August 26, 2008
Gentle rain becomes vast rain, and rain still welcome. The groundhog takes shelter on the porch, climbing the seed can and peeking in through the front window, bewildering the cats and leaving muddy nose and paw prints at the bottom of the glass.
My painting Leda and the Swan is up in the library as part of the "Faculty and Staff" show. They put it in a very good place, where it looks radiant, where you can hardly enter without seeing it. I have fought the urge to go and stare at it.
The latest word on Michael Minor is that he is cancer-free. I have seldom prayed so hard for anything, without being able to explain to myself exactly why. But I rejoice, and thank Him who heard the prayers of all.
Spoke on the radio this morning with SP, I about my show and he about the building which houses the show. It would be difficult to imagine two minds as different in their workings as mine and his, yet I like him, and enjoy being near him.
Phone call from, of all people, Jim Powers. Is he still in prison? In or out, what does he want with me? Curiosity almost leads me to return the call, but not quite yet.
AW commended me via email on my "passive employment," which is what she calls my having dodged committees and senates and offices at the university. It brought me up short. Is this what people think of me? Is it in fact what I have done? I would have said that I kept the extraneous away while concentrating on my teaching, my students, and my art, but the extraneous might well be what people see. Nothing can be done about it now. . . in part because there’s nothing really that I want to change, except the perception.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
August 25, 2008
Blessed rain, slow, gray, like a veil everywhere gently descending.
Last night our last at the amphitheater. Tossed my rather under-annotated script into the trash, gently, though, so the gods would know it was housecleaning rather than symbolism. LD walked her dog backstage during the intermission, and said "Way to project! Everyone else looks like they’re screaming, but you just open your mouth and out it comes, straight to the back row." I suppose that was on the list of compliments I wanted, but not right at the top.
I think, finally, I am not a fan of gender-blind casting. If a playwright is any good, his males will be awkward if portrayed by women. Shakespeare should be an exception, but he’s not; he is rather an extension. His women are the tiniest bit off when they’re not being played by boys. Viola and Rosalind are both less fun unless you can think that Orsino and Orlando are falling a little bit in love with boys, saved from themselves only by good luck at the end. I would affirm the opposite, that a good playwright’s females are awkward when played by men, but in this age of superabundant female actors, that almost never happens. Our AYLI’s gynocentrism was among its faults. It made Rosaline’s masquerade pointless, and turned Arden into a singing church camp. The "second son of Sir Rowland de Boys" had the figure of Jayne Mansfield. Plopping a jaunty cap atop all that did not convince.
Blessed rain, slow, gray, like a veil everywhere gently descending.
Last night our last at the amphitheater. Tossed my rather under-annotated script into the trash, gently, though, so the gods would know it was housecleaning rather than symbolism. LD walked her dog backstage during the intermission, and said "Way to project! Everyone else looks like they’re screaming, but you just open your mouth and out it comes, straight to the back row." I suppose that was on the list of compliments I wanted, but not right at the top.
I think, finally, I am not a fan of gender-blind casting. If a playwright is any good, his males will be awkward if portrayed by women. Shakespeare should be an exception, but he’s not; he is rather an extension. His women are the tiniest bit off when they’re not being played by boys. Viola and Rosalind are both less fun unless you can think that Orsino and Orlando are falling a little bit in love with boys, saved from themselves only by good luck at the end. I would affirm the opposite, that a good playwright’s females are awkward when played by men, but in this age of superabundant female actors, that almost never happens. Our AYLI’s gynocentrism was among its faults. It made Rosaline’s masquerade pointless, and turned Arden into a singing church camp. The "second son of Sir Rowland de Boys" had the figure of Jayne Mansfield. Plopping a jaunty cap atop all that did not convince.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
August 24, 2008
The forecasts promise rain for tomorrow, but I’m so dispirited and angry with it that all I could respond was "Why not today?" It has been an unconscionable drought, and any delay is the deepening of a crime. I trusted the forecasts enough, though, that I took none of the Sunday afternoon to water the gardens, but slept, heavily, and woke myself in such a thirst that I downed a 750 ml lemon Perrier without pausing to breathe.
This morning, between waking and going to church, I wrote for the first time since dad died. That drought also had become deeply disturbing. I wrote like a fury while he was dying, but when it ended at last, energy and inspiration scattered. I won’t say they died, for they rather went elsewhere, toward learning how to control and husband an estate, which is a far more creative and engaging enterprise than I allowed myself to think when there was no hint that I would ever do so. I was not doing nothing; I was learning new skills and adding something permanent to my intellectual life. But I was not writing. It is good to be back. I restored Four for the Gospel Makers with a revision that replaced several false–and ruinous-- starts from the past. I began a new play sprung from all the discussion of fire in Faustus. I didn’t feel especially electric in the morning, but I must have been ready, for forth it came. At one point I did ask myself what if the writer in me was gone, replaced by another man with other (and more immediately profitable) interests. The answer to the question never came, and now it need not at all. I think I’d almost decided I could endure it. That must have shocked my system back.
Weary unto death of AYLI. Weary of some, but by no means all, of my fellow thespians. I sometimes hesitate to accept supporting roles, not because of pride but because I am a bad backstager. I hate the idleness, the need to find something to do without losing focus while waiting for a cue. It’s like a bad family vacation, boring and frenzied by turns. While I’m performing, I can’t do anything but the play. Can’t read, can’t run lines, can’t chit-chat in the green room. I don’t pick up quickly on the tone and direction of backstage gossip. I don’t understand the subtleties and undercurrents, but still clomp in sometimes like a lummox, leaving bitter silence around me. The life I lead–balanced between the mundane and the empyreal, between livelihood and poetry, with the necessary darkness and solitude of creativity looming huge in the center–is not conducive to any sort of casualness. Twice in two days people invited me to dine THAT DAY. I couldn’t. How do people make room in a day for what is not already there? How do people find the gaps? I need at least a day’s warning to have a convivial cup of tea. Conservation of energy is a huge issue in my life now, and I know it must look like unsociability or snottiness from outside, but I can think of no explanation that does not itself drain energy. I can’t imagine going to a cast party after a show, unless it is right across the street, which, thanks to D, it sometimes is. There are people who have one pursuit and concentrate on that, and I admire them, but way back once upon a time I took another route. I decided not to say no to anything that said yes to me. I’m not sure it was the best idea, but it was what happened, and now I have to do whatever I have to do to keep at it. This is all to say I’m probably an unsatisfying after-the-scene companion, stepping into my own world almost the same instant that I step out of Shakespeare’s. Oh, of course I want everybody to love me. I don’t make it easy, I know, but I want to wear a T-shirt that says, "I’m making it as easy as I can."
Friend groundhog is back in the front yard, grinding down grass and clover in a paradise just his size. I am suddenly joyful.
The forecasts promise rain for tomorrow, but I’m so dispirited and angry with it that all I could respond was "Why not today?" It has been an unconscionable drought, and any delay is the deepening of a crime. I trusted the forecasts enough, though, that I took none of the Sunday afternoon to water the gardens, but slept, heavily, and woke myself in such a thirst that I downed a 750 ml lemon Perrier without pausing to breathe.
This morning, between waking and going to church, I wrote for the first time since dad died. That drought also had become deeply disturbing. I wrote like a fury while he was dying, but when it ended at last, energy and inspiration scattered. I won’t say they died, for they rather went elsewhere, toward learning how to control and husband an estate, which is a far more creative and engaging enterprise than I allowed myself to think when there was no hint that I would ever do so. I was not doing nothing; I was learning new skills and adding something permanent to my intellectual life. But I was not writing. It is good to be back. I restored Four for the Gospel Makers with a revision that replaced several false–and ruinous-- starts from the past. I began a new play sprung from all the discussion of fire in Faustus. I didn’t feel especially electric in the morning, but I must have been ready, for forth it came. At one point I did ask myself what if the writer in me was gone, replaced by another man with other (and more immediately profitable) interests. The answer to the question never came, and now it need not at all. I think I’d almost decided I could endure it. That must have shocked my system back.
Weary unto death of AYLI. Weary of some, but by no means all, of my fellow thespians. I sometimes hesitate to accept supporting roles, not because of pride but because I am a bad backstager. I hate the idleness, the need to find something to do without losing focus while waiting for a cue. It’s like a bad family vacation, boring and frenzied by turns. While I’m performing, I can’t do anything but the play. Can’t read, can’t run lines, can’t chit-chat in the green room. I don’t pick up quickly on the tone and direction of backstage gossip. I don’t understand the subtleties and undercurrents, but still clomp in sometimes like a lummox, leaving bitter silence around me. The life I lead–balanced between the mundane and the empyreal, between livelihood and poetry, with the necessary darkness and solitude of creativity looming huge in the center–is not conducive to any sort of casualness. Twice in two days people invited me to dine THAT DAY. I couldn’t. How do people make room in a day for what is not already there? How do people find the gaps? I need at least a day’s warning to have a convivial cup of tea. Conservation of energy is a huge issue in my life now, and I know it must look like unsociability or snottiness from outside, but I can think of no explanation that does not itself drain energy. I can’t imagine going to a cast party after a show, unless it is right across the street, which, thanks to D, it sometimes is. There are people who have one pursuit and concentrate on that, and I admire them, but way back once upon a time I took another route. I decided not to say no to anything that said yes to me. I’m not sure it was the best idea, but it was what happened, and now I have to do whatever I have to do to keep at it. This is all to say I’m probably an unsatisfying after-the-scene companion, stepping into my own world almost the same instant that I step out of Shakespeare’s. Oh, of course I want everybody to love me. I don’t make it easy, I know, but I want to wear a T-shirt that says, "I’m making it as easy as I can."
Friend groundhog is back in the front yard, grinding down grass and clover in a paradise just his size. I am suddenly joyful.
August 23, 2008
Disturbing dream before waking. My lover had died, and I went through all my files looking for remembrances of him, and each time I opened a file, the memories withing would run in the air like a film.
Forty two years ago tonight I became a poet.
Kevin suggests that he may want to do some cutting in Anna Livia. This is a no-win proposition for a playwright. If you resist it, you’re "difficult" and "married to" your own words. It doesn’t matter whether the suggestions are good; you are meant to take them or you’re not being "collaborative." Editors are worse, though, so perhaps I should count myself lucky on this occasion. Kevin made no specific citations, and I suggested that they wait until sometime after the first read-through to make decisions about the text, as difficult passages have a way of becoming easier, even favorites, after you’re given them three or four go’s. He wants to shorten the play in order to do it without intermission. I point out that one way of solving the length problem (it is by no means a long play, not much over 90 minutes at a reasonable pace) is to restore the intermission, which is deliberately written in, and allows for a time break of a century. He wants to make room for the music he’s writing for the piece. I love original music in my plays, so I didn’t make the next obvious suggestion: less music. What I finally say is, "Do anything you want so long as I don’t notice it opening night." This is quite a liberal allowance, as my memory of my own work is by no means perfect.
Finished the last and biggest painting for my show. Two travelers from Charlotte happened by as I was finishing, and they thought it was weird and glorious. Weird and glorious are exactly what I’m going for.
I pray for deluge if there’s the smallest cloud in the sky before performances of AYLI People think I’m thinking of my garden. Never to be rained out is a cruelty I am not ready for from the universe.
Disturbing dream before waking. My lover had died, and I went through all my files looking for remembrances of him, and each time I opened a file, the memories withing would run in the air like a film.
Forty two years ago tonight I became a poet.
Kevin suggests that he may want to do some cutting in Anna Livia. This is a no-win proposition for a playwright. If you resist it, you’re "difficult" and "married to" your own words. It doesn’t matter whether the suggestions are good; you are meant to take them or you’re not being "collaborative." Editors are worse, though, so perhaps I should count myself lucky on this occasion. Kevin made no specific citations, and I suggested that they wait until sometime after the first read-through to make decisions about the text, as difficult passages have a way of becoming easier, even favorites, after you’re given them three or four go’s. He wants to shorten the play in order to do it without intermission. I point out that one way of solving the length problem (it is by no means a long play, not much over 90 minutes at a reasonable pace) is to restore the intermission, which is deliberately written in, and allows for a time break of a century. He wants to make room for the music he’s writing for the piece. I love original music in my plays, so I didn’t make the next obvious suggestion: less music. What I finally say is, "Do anything you want so long as I don’t notice it opening night." This is quite a liberal allowance, as my memory of my own work is by no means perfect.
Finished the last and biggest painting for my show. Two travelers from Charlotte happened by as I was finishing, and they thought it was weird and glorious. Weird and glorious are exactly what I’m going for.
I pray for deluge if there’s the smallest cloud in the sky before performances of AYLI People think I’m thinking of my garden. Never to be rained out is a cruelty I am not ready for from the universe.
August 22, 2008
Evening, minutes before I have to put on my motley for the play. I think my groundhog is gone. He’s not in his usual place, and hasn’t been for several days. Could be that Carolyn’s being back in her house above him was too much tumult. He was very calm, a little burrowing boddhisatva.
Back in school, I can’t keep up with the watering. My poor little garden must fend for itself until come some hurricane from the south. I have to say that I bear a grudge against the climate these days, holding off rain as a brat holds some bauble all to himself. It is ludicrous. It is unnatural. I have forgotten what it is like to see these grounds in rain.
I must find some center. Everything I do in a day is done quickly, with fury at delays and crosses, to get through to the central, significant thing, but what is that?
Have been wishing that my father was more vivid to me. When I remember him, it is always a long time ago, when I was a kid, or before that, not a memory at all but a fantasy from before I could have known him at all.
I look late at my email and see requests, sent last night, from former students for recommendations that would have been due today. I throw my hands into the air, even though none can appreciate the gesture, wondering what can possibly be done.
Watch the beach volleyball finals of the Olympics, screaming profanities, which I recognized as my method of cheering.
Jameson Currier is the man behind Queer Type, which I suppose I should have known if I paid better attention. Danny Hamm asks me to be his friend on Facebook. I delight to be back in touch. If I understood what he wrote, he’s in China. His photo looks like a punk kid from the 50's. This is a good thing. Michael Minor is still fighting, his wife still building a mountain of faithfulness and desperate eloquence. The postcards for my show, Night, are glossy on both sides so that it is almost impossible to write addresses on them. I recognize how small this is in the scheme of things, but I sit with my head bowed with disappointment for a good two minutes anyway.
Evening, minutes before I have to put on my motley for the play. I think my groundhog is gone. He’s not in his usual place, and hasn’t been for several days. Could be that Carolyn’s being back in her house above him was too much tumult. He was very calm, a little burrowing boddhisatva.
Back in school, I can’t keep up with the watering. My poor little garden must fend for itself until come some hurricane from the south. I have to say that I bear a grudge against the climate these days, holding off rain as a brat holds some bauble all to himself. It is ludicrous. It is unnatural. I have forgotten what it is like to see these grounds in rain.
I must find some center. Everything I do in a day is done quickly, with fury at delays and crosses, to get through to the central, significant thing, but what is that?
Have been wishing that my father was more vivid to me. When I remember him, it is always a long time ago, when I was a kid, or before that, not a memory at all but a fantasy from before I could have known him at all.
I look late at my email and see requests, sent last night, from former students for recommendations that would have been due today. I throw my hands into the air, even though none can appreciate the gesture, wondering what can possibly be done.
Watch the beach volleyball finals of the Olympics, screaming profanities, which I recognized as my method of cheering.
Jameson Currier is the man behind Queer Type, which I suppose I should have known if I paid better attention. Danny Hamm asks me to be his friend on Facebook. I delight to be back in touch. If I understood what he wrote, he’s in China. His photo looks like a punk kid from the 50's. This is a good thing. Michael Minor is still fighting, his wife still building a mountain of faithfulness and desperate eloquence. The postcards for my show, Night, are glossy on both sides so that it is almost impossible to write addresses on them. I recognize how small this is in the scheme of things, but I sit with my head bowed with disappointment for a good two minutes anyway.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
August 20, 2008
Gesualdo on the CD.
First class day came well enough. Bright shining faces, eagerness and expectation which I hope I can in some degree fulfill.
The department stood up for its annual official photograph, which had to be done twice because one of our number comes only when she pleases. Stood beside S, and caught from him the sharp smell of old age. It was a moment of pity and fear.
Faustus rehearsals are going well. When they’re not going well it is not, as with AYLI, because the conception is faulty, but because the actors have not yet realized the conception. Jason is an excellent director. He over-directs for my taste, but that is proof that he has a pageant running in his mind. I am not prepared for tonight. There will have to be forgiveness all around.
Gesualdo on the CD.
First class day came well enough. Bright shining faces, eagerness and expectation which I hope I can in some degree fulfill.
The department stood up for its annual official photograph, which had to be done twice because one of our number comes only when she pleases. Stood beside S, and caught from him the sharp smell of old age. It was a moment of pity and fear.
Faustus rehearsals are going well. When they’re not going well it is not, as with AYLI, because the conception is faulty, but because the actors have not yet realized the conception. Jason is an excellent director. He over-directs for my taste, but that is proof that he has a pageant running in his mind. I am not prepared for tonight. There will have to be forgiveness all around.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
August 18, 2008
I knew I was healthy again when I was onstage Friday night, and everything was going like fire and air, and I was happy. I felt the disease long before it came to the surface. I was tired and heavy, and felt 1000 years old. Today I feel about 40, which if still off the mark, is so by not so far.
Meetings before the opening of school. The next decade will be dedicated to my quelling impatience at what seems not only beside the point but actually detrimental to the hard struggle of education. I don’t know whether I’m a true hearted classicist or only an old grump. Our latest curricular innovation, a thing called ILS, is devoutly hated by all students, and, though rich in flourishes and pitfalls and paperwork, seems to add nothing to the educational process but dilution and a sort of grand context-less euphoria which allows one to come out of college thinking that all details and theories and ideas are of exactly the same value and were thought of by somebody in Jamaica and then stolen by Europeans. Most of the concentrations are arbitrary, and the instances in which the program seems to have avoided pedagogical disaster involve those students who are so good anyway they’d learn if you gave them a shovel and a piece of charcoal. And yet, there were are, receiving adjustments to and working ourselves up into enthusiasms for a clanking, doomed machinery. Why? Most of us see the emperor is naked, but none of us wants to cry it out very loudly. This includes me. I don’t think I cry "wolf" unless there is a wolf, but that wears thin almost as quickly as crying wolf when there is no wolf at all.
Innovations in education which do not come from teachers are always wrong. Former teachers who have fallen in love with the image of themselves as administrators or, perhaps, educational theorists, do not count at all.
I am also unclear on the inescapable concept of "diversity." I know what it means when Admissions talks about it: trying to get more black, Asian, Hispanic kids on campus. This is hugely praiseworthy, but I don’t see why anybody thinks it can be forced, or have asked themselves why, after twenty years of trying, no actual progress has been made. Lunch counters and busses became integrated because black people wanted to use them, not because white people suddenly willed for them to come aboard. Our campus publications photoshop black faces onto athletic teams and into campus crowd scenes, to make it look like there is a fair representation of the races. I understand, but I think it is a waste of shame to be very blameful about it. The camel might as well weep itself to sleep because it can’t persuade the heron to come live with it in the desert. Of course you must try, but then you must take no for an answer.
In academic discussions "diversity" is more sinister. Colleague X uses it as an excuse to teach mean, temporary, unrepresentative literature, and then to teach good literature badly, grudging and judgmental because, whatever tests of time and criticism it has sustained, it is not by the right person. She drives men away from her classes and the department with her violently prejudicial behavior, but, so far as I know, it all goes unremarked and un-chastised. I suppose the boys are paying for the sins of their grandfathers. X expresses anger that some of our students could escape our clutches WITHOUT having studied Cambodian Menstrual Journals of the 17th Century, or whatever today’s flavor might be. I try to keep silent, assuming that all nonsense will pass, or, if it does not pass, it was not nonsense, and my retrograde opinions instead will wither into oblivion.
We all have resentment and envy at the greatness of the great. Only recent times have given us a way to transmogrify that into a virtue.
I’m going to try to make this first day of the semester the only one in which I stoop to satire.
I’m going to take the stairs instead of the elevator every day. See which makes me healthier.
August 17, 2008
Full moon night. Watched the Olympics at DJ’s, wondering what it would be like to be Michael Phelps.
I knew I was healthy again when I was onstage Friday night, and everything was going like fire and air, and I was happy. I felt the disease long before it came to the surface. I was tired and heavy, and felt 1000 years old. Today I feel about 40, which if still off the mark, is so by not so far.
Meetings before the opening of school. The next decade will be dedicated to my quelling impatience at what seems not only beside the point but actually detrimental to the hard struggle of education. I don’t know whether I’m a true hearted classicist or only an old grump. Our latest curricular innovation, a thing called ILS, is devoutly hated by all students, and, though rich in flourishes and pitfalls and paperwork, seems to add nothing to the educational process but dilution and a sort of grand context-less euphoria which allows one to come out of college thinking that all details and theories and ideas are of exactly the same value and were thought of by somebody in Jamaica and then stolen by Europeans. Most of the concentrations are arbitrary, and the instances in which the program seems to have avoided pedagogical disaster involve those students who are so good anyway they’d learn if you gave them a shovel and a piece of charcoal. And yet, there were are, receiving adjustments to and working ourselves up into enthusiasms for a clanking, doomed machinery. Why? Most of us see the emperor is naked, but none of us wants to cry it out very loudly. This includes me. I don’t think I cry "wolf" unless there is a wolf, but that wears thin almost as quickly as crying wolf when there is no wolf at all.
Innovations in education which do not come from teachers are always wrong. Former teachers who have fallen in love with the image of themselves as administrators or, perhaps, educational theorists, do not count at all.
I am also unclear on the inescapable concept of "diversity." I know what it means when Admissions talks about it: trying to get more black, Asian, Hispanic kids on campus. This is hugely praiseworthy, but I don’t see why anybody thinks it can be forced, or have asked themselves why, after twenty years of trying, no actual progress has been made. Lunch counters and busses became integrated because black people wanted to use them, not because white people suddenly willed for them to come aboard. Our campus publications photoshop black faces onto athletic teams and into campus crowd scenes, to make it look like there is a fair representation of the races. I understand, but I think it is a waste of shame to be very blameful about it. The camel might as well weep itself to sleep because it can’t persuade the heron to come live with it in the desert. Of course you must try, but then you must take no for an answer.
In academic discussions "diversity" is more sinister. Colleague X uses it as an excuse to teach mean, temporary, unrepresentative literature, and then to teach good literature badly, grudging and judgmental because, whatever tests of time and criticism it has sustained, it is not by the right person. She drives men away from her classes and the department with her violently prejudicial behavior, but, so far as I know, it all goes unremarked and un-chastised. I suppose the boys are paying for the sins of their grandfathers. X expresses anger that some of our students could escape our clutches WITHOUT having studied Cambodian Menstrual Journals of the 17th Century, or whatever today’s flavor might be. I try to keep silent, assuming that all nonsense will pass, or, if it does not pass, it was not nonsense, and my retrograde opinions instead will wither into oblivion.
We all have resentment and envy at the greatness of the great. Only recent times have given us a way to transmogrify that into a virtue.
I’m going to try to make this first day of the semester the only one in which I stoop to satire.
I’m going to take the stairs instead of the elevator every day. See which makes me healthier.
August 17, 2008
Full moon night. Watched the Olympics at DJ’s, wondering what it would be like to be Michael Phelps.
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