-up to the next morning.

January 21, 2019

Brilliant moon on snow through the night. Circe climbed back into bed and we had our first sleep together since her sickness.

In fact taking over Ann’s American Lit. Her syllabus is as far as can be imagined from what I would do, so I must spend part of my MLK day figuring that out. Part of it too must go to dealing with the plumbers, who warn that they might be tramping through the house all day. I’m like some burrowing rodent from Wind in the Willows, hating upheaval and disorder so much.

Cleaned out the pond and the drain, oddly unable to remember if the water was cold. The world is cold now. The radio says it’s 11 degrees F outside my door. I think of those bulbs from Eden Brothers, hidden in the earth just in time.

January 20, 2019

Shocking rainfall in the dark and early morning.

Writing a slog today, by which I understand I’m working on the wrong things in the wrong way.

Filling out questionnaires and submitting blurbs for Black Mountain Press for NSDL for the second time. The previous ones got lost, or he never looked for them. I have no hope for this book, though Carlos wakes up and mentions its imminent appearing every six months or so. Hope is a kind of cruelty, though, isn’t it?

January 19, 2019

Woke into amazing physical well-being. Not a pain anywhere. How much of my daily inflammation is bacterial after all? All those antibiotics shouldn’t affect arthritis, if it was arthritis. Oh, the wonder of life. . ..

Kyle’s birthday cocktail party at the Hilton in Biltmore Village. Bought 5 boxes of Girl Scout cookies from a little booth under the Christmas lights.

Looking forward to the terrible weather predicted by the TV, to keep me home writing.

Lured by email promising lily bulbs, I drove to Eden Brothers. There were no lily bulbs, but the ladies working there showed me shelves of fall bulbs that they said I could have for free, since later that day they were going to be thrown away. Not much variety remained– pale yellow iris, purple crocus collections, one bag of anemone that I couldn’t tell the color of. I took the anemones, a bag of crocus, a bag of the pale iris, though I told the lady it was like going to an animal shelter, and I wanted to save them all. I got them–except the crocus, which remain forlorn – into the ground just as the cold drizzle was becoming a driving rain, which lasted in ferocity all night, and–as I see out the window--has turned to billowing snow.

January 18, 2019

Got through a class on Cervantes. It’s probable that I’ll be trading my freshman writing class for American Lit. Anne’s father is sick, and she needs to go tend to him, and though my course and hers are at the same time, it’s easier to find an adjunct substitute for freshman writing than American Lit. I’d rather it be that way, except in two class meetings I’ve grown fond of my freshmen, and fear their fate without me. I know, hubris, but it’s how I feel. It was a big deal to have me teach freshman writing after 32 years of not. But, see, even the gods were against it. Meeting yesterday with the freshman writing coordinator who had to have the chairman in the room lest I– I don’t even know what. Lest I bite her? Lest I treat her with the contempt she deserved for that bit of passive-aggressiveness? I am far more harmless in my own eyes than I seem to be in others’. Have slept all day except for my class, and perhaps I was partially asleep then. This is a light and headed-off-at-the-pass occurrence of the disease, but it still is one. Kyle’s birthday tonight. I think I’ll go even if---

January 17, 2019

The pervading body pain that could not be controlled by aspirin or CBD, and which therefore terrified me with the specter of incurable pain throughout the rest of my life, turned out to be an onslaught of phlebitis. Unlike a year past, I got control of it this time, and endured about an hour of that remarkable battle in my body before it began to pass. Long sleep, with the repetitious dreams of fever. I will be off to school this morning.

January 16, 2019

Though life is often disappointing, I’m glad to have lived to witness two colossal transformations in the world. No one would have seen them coming when I was a boy. The first is the recognition of “toxic masculinity” and the sad danger women have been in from violence from their men for generation upon generation. It wasn’t invisible, I suppose, but it was interpreted as “just the way things are” and women were advised to find a way to accommodate themselves to a dangerous world. Now that the veil is lifted, or lifting, men too breathe deeper, easier, as on the day you recognize you have been horrible without really meaning to be, and see a way to change. Put on the pink hat, gentleman; kiss your buddy in the street if you want to. The other is related insofar as both have to do with compassion. That is the new relationship building between humans and animals. Maybe You Tube allowed us to see what always was happening, but I think rather that divers endangering themselves to save entangled mantas, that vacationers dragging stranded dolphins back into the water, that men climbing down into crevasses to save puppies, is new to the world. The sentiment that it’s “just an animal” which was current when I was young is embarrassing now. Little boys are embraced by chickens, men by lionesses; women pet wild cheetahs and sit in pastures with the heads of cows in their laps. It is shocking, beautiful, and yet I believe it was the way it was meant to be when the Creator asked us to tend his garden. These two things –there may be others, but I don’t yet see them– are huge. . . like the recognition sometime in the XVIII century that all humans are equal, and that there is no rational way of discriminating among us. That is STILL catching on, so we must be patient. Every dad sitting at a toy tea party with his daughter, every deer coming out of the woods to be petted by the housewife, hurls us forward. 

The cringing Boy who ran Humanities and ended my career there has been fired. Too much time has passed for me to be truly exultant, nor do I feel the inclination to exult. But I want to say to somebody that you would have saved 4 ruinous years had you sided with me rather than him. I was right; he was wrong, and testing that nearly did–or perhaps did–destroy the program. It is a victory I will at least keep in my heart, for I was right in large rather than merely wounded in particular. Maybe I will be bolder next time.

January 15, 2019

Two classes today, now all classes met. My freshmen were bright eyed and eager to participate, far more diverse in mien and background than I am used to. Several shook my hand and thanked me after class. One student whom I had known as Patrick appeared in what I would have called full Stevie Nicks drag, long straight wig, peasant skirt, high heels, and asked to be called Virginia. “Why Virginia?” says I. “After Virginia Woolf.” Brava! Another student had turned from Michael into Marcella, her dress the only apparent change from when I taught him as a boy. A baritone with a dark wig and five o’clock shadow. Transgenderism confuses me. What confuses me most was where was it erewhile? Did people suppress it through the years? Before it came into public consciousness, did people have those feelings but not know what to do with them? Is it a kind of fad? Is it more political than I understand, a radical protest against “toxic masculinity”? Anyhow, on we go, me scratching into the margin of my grade book female names for people I knew as boys. It does go the other way, girls becoming boys, but not yet this semester. I catch myself lamenting when a handsome boy turns into a homely woman, or a striking woman into an odd looking man. Just shows my shallowness, or the degree to which I think that, when offered choices, one should go with beauty.

Hour long conversation with Mickey in Costa Rica. Brought all that back. Spent a significant part of the time hearing about all the Asheville people with whom she had affairs I never suspected. Nearly everyone with a penis. I don’t see the illicit until it’s pointed out to me. My days, in comparison, have been serene.

January 14, 2019

Googled my father. All I found was a two line obituary in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

January 13, 2019

Mostly looking forward to the beginning of the semester tomorrow.

Thirty years ago I was in the midst of my affair with Jo-Jo. Tom was the center of my life. God, how I loved him. Spent New Years in New Orleans, where we hired Rick. Zimmer/Bees Productions cancelled my production at Lincoln Center because I refused to do the (idiotic) revisions they wanted. I was about to found Pisgah Players. Twenty-two years ago I wrote in my journal from my chill office in the “Downtown School of the Arts” on College Street, whose life was as short as its inception was adventurous. Twenty years ago I was closing –dramatically–on 62 Lakeshore. I was determined to write a string quartet. Ten years ago W.D. Snodgrass died. I was beginning rehearsals for Titus Andronicus. Adam brought me projects we could do together at HART. I record in my journal that I’m nearly finished with The Falls of the Wyona, first draft. Everything took too long. Nothing ended up the way one hoped at the outset. Yet, one grinds on. The night is very quiet.

January 12, 2019

Accomplished much at the studio in a brief period of time.

Sang for Suzie’s memorial service at All Souls.

I’m at that stage mocked in movies and TV shows where you can tell the weather by how much your body aches.

January 11, 2019

Achy all day. The weather? Went to school and did my grumpy syllabi, and met with three sweet boys who mean to be English majors. In the evening, at Adam’s invitation, went to the Phil Mechanic for an “immersive cabaret” called “Finding Home,” put on my Homeward Bound, a local group fighting homelessness. It was in the old Flood, where I have not set foot for years, though it lie two floors below my studio. Turns out the “Finding Home” was tight, inventive, professional, excellent in all regards. Asheville has the talent to put on truly good theater. I had misunderstood the nature of the evening, and handed the lady at the door a $20 bill, congratulating myself on my generosity. Turns out it was a full-dress benefit for which tickets were $95 each. She let me waltz right in. Maybe I looked homeless myself. Made it up to her after the show. I thought, as I always do, “I need to get out more.”

January 10, 2019

Busied myself around the house, waiting for the plumbers. When it was 4:30 and the plumbers hadn’t come, I gave a call from their dispatcher saying “they’re running late” a bitter reception.  “All our personnel got stuck on a project that’s taking much longer than–”
“My faucet might take five minutes. Send one of them now.”
“But, if it’s around 6 PM when they’re done, is it still all right–”
“No, it is not all right. I need them in half an hour or I go on social media and start relating my experience.”

Two plumbers were at my door in twenty minutes. One was a master, the other an apprentice. It was like watching a sweet, comic movie. They were funny and enjoyed working together. The older related that when he was in college is English teacher had them read Beowulf aloud in class, divided up in parts like a play. She had them read it aloud in modern English but also to themselves in Anglo-Saxon. I admired her. Things learned: a faucet can cost $800. I had figured $70 or $80. The other is that the slow water pressure in the guest bedroom is because the pipes are original to the 96 year old house and are almost clogged with. . . whatever it is that clogs pipes. So, next week I have $5000 worth of plumbing done. But I will have a decent guest bathroom at last.

GMC rehearsal. I didn’t enjoy the rehearsal, actually, but I enjoy my colleagues more than I have in the past. Looking into the future, as Simone laid it out, I see no music I’m really interested in singing. I want to stand in my tux and sing Gibbons. The group wants to wear sparkly vests and belt out show tunes. 

January 9, 2019

Beethoven.

Correspondence caught up with in the morning, not much after. Lunch with Kermit and DJ. A little sick afterwards.  Do I call such days wasted or restful?

January 8, 2019

Again, tried reading Charlie’s book, and again started into a play about reading Charlie’s book. It probably cannot be stopped.

Quite good day at the studio. I may be over-prepared for the UNCA show.

Trump tries to hoodwink the nation tonight into believing there is an emergency at our southern border. He recreates Hitler’s play book page by page, and for every one crying a warning there’s one who thinks it’s all fine. He is the most destructive person in American history, and the repercussions of his misdeeds shall outlive us all.

January 7, 2019

Vivid dreams. In the last before waking, I was some sort of prophet or reformer, speaking to large crowds at bus plazas and public squares. It felt good doing this. My special emphasis was to remain friends with the people who advocated the positions I’d just excoriated in public. Bonnie Hobbs, who used to run the green door, was one of my targets during a big harangue on the public square. Afterwards, I and my followers went to a play she was producing. The dream ended before I knew whether she was going to let us in.  The city we were in was beautiful, a white city with broad vistas.

Had the whole Phil Mechanic building to myself for a couple of hours. This was after a first arrival when, again, I encountered a refugee stumbling away from the bus stop. He asked me where a certain employment service was, and I didn’t know. He gave me the address, and it is on Leicester Highway. He wanted to know if he could walk and I said it was, like, six miles, and so I cleaned out the front seat so I could drive him there. He was a (quite large) black man with a French accent, so I guessed the Caribbean, but he is from Benin. Somehow he is staying in Marshall, which I would have thought was the last place anyone from Benin would have found his way to. Something on the radio brought up politics, and he said the President of Benin, Patrice Talon, is a “very strong man” whom everybody is tired of after five years. He allowed, though, that in that regard America has it worse.

January 6, 2019

Epiphany. Radiant. Summerish.

Keyboard out this morning. Of course I assumed it was all manner of worse things until I bought a new keyboard, and it was. . .  the keyboard. But I did not go ballistic, did not curse the heavens. This is progress. Down came Christmas. I started un-decorating when the movie Jaws came on TV, and finished when it finished.  Thus inventing Shark Epiphany.

January 5, 2019

Stupendous wind all night, and now into morning. I could hear my chimes making rough love with the wind out in the garden.

Two men from my past in two days getting in contact and saying they loved and miss me. I should make more of these events.

At the end of the day, the wind had moved everything around, even the aluminum tubs that I don’t like to lift myself.

Inflamed shoulders in distracting pain. I took four drops of CBD oil, and in twenty minutes the pain was gone. Why is this not better known?

Finished Daniel’s painting. Made progress on Sam-sam

Katherine posts agonizing post after agonizing post from the threshold of death.

January 4, 2019

Reviewed the photos I took at the New Year’s party. Unless they were of a cat or a Christmas tree, there was not one where somebody–in some cases everybody– wasn’t looking at their phone. At the stroke of midnight I surveyed the room and everybody was on the phone, texting or reading text. There is no “here” anymore.

Rain unrelenting.

Wrote well in the morning on Sam-sam, then drove to the studio to work on Daniel’s painting. As I parked, I watched a woman pushing a stroller and with two other kids in tow run for and miss the bus at the stop by the studio. When I looked again she was on the street, trying to compose herself, looking wildly around. Her baby was crying and her two girls huddled against her, their lips trembling with cold. As I watched, her face convulsed into one of the most awful expressions of fear I’ve ever seen–like the women in news reports of lands at war or after an earthquake. It was cold, raining hard, and she clearly had no way to get anywhere. She was pushing the stroller down Roberts Street– in the direction that leads to nothing–when I shouted at her “Where are you going?” As they piled into my Prius I learned that her car–a 2002 Jeep-- had overheated and stalled, and she had left it at the dealership to be fixed, but then she missed the bus and her phone had died so she couldn’t call her sister for a ride– a clusterfuck on a winter morning. I drove her to her sister’s (her sister’s boyfriend’s she explained, as though precision in this event were paramount) on Brevard Road near the Outlets. The two pretty girls– six and four, I’d guess-- sat in the back seat drawing, while the boy sat in front with mom. He was probably 2 or 3. Nothing prepared me for the bombshell of undirected energy that is the three year old male. He WOULD play with the dashboard. He WOULD stand and look out the window whatever his mom did to prevent it. At one point he knocked the car out of gear. I hadn’t seen him do it, so I didn’t at first know what the problem was. But he was also curious and attentive, and listened rapt if you told him anything remotely engaging. I couldn’t help comparing him to his sisters. I’m an essentialist, and believe that gender difference is at once congenital and real, but I suppose the case could be made that he was the way he was because got away with things that his sisters didn’t because he was beautiful, and a boy. Funny, I don’t remember getting away with anything. Probably I did. As I drove back to the studio, I thought of the dozen things that delayed me and, as I decided then, insured that I would arrive at the right place at the right time to help this woman. The Lord had provided, and the immensity (and complication) of the providence was overpowering. You’re fed up with God, and then He goes and orchestrates something like this. . . .Finally, it is finer to be the instrument of Providence than to be the object of it.

Met my new neighbors again, and I was in a better mood, and all is well, and we shall be a jolly family. Learned two texture-makers that I hadn’t known before.

Dark now, the rain still falling. Books take a very long time.

January 3, 2019

Re-reading the volume of Tennyson my parents gave me for my 13th birthday. To see the inscription on the front page in my mother’s exquisite handwriting is a little shocking. I see why Tennyson appealed to me as a kid. His early poems are clearly inspired by simply being alive and having discovered a vocation as a poet. Everywhere one turns is a possible poem. Let’s write a poem about a Merman. Done! Let’s think of all the girls we know and write a poem for them. Done! It’s exactly the impulse that drove me. My first poem came a week short of three years after receiving that book.

Painted on Daniel’s landscape. New people are moving into the Mechanic, altering most of the second floor. My new next door neighbor beat my paintings to the floor hammering on his wall, then tried to steal my pitiable ribbon of exterior wall space. I think that is set right.

Bought airfare and housing for my sojourn in Portland. Had the pleasure of deliberately choosing ANYTHING but American Airlines.

The only Christmas trees still up are in the houses of Episcopalians.

Katherine Min, dying, writes beautiful essays about the process of dying.

Rudy DiDonato, my high school counselor, has died. Fifty-one years ago I asked him “How can I go to Harvard?” and he said “You can’t. Nobody from Ellet has ever gone Ivy League.” I believed him. I assumed there was some sort of rule. He called me in later– Jim Mottice recruiting from Hiram was in his office-- and he said, “Hiram is the closest we ever get to Harvard.” And so that’s how all that happened. This cannot be mentioned amid the eulogies piling up from my classmates on Facebook. They all agree he was nice. He was.

Rehearsal, then jollity at the Wayside.

January 2, 2019

A little angry at things yesterday, I am going to designate today– into which I woke clear and joyful– as the first day of my year. 

Michael Havens phones New Year’s night, reminiscing. He uncovered poems, even whole books of them, I had given him in the 70's. He read the titles and I remembered almost none. Some were written specifically for or to him. I must have loved him more than I remember. He wanted to know if I wanted any of them copied and sent back to me. “No,” I said, “no.”

I seemed to have hired Finn McGill and his Brazilian friend for a house concert on May 7. Maybe the excuse will be the publication of The Falls of the Wyona.

Looked back at my journal for 2018. It was, objectively speaking, a trying year. Some triumphs. It would have been lovely for the high places not to have alternated so relentlessly with the pits.

January 1, 2019

Mozart from the kitchen radio. Spent the dawning morning of the year cleaning up after the party and doing the backlog of laundry. If what you do on the first day sets the tone for the year, it is well enough to scour and clean and put to order.

Read Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells” for the Appalachian Brass concert at All Souls.  It was a lovely concert, all in all, with a room packed n the first day of the year. I liked the brass music more than I usually do. The poem is piercing, and lamentably as relevant now as when his lordship wrote it.

December 31, 2018

Baked a raspberry cheesecake and made split pea soup, with ham and vegetarian, almost ready for guests tonight. Will yet bake oatmeal raisin cookies, because they are Any’s favorite. Last year’s party was frozen out. This day is clement, even sultry in a wintery way. I have not one dram of the host’s anxiety I usually have before opening my doors to a crowd.