October 9, 2012

Yesterday a boiling cauldron of deeds. I finished Act I of The Mermaid. I sent off my application for an artist’s grant from the state (my eighteenth application, with no reason to think it will find more success than the others). Worked out memorably at the Y (still stretching against leg cramps), met with TD at Starbucks to convince him to enter his screenplay for a grant as well. Did not once look at my portfolio. Made a slumgullion of the vegetables left from the garden, peppers, tomatoes, red onions, the un-eggplant looking white eggplant. Then it was noon.

The Mermaid sends me back to those days when I set down to write and the writing rolled out before me like landscape before a moving car. All I had to do is look, and write. Great joy, but also, behind the joy, anxiety that this too will never find its way into the world. Does the world need it? Not so much as a cure for cancer, as much as anything onstage now. I hear MM saying the lines as I write them. I must tell him.

Late dream that DJ and I were in a hurricane on the coast. I parked the car, with him in it, and ran. I assumed he’d follow, but he didn’t. When the wind died down, I went back to look, and the street was empty, no cars, no people at all, just emptiness and debris.

No frost yet, but the garden looks as battered as after a night of frost, or it will when the light comes. It must sense what’s coming, give up, some of it, on its own terms.

October 7, 2012

The roof leaks again. I thought my golden friend had fixed it. No match for the autumn rains.

Cantaria sang for Blue Ridge Pride yesterday afternoon. It was far more clement than it had been the year before. Bright skies. Enthusiastic audience. Had a sort of crush on the one who was singing to my left, so there was an interesting frisson to the event.

Bought a Mac Book.

Can hardly bear looking at my garden, for it’s in the transition between abundance and productivity and the sort quiescence which allows one to dig it up and prepare for the next round.

The movie Battleship (which wasn’t as bad as everyone said) and shots of moonshine in apricot nectar at DJ’s. Staggering home in the dark and the unanticipated cold.

October 6, 2012

Aches and bruises left over from yesterday’s tumble. Everything is worse than you think it’s going to be, except those things which you think are going to be really bad. Often they’re nothing at all.

October 5, 2012

Zach had double booked (more likely I had forgotten a changed arrangement) so I went without the massage around which I had planned my morning. Worse, leaving the building I slipped on the steps and crashed down, breaking the step under me. I could feel my skeleton jolt inside me, and I had to sit for a moment before being assured nothing–but the step–was broken. Gashed elbow seems to be the only effect, aside from jolted nerves. There was something on the step which was invisible and slick as ice. Didn’t matter going up, but coming down it did. What I took to be a homeless man helped me up and said he'd pray for me. The receptionist who came out to investigate fell at exactly the place I had done. She was afraid to get up, so I held her hand and eased her down the remaining steps. Stopped for an extra coffee coming home.

Working on my lost-play-of-Shakespeare play. I’d thought of it long ago, but forgot, until TD reminded me over coffee. It’s good to have a specific project again. I know it’s right because it’s going fast and, if not easily, unwaveringly.

Went downtown to see Kenn’s work at the new Aloft hotel. Wine on the fine balcony overlooking Biltmore Avenue. He was being lionized so I didn’t have much time with him, but I discovered I was in the midst of a gallery walk, which I have not attended in a long time. Walked among the galleries, seeing much I liked but nothing I wanted. It used to be I couldn’t walk down the street without seeing somebody I knew.

October 4, 2012

Blue day, scorching but still, somehow, autumnal.

Migrating parula warblers in the limbs over the back yard.

Attended my last meeting as a member of the Board of the Friends of the Warren Wilson Library. It was an interesting enterprise, if an anomalous one.

Colossal directory of the alumni of Syracuse University arrives at my door. I must have ordered it thinking I would be in it, or some of the friends I remember, but it is all undergraduates. Too big even for a doorstop.

Committee meeting in the science building. Seven of us were present, representing a commitment of time at 75 minutes x 7. We had each read and considered the applications set for consideration that day, and the submitters had presumably spent many hours meeting our rather precise requirements. We were all serious and honorable. Nevertheless, one recognized that all that expenditure on all sides had no necessary influence on the delivery of curriculum, and was not likely to improve even a single student’s educational experience. It was all, in the basic sense, irrelevant. It was all busywork set up by people with a need to make busywork look like real work. After that revelation came the one whereby I realized that–perhaps accidentally–I have conducted my career correctly, avoiding what I sensed may be irrelevant to education and to art, concentrating on what needed to be done, despite the fact that this choice marginalized me. I may be marginalized, but there are a thousand hours not wasted, and I will take that as a bargain.

Sophie observes that the ancient Greeks in greeting shouted, “Happiness!,” the Romans, “Health!”
“Upon that,” she continues,”turns the whole story of two civilizations.”

Off to Flat Rock to see their new musical, Zelda. I get down there infrequently enough for it to make an impression. It’s clearly more than a venue; it is a destination, with places to eat and lounge, with eager, helpful students waving you into parking places at the edges of the actual flat rock, which is not flat at all but more like a gouged and pitted shield. The boy at the T-shirt cart was practicing his time step as he waited for customers to make their choices. It was nice to be the youngster in the crowd again. Whatever mirth in the campus, the show itself was pretty awful. Flat Rock had poured its considerable resources and expertise into putting over a generic automaton, a show made to look and sound like a Broadway show, but without any soul whatever. The subject was supposed to have some regional flavor–Zelda having suffered and died in Asheville and all– but it could have been about any two glamorous people anywhere, for all the characterization was bad Broadway, telegraphed to the audience by timeworn gestures and signature pieces. It was not about anything but the collaborators’ pride in being able to make a show by collage, without having to bother with imagination, inspiration, an actual melody, or even that much research.  It was not quite dreadful, for the performance was excellent. But I thought overmuch of the long ride home, and gloated overmuch that I had not bought my own ticket.

October 2, 2012

Driving dark rain.

Joe Biden throwing the campus into turmoil with his appearance later today. Classes canceled, uncertainty about parking. I suppose it’s an honor. I would go see him if it were easier.

In contact with my director for Night Music, though he not with me just yet.

Daniel calls the Prius “the vaginamobile.”

Made magnificent chili from my homegrown tomatoes, onions, peppers. Did not grow the beef. There’s a sharpness to homegrown tomatoes in a recipe (I noticed this when I made tomato soup) that’s not in canned versions. A greenness, one might say. They probably purge it with sugar, though I rather like it.

One remembers the famous announcement from our Provost that the university was turning to a “culture of evidence.” That was the opening slip of the assessment debacle. Though there’s nothing to criticize in the first few seconds after the words are uttered– of course we are and always have been a culture of evidence– another moment’s reflection reveals a central difficulty. To whom is this evidence presented, and with what methods of evaluation? Nobody minds being held accountable, but the question is, to whom? It makes perfect sense for the each department to hold itself up constantly to the scrutiny of its own best practices, and, so far as I can tell, that’s what had been happening since I came to teach. But for the French department and the Chemistry department and Lit and Art to be held up to the general scrutiny of the administration– or any heterogeneous body assembled for that purpose–is not only insulting but absurd. The administration which insists on reviewing the practices of the individual departments lacks the expertise to do so. One should not be evaluated by those whose understanding of one’s practice is less than one’s own. And yet, this is precisely the demand that was made, with much grumbling from the faculty but, oddly, no serious resistance. Recognition of their own incompetence to evaluate properly has led the administration to insist on new criteria of assessment, a Procrustean bed whereupon the most disparate things are reduced and made to conform to some pattern the assessors think they can recognize. All is in the service of the limitations of the assessors, while the actual achievements, practices, and ambitions of the individual disciplines are rendered irrelevant. It is not merely destructive, it is risible. Someone standing outside of us would be writing a comic operetta.

My sister’s birthday. Hanging with her this weekend in Georgia, I had this thought: she is the most successful person I know.

October 1, 2012

Late rising, though it is still dark.

Cantaria grows by a few singers a night. Our sound must be quite formidable –rough and formidable just now. Some of our time is frittered away by divas, some of it by chatterboxes. But that many gay men together in the same place, what else could be expected?

Unearthed a sheet of paper, and remembered that during the last class my student taught I had been practicing writing with my left hand. On that day I wrote more with my left hand than on all the days of my life before. Felt like a student again, doodling like mad, watching the clock.

Obama ahead in most polls in most constituencies. This is well, for a Republican administration is unthinkable. They’ve not even bothered to conceal their selfishness and scheming love of inequity. They have not participated in government for four years except to insure that the president’s plans should fail. They probably think of what they do as politics, but it is actually evil. Amazingly, Romney feels worse than Bush. One imagined that could not happen. Bush had at least a bit of the scamp about him. Solemn evil is worse than twinkling incompetence. Justice would be for the Republicans never again to have a national presence, having lost the right to govern anything, anywhere.