December 6, 2009
Later night than I am used to since returning from London. I finished Michael Furey, the first draft, anyway. My wallet is lost or stolen. Made the necessary phone calls today, which can yet be unmade if, against hope, it is locked in the Y safe for safekeeping, and I will find it tomorrow. I think it was stolen from the robing room at church. That would be very sad, so I have not said it to more than one or two.
I was thinking of the places where I’ve been, London, Dublin, New York, and the fact that knowing them, how their streets lie, how they look in the morning or the evening light, is a little scandalous–the scandal of particularity. Before I knew them they could be any way at all. Now, they are but the way they are. How Dame Street turns just so. The grubbiness in front of the Bank of Ireland. The ugly modern building at the end of O’Connell Bridge. All this should be better, different. It should be able to grow and change as my knowledge of them changes. Imagination should be able to make real change in the things imagined.
As I was talking on the phone (to one of the credit card operators) I was watching out the window, and a turkey vulture flew very low over the house, south to north. Maybe I’m the only person in the world who would have taken this as a very good omen.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
December 5, 2009
Bought a little electric Christmas tree that sheds a blue lunar light from its clusters of bulbs. It’s not very Christmas-y, but it is wintery, and I have burned it all the night since I set it up.
Trying my first Julia Child recipe, cassoulet, for the read-through Monday night. It is stupendously complicated, yet I chose it because it was relatively uncomplicated, compared to the rest of the book. Those French peasants had time on their hands.
Bought a little electric Christmas tree that sheds a blue lunar light from its clusters of bulbs. It’s not very Christmas-y, but it is wintery, and I have burned it all the night since I set it up.
Trying my first Julia Child recipe, cassoulet, for the read-through Monday night. It is stupendously complicated, yet I chose it because it was relatively uncomplicated, compared to the rest of the book. Those French peasants had time on their hands.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
December 4, 2009
Cardinal Javier Lazano Barragan assures the world that gays are not going to heaven. I assure the world that A) his satanic eminence has no idea who's going to heaven and not, and B) it is Cardinal Barragan who is destined for the hell of his own creation, by reason of arrogance, malice, and blasphemy, blasphemy being the assigning of one’s own hatefulness and corruption to God. When will we have done with this? Does the Catholic Church have to be pulled down stone by stone before Christ can reign? One would have been content to let it die its long-delayed death in some suffocating scarlet corner of the Vatican, but perhaps in this patience is not called for.
Read Byron on the crosstrainer.
Cardinal Javier Lazano Barragan assures the world that gays are not going to heaven. I assure the world that A) his satanic eminence has no idea who's going to heaven and not, and B) it is Cardinal Barragan who is destined for the hell of his own creation, by reason of arrogance, malice, and blasphemy, blasphemy being the assigning of one’s own hatefulness and corruption to God. When will we have done with this? Does the Catholic Church have to be pulled down stone by stone before Christ can reign? One would have been content to let it die its long-delayed death in some suffocating scarlet corner of the Vatican, but perhaps in this patience is not called for.
Read Byron on the crosstrainer.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
December 3, 2009
And when I rose this morning and went to the Y, the moon was round and huge, set in a sky momentarily flawless.
It looks like I’ll be summering in Cambridge this year.
Critcher sends me the annual Christmas toy. What a sweet touch from the past!
The school day and finals and reading papers and the unfolding of Michael Furey take up almost all my energy. I can barely press the keys. I’m due to see a vampire film with friends in a few minutes. . .
And when I rose this morning and went to the Y, the moon was round and huge, set in a sky momentarily flawless.
It looks like I’ll be summering in Cambridge this year.
Critcher sends me the annual Christmas toy. What a sweet touch from the past!
The school day and finals and reading papers and the unfolding of Michael Furey take up almost all my energy. I can barely press the keys. I’m due to see a vampire film with friends in a few minutes. . .
November 30, 2009
Four in the morning. Very detailed dream. I was at a camp, a huge camp with hundreds of people in adjoining tents in long rows. There were vast common areas, like the covered pavilion at Covent Gardens. I was unfamiliar with everything in the camp, as though I had come late. Even the contents of my own tent had to be investigated with some surprise. If I had packed, I had thought of everything. I recognized nothing of my own. There was an elite group in the camp, like Order of the Arrow or Special Forces. Everyone wanted to be in it. I discovered that I was in the group, but I had no idea why, since I had spent most of my time trying to get oriented. But, there was my name, on the slowly turning silver sphere engraved with the list of the chosen. Then I went about trying to discover why I was on the list, so I could guess also what I was supposed to be doing. Was it scientific? Paramilitary? What duties were connected? I visited one of the few friends I had made, a heavy girl with glasses. On her table were laid out the fronds of ferns, which she was going to preserve and identify for a private herbarium. “Do I have to make a collection?” I was thinking, identifying ferns–real ones that I could identify now–at the end of the dream.
Began a play about Joyce’s Michael Furey. The badness of The Habit of Art mingled with the greatness of Othello to send me back to the keyboard in some fury. Yesterday I counted four projects that were trying to rush simultaneously out of the narrow portal of my time.
Four in the morning. Very detailed dream. I was at a camp, a huge camp with hundreds of people in adjoining tents in long rows. There were vast common areas, like the covered pavilion at Covent Gardens. I was unfamiliar with everything in the camp, as though I had come late. Even the contents of my own tent had to be investigated with some surprise. If I had packed, I had thought of everything. I recognized nothing of my own. There was an elite group in the camp, like Order of the Arrow or Special Forces. Everyone wanted to be in it. I discovered that I was in the group, but I had no idea why, since I had spent most of my time trying to get oriented. But, there was my name, on the slowly turning silver sphere engraved with the list of the chosen. Then I went about trying to discover why I was on the list, so I could guess also what I was supposed to be doing. Was it scientific? Paramilitary? What duties were connected? I visited one of the few friends I had made, a heavy girl with glasses. On her table were laid out the fronds of ferns, which she was going to preserve and identify for a private herbarium. “Do I have to make a collection?” I was thinking, identifying ferns–real ones that I could identify now–at the end of the dream.
Began a play about Joyce’s Michael Furey. The badness of The Habit of Art mingled with the greatness of Othello to send me back to the keyboard in some fury. Yesterday I counted four projects that were trying to rush simultaneously out of the narrow portal of my time.
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