August 8, 2011
Massacre in Copley. One never expects to type those words.
Maud was relating to something in the back yard before dawn. I turned the light on to expose a little opossum scrounging around on the terrace.
Digging and weeding so that the stone back stairs are now completely revealed, perhaps for the first time since I’ve lived here. It actually looks quite noble.
Dream of chasing a lost kitten into Mr Ralphsnyder’s yard, and finding there a menagerie, teaming and mysterious, some of the creatures extinct elsewhere.
Met RN and two handsome sons at the Newbridge Café. Tried to think of an excuse to invite them to eat with me, but nothing surfaced in time.
S&P downgrades the US credit rating, an almost unbelievable deed of arrogance and self-delight, distinguished from most deeds of arrogance and self-delight in that it cost real people hundreds of thousands in real wealth. Justice would mean annihilation for this self-serving organization, that they might contemplate the place in history they made for themselves in the unemployment line. But the deed does have the effect of embarrassing the right people, and maybe that justifies it minimally. The hysterically partisan brinksmanship of the Republican Party needs to be remembered in the roll call of idiocy. They did ask for it. There are so few things– violence in Ulster, the Opium Wars-- where all the blame is on one side, that one wonders at them, and welcomes with awe one more– the American budget catastrophe of 2011-- among their number
Arrived at the Y apparently at peak time, and decided to do a zumba class rather than wait for the weights. It was hell. It was hell in ways that are difficult to convey, as I suppose the hellishness of hell is too. Overcrowded; overcrowded, with latecomers pushing in nevertheless; showoffs blocking your view so you had only a vague notion of what the leader was doing; big stinky fat guy making part of the already crowded room uninhabitable; women piling their bags and shoes on the floor for you to trip on, as there’s evidently something declasse about the women’s locker room; everyone rushing past you to “hydrate” between songs, as though one cannot go five minutes without a drink; the motions, when you can see them, too subtle and intricate and arbitrary to count really as exercise; overcrowded, so that one’s tiny fragment of claustrophobia begins to swell like a sponge dropped in water; the leader, when you catch a glimpse of her, a middle-aged Anglo lady trying to heat up the room like a Latin temptress; all the wrong people shrieking and having a gay old time, and you ruining everything with a bad attitude you cannot account for. I ran. I pulled weights out of someone’s hands and finished my workout, shivering from the near approach to hell. Outside, though. it was briefly raining, and one blessed that so hard nothing else mattered.
Reading my tome of the Medicis, wondering what causes all the best people, sometimes, to be gathered in the same place.
Monday, August 8, 2011
August 7, 2011
PayPal has decided my dispute in my favor, and returns 124 pounds to my account. That’s approaching $200 for tickets to Richard III at the Old Vic for a seat which did not exist. I expected no such outcome. I wonder where the get the money; surely the perps did not allow themselves to be located.
Sold my push mower to Kelly for $20. I could probably have used it, but Roland bought it and I therefore hated it.
Weeding, I found a luna moth caterpillar among the vine roots. It was colossal. You’re tempted to use comparisons involving body parts, but it was quite a bit bigger than both of my thumbs together without quite approaching the girth of an arm. It was emerald green, squirming, almost sickening in its fulness of life. I tossed it in the deeper thickets, where I did not intent to weed today, to let it pursue its beautiful destiny.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
August 6, 2011
Insulting minim of rain yesterday afternoon. Just increased the dampness of the heat.
DJ’s cat Gracie had an adventure this evening. As I was coming up the walk, she was being mobbed at the window by a throng of birds. I heard the same throng for several evenings clustered around my chimney, but this time I saw them, attacking the cat as nearly as they dared. Gracie eventually got over-excited and hurled herself through the window, expelling the screen and landing on the ground. The birds took to the bushes. Gracie was confused about what happened, and I had to chase her around for a while, before she climbed a tree, got frightened a little way up, and allowed me to take her in my arms. Returned her and fixed the screen. Her master was gone and might know nothing of it.
There was a foam-green, five inch long mantis on the red car when the salesman took me to look at it. Gorgeous. I asked if that could be included in the package. The salesman thought I was joking.
Watched Altman’s A Wedding on DVD. Nashville redone as a B picture. But it did call to mind the evening I met Lillian Gish. She had given her presentation on the early years of cinema at Hiram, and as I left she was standing, quite alone, in the lobby of Hayden auditorium, waiting for her driver. I had her to herself until her driver came. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember noting how lively, witty, strikingly beautiful she was at what was even then an advanced age. I remember the sound of her voice relating anecdotes from films such as Way Down East. In a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, can get to D. W Griffith in two.
Insulting minim of rain yesterday afternoon. Just increased the dampness of the heat.
DJ’s cat Gracie had an adventure this evening. As I was coming up the walk, she was being mobbed at the window by a throng of birds. I heard the same throng for several evenings clustered around my chimney, but this time I saw them, attacking the cat as nearly as they dared. Gracie eventually got over-excited and hurled herself through the window, expelling the screen and landing on the ground. The birds took to the bushes. Gracie was confused about what happened, and I had to chase her around for a while, before she climbed a tree, got frightened a little way up, and allowed me to take her in my arms. Returned her and fixed the screen. Her master was gone and might know nothing of it.
There was a foam-green, five inch long mantis on the red car when the salesman took me to look at it. Gorgeous. I asked if that could be included in the package. The salesman thought I was joking.
Watched Altman’s A Wedding on DVD. Nashville redone as a B picture. But it did call to mind the evening I met Lillian Gish. She had given her presentation on the early years of cinema at Hiram, and as I left she was standing, quite alone, in the lobby of Hayden auditorium, waiting for her driver. I had her to herself until her driver came. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember noting how lively, witty, strikingly beautiful she was at what was even then an advanced age. I remember the sound of her voice relating anecdotes from films such as Way Down East. In a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, can get to D. W Griffith in two.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
August 5, 2011
Still, almost silent, torrid darkness of morning.
Kat has dropped out of Vance. She asks to be remembered if some other part appears some time.
Linda and David and Daniel appeared yesterday, leave this morning, perhaps have left already. The boys are alpha males, exactly the sort I almost never talked to in high school. Daniel is so handsome it seems almost artificial. They are full of sports and girls, and David of upcoming adventures at college, but each is the largest piece of the other’s universe. How fortunate to have permanent companionship. Reception for them at Avenue M. It was all merry and happy. The boys had Asheville at their feet last night, and I hope they made the best of it.
It has been a strange day. Woke dissatisfied, maybe wishing for sons rather than nephews. Excellent workout. I took the Prius to be inspected, but before two hours were over I had traded it in on a brand new model, of a color between rust and rose. With the trade-in it was, as DJ said, so cheap it was impossible not to buy it. But I was sad afterwards, as though I had betrayed my former car. Its anthropomorphizing reached epic proportions, and I could barely force my head back into a semblance of reason. It was not the merely car, surely, but something I had done or thought that day brought to mind all the betrayals, or things which could remotely be called betrayals, which I had committed in my life.
Since I was close, the first trip I took my new car on was up the Parkway to Sleepy Gap, where I turned north up the trail that was so familiar, though I may not have hiked it for several years. It had been long since I hiked anywhere alone, and it was a profound, and in some ways grievous, homecoming. The rage I used to build to when I had solitude to contemplate my life was gone. In its place was sadness– heavy, unfamiliar, but hugely to be preferred to the rage. The forest on a summer afternoon was almost unimaginably silent. At one point I heard grosbeaks twittering in the canopy, and at both ends of the journey was the polite, tentative pecking of woodpeckers. It all seemed mystical at the time, though I am not writing it the right way to convey that.
Sweating in the dark as I write. My bragging that I could live my life without air-conditioning begins to seem a little overblown.
Still, almost silent, torrid darkness of morning.
Kat has dropped out of Vance. She asks to be remembered if some other part appears some time.
Linda and David and Daniel appeared yesterday, leave this morning, perhaps have left already. The boys are alpha males, exactly the sort I almost never talked to in high school. Daniel is so handsome it seems almost artificial. They are full of sports and girls, and David of upcoming adventures at college, but each is the largest piece of the other’s universe. How fortunate to have permanent companionship. Reception for them at Avenue M. It was all merry and happy. The boys had Asheville at their feet last night, and I hope they made the best of it.
It has been a strange day. Woke dissatisfied, maybe wishing for sons rather than nephews. Excellent workout. I took the Prius to be inspected, but before two hours were over I had traded it in on a brand new model, of a color between rust and rose. With the trade-in it was, as DJ said, so cheap it was impossible not to buy it. But I was sad afterwards, as though I had betrayed my former car. Its anthropomorphizing reached epic proportions, and I could barely force my head back into a semblance of reason. It was not the merely car, surely, but something I had done or thought that day brought to mind all the betrayals, or things which could remotely be called betrayals, which I had committed in my life.
Since I was close, the first trip I took my new car on was up the Parkway to Sleepy Gap, where I turned north up the trail that was so familiar, though I may not have hiked it for several years. It had been long since I hiked anywhere alone, and it was a profound, and in some ways grievous, homecoming. The rage I used to build to when I had solitude to contemplate my life was gone. In its place was sadness– heavy, unfamiliar, but hugely to be preferred to the rage. The forest on a summer afternoon was almost unimaginably silent. At one point I heard grosbeaks twittering in the canopy, and at both ends of the journey was the polite, tentative pecking of woodpeckers. It all seemed mystical at the time, though I am not writing it the right way to convey that.
Sweating in the dark as I write. My bragging that I could live my life without air-conditioning begins to seem a little overblown.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
August 3, 2011
First reading of Vance at MHC last night. The outstanding impression was of the work I had to do to get it right. Did that work, and emailed out revisions this morning. The man playing Vance is sexy, which I didn’t anticipate. How would the script have changed had I known that? Did not gasp in horror at anyone’s ineptitude, nor they (audibly) at mine, so we are launched.
Second reading of Vance earlier tonight, when I delivered the revisions occasioned by last night’s reading. Improvement on all sides. The only part of play “development” that is really worthwhile is to hear your words in the mouths of actors. The skill a playwright needs at that moment is the ability to tell what is the actor’s problem and what is the line’s. My urge to brevity had left holes in the continuity, which had to be written closed. Also, I had scrimped and squeezed in order to suit a cast much smaller than the one I actually got.
First reading of Vance at MHC last night. The outstanding impression was of the work I had to do to get it right. Did that work, and emailed out revisions this morning. The man playing Vance is sexy, which I didn’t anticipate. How would the script have changed had I known that? Did not gasp in horror at anyone’s ineptitude, nor they (audibly) at mine, so we are launched.
Second reading of Vance earlier tonight, when I delivered the revisions occasioned by last night’s reading. Improvement on all sides. The only part of play “development” that is really worthwhile is to hear your words in the mouths of actors. The skill a playwright needs at that moment is the ability to tell what is the actor’s problem and what is the line’s. My urge to brevity had left holes in the continuity, which had to be written closed. Also, I had scrimped and squeezed in order to suit a cast much smaller than the one I actually got.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
August 2, 2011
Watched the garden heave from beneath, what was surely a mole digging about, happy in his invisibility. The plants were being lifted quite high, and they seem to have sustained no damage. Watered, worked-out. Weeded deeply, getting a sunburn atop my sunburn. Sense of accomplishment in me now that I prefer not to investigate. Kat Williams has come aboard as Venus in Vance. If she can act as she can sing, we’re golden. Stopped to see Justin in the daycare center at the Woodfin Y. It was a joy to see him again. The children gathered around when I came in. I thought of the cats, because of the similar frankness and innocence. One tiny boy handed me his brother’s shoe. One girl took it back again. The girl was– I don’t know what to say– back in the unenlightened days we would have used the word “spastic”–I saw her with her brothers out in the summer light, taking her time and going the longest way in the world to get into the van, and I uttered such a prayer for her, out of the briar patch of the heart, snagging every briar on the way.. Take her. . . mend her. . . something. . . anything. . .and in the middle of that grief I was overcome by something that felt like grief but wasn’t. I realized I was praying in extremis for someone other than myself. My selfishness had been proud and unexamined–no, obsessively examined, but perversely–for so long. This was a sudden freedom and a blessing that left my emotions shattered. I tried to bless the sad little girl but she blessed me more. I have no idea what to do with this world,
Stee’s package returned after its travels. Still mysterious why there was a surcharge at the other end. Think I won’t open it, maybe hang it as art just as it is.
Watched the garden heave from beneath, what was surely a mole digging about, happy in his invisibility. The plants were being lifted quite high, and they seem to have sustained no damage. Watered, worked-out. Weeded deeply, getting a sunburn atop my sunburn. Sense of accomplishment in me now that I prefer not to investigate. Kat Williams has come aboard as Venus in Vance. If she can act as she can sing, we’re golden. Stopped to see Justin in the daycare center at the Woodfin Y. It was a joy to see him again. The children gathered around when I came in. I thought of the cats, because of the similar frankness and innocence. One tiny boy handed me his brother’s shoe. One girl took it back again. The girl was– I don’t know what to say– back in the unenlightened days we would have used the word “spastic”–I saw her with her brothers out in the summer light, taking her time and going the longest way in the world to get into the van, and I uttered such a prayer for her, out of the briar patch of the heart, snagging every briar on the way.. Take her. . . mend her. . . something. . . anything. . .and in the middle of that grief I was overcome by something that felt like grief but wasn’t. I realized I was praying in extremis for someone other than myself. My selfishness had been proud and unexamined–no, obsessively examined, but perversely–for so long. This was a sudden freedom and a blessing that left my emotions shattered. I tried to bless the sad little girl but she blessed me more. I have no idea what to do with this world,
Stee’s package returned after its travels. Still mysterious why there was a surcharge at the other end. Think I won’t open it, maybe hang it as art just as it is.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
August 1, 2011
A few minutes of rain last night, not enough to dampen the ground, though enough to leave a pool on the patio table. Good days in the studio. Reading about Gertler and Carrington et al gave me courage in my own work.
J phones, wanting to meet at Bele Cher. I pick up the phone and hear the message exactly 12 hours too late.
A few minutes of rain last night, not enough to dampen the ground, though enough to leave a pool on the patio table. Good days in the studio. Reading about Gertler and Carrington et al gave me courage in my own work.
J phones, wanting to meet at Bele Cher. I pick up the phone and hear the message exactly 12 hours too late.
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