October 7, 2007
Sultry evening in Ohio, unlike the autumn it is meant to be. Drove to Cleveland last night, down empty Carnegie to the Cleveland Playhouse to see Man of La Mancha. Actually, I went to see Patrick Porter, who was in Man of La Mancha, but the one was conjoined with the other. I enjoyed the show, but I couldn’t see why it had been such a sensation, why it had become one of the permanent lights of the Broadway firmament. Patrick later told me that the experience of acting in it was rather disappointing, that some of the directorial choices were unexciting and that the rapport of the cast was not exceptional, and maybe it was these things that crept into the experience of the night. Patrick also reports that Don Quixote ripped a major fart in his death scene, and everyone was fighting off laugher, which I did not actually notice, but which did underwrite my impression that the show was running on pure professionalism and not much juice. It was great to talk with Patrick, and to hear about his life as a Rugby Star, and to hear he is fully committed to Edward in May. His partner told him he had never been in a better show than Edward the King, and had never been better in a show. Late supper at Stages, very light, so I slept unperturbed.
Interstate 77 between Cleveland and Akron is incredibly dark.
Wandered around Akron today, feeling strange emotions. I drank coffee and wrote at Angel Falls Café, listening to the intelligent conversation of people I might have known. Went to Akron U and found niches in the quite vast student union to write in, and study my lines. I went to a production of Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July put on by the Akron U theater. I have heard about the Talley series for years, but this is the first time I saw one. It is certainly workmanlike playwriting, but I think a little too busy, a little too anxious to cram in as much picturesque character detail as possible, even those which begin to veer from the plausible. One audience member had been at the Cleveland Playhouse last night, and when asked by his friend how the show was, he shrugged exactly as I would have done and said, "It was all right. The first fifteen minutes were hopeful, but it never made good on its promise." Rather as I felt and Patrick said.
The whole time here I have been besieged by the strangest emotions. I try to call them "regret," because they should be regret. But they aren’t, or aren’t exclusively so. More vivid, more immediate than regret. Tonight I walked to the elementary school, as I did twice a week day forty five years ago. The landmarks are still there. I could walk it with my eyes closed. I stood in the dark in front of Billy Bigelow’s house, thinking that all would be well if I could imagine him finding my house some dark, solitary night, standing before it and remembering. To school was a considerable walk. We must all have been in excellent shape. But as I walked I wondered what exactly was I feeling. Why were the emotions so chaotic, so inappropriate for my current age and station? Puberty was for me exceptionally forgiving and graceful. There was no trouble with the authorities, no temper tantrums, no emotional tempests, no overt rebellion (though my parents probably thought so, totally misjudging the firmament of rebellion from which they were spared), hardly any acne. It was so in part because of extreme covertness on my part. The emotions I was feeling, and, mostly, the objects of them, could not be acknowledged at that time, and so I hid them with what I believed at the time was cunning success. But nothing that must be manifest can be kept unrealized forever. Maybe the divine Bestower decreed that I should go through puberty in Akron, Ohio. I did not, and I thought that was a victory for my secretive and proud nature. But all emotions that are meant to be will be, and it crossed my mind that the chaos inside my heart right now is puberty, not so much late as interrupted, forbidden, and therefore ferocious, the part never let out, which should have run its course forty years ago, and will, by God, run it now. It is a bewildering thing. The brain spins, helpless, realizing the solution lies not within itself. That the solution lies not within one heart was the problem forty years ago. The doors of love cannot be opened by one, do not open one way. There was no one on the other side, bidding me welcome. It would be fitting, it would have the outline of a fine old story, if I were unable to continue with my life until I have an affair with someone in Akron, as I was meant to have done long ago. Yet one cannot image that happening. My mind ran all night on the faces of boys I loved, but I didn’t really know how I loved them, nor what it would lead to, nor what it would forbid. There was no way of asking them to join me in this, even if it were possible the answer would be yes.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Akron
October 6, 2007
Went downtown last night, onto the cleanly, all-but-deserted streets of Akron. It looked forlorn and sort of lovely all at once. One center of activity was the corner of Summit and Market, where there is a new arts center in an old building, including The Bang and the Clatter, which I suppose is nearly the only independent theater company of its kind in the area. The theater was a pleasantly amateurish set-up on the second floor, and the play was Eric Coble’s The Dead Guy. The evening had nothing to recommend it but adequate performances–in the lead’s case a quite good performance-- of a play that was all premise, and a flawed premise at that. After arising at 2 and traveling all day, I could barely keep my eyes open, and after a while stopped trying. It was a bad play, actually, and I mention that to point up still more dramatically the enthusiasm of the little crowd, which didn’t care that it was a bad play, only that it was OUR bad play. I went to see how my life would be if I had stayed here. I don’t think, now, that I would ever have been any of the people I saw in that room.
Things I had forgotten about Akron: its intense enthusiasm for Halloween. Halloween decorations are up all over, many of them quite elaborate. The lawn across the street from my father’s is turned into a graveyard, with a forest of tombstones with ghoulish saying on them, interspersed with skeletons and ghosts arising from the grass. The theater offered snacks of Halloween candy-- sugar pumpkins and those bright kernels of corn the taste of which is so distinctive–in bowls shaped like pumpkins and the hands of monsters. Almost every house acknowledges the season. The second thing is its sports-mindedness. A radio was playing in the theater lobby with the Indians/Yankees game on it, and the Indian victory was trumpeted at intermission.
Bought dad an expensive new computer system yesterday, which he will be happy with, I think, because he can actually use it. I will buy him a notebook to store all the passwords which he seems unable now to remember, even if he used it five minutes before. My organic inability to repeat myself runs headlong into dad’s increasing inability to hear anything, and his need to hear twice even if he has.
I would be well into my first day in Dublin about now, had things gone the way I’d planned.
Went downtown last night, onto the cleanly, all-but-deserted streets of Akron. It looked forlorn and sort of lovely all at once. One center of activity was the corner of Summit and Market, where there is a new arts center in an old building, including The Bang and the Clatter, which I suppose is nearly the only independent theater company of its kind in the area. The theater was a pleasantly amateurish set-up on the second floor, and the play was Eric Coble’s The Dead Guy. The evening had nothing to recommend it but adequate performances–in the lead’s case a quite good performance-- of a play that was all premise, and a flawed premise at that. After arising at 2 and traveling all day, I could barely keep my eyes open, and after a while stopped trying. It was a bad play, actually, and I mention that to point up still more dramatically the enthusiasm of the little crowd, which didn’t care that it was a bad play, only that it was OUR bad play. I went to see how my life would be if I had stayed here. I don’t think, now, that I would ever have been any of the people I saw in that room.
Things I had forgotten about Akron: its intense enthusiasm for Halloween. Halloween decorations are up all over, many of them quite elaborate. The lawn across the street from my father’s is turned into a graveyard, with a forest of tombstones with ghoulish saying on them, interspersed with skeletons and ghosts arising from the grass. The theater offered snacks of Halloween candy-- sugar pumpkins and those bright kernels of corn the taste of which is so distinctive–in bowls shaped like pumpkins and the hands of monsters. Almost every house acknowledges the season. The second thing is its sports-mindedness. A radio was playing in the theater lobby with the Indians/Yankees game on it, and the Indian victory was trumpeted at intermission.
Bought dad an expensive new computer system yesterday, which he will be happy with, I think, because he can actually use it. I will buy him a notebook to store all the passwords which he seems unable now to remember, even if he used it five minutes before. My organic inability to repeat myself runs headlong into dad’s increasing inability to hear anything, and his need to hear twice even if he has.
I would be well into my first day in Dublin about now, had things gone the way I’d planned.
October 5, 2007
Detroit airport. The wireless in the Charlotte airport allowed me to read messages from Ganymede Arts about The Loves of Mr. Lincoln. The substance of the queries was routine, but it is wonderful to be receiving messages from a theater, about my play, with some measure of urgency behind them.
I lay down to sleep last night, but I knew I had to wake very early, so the sleep was all REM, dream after dream of great vividness, near-the-surface dreams through which the sounds of the real night occasionally broke. I was thinking of my students, of the extraordinary ways they are trying to relate to me, trying to enter the sphere they perceive around me, of my too casual reception of this interest, as though it were amusing or of slight account. I must stop this. I must take their attention seriously, as they intend it.
In the end I rose far earlier than I needed to. When I drove to long-term parking at the airport, it was not open, and I pulled under a light at a closed service station and studied my lines for Virginia Woolf until the airport started up again at 4 AM. Contemplated the likelihood that such a thing had never happened on that spot in all the history of the world.
A boy and his father karate-spar in the concourse. There is the woman with the largest butt I’ve ever seen in the world. Her face and torso do not seem fat, especially, but her butt is colossal, and one cannot help wondering if she fits into one seat on an airplane, or has a row to herself, or what.
What is I had stayed in Akron? What if I made this trip again and again?
Detroit airport. The wireless in the Charlotte airport allowed me to read messages from Ganymede Arts about The Loves of Mr. Lincoln. The substance of the queries was routine, but it is wonderful to be receiving messages from a theater, about my play, with some measure of urgency behind them.
I lay down to sleep last night, but I knew I had to wake very early, so the sleep was all REM, dream after dream of great vividness, near-the-surface dreams through which the sounds of the real night occasionally broke. I was thinking of my students, of the extraordinary ways they are trying to relate to me, trying to enter the sphere they perceive around me, of my too casual reception of this interest, as though it were amusing or of slight account. I must stop this. I must take their attention seriously, as they intend it.
In the end I rose far earlier than I needed to. When I drove to long-term parking at the airport, it was not open, and I pulled under a light at a closed service station and studied my lines for Virginia Woolf until the airport started up again at 4 AM. Contemplated the likelihood that such a thing had never happened on that spot in all the history of the world.
A boy and his father karate-spar in the concourse. There is the woman with the largest butt I’ve ever seen in the world. Her face and torso do not seem fat, especially, but her butt is colossal, and one cannot help wondering if she fits into one seat on an airplane, or has a row to herself, or what.
What is I had stayed in Akron? What if I made this trip again and again?
October 4, 2007
Charlotte Airport Microtel, tiny, adequate, lullabied by the sound of several expressways. Whoever was here before, perhaps the maid, left the Gideon bible open to Job 20-21. I was promised wireless internet, but it goes off and on, so I am isolated in my little room, with a vampire movie on the TV. Supper at a steak house surrounded by black families who treated the place as their own dining room. They laughed and I laughed. I sat near to them, and I didn’t need to.
Stayed at school this afternoon until the last minute, realizing that my students were giving me joy, and insulating me, if momentarily, against the anxiety of this journey.
Charlotte Airport Microtel, tiny, adequate, lullabied by the sound of several expressways. Whoever was here before, perhaps the maid, left the Gideon bible open to Job 20-21. I was promised wireless internet, but it goes off and on, so I am isolated in my little room, with a vampire movie on the TV. Supper at a steak house surrounded by black families who treated the place as their own dining room. They laughed and I laughed. I sat near to them, and I didn’t need to.
Stayed at school this afternoon until the last minute, realizing that my students were giving me joy, and insulating me, if momentarily, against the anxiety of this journey.
October 3, 2007
Jeff Johnson e-mails from DC that the night for The Loves of Mr. Lincoln has been changed, which renders my flight and hotel reservations useless. I’d bought "vacation insurance" from Expedia, so that I wouldn’t lose piles of money if I had to cancel the trip, as I have had to cancel nearly everything for the last year. It turns out that the "peace of mind" it offers means that you are able to THINK you’re going to get your money back for as long as you don’t actually need to. The peace of mind ends when you actually have to fiddle with the schedule. The woman on one end keeps repeating. "The flight is non-refundable," and you keep saying on your end, "But I bought the damn insurance that’s supposed to handle that." Eventually you give up, because your cell phone battery is dying, and to keep from starting an international incident with India.
Bad day, all in all, agitated, wishing I were doing almost anything but what I am, horny as a teenager, wild with frustration over small things, which probably gather to the big one of not going to Ireland on Friday.
Mickey enters the hospital tomorrow.
Jeff Johnson e-mails from DC that the night for The Loves of Mr. Lincoln has been changed, which renders my flight and hotel reservations useless. I’d bought "vacation insurance" from Expedia, so that I wouldn’t lose piles of money if I had to cancel the trip, as I have had to cancel nearly everything for the last year. It turns out that the "peace of mind" it offers means that you are able to THINK you’re going to get your money back for as long as you don’t actually need to. The peace of mind ends when you actually have to fiddle with the schedule. The woman on one end keeps repeating. "The flight is non-refundable," and you keep saying on your end, "But I bought the damn insurance that’s supposed to handle that." Eventually you give up, because your cell phone battery is dying, and to keep from starting an international incident with India.
Bad day, all in all, agitated, wishing I were doing almost anything but what I am, horny as a teenager, wild with frustration over small things, which probably gather to the big one of not going to Ireland on Friday.
Mickey enters the hospital tomorrow.
October 2, 2007
Yellow morning. My windows are closed against the chill, but one happy bird-voice hammers through.
GW came to my office yesterday with news that I had not been selected for the India trip this summer, the reason being, basically, that I had not gratified the sort of people who look for that sort of thing by making up a story about how I was going to teach Hinduism to homeless kids when I got home. I recognized as I was dealing with the twin onslaughts of anger and disappointment that this is probably the story of most of my unsuccessful applications for grants and perquisites. I believe–I know–that the best guide to future action is past action, and, displaying the objective fact of my record instead, I have always fallen short on creating the fiction of what I will do with the money or how I will improve the world with the trip. Having done much without the money, having brightened my corner of the world without the trip, is the test of how I will use the advantages, and the reliable truth where all else is but a hopeful expectation. It is not that I haven’t known this was my downfall; it’s that I have stubbornly refused to budge from it. The criterion is wrong and a form of self-flattery to those who employ it. The poem I wrote yesterday, the class I taught yesterday, is the only thing known, the only thing knowable, and upon that should judgments be made.
Do I want to go to India? Not any more. Of course, I never wanted to go more than I did when GW appeared at my office, as he has never done before, and I knew why he was there.
A great yellow steam shovel is digging in the street in front of my house, putting in my gas service. It looks to me like they’re digging where the water line is, but I suppose they know their business. It might be a relief for the whole thing to blow up.
Rehearsal in Waynesville last night. It’s maddening to have two directors whispering to each other while you’re trying to do a scene. Mickey gave me a beautiful photograph from her show.
Yellow morning. My windows are closed against the chill, but one happy bird-voice hammers through.
GW came to my office yesterday with news that I had not been selected for the India trip this summer, the reason being, basically, that I had not gratified the sort of people who look for that sort of thing by making up a story about how I was going to teach Hinduism to homeless kids when I got home. I recognized as I was dealing with the twin onslaughts of anger and disappointment that this is probably the story of most of my unsuccessful applications for grants and perquisites. I believe–I know–that the best guide to future action is past action, and, displaying the objective fact of my record instead, I have always fallen short on creating the fiction of what I will do with the money or how I will improve the world with the trip. Having done much without the money, having brightened my corner of the world without the trip, is the test of how I will use the advantages, and the reliable truth where all else is but a hopeful expectation. It is not that I haven’t known this was my downfall; it’s that I have stubbornly refused to budge from it. The criterion is wrong and a form of self-flattery to those who employ it. The poem I wrote yesterday, the class I taught yesterday, is the only thing known, the only thing knowable, and upon that should judgments be made.
Do I want to go to India? Not any more. Of course, I never wanted to go more than I did when GW appeared at my office, as he has never done before, and I knew why he was there.
A great yellow steam shovel is digging in the street in front of my house, putting in my gas service. It looks to me like they’re digging where the water line is, but I suppose they know their business. It might be a relief for the whole thing to blow up.
Rehearsal in Waynesville last night. It’s maddening to have two directors whispering to each other while you’re trying to do a scene. Mickey gave me a beautiful photograph from her show.
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