July 30, 2020

Obrecht on the CD. Good lines for basses.

I think the sunflowers are flying apart, but it is goldfinches taking off.

Former students are posting photographs of their grandchildren.

July 29, 2020

AGMC want to feature bios of its members. Here’s mine:

1. Where were born?
2. How long have you lived in Asheville and why did you move to Asheville?
3. Choral/choir experiences.
4. Career/work.
5..Family.
6. What ever you would like to say about your partner, husband, lover or most unusual "friend''.
6. One thing--unusual, funny, meaningful--that most people don't know about you.

I was born in Akron, Ohio, and have lived in Asheville since July, 1983. I moved here to take a position as Assistant Professor of English (then Literature and Language) at UNCA.

I started singing in the 7th grade when I somehow screwed up the courage to audition for the Hyre Junior High choir. I was a soprano. Somehow during that time I divined (without actually being taught) how to read music. Sang all through high school, branching out into Boys’ Glee Club and the Madrigals. By then I was a bass. The Madrigals were great because we got out of class and sang for local businesses and professional meetings. Sang through college, where I began to appreciate the concept of repertoire, and to understand what I liked and why. In graduate school in Baltimore, I sang with the Goucher-Hopkins Chorus, the Goucher-Hopkins Madrigal Singers, and got my first paid gig at the Second English Lutheran Church, about a block from Johns Hopkins. I sang for the Baltimore Opera, at which time I performed for Aaron Copeland, met Rosa Ponsell and Bidu Sayao. Long story. . . . In Syracuse I auditioned for a group called Pro Musica, which specialized in ancient & Renaissance music, and which performed old form full sung masses at the Church of the Saviour. It was then I began my love affair with ancient and Renaissance music, which has not abated. Sang also for a group called Schola Cantorum, which concentrated on the more secular side of things, Monteverdi and old opera, etc. Coming to Asheville I began singing at All Souls in 1988– following in Jack Parsons’ footsteps– and joined in the creation of Cantaria, as it was then. Did stints with Asheville Choral and Symphony Chorus.

I just ended 40 years of teaching (37 of them at UNCA), while before and after that time I am a writer. 

I have a sister who lives in Atlanta with her second husband, three nephews and a niece. My niece is expecting her second daughter in Colorado. I’ve been doing genealogy and, believe me, there is more to it than that, but we’ll save it for another time. 

OK, what leapt into mind when I read the question was. . . let’s call him T. We were both heavily into theater, and I’d come to watch his plays, and he mine. Though this says nothing good about our concentration, we’d manage to blow a kiss into the audience, hoping we hit the general direction where he sat in the dark. That’s hard to do in something like Macbeth.

I am an open book. Everyone knows everything about me. But let me admit to a couple of guilty pleasures: Jackie Chan movies, YouTube videos of hunting feral hogs, vanilla anything.  

Standing in my garden at twilight. A turkey cock struts along the fence. A rabbit nibbles over by the sunflowers. Since I’ve never seen him do anything but graze the grass, I’ll suspend my war with the ground hog for now. Thrushes and catbirds flit from one branch to another. It is a kind of Eden. I’ll try not to do anything to break that trust.

July 28, 2020

Distant thunder. Good work on Horses

Have been gifted with various surveillance cameras over the years, decided to set them up today. They do not come with the SIM cards without which they are useless. You don’t just plug them in somewhere. Some unexpressed wisdom caused me to ignore them all this time.

Re-started my Learn Italian” program. The boy is swimming. The girls are swimming. . .

The genealogy of the Keenans in BN allowed me to trace Sam-Sam’s descent from Columba, Bann Keenan’s vanished son.

July 27, 2020

Huge labors on All the Tired Horses. Cut 40,000 words that didn’t belong, working hard to get back where I was.

Went to Dick’s to get a bb gun. They were sold out. That was the hand of God, to spare me from spilling innocent blood. Did get some repellent that is supposed to irritate varmints until they vacate.

T confessed himself confused by the characters in Beautiful Necklaces, inspiring me to draw up a genealogy.

Ate corn on the cob for the first time in many summers.

July 26, 2020

Dream about K this morning just before waking. I was living in a gigantic, creepy palace where I had some sort of residency. Much of the dream was about wandering around the palace (palatial in size, but creepy and run-down). My assigned bathroom was really remote and down many flights of stairs, and when I finally found it, I turned around and saw K on a ladder in a sort of alcove, sorting gorgeous, gigantic Christmas tree ornaments. The walls and floors were covered with them, all sorted by color, red and purple and blue, but mostly gold. I surmised that he was famous for his Christmas trees, and remarked, "You must have one whole tree just for the golden ornaments."
"Yes," he said, very sadly. "One just for gold. People said you could see the golden one flashing all the way to Weaverville." It was winter and I assumed he was taking them out, but he said "No, putting them away, putting them all away," and from the ladder delivered this long, Shakespearean soliloquy on putting the Christmas ornaments away.

Checking the spelling of Phillips Exeter (two ll’s) I ran across articles saying that Rick Schubart and George Mangan, whom I knew, were charged with sexual misconduct there. Learned that Lane Bateman, big news for a while, is dead. I keep forgetting that people who were my elders, even slightly, as I grew up are likely to be dead. Lane lent me his apartment in his absence, and recommended videos that he kept under his floor. I never looked at them. Those were the ones that sent him to Federal prison.

July 25, 2020

Mother’s birthday. She would have been 96. She has been dead 46 years. It’s absurd. What did she think of me when she died, when I was apparently a failure living in a trailer, working as a janitor in Ithaca? It’s one of those things I cannot think about.

The combination of quarantine and retirement does odd things to my perceptions. I live so much in the world of the Ideal-- literature, art, conversations with the glorious dead, the characters I’m creating as I write--that actual people, with their slowness, their indirection, their scattered or invisible purposes, irritate me a little. I do remember this from times before, especially graduate school when I was conquering poetry and living in my little Platonic retreat on Madison Street. But then I was also sexually active, and the hunt for and seduction of sexual partners brought me back to a state of civility.

July 24, 2020

Misty day, probably between rains.

Zoom meeting of the All Souls Endowment Commission. Jack is a sublime explainer, but a certain rancor governed the meeting anyway. I believe that to be a reaction to the unnecessary secrecy of goings-on there. An impulse of indirection becomes, after a while, a reflexive failure of candor.

Working hard on the rock-and-roll book, a foundational tone for which I discovered two days ago. Sat by the river writing, while horn worms inched across the page.

Nephew David advises me on firepower (non-lethal) to bring against the groundhog. We decide on air-soft, with which David and Daniel used to shoot each other when they were teenagers. Carrying on a family tradition.

July 21, 2020

Heat wave continues.

Watching my groundhog, wondering if we can co-exist.

Down at the river looking at old, hand-written journals where I could go on page after page, reasoned, passionate, fully legible.

Thinking of the unexpected and unearned luck of the administration at UNCA. The fact that their incompetence already sealed its fate will be lost in greater issue of the pandemic– like a trash fire obliterated by the fall of a comet.

What held me through the first five months of the pandemic will not hold me much longer. Must find new energies, new resources.

July 20, 2020


Email from school preparing campuses for reduction in funding of up to 50%.

Fairly radical weeding before the heat of the day.

Sent off a manuscript with an error in the second line of the very first poem.

Native hibiscus and her eye-of-Sauron blooms.

July 19, 2020

Days of flash thunderstorms, heat rolling back afterwards. My groundhog returns. Wild Kingdom. If I could get my bear to chase away my groundhog all would be well.

Sleep interrupted by a rash of robberies, in which someone saws the catalytic converter off the bottom of a Prius. Wake ten times a night to check if someone is sawing away at my Prius.

Long conversation with an emerald green mantis perched on my forest green trash can lid.

Had trouble with my mouse for months. Here’s what I discovered about myself fighting THAT battle. Since by far the easiest thing to heal would have been the mouse itself (get a new one, fuss with the batteries) I waited and bought a mouse pad and struggled and wondered if I needed a new computer–ALL BECAUSE IF I TRIED A NEW MOUSE AND THAT WAS NOT THE PROBLEM, I WOULD BE LOST. Had one lying around. Tried it. Perfect. Problem solved in one go. I cannot believe what we do to ourselves.

“Finished” The Nurseryman’s Wedding, though who knows what tinkering commences now.

Yesterday was perilous, as it tipped toward being fed up with this pandemic before the pandemic is even vaguely abated. You calm yourself, find another project, have a cocktail or a nap. I’m fairly good at isolation, and pity those who need more constant company.

Virtual church meeting this morning, the Vestry speaking with solemn decorum and indirection about the loss of Milly and Naomi. Everyone is so discreet I still don’t know what actually happened. Episcopalians spend so much time on discernment and self-reflection that, occasionally, the opportunity to act is lost. I think this will be one of those times.

 

Secret military police kidnapping on the streets of Portland. You never expect to see things you end up seeing.  I thought reason and compassion would rule, and would do so because, in the end, they are more efficient. People are willing to expend more effort on evil than I ever imagined.

July 16, 2020

First thing in the morning assembled The Ones with Difficult Names. Have been receiving books of poetry in the mail, and the one thing they have in common is that they are beautifully produced, lovely to look at, and within the covers, dreadful. Not merely bad, but aggressively bad, as if badness were a kind of goal to be achieved and surpassed. One at my elbow is called.The Bees Make Money in the Lion The author’s name is Chinese, so the fact that it sounds like someone attempting poetry in a language they don’t understand may be exactly the case. Even the blurbs on the back are nonsensical: “Her honeyed roar, itself golden and generously gilding, acknowledges an echo’s willingness to submit, and cries ‘Lo!’” Not one line makes sense from beginning to end, or conveys a palpable image. People have so given up on poetry, even those who pay lip service to it, that they no longer require it to possess meaning or content, in fact resent when it does. In such a world all efforts are equal. The New Yorker fills its poetry nooks with sawdust and last night’s caviar. Publishers bring out volumes based, apparently, on how distant the work manages to be from any ghost of relevancy. The odder the poet’s name, the better. That’s what I’m up against. I know Difficult Names is a masterpiece, and that fact will be absolutely irrelevant to its fate from the moment of its conception forward. 

But, two books in two days, not written, but at least gathered. Assembling this one humbled me a little, for I realized how many poems can never, for reasons of quality, be gathered into a volume.

Blocked M on Facebook, only the second person who has suffered that fate. She called–one of those Facebook calls, with the horrible ring tone–ELEVEN times this morning. Let it ring each time several minutes. I knew who it was without looking. I told her before that I’d text with her any time, but the phone did not work for me. I saw on the screen she had begun to message, “I’ll keep calling until you answer.” Texted back for her to stop, which began a long diatribe about why am I treating her this way and do I have dementia, etc. Everyone had shut her out except me. It’s not that I didn’t know she is as mean as a snake, but that I thought I could get beyond that. Not today. I wonder if a person knows she’s blocked, or of she’s still sitting in her cabin in the jungle typing out ugly messages.

Brother bear returned. I heard him ripping out one of the basement windows. That puzzles me, for he can’t possibly get in. I chased him around front. He soaked in the pond for a while, ate some waterlily leaves, headed out back over the wall. Got a lovely video.

Hot. Maud hasn’t moved for two hours. My little work fan moves warm air against me, but that is enough.

Sort of wanted to be an Emeritus. I looked that up, and it appears that honor’s initiated by the Provost. The last Provost was an officious biddy, and this one, taking into account the gender change, is the same, though maybe even a little dumber. Practically his first task was to remind me of the penance for my harassing students which his predecessor had set me, and which of course I never did. So much for that.

July 15, 2020

Addressed myself to the riverside office. Went to Habitat for Humanity to find the last necessary shelving, and was successful. Deep delving will wait for another time, but in passing I remember when photography was my second art. There are dozens of albums full of photos, and a couple of thousand slides slipped meticulously into little clear pockets. I bet on the wrong technology there. Flipped only a few pages when grief and remembrance made me stop. Does anyone manage to hold their whole life together, beginning to end? The first scarlet hibiscus blooms. The sore I was certain was cancer is gone. People complain about the heat, but I creep around like a tropical lizard, soaking it in, storing it for the time of frost. Put together In a Garden of Almost Too Much Light.

July 12, 2020

GGD is posting again about how Covid19 is a sham and the best way to protect against it is to stop listening to the news. It’s everything I can do not to respond “Bad poetry=Bad science.” I don’t get nearly enough credit for my forbearance.

Dug out some old exercise tapes and began using them, to immediate and encouraging effect. The theory of the tapes is to train like a boxer. Sweaty, not out of breath, feeling of virtue far into the next day. Second round today.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that I don’t feel pressure to get revising, submission, etc done? “Plenty of time” says I. Is there?  Even with the fan aimed at my head, my study is too hot-–too nap-inducing–for sustained application. Maud sleeps on my foot and does not stir from hour to hour.

Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers

July 10, 2020

SL has had a stroke. Apparently the recovery was swift (he writes about it himself) but–

Got my haircut from lovely Celeste with the five-colored hair. Had a drink at Cappella’s. It was sad and empty, but not THAT sad and empty

Looked out the window to see other turkey and her four chicks touring my garden. They stayed a long time, the babies chomping on somethng down in the grass.  My across-the-street neighbor was touring the garden just as they were, and the seven of us. . . looked at one another.

So, here is Branyon’s review as it appears in Rapid River:

How many Asheville book reviews have claimed to discover Asheville’s next literary genius, our next Thomas Wolfe? Well dagnabbit, here’s another. But this one will provide irrefutable proof that David Hopes’ new book, Night, Sleep and the Dreams of Lovers, is as lovingly luscious as Look Homeward Angel and other Wolfe masterpieces.
Consider that Hopes repeatedly displays Wolfe’s powerful energy and elegant sentence structure. In describing Shakespeare-in-the-sunsetting Montford Park he gushes: “Whatever was happening on stage, the west was flaring pink and lilac and the grass was pearled incense and great white moths fluttered in the stage lights.”Or the description of a first climax: “The orgasm came over him in two waves, one quizzical, tentative, the other like a battering ram on a wooden door, bursting, sundering, setting free.”
And then there’s Hopes’ thinly disguised depictions of numerous local luminaries. Take long-serving Asheville DA, “Orville Moody” who viewed “naked shows of force” as “one of the perks of his office” and “everyone hates his guts, half his guts hate half his other guts.” Or the poetry slam emcee’s whose incandescent egotism made people want his “poem to be worse than it was,” but “jackass or not, the guy was mesmerizing.” Then there’s Milo Crane, the “short, hairy, intense man who owned the three-story art gallery” called the Green Cube, and who “wanted people to love art more than he wanted to sell it.” Ahem.
More than fifty local denizens get such rough and/or complementary treatment, as well as many area institutions and subcultures. Anyone who’s participated in Asheville’s wealth, poverty, LBGQT, straight, art, poetry, music, political, law enforcement, skateboard — and much more — life will probably recognize them.  So much so that Hopes might be run out of town on a literary rail and, like Wolfe for a while, literally not be able to go home again.
In addition there’s the Wolfe-like gigantic scope where settings range from parties at elegant homes on Sunset and Town Mountains to the cavernous catacombs of squatters in the abandoned, 1970s downtown Asheville; or at the Vance Monument, Biltmore Forest and All Soul’s Churches; or in the maze enigmas of the Masonic Temple and the sultry sanctuary of the late lamented Vincent’s Ear — or a past rendition of the current gay bar, Scandals; or in sexual and political dynamics of the downtown YMCA weight room and the Pritchard Park drum circle that inspires Hopes to sigh: “Bless you little town for being so weird.” And in so many others.
And yes, Hopes façons de parler sometimes simulates Wolfe’s vibrant leaping from feverish scene to frantic action. Yet he may even exceed Wolfe by displaying a controlled omniscience of storytelling that is positively Steinbeckian. Of a smoldering Ohio home Hopes writes: “The people inside had burned to death, so there was a certain purity about it, no screaming over somebody left behind, no wailing over lost possessions, only the crackle of the fire and the firemen yelling at one another.”
Yet unlike Wolfe, the Hopes’ novel still retains the gentle, enchanting whimsy of say a Madeleine L’Engle. For instance, a rattled TJ rhetorically asks his cat Buddy how he got in the house. “Through the cat door,” the cat surprisingly snaps back, “if you mean most recently. Further back, you brought me here. I am your cat.” An extensive, humorous interspecies conversation ensues — and it’s not the only one. In addition, Hopes’ scenes are often fully, leisurely savored, not always slam-dunked impressively but briskly, like our exuberant Thomas.
And though Wolfe’s books are morally and sexually wild, they aren’t half as unbridled as Dreams of Lovers. Take the most discussed painting of the book — a self-portrait of the character Charlie holding his erect penis. Yet Charlie’s horribly abused childhood makes that rendering almost inevitable. and thus easily digestible. Some other paintings are so similarly, innocently pornographic that a Mapplethorpe-type scandal might cause even more “Cesspool of Sin” howls from Republican Raleigh. Perhaps to the point where they morally quarantine our city and a new Inquisition censors Asheville’s weirdness and growth? Possibly. If the book sells as well and broadly as it should. 

 Gender Fluidity Meets Artistic Rigidity
. Many of the book’s characters are deeply developed, but Charlie, TJ, Barry and the city of 1980s and `90s Asheville are the most richly and realistically conceived. TJ and Barry begin their teenage years surrounded by Town Mountain prosperity where “Bicycles were freedom. Once the boys were mounted they were their own masters” riding down to the desolate, 1970s Asheville that “stood fundamentally vacant.” After rush hour was over the boys “could have six square blocks to themselves, with only the disco from a single gay bar [O’Henry’s] to interrupt the nighthawks and the dopplering sirens. The rest sat empty as the craters of the moon. It was boy paradise.”
There they would sometimes taunt the ancient Romulus Patton (an heir of James Washington Patton of Patton Avenue fame) while he was inspecting his extensive Lexington Avenue properties. The boys imagined him “the old Asheville, KKK-governed, debt-ridden, threadbare and in some indefinable way, disreputable.”
Barry quickly discovers he’s gay and in love with the gender-dysphoric TJ. Yet TJ remains chillingly cold in part because “Long ago” his parents had “arrived at an agreement by which they shared with each other nothing about their inner lives.”  These and other ominous descriptions vividly explain TJ’s incipient sociopathy.
The two are somewhat separated by college choices: Duke for Barry’s premed aspirations, and UNCA for TJ at the suggestion of Moody. The DA claims half the professors there “will do you no harm, and that’s a better percentage than you’re likely to get anywhere else.”
UNCA is where TJ first hears a resounding, but not annoying theme in Hopes’ book: Artists will leave Asheville if we continue to price them out of their housing, gentrify their inspiration, and Scrooge their meager sources of existence. Or as UNCA professor Miss Vogovna “who ran the famous dance academy in town” and was “thin as twigs, somewhere between 40 and 70, still seductive” teaches in an affirmative way: “What caused the Renaissance? … Money… The Gonzagas. The Boromini. The Pamphili. The Franese. The Medici…They realized that in the right hands, money is an art. They created — civilization.” 
Hopes believes Asheville could actually become the Paris of the South — as well as East, North and West. In an interview he mentioned New York City's WestBeth apartment complex as a good way to start. It involves 13 buildings spanning an entire city block and dedicated to providing rent-controlled housing to 384 artists of all types. The compound includes an art gallery, studios and performance spaces fostering its tenants’ work. Current average monthly rent, electricity included, is $800 per month — in top-dollar real-estate Manhattan.
But Hopes predicts Asheville probably won’t achieve Parisian potential because we’re addicted to following the heartless path of maximized profits and rents — and minimized wages. Luckily, in his book the artists don’t have that problem, having arrived before Asheville’s exploding rents forced out downtown artists. On the contrary, they are rent-free squatters living in what would feel like atrocious conditions to 21st-century sybarites — and unused to talking stray cats, friendly rats and occasional fat bats. 
Murder Mystery or Art History?
TJ is inspired by Miss Vogovna’s vision and uses his money to help finance some of the downtown revitalization that has made Asheville what it is today.  He also allows a few artists, actors and kids to keep their free rent, but he begins to undermine them in other nefarious ways. 
Meanwhile, in Cleveland (Hopes grew up in Akron) Charlie, a scintillating force of artistic nature who’s obsessed with sketching, is being raised by a neglectful, suicidal, yet hilarious mother. He eventually lands with a foster family and when he realizes he’s going to be evicted from even it, thumbs a ride South, and makes friends with free spirits in Asheville.
The scenes where Charlie bonds with street-wise Board, Leontyne, Denbo, and Abby are so sweet, nurturing and feral that Hopes deserves his own 23rd Psalm: “Yea though I walk through the tempting valley of the bountiful bourgeois, David Hopes restoreth my bohemian soul — all our bohemian souls — by putting phallic flesh and emotional bones on the tenacious teens and ragged adults pilgriming through our gorgeous city.” After reading Night, Sleep and the Dreams of Lovers, one can no longer dismissively say we don’t want their vagabond sort. Instead, we’ll have to understand they are whole souls, often with amazing stories of brave creativity, tragic accidents or hundreds of other tales as to why they’re street bound.
After finally finding a relatively secure home in the extremely gender-fluid digs, Charlie commences to sketch with and on anything he can find. In fact, anyone wanting a vicarious experience of mature gender fluidity, read this book. At least five major characters are wrestling with or expressing their evolving sexual identities. Yet, at least in Charlie’s world, there’s not the usual angst associated with such struggles.
The now Dr. Barry recognizes Charlie’s genius and gives him bona fide canvasses and oil paint. Unbeknownst to Barry, TJ does the same and they, along with DA Moody and the APD, race toward a crescendo that’s shocking and heartwarming at the same time. Meanwhile, bones of a possibly murdered woman found behind Charlie’s homestead walls shriek for justice — and for Charlie’s artistic vindication.
My only complaints about Hopes’ tour de force are several plot twists that felt uncharacteristic of the characters and jarring to the story, sometimes giving the book an almost soap-opera feel. But Hopes’ quickly follows these with denouements that make the apparent cacophony harmonious and often redeemingly beautiful. His most dissonant twist involves the plot pinnacle set at Asheville’s Green Cube. It has an intensity reminiscent of Hugo’s climactic Hunchback of Notre Dame scene. Yet the tying up of those loose ends and the healing resolution of dangling facts give the reader such satisfying closure that all the so-called surfeit of drama apparently, inevitably had to happen.
I’ve only scratched the surface of the multiple plots, tantalizing Asheville settings, and familiar people that left me galloping back to read, several times a day. I’ve also overemphasized the sexuality of the book. It’s mostly fun Platonic action and chaste, profound character depth.
Nor has Hopes suddenly arrived full-blown on the Asheville literary world in all his Wolfe-arian splendor. He’s made literature dazzling for thousands of students at UNCA for over thirty-five years, written five novels, composed four poetry books and had over twenty plays performed in Asheville, New York and Los Angeles — all while painting legions of charming, symbolist works. He certainly has the artistic chops to challenge the splendid Wolfe. But in the end of course, it’s you dear reader who will have to decide if you lavishly love Night, Sleep and the Dreams of Lovers as much as you lustily liked Look Homeward, Angel. I delightfully did — and definitely have. And such logic leads to the conclusion that someday Asheville tourists may be touring the Old Kentucky Home of Hopes.

July 9, 2020

Thunderstorms passing through, sometimes shedding their rain In full light.

Rose in order to get downtown for a haircut at 7:45. Wondered at the locked door, so I looked at the message on my phone to discover it is 7:45 PM. I never do anything like that in the evening, so it had not crossed my mind that anyone else would. Talked with the workers covering up the Vance monument. A wall of plywood over the hated name will be replaced by a drapery of some kind. I said “I hope it’s something pretty” and the hardhat replied “I doubt it.”

Went to the riverside office and set up my shelves, which, as I had inwardly prophesied even as I was buying them, do not work.

The cleaning ladies taking longer than usual, I was forced to go to the ABC store for various flavors of vodka. The lady made me take the grapefruit vodka back in order to get a bottle with a sample bottle of something else attached to its neck. I am glad that someone, sometimes, looks out for me.

Drove to Biltmore and sat under the trees in front of All Souls for a while, out of nostalgia. The Lay Weeders were fussing with the shrubbery. If I do manage to get a haircut tonight, it will be the first time I’ve been downtown in the evening since early March.

Wore holes in my L L Bean flannel sheet. Who wears holes in his sheet?

July 8, 2020

Torrential rains. What kind of animal sleeps in rain? I am that animal. The rain bear.

July 7, 2020

BB’s review of Night, Sleep appears in the online version of Rapid River (there is ONLY an online version now). It makes the book seem very important indeed. It also makes it seem like I’m in some kind of war with Thomas Wolfe. The review, perhaps to mirror the book itself, is eloquent and full of typos. I can’t figure out how to print or download the pages, so the review may be lost to me over time, but right now I’m happy and sending it to anyone I imagine might be remotely interested.

http://issues.rapidrivermagazine.com/books/xydk/mobile/index.html#p=153

SdG snipped, “My, that was a wordy review. . .”

I believe this is the first time Rapid River ever took notice of my existence.

Chopping out rogue walnuts, planted by squirrels. Cleared out around the sassafras, trying to save it.

Made an appointment for a haircut.

July 6, 2020

Y’s lovely program in Raleigh, Sips ‘n’ Scripts, presented the first scene of Ben and Angela as part of a Zoom reading of six North Carolina playwrights. The acting (reading) was good down the line, and I was especially happy with my two young people. Two of the plays were decent-- the last two (mine was second-to-last)– while the rest ranged from gawdawful to not-there-yet. Mine was the only one hitting NEAR the prescribed ten minutes (the discussion of most of the rest had to be stopped because the plays had gone so far overtime). During my “discussion,” the actors were rightfully praised, but not a word said about the work, except that someone wanted to see the whole thing. I took this as a compliment, actually, that the excerpt could be listened to as an achieved opus rather than as something to repair and cobble. Three offerings were monologues, or essentially monologues. People want to be playwrights without the bother of actually writing dialog. It was the 3rd or 4th time I’d seen J’s play about the rock star. She brought it to class, and later solicited my personal analysis because she wasn’t interested in the amateur observations of her classmates. She dismissed my (rather thorough) analysis because the play was as she wanted it and she resented suggestions of how to change it. The play is an interesting example of something that is a complete failure without one’s (this one, anyway) being able to say exactly why. The issue is subtler than ineptitude. In some ways, she has done everything “right,” and has cause to be irked when people observe it has not, somehow, nevertheless, come out right. The first scene is solid exposition, to give the audience what J thinks is necessary backstory, and to set the characters in mind with clever little mannerisms and joshing references to droll moments in times gone by. All the characters are preposterous, perhaps because so much energy went into “character-building” and character biography outside the action of the play. It has been workshopped to death, with that smoothed off and sweated-over aura of the too-much-workshopped. J does not accept that when difficult concepts or passages need to be explained, that writing is at fault. She takes time out of the discussion to explain what she meant, without, in the piece itself, ever saying what she seems to have meant. She declared at the outset that she was, this time through, primarily interested in the character development of the Mexican maid. The character development was essentially a sign saying “Mexican Maid” hung around the actress’ neck. Besides, to be focused on that is like fussing about what brand of brandy is being served in the Titanic lounge. Well, maybe I CAN say why it fails, after all. Maybe my personal living purgatory is to encounter J’s rock star play every few months for the rest of my life.

July 5, 2020

Day mostly wasted until the evening, when I finally got to work on Nurseryman. The pink snapdragons came up in the urn. Goldenrods are trying to kill one of my sassafrases, but I can’t figure out how.

July 4, 2020

Josquin in evening light.

Independence day–except for rolling thunder–of unusual quiet. I was weeding when something stirred against my hand. It was a fledgling flicker. I backed away so it wouldn’t be frightened and could go on with what it was doing. Sat downstairs typing when I heard a thump against the wall. The flicker had come up onto the front porch. I went out and looked into his proud, defiant eyes. I set a bowl of water out for him, and when I went out again he was gone. Rabbits in the backyard now, nibbling at the clover.

Streamed Hamilton after purchasing Disney +. I’ll say what everybody says– that I was surprised that it was as good as everybody said. The first five minutes made me impatient, until I got used to the presentation. It was moving, well-made, inspiring. Oddly, Miranda himself was the weakest performer, without the radiance of many of the others. I wonder if anyone dared to notice that? Maybe he should been satisfied with the laurel of the creator.

May have started a political blog. Will check in the morning of I want to go through with it.

Remembering the first time I heard Jannequin.

Remembering Toni and me auditioning for Pro Musica in New York. I made it and she did not. She sat me down at the table and said, “I’m only going to say this once. I’m a better singer than you. You just made it because they needed men. That’s all that needs to be said about that.” I realized how far apart we had grown, and had no idea how to close the gap.

Remembering the Allegri, and Penny pinching out those high notes in the darkened Saviour.

Remembering the first time singing Machaut, like entering a new world, a vocal version of Conan Doyle’s Lost World

July 3, 2020

Dropped the last of my UNCA office impedimenta at the riverside office. Lingered and tried to write beside the moving river waters, but the writing didn’t come. I didn’t care. The river was beautiful. Ducks flew fast and so low they would have grazed the water had they dropped their feet. Six old ladies with folding chairs moved around according to the movement of the shade, talking, talking. I could hear a little of it. It was surprisingly political, surprisingly savvy. Zoom cocktails in the evening. I have a remembrance of good fellowship.

July 2, 2020

Woke with true euphoria. Misty morning, as promised by the weathermen last night.

Reading over my poems, trying to assemble a new book. Some of them make me shake, they are so good. Others, not. When I go astray in poetry it is usually by having shown the route and not just the destination, something I warned my students against without heeding myself, sometimes. I forget how boring the Wordsworth in me can be.

July 1, 2020

Online session with my doctor about a sore on my arm that seemed like cancer yesterday but like nothing when it actually came to talking about it.

Between rainstorms, I went to school and cleaned out all of mine that remained in the office, which I inhabited, I think, for 34 years. Wept a little, turned to the empty room and whispered, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,” and shut the door. Left my keys on Wren’s desk. Said goodbye to the red oak whose growth I’ve watched for its entire life.

Picked up Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin, which Jay gave me for my 27th birthday. The first poem is bad, and I never went beyond that. The rest of the poems are fascinating, and I read them while waiting for my doctor’s appointment. Envy makes him grant to Yeats “one good poem.” May we not leave clear record of our faults behind us.

June 30, 2020

Woke still groggy from last night’s dose of Mucinex.  Thought I had one more day left I June.

SS here to talk about the initiation of the Sublime publication program. He has everything magnificently worked out. I was berated for my insufficiency in proofreading.

At evening I bestirred myself, got the hand truck from the shed, moved the rest of my books from Karpen Hall. A number of paintings and art items remain, but they’re not heavy and can be taken care of in one load, I think. I hope I won’t be required to undertake anything like that again.

I see by university mail that SW is retiring, too. Once upon a time he and I would have made a wonderful team, but the Drama Department’s insecurities could not be overcome. We are all, this year, ending with a whimper.

Scott responds to my congratulatory email:
Thank you, David! I regret that departmental politics got in the way of a better collaboration between us -- I know the students want much more involvement with the playwriting students. Maybe the next generation can pull it off. I hope you are enjoying retirement as much as I am -- it is nice to be doing only those responsibilities that I have chosen myself.

I confessed I didn’t understand what those departmental politics were after the departure of my main adversary– who had invented the controversy himself out of thin air–and S said there were “weird feelings” on the part of his colleagues that kept him from reaching out. . . though he admitted that I had reached out by, time and again, auditioning for and acting in plays there, even when it was uncomfortable. I knew that a collaboration between us would have been joyful and fulfilling for me and saved his department from its long-standing and dreary mediocrity. . . no, a little worse than mediocrity. But, “weird feelings”. . . It’s all best left behind with as little afterthought as possible.

June 29, 2020

Goldfinches flocking rather prematurely to my sunflowers. The welcome mat is out.

Torrential rain will keep me from loading up boxes today. I have until the end of July, but I’d like to be done early and appear to be cheerful and cooperative.  When I was there yesterday I foresaw that the sanitizer bottles will be empty before a week is gone, the dispensers knocked from the walls by over-eager use. No one will follow the silly blue arrows. Lord, have I told you how many indignities are forgiven for your allowing me to walk away when I did?

Finished last night a big Plague poem. Read in the light, it stands.