April 30, 2022
Oddly still Saturday. Hoed and planted the last of the central back garden with the remnants of what I had on hand and some newly bought annuals: pale cosmos, marigolds, nasturtium, the big orange Mexican sunflowers that I fear will take over everything. Sat in the shade and watched the birds at their not-always-intelligible tasks.
Michelangelo was my age when he died.
April 29, 2022
Planted dark sunflowers and dug around in the central garden, making room for something not yet chosen. A large dollop of bear shit rides the grass under the maple. I have no way of knowing whether a bear visits every night, or only sometimes. But I do not go out on the porch any more without turning on the light.
April 28, 2022
Finished a further–ultimate?– revision of Jason of the Apes.
Tiny tithe of choristers at rehearsal last night. I was the only bass– I pretend to complain, but I actually kind of like it. We’re going to look ridiculous, in ridiculous costumes, doing ridiculous choreography, but I’m done with fighting that fight.
April 26, 2022
Washing machine buzzing away downstairs. . . .
Picking up a theme begun yesterday, it was the day of the most concentrated physical labor I’ve had since the Pandemic began, yet I never remember being winded, and came away from it all with no particular sense of exhaustion. My foot hurt pretty bad, but maybe that drew my concentration from other debilities.
Vestry last night. Financial crisis. I am of the “tread water, it will be OK” school of thought, not a popular position in that venue, though experience with the Market is the source for my complacency. The vestry experience has been enlightening to me. Probably I would have come to the same conclusions had I been more active with the politics of the university. Perhaps I was NOT more active there because I intuited my limitations. I can be a leader at certain times- I am a good kicker in of doors, basher down of walls, igniter. But I am not systematic. Somebody will present a necessary action, and I will agree with the necessity, while having no clue how to make it happen. We need to have an active Stewardship Committee. I agree. How to make one, though? The hand that wants to volunteer lies still in my lap because I wouldn’t know where to begin. Learning by doing may delay or damage. I think back on my organizational activities and see their ongoing likeness– I have run a gallery, a theater company, a publishing house, all without any sort of plan whatever, plunging in, facing problems as they arose, relying on inspiration and good intentions. I can be Thor but I cannot be Odin. This carries through in my life in the arts. I never drew a preliminary sketch. I never made an outline.
April 25, 2022
Woke last night convinced I was under attack by bears, then lulled off (as much as I could with my toe on fire) convinced that I was paranoid. Nope. Two basement windows and their cement and wire buffering were torn out, plus a bed of daffodils dug up (that must have been a disappointment). Rebuilt this AM, went to ACE for a load of cinderblocks to fortify what was not yet fortified. Loaded up the bb gun David got me for Christmas. Limping like a cripple, but I not only got it all done but–except for the goddamn toe– with a feeling of vitality.
April 24, 2022
Unvarying, distracting pain in the toe. Discomfort mixes with anger.
Most glorious weather imaginable.
Yesterday’s reading of The Frankenstein Rubrics was excellently done by the cast but gave me distress as a playwright. It was not right. I took what I learned and did a hefty (though not essential) revision, which I hope D will accept and which I hope materially improves the piece. I think it does. Each revision takes it further from the vaudeville-y romp they anticipated. I hope they’re all right with that.
Sitting late on the front porch I watch silvery skinks with heads like tiny submarines frolic in the last sun.
April 23, 2022
Shakespeare.
Last night to the Cathedral to hear the Bach Akademie of Charlotte’s program Florilegium at 400. The Florilegium was (is?) an anthology of motets out of which JS Bach probably choice pieces for the churches of Leipzig when he was unable to provide them himself. Many seem to have been by relatives of his, including Johann Ludwig Bach’s “Gott, sei uns gnadig,” one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard, yet wonderful for all that. I’ve never heard better singing, and the music itself is almost impossible to credit, doing apparently effortlessly what XXth and XXI century music has not managed, a full harmony of the intellectual and the emotional. I’m on the verge of saying, though, that the concert was not a success, for we were talked to death by the director. Fully 1/3 of the time of the program was dedicated to his explanations and elucidations, which I would have welcomed in a Music History class, but which shattered the concert into disparate and un-connectable fragments. I think I remember this flaw from the last time I heard the Akademie. Has no one spoken to him about this? It’s not that what he was saying wasn’t interesting–it was– but it required us to apprehend the works only and exclusively through the lens of his mediation. What if the director came out before each scene of a play to explain what was going on and how the playwright made it happen? Fine in a classroom: at a performance, not. I was actually in a sort of rage about this by the time I left Biltmore, limping on my gouty foot.
Printed out The Frankenstein Rubrics for the reading this afternoon.
April 22, 2022
Warm Earth Day. I spent it as I should have, in the garden, planting flame cosmos, marigolds, and the mixed wildflower packet Sara gave me. Dug out rogue cherries. Sat at the backyard table and almost fell under an enchantment whereby I couldn’t move. A thousand years later they’d find me sitting in the midst of a haunted wood, my beard tangled in the roots. Birds hard at work, feeding and finding linings for their nests. The bluejays spread themselves out on the sunlit leaves, taking in the warmth, or maybe there’s an ant there that performs a cleaning service. It’s behavior I’d not seen before. All of this was enhanced by gout in the second toe of the right foot.
Received my Federal stimulation check for $127.01. Not all that stimulating.
April 21, 2022
Tony the lawn guy says, “People say you’re a warlock.” I decide not to deny it.
The play went well last night, to a room full to capacity (small capacity, but still–) I was thanked for being “the professional” and having “everything under control.” The infuriating questions-asker was at the top of her form, eventually forming a wide breach around herself that nobody wanted to enter. She is a cabaret singer and laments that there are no cabarets in Asheville. CJ and I convinced the muscular Asian boy not to go to UNCA for Drama.
April 20, 2022
Dress rehearsal in Black Mountain. Everyone was there, I gather for the first time. Muscular Asian kid whose family owns the Japanese restaurant in Biltmore, peacocky mixed-race kid with many necklaces and black fingernail polish, couple of others missing the night before. One of the new ones is one of a kind that makes me berserk– the uncontrolled question-asker: a query at every pause, a request for clarification the third time just to be sure, attention drawn to self because of one’s anxiety for everything to be done right, inability not to have her say at every occasion. She argued for five minutes because someone else had been given one of her lines. She is sixty, I guess, and the line was clearly written for a teenage boy. What will an audience think? Because of the subject matter, they will say it’s “powerful” whether it is or not.
April 19, 2022
TheaterQ in Madison, Wisconsin, has accepted Before the Holy Temple for their one-act festival. Unfortunately, the performances are on the weekend where both the Hiram reunion and the AVGMC stand already scheduled.
Answered a text message from CJ just in time to become part of a play reading that occurs this Wednesday at the Black Mountain Center. Last night and tonight will be my only rehearsals. The play is #Enough, a series of short student plays dealing with the epidemic of gun violence, and how it impacts overwhelmingly the Black community. The man (called “a hippie” by way of excusing his fecklessness) who was reading my parts simply stopped coming to rehearsal. Mixed bag of actors, two good, the rest passable, one goofy young kid whose present experimental goofiness bodes well, I think, for the development of a fine actor. The plays are important if not necessarily very strong artistically. One forgets that one use of theater is documentary. One forgets because the more purely documentary plays fade as the causes they dramatize fade. Something like Waiting for Lefty abides for a while.
April 18, 2022
Easter Monday, Paul Revere, all that. God watering the plants I planted yesterday.
Got my second Covid booster. The lady who gave me the booster has a brother who was in Federal Law Enforcement and a father who was a homicide investigator here in Asheville. This came up because I was wearing my New York City Police cap.
The dry cleaner’s had a decorated Easter tree in their lobby. It made me happy.
April 17, 2022
The Great Vigil of Easter last night, two Easter masses this morning. However meaningful it is to the congregant, to one of the performers (is that the word I want?) It can be grueling. I left the church in considerable pain, which ebbed away during a long nap. After the nap I rose and pruned roses and planted a patch of black-eyed Susans. I changed where I was going to plant the black-eyed Susans because Fatboi was grazing in back, and I didn’t want to disturb him. Maud doesn’t like me in the room when she’s eating. She’ll wait for a moment, then begin hollering until I leave.
Blood stain on my collar when I took off my shirt.
Image during the Gospel reading of a warrior-god, blinding white, in a flash of white fie in a moonlit meadow. This was my vision, for today, of the risen Christ.
April 16, 2022
Holy Saturday
Inspired to begin submitting Jason of the Apes. I discover that the latest version is worse than the one before it, probably because I kept breaking stride to explain matters which, likely, can endure without explanation.
Debilities of the past few days disappear. Everything concerning the body is a mystery.
April 15, 2022
Brilliant morning. Making a play in my head, then on the screen, for the first time in many months. It’s joyful, restorative. But reading in my Stanislavsky history makes me feel bad (worse) about my own life as a playwright. No one has ever waited breathlessly for the next act of my play. Never once have I had a slot in a season without already having written the play. I remember a quip–I forget whose it was– from the old Magnetic, “Well, I have my slot, now I’d better write my play!” As for that, no one has awaited anxiously my next chapter, the completion of the longed-for manuscript. I have consistently laid the table before anyone was hungry.
Progress on September.
April 14, 2022
We read 900 little plays for the Magnetic festival. Now I’ve read the ones the other readers liked, and maybe 4 or 5 were as good as mine, none better, and my little piece represents and hour out of a day amid easily sixty of its own kind. I do believe I can read with a reasonably impartial eye, and unless I’m deceived in that, I have opened a new door (or reopened an old one) in the theater, complex, limpid, unique, uniquely eloquent and adventurous, the dialog in most places perfect. So when I consider my relative obscurity, I must first rail at God for making everything so difficult, then at myself for letting that difficulty detain me. I have not sacrificed very much to sell my work, whatever I sacrificed actually to make it. Somehow I didn’t expect to have to make and sell both. My time as a painter should have corrected that, but didn’t, quite. I found a theater in DC which might be interested in my lengthening list of American history plays, but each time I sit down to write the query letter, despair like lead weighs down my spirit, turns my fingers to You Tube videos.
Took an Enneagram Test on line. I’m type 4, the Artist. As if that were a surprise.
*
The report reports:
Generally, Fours are intuitive, sensitive, impressionable, quite, introspective, passionate, romantic,elegant, witty, imaginative, and self-expressive.
Fours get into conflicts by being moody, emotionally demanding, self-absorbed, withholding, temperamental, dramatic, pretentious, and self-indulgent.
At their best, Fours are creative, inspired, honest with themselves, emotionally strong, humane, selfaware, discreet, and self-renewing.
*
I see all that, except I THINK that the only one of the conflict markers I have is “withholding.” Maybe pretentious, but would I see that myself?
Glittering spring evening. I’m not at Maundy Thursday service because of an onslaught of diarrhea that I think might have been brought on by a glass of grape juice. Can’t take things like I used to.
Tore out vines and planted mint to beat a storm which never came. There will be no end to the tearing out of vines.
April 10, 2022
Read the St Luke Passion at three services. Annihilated most of the rest of the day with a gigantic nap. When I returned from church, Fatboy was on the porch. The stairs must have been a challenge for his tiny legs. I didn’t expect him ever to be that bold. His panic at the sight of me is unnecessary.
Melancholy. One of the surprises of passing time is how little, finally, one has to do with one’s own success. Some, not much. This is a comment on the wide gray plain of disappointment. On the other hand, one has a great deal to do with one’s own actual failure. I look around to see how I have failed, and I don’t honestly detect the catastrophic moments. Nevertheless, I have not succeeded.
Lenten rose, celandine, lunaria in bloom.
April 9, 2022
Rose in the night and saw by the curious light over things that it had snowed, and was snowing. Wide awake now. Light snow everywhere. Hayden from the downstairs Alexa.
Evening: the strangest day: snow off and on, sometimes almost a blizzard. When the clouds broke it was hot, so snow falling in considerable warmth. Sometimes the snow made the sound of rain. I suppose then it was actually hail. During some of the worst of it we were sitting outside at an outdoor table at a café on Haywood Rd choosing plays for the one-act festival. The Irish coffees did not quite turn the tide against the cold. Driving home I could barely steer for the convulsive shivering.
Visited DJ, where I saw the considerable stand of mayapples planted by my hand, the only thing I envy from my old house.
I was ready to call it a night when an ancient memory flooded in upon me. Somebody’s mother drove a group of us friends to Mogadore Lake, and we took my little dog Bimbo along. We played for a while, and then we came home. It was already dark when with a stab in my heart I looked for Bimbo, and realized we had left him at the park. I asked my father to drive me there. My father said no. He said, “It’s time to get rid of that dog. You don’t love him anyway.” I believe I felt the emotions again I felt that night, confusion and betrayal, and shame, for if my father said I didn’t love the dog, there must be some reason. Had I been cruel or cold to my friend? It didn’t look like my father was going to relent, so I went out the back door and headed for Mogadore Lake, on foot, at least ten miles away. I was a block or so up Eastwood when father came by in the car and drove me. As soon as we came to the parking lot, Bimbo was there, wagging his black and white tail. I scooped him up in my arms. Father said, “Don’t you pretend to care about the dog. We should have left him here.” Between shame at the betrayal of my four-footed best friend and hatred of my father I didn’t know what to do. I wouldn’t cry in front of my father, but I do in the dark of my own room sixty years later.
April 8, 2022
Changeable days, blue sky followed by tremendous storm. Planted avens, spaded up more grass, settled the iron butterfly and the cement swan into new places. Bought a white geranium to keep by the fireplace until the freezes end.
Suzanne says that DN is “hard and clear.” I always thought that if clarity could be achieved, all else would fall in line.
Rehearsals compromised by hoarseness, but I do manage to get through. S cannot resist the temptation to vulgarize. I should endure this or move on.
D characterizes his experience at All Souls as a radical inroad into “one of the most affluent churches in the area.” To those of us who have seen the books this is laughable. The project was an artistic coming-of-age. He is hugely proud of the work he did with this, and, all in all, he deserves to be.
Bought a copy of Katherine Ann Porter’s Flowering Judas for $1 at the library. Into the pages its former owner had pressed flowers, all beige and translucent now.
Reading about Elizabeth Hardwick. The path of the critic is one I might have taken, but didn’t. The Johns Hopkins debacle may have been the switch that turned me onto a purely, or primarily, creative track. Are there–what?– 20 people who make their living as critics in America? 100? Speaking only of the Asheville scene, a solid critic is what it most needs and what it sometimes pretends to want, but which it will never welcome, or tolerate. The contemporary perspective refuses the idea that some things are better than others. It maintains that the pure expression of the individual cannot be improved upon, and that it is an affront to try. I’m singing my song; who are you to say I’m under pitch or the lyrics are stupid? It’s not that I don’t understand that perspective, but till the end of days I’ll make a clear distinction between what suits my taste and what is great. Long ago I set myself the task of bringing those two principles as close together as possible. I don’t worry when there’s still a gap, but I do acknowledge it.
I’m going to teach a class one day on the Objectivity of Aesthetics.
Had hives for the second time in my life. Trying to imagine why, I recollected that I’d had nothing to eat but cashews. They may have been the culprit the first time too.
Wrote a poem first thing this morning. Picked up the notebook moments ago (it is now noon) and was surprised, having forgotten it.
April 5, 2022
Swept speedwell and a yellow calla off the half-price table at Ace Hardware and got them into the ground before this formidable rain began. Rolling thunder.
Ran across some videos made by Steve in his Buster mode. Of all the things I brag on, it’s seldom that I was the first boyfriend of a significant porn star.
April 4, 2022
Something was keeping me from writing. Not from the ability to do it, but from the desire. Whatever that was went away today, and I have churned out many paragraphs. The material is new, to be sewn into an old story.
I went to G’s Facebook page today. It has not been taken down, and speaks of happier times.
The strangeness of the souls we live with! Since she came to live with me, Maud has pursued a pattern of claiming one space after another as her own, dwelling there almost exclusively, then moving on to the next one without a look back. Sometimes she’s hidden; sometimes she’s in plain sight. It’s only a real problem is when it’s at the far corner of the study, at the highest place in the house, when the litterbox is too remote and she adapts a corner of the floor for that purpose. Now she’s in the tenth or eleventh rotation of the TV stand, wedged in the little slot behind the cable box and the DVD player. Before that it was buried in my winter coat on the guest bed. Before that it was on the chair looking out the front window. Sometimes it’s in the bathroom cupboard, shut in her cave like a puma.
April 3, 2022
Phlegm made me useless in choir this morning. Hope I was ornamental.
The Magnetic did excellently well at All Souls in the afternoon. I say that with an asterisk in my voice, for, despite my warnings, no more than one word in five could be heard. It has been years (I guess not since Montford Park) since I’ve heard the command “Project!” from a director. Actors expend no effort with their voices, and seemingly are never told that a conversational tone will not do. Also, someone brought a baby. The baby wasn’t misbehaved in the least bit, but the random little baby noises he made had better breath support and projection than the actors on stage. The work was at least twice as good as anybody was able to understand.
April 1, 2022
Signed horrific checks payable to the treasuries of the US and NC. As I wrote, the secretary told me how she had been hit hard by child support (which she was apparently paying) and how her daughter, visiting a while, had clogged the toilet upon her first use.
Planted a hillock of Shasta daisy and a new patch of triphyllum.
Did my first period of duty as the Resource Desk at All Souls. Had one call left over from yesterday, which had already been taken care of. Stuffed envelopes in the work room for a while. In any such place there will be chatterers and others who keep silence. The chatterers are by no means the slower workers. I keep silence.
Went to the season opening gala at the Magnetic. It was lively and boisterous, and I was much better known than I knew. But for the most part, this generation of theater people is one, two generations removed from the generation which I dominated, when directors would call and I would tell them the part I’d do. Except in imagination, I do not miss that at all. These young actors are so good that if I, young again, fell among them, things might not be the same. I was uneasy. I crept into the corner in the whirl of so much energy. I remembered why I had declined long ago– even though I would always act–to become a “theater person.” Self-demonstration is foreign to me except on paper. Magnetic forms an alliance with Anam Cara, a cooperative which emphasizes what its founder calls “abstract, physical theater.” You give actors a task or an image and a few minutes in which to discover how to act it out. Fascinating, actually, and the results last night were impressive. I’m so script-oriented that I wonder what could be the use of that except as a party game or a way to make the realization of text more expressive. Preview of a Christmas show so gobsmackingly bad it eludes vocabulary to describe it, its badness temporarily disguised by antic and effortful acting. The effort of the acting becomes laughable– and therefore, in a way, pleasing–on its own.
March 31, 2022
Official notice from the university that GH has resigned and will be, so far as we are concerned, blotted from the Book of Life. His name was not mentioned in any of the communiques.
Turned down the invitation to serve of the Magnetic board.
I have a new grand-niece, Alma Jane, born last night in Colorado.
