June 14, 2024

Missed Yeats’ birthday. He will forgive me. 

Good weeding yesterday– which I forgot until I looked out and saw dead weeds wilting on the grass.

Scolded at Riverside for feeding the white lab. 

AVLGMC concert at Givens Estates last night. Well attended, appreciated, but I don’t know how good. Perhaps adequate. I was better than adequate, though not perfect. Unable to walk for half an hour afterward. D and G had me up to their apartment for wine. Much talk of Ireland and Celtic culture. Another thing I’d forgotten was that in the despair of February, 2020, I invited everyone to my studio to take what they wanted. D and G took a good deal, the bluebird box and the painted drawer face for themselves, and bird paintings for each of their grandsons. I was happy to know this, to feel a ray of redemption. It was also curious to see the works in an unexpected context, though I must have known this all happened long ago. 

I like the boys in AVLGMC more than I have in the last decade. 

Delayed announcement from UNCA that certain programs– Classics, Drama, some foreign languages– will be cancelled. I want to be apoplectic, though can’t quite rise to it. It would be like trying to reason with a MAGA rally. Every aspect of the decision–including the identity of those who made it–is wrong. Everybody knows it’s wrong; it doesn’t matter. “Administration” must be eliminated as a caste and as a concept, but I am not the one to lead that fight, or more than a puling skirmish of it. Sneaking into my thoughts is the slightest satisfaction that Drama is gone, Arnold’s entire and only legacy disappeared before his eyes. A university without a theater is an absurdity, so if UNCA survives, theater will return, perhaps this time founded upon something other than mediocrity and dilettantism.