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.