November 29, 2023
Decided to touch up L&J’s painting after I got it back from the framer. Had to reach under the plastic wrap to do it.
Growled through rehearsal. Mucus in the throat is the one thing that cannot be powered through.
He found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness; he encircled him, he cared for him, he kept him as the apple of his eye.
November 27, 2023
Annual realization that the fog in my throat is caused by dryness. Annual conclusion that a humidifier is too much mess and probably won’t work.
Bought a drill at Citizens’ Hardware. Betty chose the right tool for me, and then said that she would have included me in her Power Tools for Women course if I had wanted.
November 26, 2023
Without actually planning to do so, I set up the Christmas trees. Rearranged the living room to get the big tree in front of a window, so it looks like somebody lives here. One outcome of the absence of cats now is that doors may be closed–and thus spaces used– in ways they would not have tolerated. I am in the best shape for climbing the stairs with burdens and the like since I moved here.
November 24, 2023
The Y was smelly this morning. It usually isn’t. A murder of crows screamed in the parking lot. You looked around to see what had agitated them.
Vowed not to shop on Black Friday; nevertheless, brought home $100 worth of birdseed.
Sat by the river in the afternoon, drinking my limeade and remembering things past. Wrote a little. Thought I saw shovelers on the far side of the river, but I couldn’t get a sufficiently precise image.
I miss my cats so much. I think I see Maud approaching from the corner of my eye. I feel a tangle in the bed and make sure not to kick it lest it be a sleeping cat.
November 23, 2023
Thanksgiving, me thankful that I don’t have to go anywhere or do anything in particular.
Nevertheless, before 9 AM I’d cleaned out the leaf and stick debris in the pond, cleaned out the Jurassic muck from the pond pump filter, cleaned out and discarded the free weights that lived several years at 62 and at 51 since I moved in and were used once in all that time, stowed the garden tools in the tool shed for the winter. Little paw prints of raccoons decorated the dust in the tool shed, which they had tumbled and disordered like unruly children. Watched a little of the Macy’s Parade, and a little of the Asheville Christmas parade, which was actually better, more interesting, considerably less appalling. AVLGMC looked. . . confused. . . but nobody will remember.
November 22, 2023
Schlep from one “extra” rehearsal to another. Because “there are only so many weeks until” this or that performance, because “We can’t lose Thanksgiving week.” Maybe somebody should have planned better.
Vacuumed my office/studio for the first time ever.
D sends me what appears to be a bag of vacuum lint. I phone and remember that I asked him to send me seeds from his ironweed. I got an entire flowerhead.
The anniversary of the first public chaos in my memory. Alas, not the last. On the 23rd a wreath-making event was scheduled at Emmanuel Church. We all still went, twisting nuts and pine cones onto frames with wire, but nobody knew what to say.
November 20, 2023
Y first thing. The hour of Amazons. Stopped at Starbucks afterwards. Sat outside watching the traffic on Charlotte Street, thinking God knows what. Tried to put my waste in a plastic bag lying just outside the door. A kid sitting at one of the outdoor tables said, “Hey! That’s my bag!”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I thought it was trash.”
After that there was no recovery. I wanted to give the kid money, but anticipated the response, “What makes you think I want money, you old perv?” Nothing for it but to walk on.
Continually amazed at how little dream life references waking life, how thoroughly independent they seem to be. Last night one dream had me in an iffy urban neighborhood, with some glamorous sections and some downtrodden sections. I seemed to be a mediator of some kind, keeping various gangs from wiping one another out. At one point I befriended a young girl, who was the girlfriend or perhaps property of a man (MM, actually) who may have been her pimp. I saw her crying on the street and she said MM wouldn’t let her eat because she had disobeyed in some way. I took her to a restaurant, intending to buy her a meal. The people at the restaurant said they couldn’t seat us unless we proved that our financial situation was equal, unless the girl could prove she had money or credit cards in her pocket, which of course she had not. I realized this was a way to curb prostitution in the establishment, but it still seemed unfair. The dream ended with me arguing with the manager, threatening, I think, to put her out of business. Waking, even if I were casting about for matter for a story, I would never have thought of that.
Reading of A God in the Waters cancelled for tonight.
This month’s electric bill is twice last month’s. I assume it’s the heater that lets the studio be habitable.
November 19, 2023
Cloud of bluebirds in my yard when I left for church.
Listened to our rendition of “Steal Away” on the Internet this afternoon. Almost perfect.
Read Wilde and Lord A Douglas on R’s invitation at P, a throng of old guys who get together for society and, apparently, a program. The program was distended by R’s having to lecture widely and wildly at ever lacuna. There were six readers. We were told to take ten minutes each. I took ten. The others ranged from twenty to forty minutes. I wondered if I wanted to join the group. I’m bad at chit-chat, which is what most of that sort of thing is. Maybe I’d be better if I practiced. Some faces not seen in a long while. The idea of my natural society being now old gay men is more than a little horrifying.
November 18, 2023
Coffee with my ex-student, now craving advice about graduate school and Johns Hopkins. I didn’t recognize the student at first because in 2017 he was a boy and now she is a girl. The name changed too, but as she didn’t remind me of it, I assumed all that had been left behind. Some research revealed it was R. Trans-sexuality baffles me, but one doesn’t know what questions one is permitted to ask. He was a beautiful, Grecian boy. She is a rather alarming woman, the face too broad and too like porcelain. The Goth look adds to the alarming affect. He always preferred girls, so a transition makes him a lesbian. This is so odd to me that I must conclude it’s ignorant to think that sexual preference has anything to do with trans-sexuality. She said that the hyper-masculinity of the LA rock scene turned her off so much she decided to go as far the other direction as possible. Is that it? An aesthetic choice? One might have stopped at androgeny. The poems she showed me made better sense when I went online and looked up the band he used to front in LA. The person in those videos was dynamic, torch-y, elfin, passionate, Olympian, every inch a star. I’m not sure an MFA program is the turn I would have recommended for that extraordinary soul, but the journey is not mine.
The lady at the Woodfin liquor store related at some length the false charges to her Amazon debit card.
Cooked venison for the first time, in a stew. Venison relates to vegetables in a whole different way from pork and beef.
November 16, 2023
Watched a movie late last night, Design for Living from a play by Noel Coward– 1933, I think. I mention it because it was smart and witty and has the best first scene of any movie in the world, without, so far as I could tell, a single special effect. Don’t recall Miriam Hopkins from before, but she was sharp. That’s what I call a script. Besides the fact that two men prefer each other to the girl, but can’t, by the weight of a whole culture, say so. Incredibly, I saw one of its stars, Edward Everett Horton, live on stage at the Kenley Players in The Fantastiks at least thirty three years later.
Began my day at the Y, wherefore I felt fantastic, until late afternoon when the flux came upon me. That improves by the hour. Possibly I ate the pork lo mein after too many days in the fridge.
Finished Three Views of Mount Pisgah, though there will be details and touch-ups.
November 15, 2023
A nasturtium still puts forth four sun-colored blooms in the shelter of the magnaflora magnolia.
Email: Dr. Hopes,I'm not sure if you'll remember me, though you certainly left your mark on me and my writing some years ago when I took your Intro to Creative Writing at UNCA in the fall of 2017. I recall you, after finding out that I was only 16, talking about the lineage of great prodigies in poetry and saying "there was Ezra Pound, then me, and now I suppose there's you." Since then, I changed my name, chased passions across many state lines, and, after a number of artistic and personal detours, I am finally completing my Bachelor's through Arizona State's online program (graduating in the spring).
I've been looking into applying to the Poetry M.F.A. program at Johns Hopkins, among others. Seeing as you went there, I wondered if you might be willing to let me buy you a meal or a coffee and ask you a few questions about the school and my portfolio.
All the best,
NRH
Your Student
November 14, 2023
Emptied the last sacks of dirt and mulch, finished with the garden except for a few loads of fallen leaves I want to dump on the new tulip beds. Painting ferociously. When I’m painting I’m not very much interested in writing. When I’m writing I have no impulse to paint. Do the disciplines fight it out somewhere inside my head to see who rules the coming week? The hiatus I gave to painting after 2019 has been miraculous. The fastest way to describe the difference would be the intuition to accept happy accidents. Second, to stare at the canvas long enough to understand what it wants to bear. Since then, so image that I really wanted to make has resisted me.
November 13, 2023
The concert went off well, I suppose (from the front is not the best place to judge). Admired K's attention to every detail, his radar alight when anything goes wrong. I wondered if my faculties are as alive to my own disciplines, and I sadly conclude, probably not. In my writing I can enforce perfection, as I see it in the moment, but in collaborative efforts such as theater I often decline to let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. I thought as I looked out into the gray crowd there couldn’t be much they actually liked other than the Brahms. I ended up liking the Bardos quite well, and even sing it as I walk. T played some difficult (they sounded difficult) modern organ pieces. I could find something to admire in each one, but nothing really to like. Is “modern” concert music destined to be unlikeable? It seems to have rather taken a vow not to please, pleasing being somehow contrary to advanced political aesthetic. Will our ears someday attune to it, as they have to others who presumably jarred expectation when they first were heard? I think likely not. Music written on an impulse not specifically musical cannot succeed. Big J and my companion D– on whom I depended for correct pronunciation– were both absent. I croaked like a frog for the most part, though the sopranos in front of us were kind and said we sounded great. Limped home on my preposterous legs.
November 12, 2023
Cold late autumn drizzle-dawn.
Five hours of rehearsal two days before a concert is not a good idea, crossing over at some point from the unhelpful to the destructive. My voice was gone when I rose this morning. I was weighing ways to say “I can’t make it to the concert; you’ve rehearsed me to death,” but as the hours go the voice clears, and with more tea it may be well enough. J, the big Argentine bass who sat mute beside me during King David (still accepting, I bet, his $200) does possess a beautiful voice, and a vast one. He missed most rehearsals and for various reasons (he doesn’t read music, listens to others until he gets it) didn’t sing much during the other ones. Yesterday he was present in might. He sang maybe every fourth phrase, but when he did it was not the piano or pianissimo indicated by the score but a blast of trumpets, carried out considerably past the cut-off so the full glory of it could resonate in the space. Our director, who never met a mistake he didn’t grind into a pulp, obsessively triaged those places as though we’d never sung them before.None of this will bother me tomorrow.
November 10, 2023
Cool drizzle after weeks of extended summer.
Cancelled my trip to the beach, for no particular reason other than that I thought it was, somehow, the wrong time.
Driving home after rehearsal last night, I realized that all was dark from a certain point north. No streetlights, no traffic signals, just buildings and corners rendered unfamiliar by the sweeping lamps of cars. Home loomed profoundly dark. My unreadiness for such an event was made clear to me, being without a usable flashlight and with only one candle in the house. But I managed to pour myself a hefty vodka and make it to the front porch, where I discovered I had been given one of the loveliest nights of my life, soft and purplish, but lit by the city lights southward under the clouds so that every detail of the landscape was, if rich and strange, discernible. I longed for a bear to share the porch, but that did not happen. I sat the while in a kind of ecstasy, joyful and worshipful, wondering what small thing– or perhaps a power failure is a large thing after all– could turn life around. I poured out my spirit like a fountain. Silence came with darkness, and holiness with silence. Wondrous beautiful to me, for perhaps an hour. When the lights came on it was jarring. The streetlight at the end of my drive pounded white and solar and almost unbearable across the grass.
The blackout was caused, it is rumored, by a drunken or otherwise disoriented driver taking out a utility pole in front of McDonald’s.
Huge rehearsal at First Baptist. I’m not the asset in this concert that I sometimes am. I hear the men on either side of me pronouncing Hungarian and Slovak at 50 miles an hour . . . .
November 8, 2023
Some animal scurries on the roof as I write.
Good session by the river this morning. Wrote from a heart that looks more, sometimes, like Shelley’s than my own.
C says she dreamed of me in a glorious suit of clothes, and that I swept her off her feet to a new life in California. She should warn her husband that she has options.
November 7, 2023
Some mulch must yet be spread, but other than that, gardening’s done for the year. Dug a bed out of the tangles at the north edge of the lawn and planted fifty tulip bulbs. Transplanted peony and iris that found themselves in the shade. Thought the defeat of the honeysuckle vines during the winter is something that might be achieved.
Venus in my western window, guarding the night.
November 6, 2023
Great gardening day, in summer warmth. Dug and planted and mulched. Transplanted the white iris to enlarge the front peony bed. Planted tree peonies, transplanted those damaged in the process. Blue anemone. Narcissus and crocus in the backyard. Planted more bulbs this fall than ever before, by a factor, I think, of at least two. Species tulips remain. Never know why I buy tulips, but I do.
Attendance at Ben and Angela is looking like one of those affronts that shall never be forgiven. Long fuse, that burns hot once it’s lit.
Some noise earlier on about HART’s doing Washington Place. The season announcement arrived today, and I didn’t even have to look at it to know my play had not been chosen.
Nap-dream that I had a pet raccoon. We brought joy wherever we went.
November 5, 2023
Patronal Feast celebrated at All Souls with the performance of the Durufle Requiem. It appeared to be a huge success, and the reception afterward overflowed with praise. One thing I learned is that standing in one place for a long time will not be part of my future.
Thought of my mother whenever the hymns spoke of those who have crossed over and await us on the other side
November 3, 2023
The pilot is out in my gas heater in the studio and I don’t know how to light it. Moved an electric space heater up, but it’s insufficient. Two heaters flip the breaker switch. So the one heater is positioned roughly in the middle where it provides a pool of warmish air that I can move into and out of in my work. Cold has come upon us. The flowers I can see from the windows are gone.
Counted last night that S can chatter at least six different directives or repetitions or half-jokes between the time she calls for pitches and when we actually sing. K is generally only two or three. I wonder what they teach in director school.
Huge revision of A God in the Waters. It worries me sometimes that I’m so easy about detours from the Original Vision. Was the Original Vision so weak? Or is it broad enough to accommodate re-interpretation? I think Vision is a door suddenly open onto a whole landscape, in which there can be much wandering.
Painted, after several weeks.
Unexpectedly did some major gardening, spading up waste places and planting grape hyacinth, daffodil, crocus. A new carton of bulbs arrived in the mail.
November 1, 2023
Most exquisite dream. I had been invited to live in a sort of commune (in one enormous house) with a group of young men. We were all artists, and went around critiquing and assisting one another’s work. They’d found gigantic paintings of mine somewhere and urged me to retouch them and bring them to perfection.
All Hallows Eve
Magnetic is– finally– closing at the end of the year. It outlived expectation. Its death-throes– the kind of shows it choses near the end– are not pretty.
Chill. Rehearsal. The most uneventful Halloween of my life. Gave myself a thrill by driving down Kimberly to watch the trick-or-treaters in their costumes bracing against the cold.
