Downtown

 

October 8, 2020

Wearing actual tailored men’s pants for the first time, I think, since March 13. They’re pretty loose, too. While most have gained weight during isolation, I have apparently lost it. Doing nothing & eating nothing balanced a little in my favor.

Anxiety about Covid made me cancel plans to go to Ohio. The threat seems to be tightening, though people treat it more and more cavalierly. If all those in the Republican inner circle who have, through their own belligerence and childishness, contracted the disease become at least temporarily incapacitated, we might get through this year with a shred of dignity. 

Went downtown for a haircut. Walked about in the autumn light. Masks were general and ungrudging. I had wine all by myself at a street side café, some tongue-burning Mexican sandwich at the place where the exquisite TABLE used to be. The lady wanted to explain all the exotic dishes to me, but she did so in Spanish, which is why I ended up with the flamethrower sandwich. Almost inexpressibly exhausted 

Louise Gluck receives the Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s not that one didn’t see it coming, but that one lives in hope that, sometimes, the worst thing one imagines does not come to pass. All part of the spiraling disaster that is 2020. Gluck and I have met or read together several times. The first time was at Warren Wilson. She was beautiful and dramatic then, like a witch in a TV romance, and you knew that the manifest badness of her work was going to be set aside because she LOOKED like someone who ought to be a poet. Her destiny set, her actual achievement from that point onward was going to be irrelevant. Her poetry was not merely lacking, but bad to the point of parody—which Tom and I did during the drive home, turning the mundane things visible through the car windows into poetry is fully Gluckian as her own. We were making the point that the work is all tone and no substance, and that even the tone has to be laboriously and externally applied but those who trust the effort is worth it. You say the lines as if they meant something, even though they don’t. We are like people in community theater, standing and hollering for bad performances because we have, somehow, invested in them. Or, from another angle, it’s quite Trumpian: a man who provably failed at everything he tried is still passed on as a paragon of some sort until he sits in the White House. Luckily, Gluck can go very little material damage from the eminence to which she has been sadly and predictably raised. It makes me sad for poetry, though, when bad and good are tossed together in one rancid bin as though there no difference between them. Only people indifferent to poetry could make Louise Gluck a Nobel laureate.