January 31, 2008
Saw Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at All Souls last night, as part of a series that is rather badly organized but offers, nevertheless, music the one never expects to hear in Asheville. The man at the ticket table was not only blind and had to peer searchingly at each ticket or document–even if he had peered at its identical twin seconds before–but couldn’t remember what things cost, and so the organizer (the darkly handsome symphony cellist) had to be sent for every time someone wanted to buy a ticket for any event but that. I stood the entire intermission behind the richest woman in Asheville, who was afraid he was charging her $10 extra for a ticket for Friday night. Turned out he was. The people next to me arrived late, chattered until they were hushed by a woman behind us, then, having chattered about the rudeness of someone shushing them, left early. Still, I loved Orfeo, and the performance was good enough that what I love was everywhere discernible. Amanda sang like an angel, and looked like one. The high artificiality of the piece strikes as the most amazing daring. Maybe it was even then. I want to write such works. When, that is, I have a moment to write anything at all.
After a final sally, the battle over my leave ends with complete capitulation on my part. It’s one of those situations especially bitter because I was not only right but needed the victory even if I hadn’t been right, would have needed a concession, or mercy, needed the thing I fought for despite the arguments against it. No go. K was rooted to the principle that the deans must never appear to have been in the wrong. I have never in my life continued a quarrel, held to a stance, fought a point for one second after I perceived I might be mistaken. Or for one second after I perceived that need lay on the other side, even if rectitude lay on mine. I sort of expected that energy to be returned to me by the universe. Again, no go.
Turquoise and flamingo dawn.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
January 30, 2008
Someone on the radio repeated that old saying, "More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones." I think that’s a lie. I have shed not one tear over getting what I wanted, unless it came too little or too late, which is not what I think they mean.
Mickey bought me a ring, a cool round moonstone which looks like the crown of Ra. She said it’s the color which reminds her of me. It's a different color at each looking, depending on how it's held.
Someone on the radio repeated that old saying, "More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones." I think that’s a lie. I have shed not one tear over getting what I wanted, unless it came too little or too late, which is not what I think they mean.
Mickey bought me a ring, a cool round moonstone which looks like the crown of Ra. She said it’s the color which reminds her of me. It's a different color at each looking, depending on how it's held.
January 29, 2008
Evening, had my interview with the deans–or whatever they are in this changing world--and my leave remains denied. I really thought there was a chance of talking my way back into it. I understood their point. They understood mine. They said nothing could be done. I assumed that was untrue, but you can repeat the same argument only so many times before you become sickening to your own ears. It’s a bad destructive, reductive choice, but I’m content that no amount or no quality of protest will change it. I’m sorry I argued, for instead of one day of sadness and defeat I have two. K may remember that years ago her signature was on the letter that denied me promotion, for a reason that appeared on none of the guidelines and which her committee had to make up to disadvantage me. The same thing happens now, though they cannot admit to it. My early journals are full of accounts of our friendship. I do not know what I do to create hostility. I mean always to be a gentle friend.
My sister sends the web page of the auction at our house. I cannot bear to look at it.
Today I became ordained in the Universal Life Church. It’s for Devin and Ariel’s wedding, but who knows what other mischief I can get into?
Evening, had my interview with the deans–or whatever they are in this changing world--and my leave remains denied. I really thought there was a chance of talking my way back into it. I understood their point. They understood mine. They said nothing could be done. I assumed that was untrue, but you can repeat the same argument only so many times before you become sickening to your own ears. It’s a bad destructive, reductive choice, but I’m content that no amount or no quality of protest will change it. I’m sorry I argued, for instead of one day of sadness and defeat I have two. K may remember that years ago her signature was on the letter that denied me promotion, for a reason that appeared on none of the guidelines and which her committee had to make up to disadvantage me. The same thing happens now, though they cannot admit to it. My early journals are full of accounts of our friendship. I do not know what I do to create hostility. I mean always to be a gentle friend.
My sister sends the web page of the auction at our house. I cannot bear to look at it.
Today I became ordained in the Universal Life Church. It’s for Devin and Ariel’s wedding, but who knows what other mischief I can get into?
January 28, 2008
Thanks to the tardy Valerie, Maud entered estrus last night. She vocalizes like a wounded bird, and holds her rump up to Titus, a likely enough male, but lacking the equipment she requires. Every now and then she screams when he swats her away, out of sheer frustration.
Turbulent waking.
Cody and Anne-Marie and Adam at rehearsal last night. They are dreams to work with, intelligent and responsive. Anne-Marie can do anything you ask, but you usually don’t have to ask. Adam is very young, and some of the emotions I sense when I’m talking to him I don’t fully understand, but, as I have said before, he has more native talent than we know what to do with. Plus, his family owns a cosmetics business of some kind, and he often smells like the gardens of the Taj Mahal. Cody too can do anything, will do anything. As their processes are so different, it is amazing to see Cody and Anne-Marie achieving the same level. One flies and the other burrows, and they get there at the same moment.
Thanks to the tardy Valerie, Maud entered estrus last night. She vocalizes like a wounded bird, and holds her rump up to Titus, a likely enough male, but lacking the equipment she requires. Every now and then she screams when he swats her away, out of sheer frustration.
Turbulent waking.
Cody and Anne-Marie and Adam at rehearsal last night. They are dreams to work with, intelligent and responsive. Anne-Marie can do anything you ask, but you usually don’t have to ask. Adam is very young, and some of the emotions I sense when I’m talking to him I don’t fully understand, but, as I have said before, he has more native talent than we know what to do with. Plus, his family owns a cosmetics business of some kind, and he often smells like the gardens of the Taj Mahal. Cody too can do anything, will do anything. As their processes are so different, it is amazing to see Cody and Anne-Marie achieving the same level. One flies and the other burrows, and they get there at the same moment.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
January 27, 2008
Cool dawn. Jocasta limps around on a foot injury she got outside. It’s much better today, and I no longer think I’ll have to take three cats to the vet tomorrow rather than two. Her going outside is the deal we struck between her no longer using the litter boxing and my needing to kill her for not doing so. She seems eager to go out when the time comes, and then vocally eager to get back in. Life runs on compromise.
Attended the monthly meeting of playwrights at the Democratic Headquarters, beside the Court House, in Hendersonville. Hendersonville fascinates me itself because it seems to hover between life and death, empty for blocks and blocks, then livened by a happy family strolling and looking in the windows. The playwrights are a perplexing lot. Like the town they meet in, they hover between one state of being and another, having worked hard enough at their craft seldom to be quite bad, but nowhere and at no time very good. Gina’s dialogue is quite good, often hilarious, and her professional experience makes her seem, to me, a little out of place. There was the one-time professional actor with his unfolding Beowulf musical. When I attended a year ago and a year before that, we were treated to bits of it, and yesterday we heard some of the music. It is by no means inept, which will make it hard to say-- if any one of that group indeed does say-- that it will not be performed anywhere, and if once never twice, being as lifeless and pointless as it is flawless. There is the man with the vague European accent who read with Dana Gioia in New York once, who speaks six languages, who brought with him copies of a magazine in which his poem appears, who presented himself as a cosmopolitan among the rubes, and whose piece was a sort of Continental melodrama, sophomoric and presumptuous in equal measure. One could accept them as hobbyists sharing their hobby if there weren’t such an anxiety of professionalism about them. So much talk of what producers want, of what theaters rejected them, and which with a note that actually mentioned the name of their play; of where one can send and what point in the "process" an ignored submission might be, parsing the silences as a Roman priest the guts of a sheep. Of course I was spoiled in the same way, at first in graduate school with poetry and later, if less direly, with theater, but I have found a way around it, a way to maintain perhaps a little purity. Going to their meeting is like a successful AA member entering a room full of drunks still in love with drunkenness. But they are steadfast and hold to their dreams, and one recoils from the seat of the scoffer.
Afterwards to the Cathedral to see Benjamin Bagby do Beowulf, in Anglo-Saxon, with harp. Bagby is a fine singer and an extraordinarily fine actor, and I had bought a seat where I could note every nuance of his skill. I wish we still spoke that language, which is maybe a little harder than ours to make yourself clear in, but whose essentiality and emotional truth was the greater for it. It was a superb performance. One imagines that the scops were exactly like that, except that in their presences you could move about and drink, which are the things which would have made the evening perfection.
Drove Chris A home afterwards. We detoured for a drink at a new bar on Patton, with a tiki-rich Polynesian theme and heavily tattooed bartenders. I liked it. People I didn’t know were shouting my name at me. There are not nights enough in a week to get in touch with old favorites while still exploring the ever-expanding offerings of even this little town.
This is the day when the auctioneers come and empty out the house on Foxboro. I though ten times of driving back and taking more, taking everything, taking something. Never had a moment. Now it is all gone. I’m not going to forgive something; I’m not sure what. I will probably have the key to the house in my drawer until the day I die.
Cool dawn. Jocasta limps around on a foot injury she got outside. It’s much better today, and I no longer think I’ll have to take three cats to the vet tomorrow rather than two. Her going outside is the deal we struck between her no longer using the litter boxing and my needing to kill her for not doing so. She seems eager to go out when the time comes, and then vocally eager to get back in. Life runs on compromise.
Attended the monthly meeting of playwrights at the Democratic Headquarters, beside the Court House, in Hendersonville. Hendersonville fascinates me itself because it seems to hover between life and death, empty for blocks and blocks, then livened by a happy family strolling and looking in the windows. The playwrights are a perplexing lot. Like the town they meet in, they hover between one state of being and another, having worked hard enough at their craft seldom to be quite bad, but nowhere and at no time very good. Gina’s dialogue is quite good, often hilarious, and her professional experience makes her seem, to me, a little out of place. There was the one-time professional actor with his unfolding Beowulf musical. When I attended a year ago and a year before that, we were treated to bits of it, and yesterday we heard some of the music. It is by no means inept, which will make it hard to say-- if any one of that group indeed does say-- that it will not be performed anywhere, and if once never twice, being as lifeless and pointless as it is flawless. There is the man with the vague European accent who read with Dana Gioia in New York once, who speaks six languages, who brought with him copies of a magazine in which his poem appears, who presented himself as a cosmopolitan among the rubes, and whose piece was a sort of Continental melodrama, sophomoric and presumptuous in equal measure. One could accept them as hobbyists sharing their hobby if there weren’t such an anxiety of professionalism about them. So much talk of what producers want, of what theaters rejected them, and which with a note that actually mentioned the name of their play; of where one can send and what point in the "process" an ignored submission might be, parsing the silences as a Roman priest the guts of a sheep. Of course I was spoiled in the same way, at first in graduate school with poetry and later, if less direly, with theater, but I have found a way around it, a way to maintain perhaps a little purity. Going to their meeting is like a successful AA member entering a room full of drunks still in love with drunkenness. But they are steadfast and hold to their dreams, and one recoils from the seat of the scoffer.
Afterwards to the Cathedral to see Benjamin Bagby do Beowulf, in Anglo-Saxon, with harp. Bagby is a fine singer and an extraordinarily fine actor, and I had bought a seat where I could note every nuance of his skill. I wish we still spoke that language, which is maybe a little harder than ours to make yourself clear in, but whose essentiality and emotional truth was the greater for it. It was a superb performance. One imagines that the scops were exactly like that, except that in their presences you could move about and drink, which are the things which would have made the evening perfection.
Drove Chris A home afterwards. We detoured for a drink at a new bar on Patton, with a tiki-rich Polynesian theme and heavily tattooed bartenders. I liked it. People I didn’t know were shouting my name at me. There are not nights enough in a week to get in touch with old favorites while still exploring the ever-expanding offerings of even this little town.
This is the day when the auctioneers come and empty out the house on Foxboro. I though ten times of driving back and taking more, taking everything, taking something. Never had a moment. Now it is all gone. I’m not going to forgive something; I’m not sure what. I will probably have the key to the house in my drawer until the day I die.
January 26, 2008
Digging around in old journals: I met TD on April 12, 1985.
Pavel sent me the program and the video from Before the Holy Temple at the First Stage festival in Hollywood. I was lucky in my brilliant and attractive actors. I was not lucky in the prize-giving. To be as fair as can be, the one the judges gave the prize to was not by any means the worst play on the program. What goes on in people’s minds?
Digging around in old journals: I met TD on April 12, 1985.
Pavel sent me the program and the video from Before the Holy Temple at the First Stage festival in Hollywood. I was lucky in my brilliant and attractive actors. I was not lucky in the prize-giving. To be as fair as can be, the one the judges gave the prize to was not by any means the worst play on the program. What goes on in people’s minds?
Friday, January 25, 2008
January 25, 2008
Maud and Circe fight for space on my lap, which I mention because they were supposed to be at the vet’s getting spayed today. I made them fast after midnight, rearranged my life so I could get them there at 7:30 as prescribed. At 7:50 I left the veterinary parking lot and took the cats home, for no one had come. When I phoned, the distraught Valerie said yes, she knows I was there (I’d left my card in the door) but her car wouldn’t start. ‘What would you like me to do, sir? What can I do to make it right? Would you like me to quit my job? I’d do that if it would keep you as a client . . .etc. . . " Whatever the words, the tone was quite aggressive, as though my complaint were crudely insensitive in the face of the trauma of her unstarting car. I should have said "Yes, I want you to quit your job," and seen where that would lead.
It has been a pretty awful week, all taken into consideration. But I was standing in my office yesterday, and happened to look through the window of the classroom opposite, and saw, on the stone rim of the building, a red tailed hawk. She was a first-year fledgling, I think, fluffed up and gigantic and perfectly at peace there on what might as well have been a cliff crag. I burst into tears. When I gathered myself, I alerted as many people as I could to the wonder, and we watched her for a good ten minutes before she leaned into the gray air and flapped off. The tears interested me, for they were the sign of an immediate release of tension allowed by the visitation of the bird. She was the gift from the sky, and I accepted her, for once, with exactly the right reaction. Meeting with Jason this morning-- after deepening the anguish of my veterinary assistant– was the same feeling, though that time I did not cry, but smiled.
I’ve decided to fight the rescinding of my Professional Development Leave. It’s likely that they will prize "face"– the unsullied impression that they know what they’re doing–over justice, but I felt it was, this time, worth the try.
My sister reports on the saga of my father’s new life in Alpharetta. He ordered the staff to take all the furniture out of his room except the bed, and to leave him alone. He refused to attend any of the activities, but then kind of liked the dancer (even if not liking the guitarist). In a gesture of determined detachment, he tossed all the files of his old life away, though the files contained the deed to his house, his insurance papers, and the like. Now my poor sister must go dumpster diving after work.
Dad insisted on leaving the amaryllis I got him for Christmas at the house in Akron. For some reason this made me very sad.
Good students, good classes, many "good"s stuffed into the pudding with a few but very bitter "bad"s.
Rehearsals for Crown of Shadow are an emotional crazy quilt for me. Most of the time I feel like some sort of fraud, all these eager and talented people spending their time bringing life to my words. I wonder when I will get over that? I felt it in New York, too, wondering when somebody would say it, would whisper, "What the hell are we putting so much time into THIS for?" On the other hand, I listen carefully to the words, and when the actors come to the end of a line and it’s perfect, in nuance, in tone, in expression, in meaning, there is one moment of perfect joy, in knowing that I have done it right, and that no one I know does it in the same way. I expect the festival to be savaged in the media, though there’s no reason to expect any media attention at all (this being Asheville), or malicious comments from colleagues in other theater companies, though to expect anything before it happens is to extend the lease of misery. All is well now, with the words in the mouths of my lovely actors. All might be well to the very end.
Maud and Circe fight for space on my lap, which I mention because they were supposed to be at the vet’s getting spayed today. I made them fast after midnight, rearranged my life so I could get them there at 7:30 as prescribed. At 7:50 I left the veterinary parking lot and took the cats home, for no one had come. When I phoned, the distraught Valerie said yes, she knows I was there (I’d left my card in the door) but her car wouldn’t start. ‘What would you like me to do, sir? What can I do to make it right? Would you like me to quit my job? I’d do that if it would keep you as a client . . .etc. . . " Whatever the words, the tone was quite aggressive, as though my complaint were crudely insensitive in the face of the trauma of her unstarting car. I should have said "Yes, I want you to quit your job," and seen where that would lead.
It has been a pretty awful week, all taken into consideration. But I was standing in my office yesterday, and happened to look through the window of the classroom opposite, and saw, on the stone rim of the building, a red tailed hawk. She was a first-year fledgling, I think, fluffed up and gigantic and perfectly at peace there on what might as well have been a cliff crag. I burst into tears. When I gathered myself, I alerted as many people as I could to the wonder, and we watched her for a good ten minutes before she leaned into the gray air and flapped off. The tears interested me, for they were the sign of an immediate release of tension allowed by the visitation of the bird. She was the gift from the sky, and I accepted her, for once, with exactly the right reaction. Meeting with Jason this morning-- after deepening the anguish of my veterinary assistant– was the same feeling, though that time I did not cry, but smiled.
I’ve decided to fight the rescinding of my Professional Development Leave. It’s likely that they will prize "face"– the unsullied impression that they know what they’re doing–over justice, but I felt it was, this time, worth the try.
My sister reports on the saga of my father’s new life in Alpharetta. He ordered the staff to take all the furniture out of his room except the bed, and to leave him alone. He refused to attend any of the activities, but then kind of liked the dancer (even if not liking the guitarist). In a gesture of determined detachment, he tossed all the files of his old life away, though the files contained the deed to his house, his insurance papers, and the like. Now my poor sister must go dumpster diving after work.
Dad insisted on leaving the amaryllis I got him for Christmas at the house in Akron. For some reason this made me very sad.
Good students, good classes, many "good"s stuffed into the pudding with a few but very bitter "bad"s.
Rehearsals for Crown of Shadow are an emotional crazy quilt for me. Most of the time I feel like some sort of fraud, all these eager and talented people spending their time bringing life to my words. I wonder when I will get over that? I felt it in New York, too, wondering when somebody would say it, would whisper, "What the hell are we putting so much time into THIS for?" On the other hand, I listen carefully to the words, and when the actors come to the end of a line and it’s perfect, in nuance, in tone, in expression, in meaning, there is one moment of perfect joy, in knowing that I have done it right, and that no one I know does it in the same way. I expect the festival to be savaged in the media, though there’s no reason to expect any media attention at all (this being Asheville), or malicious comments from colleagues in other theater companies, though to expect anything before it happens is to extend the lease of misery. All is well now, with the words in the mouths of my lovely actors. All might be well to the very end.
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