October 17, 2018

I watch the society of the department whirl around me. I am now the old man, and the kids respect me without including me. It’s lonely, but so to be expected that nothing can be said. They are more corporate and attentive to the rules than we used to be, climbing their way up the committee ladders. This does not seem to have paved our way within the institution.  We’re seriously underhanded and can teach no electives, but our hiring requests keep getting turned down. I think sometimes I did everything wrong in connection to the university. In this I seem to have been following a plan laid for me when I arrived. “This one is special.” Perhaps I was. Perhaps I wasn’t.

October 16, 2018

Take what I believe to be the last elements of my show to the framers. If I ever actually expected to have a show I might have been more provident in this area. Writing well and steadily on short fiction, having to fight off the angels of futility to get back to the novels.

October 15, 2018

I write a short story as my students take their 8 AM exam.

October 14, 2018

Arrive in my study to hear a tremendous skein of geese flying and honking over the roof. The squirrels are in a frenzy of activity trying to get all the walnuts into the ground, which they will forget, which will sprout and require me to dig them out next summer.

Sadness over my life. I lie down and sleep it away. That I do lie down and sleep it away seems one of the greater gifts.

October 13, 2018

I never know for sure what has interceded when I look and days have passed since I last recorded. It’s not as though there’s not time. . . though, perhaps, there’s no time.

Gave Tennyson a triumph in class on Friday. 

Most of my students though A was a “jackass” when he came to the workshop. This surprised me because I didn’t see that at all. I thought he was candid and maybe a bit heroic. Maybe those qualities read as “jackass” to the young.

Impressed myself by getting the work done that finishes off the garden in preparation for winter. All the bulbs are planted, and what is not finished can wait for a day or a season. The terrible exhaustion abates measurably, a contributing factor to my success.

AW, our colleague, is caught by the police removing political signs. The local Republicans are in a froth about it, of course. Both AW and our chairman have received death threats, and people solemnly ask “is THAT what they’re teaching at that university?” It’s all so petty it’s probably old news even as I remark on it. It’s mostly a matter of bad luck that she got caught. You do perhaps wonder what possessed a grown woman. . . . Me, I would have tried to incite my students to do it. . . .

Proofing done for The Falls of the Wyona. There was less of it than might be expected, fewer mistakes, fewer passages of questionable taste. I respected and was grateful for their punctiliousness.

I believe I have enough paintings for the show. Took the last to be framed today. What will people think of it? I don’t know, and since there has been no reviewing apparatus since I was fired from the CT, I probably will never know.  I am painting what I like the way I like it, so perhaps the main thins is accomplished. 

Downtown to see Frost/Nixon and have a drink at Zambra’s. The play requires impersonation, and impersonation is hard to judge except as to believability, and in that realm, Michael was magnificent. Nixon was always the smartest person on stage. I remember the real thing, but I was young, and remember it mostly for being boring.

Blue jays in the blue sky, the remnant of the orange zinnias buzzing in the clash of light.

October 8, 2018

Day of almost comic productivity. Rose with a sense of vast well-being. In the last dream I had been playing in bed with my sons. Went for the first time since August to High-5, where I wrote an ending to the poem about Ireland. Tom was sitting with Wind, gnawing the edges of their screenplay. Most of my adult life was spent pursuing two relationships that would never bear fruit. Nothing to be done about that except to acknowledge.Then I went to the studio where I repainted the landscape that’s been hanging in my dining room. Dabbled, repainted, detailed, varnished. Came home and prepared the second raised bed. The edited version of The Falls of the Wyona arrived in email; that will be the great task of the week. Precision which so far exceeds mine is a wonder and a tribulation.

Trying not to listen to the news.

October 7, 2018

Turned off all electric media and sat with my fingers arched over the keys until I had made a poem. The poem is about my Irish lovers, a subject never dealt with fully, or in a way even I might call comprehensive. It is a beginning. It was beautiful, and then I slept.