February 28, 2025
New music last night. Sight reading is one of my joys.
Physically active day, including the first real gardening since the fall. Carrying cement blocks, I discover, will be off the agenda until I get my iron levels back up.
Made the mistake of comparing effort in the arts with achievements in the arts. Spent the rest of the day sad.
February 27, 2025
The First Baptist Choir threw a lovely reception for us last night, orphans they took in.
Renewed my ACLU membership.
D sends video of Stetson playing with his rocking horse (my Christmas gift), not actually riding it, but wrestling with it. My rocking horse was wooden, white, with blue saddle and bridle. Things disappear from your life.
$20000 of my $24000 loss in the market was from a dingle holding, Polaris. S my accountant reports that I owe $18,000 Federal tax. “Capital gains. You made $100,000 more than you did last year.”I suggested to S that one doesn’t pay capital gains during a Republican administration.
Bought white rhododendrons.
February 26, 2025
Days of mundane, enjoyable, activity. DJ to the eye doctor. The clinic was enormous, shockingly well designed, and stacked to the walls with old people. Do the young so somewhere else? The crowd dismayed me, but the operation was efficient and many were seen to as I sat. A service dog sprawled on the rug nearby, looking very bored. I resent when there’s a dog and I can’t play with it.
Got an estimate on cleaning up the yard– not from the hurricane, but from the cable pruners who left a mess afterwards. Turned into an estimate on cleaning up the rest of the wildness and opening all to the hand of the Gardener. I realized I was being led by the guy from Yard Bro, but his suggestions were things I wanted done but had imagined I’d have to do myself. The stock market has been diving since Little Hitler took over, so the thousands of the quote stagger me, but I’ll assume the approach of better times. I expressed my preference for Mexican workers (he is very Anglo) and he assured my all his workers with Latino.
Chamber Choir back in rehearsal. The guy beside me was having trouble. I thought it was because he was a baritone and I a bass, and sometimes we had different notes. But he said, “I have trouble singing beside you even when we have the same notes. But it’s my problem. I’ll figure it out.” The guy on the other side had just said, “Thank God I was sitting by you.” Don’t know whether I’m a help or a hindrance.
Blazing spring day. Turned off the heater in my studio. Pruned the laurel so it can be a tree rather than a bush. The landscape guy insisted that bay and laurels were different plants. Makes me worry.
Tried to get to Reems Creek to shop for white rhododendrons, but the inexplicable Asheville traffic stopped I-26 west dead. Sat still for ten minutes, finally exited the exit after the one I entered. Turned north on Merrimon and was stopped dead there too. U-turned and went home, to shop another day. No fleeing to the north today.
February 23, 2025
Rewrite of NW complete last night. Lost 3000 words. I think it’s beautiful. Working through manuscripts, I decided, for the moment, that my first attempt at the novel, Diving into the Moon, is likely unsalvageable. My desire that the tone sound like it arose from the time setting of the book (1950's) worked too well, and now I can’t get around it. I began it before I left for Exeter.
February 22, 2025
A hole left in my records, as it’s been too cold to use my studio. It’s too cold now, except I’m newly arisen and fresh and have a cup of coffee steaming at my elbow. Images in my head of dry snow falling perpetually from the north, almost horizontal, lit through the day by the various colors of the sky. Lovely. I shiver out to renew the bird feeders. The little downies don’t even bother to fly when I approach them. Working hard and unexpectedly on a rewrite of The Nurseryman’s Wedding. Most of its sins were the sins of excess, which is the easiest to cure. I have been happy doing this, even when my eyes bleared.
Second Blake meeting with P.
National situation deteriorating. Vance blames Ukraine for invading Russia. I vow not to listen to the news, but fragments seep in. Antietam of the soul.
February 17, 2025
Weary of posting philippics against Trump. They sound brittle and shrewish even to myself. Clearly I am not the one designated to make this right.
Complex and joyful dreams before waking. I’d taken a long sabbatical from teaching, during which time I’d bought a tiny airplane, the size of a Volkswagen bug, and learned to fly it. Over the rolling fields we’d go, sometimes over bare golden grass, sometimes over great herds of giraffe and whatnot. I decided to go back to school. I’d been gone so long I didn’t recognize it, now laid out like a carnival in a series of tents. I found Kirk and asked him to get me an office. He was so happy to see me he embraced me, and then began to babble happily but incoherently. I wandered away and came to a sealed tent. I managed to open the tent, inside of which children had been kept in captivity. They ran to me and embraced my legs, crying, “He will get us out.” I woke. I suppose that the part of me that stayed in that world got them out.
February 15, 2025
Valentine’s Fundraiser last night unexpectedly merry and successful. All possibilities of mortification remained unfulfilled. Sang well. None of the cabaret acts was bad. Great joy in the house, probably more than we performers understood. Came home with a bottle of wine.
Took my materials to the tax people in Biltmore. We talked about the flood. They are on the second floor of a building whose first floor was annihilated.
February 14, 2025
Saint Valentine.
Bach on Pandora
Last dream of the night featured P, of whom I lost track in the eighth grade, lecturing me on how my life has been, essentially, pointless, and how the confusing light beams that come from my glasses make people hesitant even to talk with me.
Took DJ to the doctor. The waiting room was filled with misery, debility, fear, people helping one another in and out for door, waiting in the rain for uncertain rides. I compared this to moon-faced Musk cavorting on the TV, oily with health and stupidity.
Each day brings new horrors from Washington. We are in not an incipient but a full-blown dictatorship, accomplished in two weeks by people who warned us every step of the way what they were about to do. One of the things one never imagined for oneself. Somebody will stop it. Law will stop it. An independent judiciary will stop it. A tradition of rationality will stop it. A tradition of country before self will stop it. Wrong–so far–on every count. If I thought guns would stop it, would I join in? I’m not sure at all of my aim, not having handled a gun since Boy Scout camp. I shock myself by thinking, “yes, as it appears now, it is that dire.” The NRA justified its otherwise blood-soaked existence by saying it would keep people ready in case of the rise of an oppressive government. Waiting. . . .
The felonious mayor of New York is released from penalty if he will agree to betray his own immigrant population.
No single Republican is free of the onus of this.
A curious line of thought, though, skirts the edges where I am, or had been, in the tinniest degree of agreement with the apparent ends of the putsch. DEI was a calamity for academia. Our former and eternally despised Provost ruined the English department (or maybe it was the whole university?) by declaring that all hires henceforward would be diversity hires. It’s not that we doubted the existence of excellent diverse employees, but knew, in the current atmosphere, we would never get them. We recognized a deliberate effort toward mediocrity, or worse, mediocrity being easier to control than excellence. Our long line of female Chancellors and Provosts need not have but did in fact illustrate the perils of diversity hires. It’s impossible to believe that in any case (except MG) that they were the best candidate offered. Serving on one search committee or another, I recognized that the appeal to diversity caused us to settle on the second–or third–best candidate. We were willing then, assuming a great injustice was being balanced by a little one. That acknowledged, The Trump scourging is like noticing your house needs a new paint job, and deciding therefore to burn it to the ground.
Also, one acknowledges that none of this is in Trump’s mind or in the minds of any of his cadre. It is all about the seizure of power, by any means necessary, with any excuse widely palatable. Mitch McConnell, hypocrite and corrupt Machiavellian that he is, is now the lone man in the Senate. If you live long enough, you will end up doing some good thing. . . .
February 13, 2025
The only news is the Fascification of America by Trump and Musk. Someone must have power to block the door.
Rehearsal for our Valentine’s Day Gala Benefit Fundraiser. Less awful than expected, though I’m practically useless in the sphere of table decoration. Admire those who are not. Also sang badly. Also, in this passage of the anemia cycle, I get winded walking from the car to the door. I stand in the corner catching my breath, trying to look ready for action.
February 12, 2025
Rain. Cold. I don’t know where the hours go. Assembled Kingdom Phylum Class Order.
February 8, 2025
Sweet summery days, that the TV news says are numbered. Blades of daffodils emerging in their multitudes. The heat is almost unbearable in my study, but I won’t turn the heater off just yet. What if it doesn’t come back on?
In the bracket with things I never expected to see are bears in my yard, a hurricane in my mountains, an American government become a toxic, fascist clown show, the clowns somehow not dragged offstage with a hook and thrown into the hoosegow. The news allows us to imagine Musk as a three year old with a crayon in his hand, whirling from room to room trying to deface as much as he can before an adult steps in. It’s more systematic than that. He chooses and his senile boss agrees to the choice of halting everything that has to do with control, safety, oversight, regulation, equality, anything that protects and strengthens, anything that tries to level the playing field, anything that might curb hate or ignorance (so useful to Trump at all times), anything that defends the weak against the predation of the strong. If it protects workers in the workplace, animals in their wilderness, children in their schools, patients in hospitals and pharmacies, innocent men and women trying to live their lives, it makes Musk itch with impatience, because nothing can be allowed to stand between the super-rich and the easy acquisition of an ever greater portion of the common bounty. If it interferes with profit or slows the 1% ever so slightly in their gobbling up of resources, it must go. Safety oversight, food and drug quality, health care, day care, workplace safety, retirement, civil rights, culture and civility are irrelevant to those who can buy them for themselves. Billionaires are the only constituency considered by this unfolding administration, the only constituency which can possibly profit from actions taken in the last week by that moon-faced fraud. The Supreme Court is bought lock stock and gavel, but where is Congress? Where is the NRA, who justified their bloody existence in the past by promising to be ready when tyrants arose. I vowed for my own health not to look at the news, but sometimes the hubbub becomes briefly audible between cat videos.
Tried to go on my sister’s Rhine cruise, but it was sold out.
PBS documentary on Jefferson. Informative. Inspiring. I was never sure just what a Federalist was, and why Jefferson didn’t like it.
Believe I have finished In the Country of the Young.
February 5, 2025
P comes for an afternoon discussion of Blake. The most civilized thing I’ve done in a long time. Old brain muscles working again.
Two healthy girls come with bags collecting canned goods for Manna Food Bank. I have exactly one can in the cupboard, ancient peaches which may well have come over from 62.
Encounter K in the Alley behind 62. She says “What’s your secret? You look ten years younger than you used to.” I decide to let it ride without refutation or contemplation.
February 4, 2024
DJ’s van fails him again just when several necessary things needed to be done at once. The difficulties circumstance throws at him are so various and unending as to be, in one sense, ludicrous. It would make a scene from a sit-com if one were not personally experiencing it. The worst failures seem to be when I’m there to add nothing useful.
Workers replacing the roof of 62, which I replaced thirteen years ago. Maybe hurricane damage.
February 2, 2025
Candlemas. Pale lilac crocus in the front yard. Queer banging sound on the eastern outside wall, like somebody throwing pebbles. Nothing visible there. DJ’s van has a grand mal when I try to start it. He doesn’t make it to church. Our insane blob of a president starts a tariff war with Canada and Mexico.
February 1, 2025
Brigid the Blessed.
Trump blames recent plane crashes on diversity hires. The amazing things is that he says it in so many words. We cannot defend ourselves with misunderstanding. Denali is back to being Mount McKinley. Trump says this is to restore honor to a great American president, and I wonder by what measure McKinley can be called great. No Black history month. The Gulf of America. Why is nobody laughing?
Jupiter glittering northward of the quarter moon.
