June 21, 2024

From Charles Schwab:

Rate of return: Your account had a cumulative rate of return of 215.05% from Oct 10, 2017 to Jun 20, 2024. (Annualized: 18.69%).

Not bad, I guess, for a naif. 

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Exhausting rehearsal last night. What should have been a simple run-through was a workshop, still learning notes the night before a concert. We take on too much. We waste too much time. There’s too much of a gap between musical leaders and followers. C who stands next to me, for instance, sounds good, but gets about 1/3 of the notes wrong. B who stands behind me sounds good and gets most things right, and I use him to check myself. A sounded sensational on his Dylan solo. Part of the downside of all this is that I’m hoarse as ocean fog. Much of the bass part is quite low and also loud and percussive. The contra D flats just stop forming after a while. The pain in my legs after climbing down from the risers is, for a moment, almost unendurable. Walked home from the venue waddling like a duck. 

S was in a dire mood because our thrice-featured soloist K “has a stomach bug.” I knew when her name was announced months ago that she would not sing this concert. It seemed hateful at the time to say so, and gratuitous now to say “I knew it.” Sometimes I’m quite clairvoyant. Without fail I predict the days when my cleaning lady will want to delay or postpone. I knew when there was all that talk about a graduate program in creative writing that it wouldn’t happen, even when the Provost said, ruefully, "it’s a fait accompli.”  I can tell this kind of conviction from a hunch, but the evidence is so subtle and subjective I wouldn’t believe it myself. Let’s not add Casandra to the names . . . 

Full summer. 

The Dublin Traviata sprints toward completion. 

A scene from Coriolanus popped up on the Internet. It was only a moment, but the lines uttered by the character C himself, I believe) were so rich, so embroidered and damasked and gorgeous that you swooned even before you understood what was going on. No modern writer would be allowed to do that. I long for it. I could do it. It would put an even longer corridor between me and any conceivable producer.