July 21, 2012

The cleaning girls smashed the green lamp in the hall, assuring me that every fragment had been swept up. Every fragment hadn’t, and last night there was something of a theater of blood as a sliver slit open my heel. I’m still finding drops and gobbets of gore by the pale morning light.

Woke to turbulent dreams of trying to get to two gets of rehearsals at once. The actor Ben Stiller was the director of one of them, a sort of ballet based on some Victorian novel, and I was trying to please him. He had been ill and was very delicate.

Finished Night Music. What a curious history this play has had, having been almost fully contained in another play with, I thought, a completely different subject. It’s testament to my theory that forcing a work into saying what you mean it to say is always a mistake. This is what I meant when I was straining to say what I thought I meant..

Good painting at the studio. Amy bought Inside the Blizzard.

July 19, 2012

Gave my first red tomato to Jack and Leland, but ate the first golden ones myself. They were hot from the sun, sweet, Edenic.

July 18, 2012

Overcast as the day leans toward afternoon thunder. In this time of relaxation I must still husband my time, fending off (unsuccessfully) temporal assaults on all sides. The chiropractor– whom I went to heal my shoulder, and who hasn’t touched my shoulder– wants my time, and the cupping therapy guy wants my time and I refrain from saying, “leave me alone, you’re a quack,” because I might be wrong, My doubts about the various therapies offered to me this summer build on the fact that there was a sales pitch before there were any diagnostics, and the one sees problems and the other sees progress where I see none.

Blue Raincoat Theater sent, more or less randomly, notice of Tread Softly, the first annual Yeats festival, to be held in Sligo beginning next week. It took me as long as it took to check the dates to decide to go. So, against my earlier determination, I am off to Ireland next Thursday. I was cautious at first, trying to think of reasons not to do it, but now that I’m committed, I’m glad and excited. I’ll be staying in the Glass House, which replaced the Silver Swan– where I always dreamed of staying but never could–at the pool where the Garavogue tumbles down to become an estuary. I got the very last ticket to the reading by Seamus Heaney at Hawk’s Well. When I hung up the phone I watched “Sold Out” appear on the ticketing screen. I’ve thought of nothing but Sligo since I booked the room and the flight.

First Stage in Los Angeles will be putting on The Future of the Theater on July 27.

Pavel passed Edward the King along to a friend who might produce it at the Celebration Theater in Los Angeles.

Began a play featuring Voltaire and Madame du Pompadour.

Drinks with J to discuss our class. Her aversion to the classics is deep-seated. I mentioned that I was re-reading The Iliad, and she took the news as if I’d confessed to violent crime. I think the reaction has something to do with resentment of authority, of a type seen almost exclusively (according to my experience in the classroom) in women. If a work is likely to be approved by the sort of person by whom one has felt slighted or by whom one was once corrected, then the work must have tyrannical intent. The actual content of the piece makes little difference, only its assumed place on what is supposed to be the hierarchy of the canon. I can see why resigning oneself to the perception that Homer and Shakespeare, etc, really are That Good is enraging. I’m a little enraged by it myself, but seeing is believing. J assumes that all opinions and all achievements are more or less equal, and so the idea of discontinuity between Homer and Jane the Angry Lesbian at Open Mic at the coffee shop infuriates her. I think. Maybe she, as I do sometimes, takes positions in order to support a point with which she does not absolutely concur. I’m championing Homer right now because of the re-reading, and the conviction that no on else has ever written like that, nor will. Book XX is the full Sublime. “Simplicity,” you want to say, is the key, but then you must add, “the Simplicity of Sunrise over All the High Places of the World.” It is not simple at all, but its complexity defeats scrutiny.  I can read one book or two before needing to lie down. Who would I be out of that crew? Odysseus, I think, though I cherish the bit of god-assaulting Diomedes in me.

July 15, 2012

Heard a sung version of Blake’s “Nurse’s Song” from Innocence, and thought it the single finest poem in the world, expressing all that poetry really wants to express. How do you know when a poem is good? All the hills echoed-ed.

Transcribed 16th and Curtis from my traveling journal.

July 14, 2012

Yellow dawn. Kevin greeting it.

When I came into the study, an indigo bunting was perched within the rose bush.

 A robin lay drowned in Kevin’s favorite pond. Maybe he was telling me that, and I didn’t know how to listen.

Painted well early morning at the studio. Planted a mulberry tree and a surrounding apron of heliotrope in light opened by the breaking of the branch. Still sweating from the labor, which includes, as ever, the breaking of tangles of vines and the uplifting of endless massive stones. But it means I can nap in good conscience the rest of the afternoon.

Denver

July 13, 2012

Sweet rain brought my hibiscuses to white and pink and scarlet flower. Kevin sings happily in the midst of his kingdom which now includes the world. Monteverdi on Spotify. Of all composers, Monteverdi is the most like rain.

Did not keep good record during the time in Denver, but will try to catch up. Getting there was none of the fun at all. Every single leg of the journey with United Airlines was plagued by some completely (or nearly so) avoidable disaster. They keep gobbling up other airlines while incapable of running the one they had to begin. Even arriving back, finally, at 11 last night was not the end of it. DJ and I are awaiting our “delayed” baggage, which one could hardly blame for not being able to follow the route of our changes and re-bookings. On the other side, they went out of their way to help DJ with difficulties in getting into and out of the plane. The airline people actually before us were sweet and helpful, shielding the money grubbers who run thing so stupidly and ruinously from behind closed doors. I heard myself grumbling as I walked through the empty corridor of the Asheville airport seven hours after we were due, “There is no reason for it to be so hard.”

Denver is a welcoming, friendly, high-hearted city, a truth I learned on my first visit, and which my second visit confirmed. There was a day of rain (quenching the fires that burned Colorado), but other than that the weather was blue, stainless, perfect. Our name tags singled us out, and the locals were happy to see us. I suppose we spent wildly. But also, I think they were just curious, in the sweetest of ways. The Curtis Hotel is playful, with each floor dedicated to a different genre of movie (we were Science Fiction). The hotel staff was friendly and, to use the word again-- because it was both surprising and delightful-- playful. I got into the practice of rising when I usually do (which is two hours earlier in Colorado) and having coffee at the Starbucks at 16th and Curtis. Out of that I got a one-act play (about having coffee at the corner of Curtis and 16th and watching the world go by) and a hundred observations to keep with me and mull over. The local homeless evidently start their day there too; I got to know at least three of them fairly intimately: the handsome, ruined loner with his wadded sleeping bag under his arm, the wild-man artsy type, the screaming insane lady who is either cajoling or lamenting, wrapped in a pale gray blanket. From there I moved to the Starbucks on Larimer, where I watched the artsy part of the city waking. Cocktails on Larimer, too, of a night. I had forgotten (since New York) the joy of being drunk in the afternoon. Denver gave that back to me. Of course I will be remembering random impressions from now on. Such as the horde of dragonflies outside our 8th floor window. Such as the half moon pale in the pale sky when I rose to go to Starbucks. Such as the rabbit grazing in peace under the feet of six thousand partygoers in the sculpture garden. Such as the Hispanic boy in the elevator who kissed my shoulder and said, “I can’t find my boyfriend, and I am so very horny,” and all I could think was, “You are so very young!”

GALA itself was excellently organized, flawlessly executed, and–contrary to my expectations–a mountaintop experience. Many of the choruses were good. Some of them passed good into categories of excellence all their own, including the choirs from Calgary, San Francisco, Seattle. Orange County, Portland. Such beauty is not satisfying; it is shocking, journey-provoking. I was moved to tears about half the time, a great and necessary cleansing. Some choruses were bad. No need to name them. After we had sung I thought I’d put us in the “quite good” category, but not in the same league with the big choruses whose oceanic tone cannot be rivaled by a group like ours. There’s no sensation like that of a mass of men singing together. Our last piece went awry, but exuberance guided us through, and that is a better pilot than caution We were not quite the smallest chorus, but we were from the smallest town represented. Sick with nerves, which is unlike me, but all was well when I stepped out in front of what I suppose to be my largest audience ever Once on stage I was so happy tears stood in my eyes. I personally had never sung those pieces better, and the thrill of a thousand people standing and cheering for you is epically inspiring. The audiences tended to be over-appreciative, but that was part of the tone of the whole event, supportive, brotherly, joyful, emotional, open-hearted. That it managed to be all those things while still being artistically credible– nay, artistically singular–is the biggest tribute I have to pay. I was sick of singing a month ago, Now I want to sing again as soon as I can.
 
The funny woman on the elevator, who remarked wryly about her duty to attend “the woman’s kumbaya concert. . . .”
The boys from Buffalo who adopted me in ten seconds, took my picture with themselves, and sent me home with one of their gold buffalo membership pins. . . .
The girl from Dublin who gave me a lollipop whenever she saw me, because I had complained I had not gotten one of the lollipops they were passing out. . .
The rickshaw boy who debated with me the relative merits of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky . . .

Returned to the art museum, a miscalculation, considering the state of exhaustion DJ and I were in.  Saw maybe half of it, though all was lovely. One of the memorable images is of the museum snack bar girl running across the pavement shouting my name, to tell me that the cab she had called for us was on its way.

On the homefront, Ben the Tree Guy had taken out one of the big yellow pines.

July 8, 2012

Epic (if trivial) dream through the night. My mother and I ran a second-hand store. We would put certain things in front of the house on a vast concrete apron– sometimes a mobile home, sometimes salt shakers-- and people would come buy them. Aunt Esther visited, and I complained because she kept the house too hot. This was one of those dreams shallow enough that I could critique it as it unrolled, and to which I would return after moments of wakefulness. Sour stomach caused by a more powerful wine than I’m used to.

In a few hours we’re on a plane. There's never more to do in a house than two hours before you must be at the airport.