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.