February 29, 2020

Leap Day. Someone said, “It’s not clear yet that 2020 deserves an extra day.”

Nodding off on the sofa last night, barely catching myself midair, I realized my fall Thursday night was caused simply by falling asleep sitting up.

Turbulent night last night. Woke at 1, did some work, went back to bed. I suppose in times past that was natural. I thought I couldn’t breathe, though of course I could. Very odd.

Michael Thompson came to the studio and took five paintings for his empty apartment, including some of my favorites. That was how it was supposed to work. I feel better about the whole enterprise now.

Talked about Shaw with only one person in the room having read it. Will be happy to be done with that. Everything makes me impatient.

End of Day: I abide in the studio until noon, the last time I ever shall. The first few moments there alone I wept bitterly, like a boy forced to move away from all his friends. Essentially, twenty-eight years of work and striving and imagining has come down to a room full of debris. I was not called to this; I wanted it for my own, so the end of it, the dying fall, leaves no one to blame but myself. One sobs in private, opens the door, smiling welcomes the first guest. Jack and Leland took several things, as did my elderly buddy from choir. A beautiful boy from Minnesota and his beautiful Mexican girlfriend/wife took one of the white bird panels. Someone left a $20 bill on my painting stool. When I left, I left the door open, hoping everything would be gone

One unexpected plus is that I’ve begun to play again my huge collection of CDs, most of them Medieval or Renaissance or Baroque. Rescued many from the studio, may rescue more. It gives me joy to listen to them, but for some reason I’d stopped. A curious impulse in me is to turn my back to things I love until some vague requirement is met, some time of penance, unclear even to myself, is passed. Let all times of penance now be passed, except for this Lent, in which I, curiously, rejoice.

Ockeghem now on the CD player.

February 28, 2020

Last night I was sitting on the sofa watching a program, then I was waking up on the floor with my glasses bent and my eye socket throbbing and no idea how I got there. I thought to myself “Why am I on the floor? I really don’t sit on the floor that much anymore. . .” Sizable shiner this morning. Need the optometrist to bend me back into shape.

This is the second time in my life when I simply passed out and woke up on the floor.

Moved paintings from the river office to the studio to get ready for tomorrow’s giveaway. Stephen hugged me and said he loved me.

Major Barbara for class today, a more intricate and interesting play than I remembered.

A week from today I fly to Ireland, unless the corona virus had reached there. Not as fearful of the virus as I am of being quarantined for weeks on end in some airport. My host is the handsomest man in Ireland. I keep that before me.

February 27, 2020

Great flood of people who have never been to my studio, never imagined paying for a piece of art wanting things of mine now and can I ship or can I choose something for them or can I meet them at some other time according to their leisure? If I had averaged a few hundred dollars a month to defray the cost of rent I would have been content, but in perhaps one month in 20 years did that happen. This is worse than closing the studio. Can people imagine how this sad this makes one? I remember a woman in the studio taken by a carefully wrought bird painting, worth in any market $600. “How much?” she asks. Wanting her to have it, since she clearly liked it, I say “$60.” She turns away in clear disgust. This art giveaway was a terrible mistake. I should have piled it up and let the trash man have his pick.

Not a word from the University about either one of my 2019 novels. Great to-do about someone in Philosophy who published a study of someone or other. Chairs write “We would like to congratulate X on publishing Y”. . . my chair writes nothing. I know, this is the sin of envy. But some other sin seems to be involved too, and not my own.

Clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed.

The tiniest salt of snow on the pavement, students writing panicked emails about how they can’t possibly show up for class.

February 26, 2020

Ash Wednesday.

Decided to have a free-for-all at the studio Saturday to make sure some of the work, at least, has a home. Already people who have never darkened the door of my studio are asking me to save them things and ship them things

February 25, 2020

Deposited the check from Will’s pay-off of the mortgage. Got my tax records together and took them to Carol. DJ and I decided that nothing could be done about the All Souls commission, despite its being kind of awful. Were we Medici, we’d know how to handle this sort of thing. Emptied out nearly the last of the things in the studio which I must keep. Will not think of the thousands–and thousands–of dollars coming to nothing, the hundreds of hours not exactly wasted, but gliding like an oarless boat on a dead sea, waiting for something to have happened.

February 24, 2020

Left the house, went to the Ingle’s’ Starbucks, and as I waited for my drink I leaned against a display cabinet, and brought the top shelf– covered with thermoses and the like–crashing to the floor. Trying to pick that debris up, I touched the second shelf, and brought THAT crashing to the floor. Slipped a $20 bill into the top jar and ran for the door. Collided with a boy at the Karpen Hall door. My box of books flew up into the air.

February 22, 2020

Birthday of Edna St.Vincent Millay.

A cheerful country boy came from the AAA to sell me a new battery for the truck. It lasted six years almost to the very day, the very duration of its warranty. The kid was required to have me sign a form that attested that my truck did not blow up after he changed the battery.

Bought giant outdoor planters from Reems Creek. Didn’t need them, but wanted to do something that was like gardening.

Magnetic has chosen  Person Meditating upon Madness for the May one-act festival. The choosing happened at my house last night. All my colleagues had read the entries more carefully than I. I resent everything, a little bit, that consumes time and doesn’t relate directly to creation.

Reading about the Dunning-Kruger effect. It explains the UNCA Title IX office (indeed, the general tenor of university administration) to a T. You listen to the outpouring of delusion and naivete, realizing that what THEY are hearing is quite different. I remember Jill’s introduction of herself to the faculty in Lipinsky long ago. We all looked at each other wondering who would be the first to call her out on what almost seemed an intentional parody of self-delight. Alas, nobody did, and the weed took root. Reading Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, illustrative of the syndrome, in which everyone hears every asininity but their own. Stupid people don’t realize they’re stupid, of course, but a corollary is that sometimes quite bright people do not recognize where their brightness ends.

Bach Academie of Charlotte at All Souls. Perfection. Mind-wandering music. Hard to say just how far mine went, and what ground it had to cover in order to come back.

February 21, 2020

Informed the people who now own Phil Mechanic that I’ll be moving out. I’ve chosen nowhere to move to, so this will represent a hiatus in my life as a visual artist-- Maybe the end of it, but we’ll let that unfold as it may. I tested myself by imagining that the building had burned and I lost everything there– would I miss it? The answer was “no.” Even if I go back to painting, I wanted to make a clean break and start again, which would be hard to do with fragments of my old vision haunting me from the walls. How long have I had a studio? I painted at my house for a couple of years until I opened the Urthona Gallery. My journal for 1994 is, curiously, lost (it must have been a horrible year), but that must have been the first year I had a studio downtown. I moved to the Phil Mechanic in September 2006. This change had been agitating me for a while. Can I afford the outlay in retirement? I’d long since given up the idea that my artistic endeavors would pay for themselves. Best get all radical changes done at once and move on. Will I miss it? Who knows, but what has been ended can begin again. I hiked before I painted, and almost never hiked afterwards. Maybe I’ll hike again. Right now I begrudged time doing anything but writing.

The notary was just here to close the book on my refinancing. After all that, I save $100 a month. The Notary says, “Yes, but that $1200 a year!”

February 20, 2020

Machaut on the CD. Too unfamiliar to be restful, but perhaps restful is not wanted just now.

Snow began early this morning, hard, and has been sticking for about an hour. Was writing in the café when it began in earnest.  How strange it is being in a public place in Asheville and not knowing a soul.

Made chili for the meeting tomorrow.

Wondering if I will have stamina enough for Dublin. . .

February 18, 2020

We meet here Friday to discuss the line-up for the one act festival at Magnetic. We are meant to advocate for those we really adored, but in my group there was none I REALLY adored. There was a B- which would be difficult to stage, but other than that, having read them I would not sit through them.

A theater in Florida accepts “Waiting for the Witch” for production “soon.”

Having bought a vacuum for the upstairs when I moved here, I used it for the first time this afternoon. Sickening build-up of stink bug corpses in a corner. . . .

The Boy Scouts have filed for bankruptcy, fighting dozens of allegations of sexual impropriety on the part of Scoutmasters. A proud ex-Scout, I never saw any such thing. It is sad and terrible.

Sudden thunder of rain.

February 17, 2020

Eager, and many times eager, J comes to my office to tell me the stories of computer games he loves. The thing I hate almost most in the world is to be told about computer games, but I know he fled from an abusive father and I feel I must listen, and he must be heard. His radiant enthusiasm prevents me from bursting into tears.

February 16, 2020

Dreamed of buying stocks, The stocks mostly involved health care supplements or health spas, and the people selling the items and services came and demonstrated them to me. Must mean I should revivify my portfolio.

Read Perelandra for class tomorrow. Remembered why I loved it.

Wished-for good things are tortoises crossing vast deserts.  Present joys are jackrabbits diving into the brush.

I painted a woodscape for my dining room, and was never satisfied with it. But this evening I realized it was a painting of the rising of the moon, and suddenly it was perfect.

February 15, 2020

Woke with strange alacrity, the sky clear as it has not been.

Theater last night, Sublime at the BeBe. The play was thoughtful, skillful, and thought-provoking, its diamond-hard dialog delivered nobly by the cast.  We’d been studying The Recruiting Officer in class, and the plays echo each other unexpectedly: Farquhar suspends action for the sake of pages of witty repartee, in his case bawdy. Lundblad suspends–pretty much eliminates–action for the sake of witty repartee, in his case philosophical. Not everyone’s cup of tea, as the sparse house witnessed. But I wonder WHY not everyone’s cup of tea? I thought it was fun. The same thing happens in chorus, when people whine that serious music isn’t “fun.” I think it’s fun. I thought Goodnight Troublemaker was fun. People are too finical concerning what they will allow to give them pleasure. Passed through the glittering Asheville downtown night toward my car, thinking I had seen something worth seeing.

Sang the “Star Spangled Banner” for the UNCA basketball game, an unexpectedly sweet experience. Taking into account the size of the venue, the girls’ basketball game was as sparsely attended as any evening of experimental theater. Find comfort there.

February 14, 2020

One of those nights last night. Missing Circe. Missing whole continents of my life– not even my life, continents that drifted by while I was stranded on a little island, watching them go.

Thinking of Valentine’s Day. I sent Jo-Jo flowers at his place of work. What? 28 years ago?

Turns out you can’t, after all, order NSDL through the publisher. Carlos cancels every order for some reason. That effort is completely lost. Something in me knew it would be. You keep plunging through, like a tattered bear through an endless field of thorns. In the midst of the thorns you cry out, but you’re in the midst, and nobody hears anymore.

This February is better than last February, I’ll give it that. Tangled with the Moffitt Medusa last year. . . skipping to the exit this year.

If only the wicked could be wicked in their own eyes.

Jakob Josef Orlinski on the Internet. Beauty.

February 13, 2020

Spectacular rain on the roof right before dawn.

Something big is on the roof. I assume it’s a bear. What shelter it can find up there I don’t know.

Pulled out of the AGMC fundraiser. We’ve traded striving for excellence to be content with a campy, jolly mediocrity. Too old to go with that now.

February 12, 2020

Cloudy morning, the calling of crows.

Though Circe was the gentlest soul on earth, she must have repressed Maud in some way, for she is now settling into her role as sole chatelaine, occupying spaces she didn’t occupy, following me about and cuddling as was not her wont.

My credit card bill tells me I spent $500 on submission fees in the last period. Three times that on a sick cat; $500 on a new lap top which I have not yet taken out of the box.

Jeff wondered in the church kitchen why UNCA has become a second-rate enterprise. He’s running tests and making charts to see why our retention late is low and getting lower. He says, “I blame the new faculty.” I see how it is possible to blame new faculty, but I think the larger problem is that new faculty are not only not encouraged to greatness, but discouraged–at least by the culture-- from attempting it. When I arrived, critical thinking, intellectual courage, experimentation, boldness, high standards were expected. All of those things are perilous now. The cause of this descent is mission creep on the part of administration, which has exercised every opportunity to interfere with operations that in a good school would be strictly hands off to them. Administration has no right to a say in academic operations (though the faculty has an excellent right to say in administrative matters), and the reversal of this at my institution has ended its career as a meaningful center of learning. The problem is insecurity and uncertainty on the part of faculty, which makes us scamper like rats to what dark safety we imagine is provided. Insecurity on the part of the faculty is visible to the students, who then assume–alas, rightly–that they are attending a second-rather institution. Administration wants to run the university as though it were WalMart, a happy experience where every customer gets what she wants and never has reason to learn a thing. I’m sure this is clear, in various stages, to everyone. No one wants to say it, because Academic Speech and Freedom of Expression were among the first to go.

February 9, 2020

Made it to the studio. I am the only tenant on the top floor now. Steve closed the door and wrote “Closed for Repairs” so that people wouldn’t come in and treat it as an abandoned building. The smell of the last flood was heavy, though the actual water had gone away. Finished my piece for John’s school.

February 8, 2020

Ockeghem on CD. Tried to get to the studio, but the road was closed by flooding. Wrote well at High 5, kicking Sam-Sam into his next chapter. Composed a story about cats. Light snow in the air all day.

February 7, 2020

Took art bought at Blue Spiral down from my office walls for the AGMC silent auction. You do accumulate in 37 years. 80% of my voice back. Michael must add his idiotic movements, like a man who passes through a gallery and must add a pink heart at the base of every painting.  We look like codgers at a rest home trying to be adorable.

Brought my mother’s frog planter home from the studio, gave it a good wash. The yellow of its flowers is gone, but it glows its own old malachite, It makes me happy to see it there. Mother put in pink flowers she got from father’s garden, until he would grow a garden no more.

This rain, cold rain, makes me glad I had Circe cremated. I could not stand to think of her in the cold ground with the winter rain around her.

February 6, 2020

Most unaccountable and ceaseless rain.

Read my last set of senior comprehensives. Only one was really good, but none was an outright failure.  As noted above, some astonishing gaps.

All but driven mad by the string of crises connected to Will’s re-financing. The bank is being absurdly petty, but, at the same time, Will customarily plays fast and loose. It may not have caught up with him in any other circumstance. Trying to write, but anxiety about the next phone call, the next knock at the door interferes.

Bought euros for Ireland and Greece.

February 5, 2020

Yet, at the back of my mind is the discovery that my creative writing students didn’t know who Thomas Wolfe, James Joyce, Percy Shelley, Plato, Virginia Woolf James Fenimore Cooper, or Dwight Eisenhower were. One remembered vaguely the Cyclops, but no one else had read The Odyssey, or heard of Ulysses. They thought that stream of consciousness was when there was no structure to the writing. I got into huge trouble in the Humanities by insisting that sometimes a student should be taught something in particular, and that it was our duty to teach that.

February 4, 2020

Caught between Will’s re-financing and my own, resulting in a flurry of irritating phone calls. Mine will be easy, finally, but his snags on a variety of corners he cut. Though the paperwork showed he should pay me something like 1209 a month, he rounded down to 1200. I didn’t care, but the people hammering put his re-financing apparently do. It is a lesson I hope they let him learn and move on. For one thing, I have gotten used to the idea of receiving a big fat check when he buys me out. Good creative writing class this AM. We all wrote on an image one of us brought of a dirty diaper with a cigarette snuffed in it, in front of an optician’s on Patton Avenue. They did better on that than the material they’d actually prepared for class.

February 2, 2020

Brigid the Blessed.

Mostly read Narnia for class discussion tomorrow. Allowed myself to forget how wonderful they are.

Went to the studio and removed some necessary possessions, finally acknowledging that era is over. The water had mostly dried from the floor.

Revised In the Paramount Hotel.

All this day I was happy.

February 1, 2020

Worked early in the morning, theater beginning to flow again.

Renewed the literary blog that I keep neglecting.

Sang for Jones Byrd’s funeral. Huge event, the church and two overflow rooms full. Southern lawyers invited to speak, the longest-winded people in the world.

Will takes me to see the house he wants to buy in Spooks Branch. I’m bemused (it’s smaller than the house he has now) but one wants what one wants.

Mired in a situation I have not known in forty years: bitter reluctance to address any of my schoolwork.

Maud makes caves in the comforter, sleeps like a bear out of sight.

January 31, 2020

Left rehearsal last night unable to sing a note. Throat not sore at all, just froggy. My low notes are now past the piano.

Snow visible through the study window, falling prettily.

Will sets things up to buy his new house on Spooks Branch, which involves paying me off for 62. It looks like I’m owed around $170,000. That will take me to Europe a couple of times.

I decide to re-finance 51 Lakeshore. Because everything is set up already, it appears that I have done so before the morning is out. The reduction is small, but small more than nothing. Refinanced my house and revised two plays before noon.