April 8, 2022

Changeable days, blue sky followed by tremendous storm. Planted avens, spaded up more grass, settled the iron butterfly and the cement swan into new places. Bought a white geranium to keep by the fireplace until the freezes end. 

Suzanne says that DN is “hard and clear.” I always thought that if clarity could be achieved, all else would fall in line. 

Rehearsals compromised by hoarseness, but I do manage to get through. S cannot resist the temptation to vulgarize. I should endure this or move on. 

D characterizes his experience at All Souls as a radical inroad into “one of the most affluent churches in the area.” To those of us who have seen the books this is laughable. The project was an artistic coming-of-age. He is hugely proud of the work he did with this, and, all in all, he deserves to be. 

Bought a copy of Katherine Ann Porter’s Flowering Judas for $1 at the library. Into the pages its former owner had pressed flowers, all beige and translucent now. 

Reading about Elizabeth Hardwick. The path of the critic is one I might have taken, but didn’t. The Johns Hopkins debacle may have been the switch that turned me onto a purely, or primarily, creative track. Are there–what?– 20 people who make their living as critics in America? 100? Speaking only of the Asheville scene, a solid critic is what it most needs and what it sometimes pretends to want, but which it will never welcome, or tolerate. The contemporary perspective refuses the idea that some things are better than others. It maintains that the pure expression of the individual cannot be improved upon, and that it is an affront to try. I’m singing my song; who are you to say I’m under pitch or the lyrics are stupid? It’s not that I don’t understand that perspective, but till the end of days I’ll make a clear distinction between what suits my taste and what is great. Long ago I set myself the task of bringing those two principles as close together as possible. I don’t worry when there’s still a gap, but I do acknowledge it. 

I’m going to teach a class one day on the Objectivity of Aesthetics. 

Had hives for the second time in my life. Trying to imagine why, I recollected that I’d had nothing to eat but cashews. They may have been the culprit the first time too.

Wrote a poem first thing this morning. Picked up the notebook moments ago (it is now noon) and was surprised, having forgotten it. 

April 5, 2022

Swept speedwell and a yellow calla off the half-price table at Ace Hardware and got them into the ground before this formidable rain began. Rolling thunder. 

Ran across some videos made by Steve in his Buster mode. Of all the things I brag on, it’s seldom that I was the first boyfriend of a significant porn star.  

Maud

 

April 4, 2022

Something was keeping me from writing. Not from the ability to do it, but from the desire. Whatever that was went away today, and I have churned out many paragraphs. The material is new, to be sewn into an old story. 

I went to G’s Facebook page today. It has not been taken down, and speaks of happier times.

The strangeness of the souls we live with! Since she came to live with me, Maud has pursued a pattern of claiming one space after another as her own, dwelling there almost exclusively, then moving on to the next one without a look back. Sometimes she’s hidden; sometimes she’s in plain sight. It’s only a real problem is when it’s at the far corner of the study, at the highest place in the house, when the litterbox is too remote and she adapts a corner of the floor for that purpose. Now she’s in the tenth or eleventh rotation of the TV stand, wedged in the little slot behind the cable box and the DVD player. Before that it was buried in my winter coat on the guest bed. Before that it was on the chair looking out the front window. Sometimes it’s in the bathroom cupboard, shut in her cave like a puma. 

Projection

 

April 3, 2022

Phlegm made me useless in choir this morning. Hope I was ornamental.

The Magnetic did excellently well at All Souls in the afternoon. I say that with an asterisk in my voice, for, despite my warnings, no more than one word in five could be heard. It has been years (I guess not since Montford Park) since I’ve heard the command “Project!” from a director. Actors expend no effort with their voices, and seemingly are never told that a conversational tone will not do. Also, someone brought a baby. The baby wasn’t misbehaved in the least bit, but the random little baby noises he made had better breath support and projection than the actors on stage. The work was at least twice as good as anybody was able to understand.

 

April 2, 2022

Fatboy cropping grass in the back yard. I shoo a starling away from the suet. 

Nap dream. I’m helping my father find a bathroom he can use on the second story of a huge old house. I see, but he does not, his mother hiding behind a cabinet in the hall. I wonder if I should tell him. 

 April 1, 2022

Signed horrific checks payable to the treasuries of the US and NC. As I wrote, the secretary told me how she had been hit hard by child support (which she was apparently paying) and how her daughter, visiting a while, had clogged the toilet upon her first use. 

Planted a hillock of Shasta daisy and a new patch of triphyllum. 

Did my first period of duty as the Resource Desk at All Souls. Had one call left over from yesterday, which had already been taken care of. Stuffed envelopes in the work room for a while. In any such place there will be chatterers and others who keep silence. The chatterers are by no means the slower workers. I keep silence. 

Went to the season opening gala at the Magnetic. It was lively and boisterous, and I was much better known than I knew. But for the most part, this generation of theater people is one, two generations removed from the generation which I dominated, when directors would call and I would tell them the part I’d do. Except in imagination, I do not miss that at all. These young actors are so good that if I, young again, fell among them, things might not be the same. I was uneasy. I crept into the corner in the whirl of so much energy. I remembered why I had declined long ago– even though I would always act–to become a “theater person.” Self-demonstration is foreign to me except on paper. Magnetic forms an alliance with Anam Cara, a cooperative which emphasizes what its founder calls “abstract, physical theater.” You give actors a task or an image and a few minutes in which to discover how to act it out. Fascinating, actually, and the results last night were impressive. I’m so script-oriented that I wonder what could be the use of that except as a party game or a way to make the realization of text more expressive. Preview of a Christmas show so gobsmackingly bad it eludes vocabulary to describe it, its badness temporarily disguised by antic and effortful acting. The effort of the acting becomes laughable– and therefore, in a way, pleasing–on its own. 

 

March 31, 2022

Official notice from the university that GH has resigned and will be, so far as we are concerned, blotted from the Book of Life. His name was not mentioned in any of the communiques. 

Turned down the invitation to serve of the Magnetic board. 

I have a new grand-niece, Alma Jane, born last night in Colorado.