February 27, 2011
Queer mace heads of the Crown Imperial burst from the ground. The Lenten Roses form constellations of white and purple. Painted some yesterday, and found the painting of Ennis that I thought had been lost. Helped Jolene write a grant proposal for a summer camp to teach underprivileged kids philosophy.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Saturday, February 26, 2011
February 25, 2011
I collide into Fridays like an exhausted skier, spent and cold and dazed with the effort to get just that far. When I consider how my classes are going well and how I like my students, it comes down to the simple wear and tear of doing the same thing this many years. I have two sections of the same class this semester, and by the time I repeat the same material twice in twenty four hours, I’m nearly berserk– though it is interesting how often the same material ends up being quite different in the two presentations. Nobody’s fault, and not the worst situation in the world.
First Shakespeare acting class Tuesday night. MM reminds me of myself as a teacher. My own ideas on the subject have set pretty hard over the years, so my task will be to keep my mouth shut and do as I’m told. I think I signed up for this before I decided to go to Rome and study Italian, to have a new project to occupy my mind. It never rains but it pours.
Boeing Boeing at NC Stage. I’m not the world’s best audience for farce. What I see is minimal content–often trite, in fact inevitably trite–being put over by extraordinary exertions on the part of the actors. There was never a second when every member of the audience did not know what was going to happen next, and how it was going to happen, and in what ways the characters would have to cope. I know there’s pleasure in seeing what you know must happen, happen, but I think my pleasure in this is less than others’. Nevertheless, amid the real moment last night I was laughing my head off, and if it was because the actors were working so hard and with such skill, so be it. The performers were perfect. It was the first time I’d seen Maria on stage, and I was proud.
Drinks at Lab afterwards, a new place for me, really quite vast and impressive. The lovely young things thronging there were in need of leavening by mature gravity such as mine.
Thinking about what I wrote above. I know what is going to happen next in Hamlet. How is that different? Because some moments are and some writing is so complex it is a discovery each time. Whereas some moments are and some writing is so calculated to illicit a specific effect (such as laughter) that it cannot afford the ambiguity of discovery. Farce is like someone jumping out from behind a door and saying “boo!” In one instance you will jump, in the other you will laugh. Farce is like being tickled. You either laugh literally uncontrollably or, unaffected, wonder what the hell is going on.
DT sends a packet of Irish memorabilia from Charles’ papers, old postcards, Dublin literary magazine from 1927, 1949, 1951, a program from the Gate for Pinero’s The Magistrate from 1949, when it was managed by the Earl of Longford. I keep no souvenirs. My conviction that I’ll remember everything I need to remember is still firm, but I won’t have the frisson I had opening Charles’ ancient postcards and brown literary magazines. Survivors, unless they read what I have written, will have no idea that I ever left the house. From the advertisements on the program I recognize nothing, except Neary’s Hotel. Those photos of old Dublin– they look exactly like new Dublin except for the Nelson’s column is gone and the Spike is in its place. They make me sad. At this moment Dublin stands in mind as a beauty I courted who scorned me, not brutally, but with a little laugh that I should have thought there could be anything between us. Then there’s me sitting there thinking, “She wasn’t so beautiful after all, was she?”
White and lavender crocus bloom in the backyard.
Late night: Drove to Brevard to the American Legion Hall to see Brevard Little Theater’s Tea and Sympathy. It was nice to be the youngest person in the room again. The play is such an awful mix of sentimentality and expired topicality that almost nothing of it can be heard without a wince. I read somewhere that probably it could not be produced again, and whoever wrote that was right. The performance was classic “amateur.” Once I’d said that sentence to myself, I wondered what I meant. It was not bad, exactly, but every gesture, every phrase remembered that it was being done by an “actor” on a “stage.” The one actor who had some naturalness ruined it by being a show-off. But, there was a loyal following, sitting with their oxygen tanks and walkers on folding chairs in the American Legion hall–.
I collide into Fridays like an exhausted skier, spent and cold and dazed with the effort to get just that far. When I consider how my classes are going well and how I like my students, it comes down to the simple wear and tear of doing the same thing this many years. I have two sections of the same class this semester, and by the time I repeat the same material twice in twenty four hours, I’m nearly berserk– though it is interesting how often the same material ends up being quite different in the two presentations. Nobody’s fault, and not the worst situation in the world.
First Shakespeare acting class Tuesday night. MM reminds me of myself as a teacher. My own ideas on the subject have set pretty hard over the years, so my task will be to keep my mouth shut and do as I’m told. I think I signed up for this before I decided to go to Rome and study Italian, to have a new project to occupy my mind. It never rains but it pours.
Boeing Boeing at NC Stage. I’m not the world’s best audience for farce. What I see is minimal content–often trite, in fact inevitably trite–being put over by extraordinary exertions on the part of the actors. There was never a second when every member of the audience did not know what was going to happen next, and how it was going to happen, and in what ways the characters would have to cope. I know there’s pleasure in seeing what you know must happen, happen, but I think my pleasure in this is less than others’. Nevertheless, amid the real moment last night I was laughing my head off, and if it was because the actors were working so hard and with such skill, so be it. The performers were perfect. It was the first time I’d seen Maria on stage, and I was proud.
Drinks at Lab afterwards, a new place for me, really quite vast and impressive. The lovely young things thronging there were in need of leavening by mature gravity such as mine.
Thinking about what I wrote above. I know what is going to happen next in Hamlet. How is that different? Because some moments are and some writing is so complex it is a discovery each time. Whereas some moments are and some writing is so calculated to illicit a specific effect (such as laughter) that it cannot afford the ambiguity of discovery. Farce is like someone jumping out from behind a door and saying “boo!” In one instance you will jump, in the other you will laugh. Farce is like being tickled. You either laugh literally uncontrollably or, unaffected, wonder what the hell is going on.
DT sends a packet of Irish memorabilia from Charles’ papers, old postcards, Dublin literary magazine from 1927, 1949, 1951, a program from the Gate for Pinero’s The Magistrate from 1949, when it was managed by the Earl of Longford. I keep no souvenirs. My conviction that I’ll remember everything I need to remember is still firm, but I won’t have the frisson I had opening Charles’ ancient postcards and brown literary magazines. Survivors, unless they read what I have written, will have no idea that I ever left the house. From the advertisements on the program I recognize nothing, except Neary’s Hotel. Those photos of old Dublin– they look exactly like new Dublin except for the Nelson’s column is gone and the Spike is in its place. They make me sad. At this moment Dublin stands in mind as a beauty I courted who scorned me, not brutally, but with a little laugh that I should have thought there could be anything between us. Then there’s me sitting there thinking, “She wasn’t so beautiful after all, was she?”
White and lavender crocus bloom in the backyard.
Late night: Drove to Brevard to the American Legion Hall to see Brevard Little Theater’s Tea and Sympathy. It was nice to be the youngest person in the room again. The play is such an awful mix of sentimentality and expired topicality that almost nothing of it can be heard without a wince. I read somewhere that probably it could not be produced again, and whoever wrote that was right. The performance was classic “amateur.” Once I’d said that sentence to myself, I wondered what I meant. It was not bad, exactly, but every gesture, every phrase remembered that it was being done by an “actor” on a “stage.” The one actor who had some naturalness ruined it by being a show-off. But, there was a loyal following, sitting with their oxygen tanks and walkers on folding chairs in the American Legion hall–.
Monday, February 21, 2011
February 21, 2011
Warm night. Maud peers through the back screen at the show of night in the yard. Good exhaustion weighs my head to the tabletop. Excellent workout at the Y in the dark of the morning. I came away feeling like a teenager.
Nice review of Cyclamen in the San Francisco Examiner.
Went to the Orange Peel to hear the Punch Brothers. What excellent musicians! My standards are the standards of Classical musicians and conservatory trained virtuosi, and even by those standards the Punch Brothers were outstanding. Clever, entertaining, intricate, intimate. Plus, the “brothers” were cute. The venue is uncomfortable, though, and I limped the mile to my car long before the night was over. I wanted to stop in every bar I passed, as I would if I were in Ireland.
On the subject of Ireland, Trevor Markham’s wife turns out to be from Asheville (they met on a plane) and he has been to Asheville, and she to that well-remembered house in Ennis, and they are both friends of GM. The smallness of the world is startling. I meant more to the Markhams than I imagined. They meant more to me than I ever felt it was my place to say.
Fine class on Shelley this afternoon. I thought I’d experienced the zenith of classes a couple of years back, but I think the golden age is not over. We learn together. Anything that happened at school was overshadowed, though, by the announcement of PD’s retirement. I said to her with absolute truthfulness that the university, for me, is unimaginable without her. She drove me to the airport after my interview here the evening that I decided I would not take the job, though clearly I changed my mind. She was pregnant with the son I married to his wife last Halloween. Her energies are among the greatest in the institution, and so far a purity of thought and dedication, the highest of all. Partially she recognized it was a good time to leave. Partially she was driven away by institutional arrogance. A man may do a necessary thing and look like a hero, or he may do the very same thing and look like a martinet and a fool. This is not just a mistake; it is an outcome based on character, and some of our colleagues show their characters at every turn.
Read one of the poems at Christine Lassiter’s memorial reading at Malaprop’s tonight. Most of us came out of the old green door days, and all was familiar, if a little gray and creased by the passing of the years. Christine has been dead ten years. I don’t remember knowing her poems from that time, so I rediscovered them tonight. They are weak on form, but very long on emotion and candor, and often the perfect image flies through like a bluebird from a cloud of mist, illuminating and rearranging the listener’s knowledge of the world. She seems more consequential now than when I knew her, as we probably all shall be, bolstered by the trappings of remembrance. Listening to the sweetness of her poetry, I thought of the thousands and thousands who have shared their hearts in poetry and then passed on, and the poems molder in desk drawers or get thrown out when the house is sold, and I pray that some Recording Angel has heard them all and can speak them out of heaven when the time is right. I know for sure Asheville would have been different had Christine lived in it till now. She was beloved. That may be better than anything else.
Trivia with Merritt and his family at Jack of the Woods after the reading. We came in second.
Warm night. Maud peers through the back screen at the show of night in the yard. Good exhaustion weighs my head to the tabletop. Excellent workout at the Y in the dark of the morning. I came away feeling like a teenager.
Nice review of Cyclamen in the San Francisco Examiner.
Went to the Orange Peel to hear the Punch Brothers. What excellent musicians! My standards are the standards of Classical musicians and conservatory trained virtuosi, and even by those standards the Punch Brothers were outstanding. Clever, entertaining, intricate, intimate. Plus, the “brothers” were cute. The venue is uncomfortable, though, and I limped the mile to my car long before the night was over. I wanted to stop in every bar I passed, as I would if I were in Ireland.
On the subject of Ireland, Trevor Markham’s wife turns out to be from Asheville (they met on a plane) and he has been to Asheville, and she to that well-remembered house in Ennis, and they are both friends of GM. The smallness of the world is startling. I meant more to the Markhams than I imagined. They meant more to me than I ever felt it was my place to say.
Fine class on Shelley this afternoon. I thought I’d experienced the zenith of classes a couple of years back, but I think the golden age is not over. We learn together. Anything that happened at school was overshadowed, though, by the announcement of PD’s retirement. I said to her with absolute truthfulness that the university, for me, is unimaginable without her. She drove me to the airport after my interview here the evening that I decided I would not take the job, though clearly I changed my mind. She was pregnant with the son I married to his wife last Halloween. Her energies are among the greatest in the institution, and so far a purity of thought and dedication, the highest of all. Partially she recognized it was a good time to leave. Partially she was driven away by institutional arrogance. A man may do a necessary thing and look like a hero, or he may do the very same thing and look like a martinet and a fool. This is not just a mistake; it is an outcome based on character, and some of our colleagues show their characters at every turn.
Read one of the poems at Christine Lassiter’s memorial reading at Malaprop’s tonight. Most of us came out of the old green door days, and all was familiar, if a little gray and creased by the passing of the years. Christine has been dead ten years. I don’t remember knowing her poems from that time, so I rediscovered them tonight. They are weak on form, but very long on emotion and candor, and often the perfect image flies through like a bluebird from a cloud of mist, illuminating and rearranging the listener’s knowledge of the world. She seems more consequential now than when I knew her, as we probably all shall be, bolstered by the trappings of remembrance. Listening to the sweetness of her poetry, I thought of the thousands and thousands who have shared their hearts in poetry and then passed on, and the poems molder in desk drawers or get thrown out when the house is sold, and I pray that some Recording Angel has heard them all and can speak them out of heaven when the time is right. I know for sure Asheville would have been different had Christine lived in it till now. She was beloved. That may be better than anything else.
Trivia with Merritt and his family at Jack of the Woods after the reading. We came in second.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
February 19, 2011
Glorious day, and it is not over. Many nights of moonlight. Now that the hedge of hemlock is gone, I can see the moon set at morning in the northwest, and that is as wonderful as watching him rise. When I drove out last night, the moon was colossal, teetering on the horizon like Humpty Dumpty.
Painted early, alone in the building for a long time. Came home and attacked the south edge of the backyard, now a tangle of ivy, which I will make into a garden. The sheer mass of all that ivy is remarkable. I carried load after load way in my arms. A shovel will not avail. You must start with a pickaxe and work up to the spade. I went to different nurseries the last few days hoping to buy trees, but there was nothing to buy. The bare ground once covered with plants and trees made me sad. Even the nurseries have winter. I planted two volunteer hemlock seedlings north of the house, because there is always shade and I know they can grow in the shade. I might dig them out in favor of something else, but if I don’t I will tend and prune them so they don’t become the spidery, squat horrors I chopped out this year at such expense. They are beautiful in the forest.
Out to Warren Wilson to see Middleton’s Women Beware Women. Both the play and the production were better than I expected. WBW was one of the plays I skipped in London, so it was good to have another chance. The Warren Wilson students trooped in in their bare feet and blond dredlocks, the girls with furry legs and the boys, almost to a one that night, petite and hairy and escorted by two or three girls each. They were a disrespectful audience, but also an attentive one.
Coffee with TB at that noisy bus on Biltmore. He confides that I’m one of the “older gentleman” he takes as a father surrogate. Flattering, mostly, though when is it that one begins to think of oneself, or begins to tolerate others thinking of one, as old, or even “older”? I’m probably delayed in this as in many other things. Toured the downtown galleries, which all looked pretty much the same. Was wanting to buy something, but every price tag turned into a percentage of a flight to Europe, so I passed on.
Night. Another spectacular moon rise. Can’t tell whether what I’m feeling is sadness or exhaustion. Bach on the CD. How to tell a friend that what he has planned for himself will not happen? Maybe this is the source of the exhaustion. But then, I’m not without an examplar. What I planned for myself did not happen, and if someone had told me decades ago, toward the end of saving me the trouble, I would not have believed them.
Glorious day, and it is not over. Many nights of moonlight. Now that the hedge of hemlock is gone, I can see the moon set at morning in the northwest, and that is as wonderful as watching him rise. When I drove out last night, the moon was colossal, teetering on the horizon like Humpty Dumpty.
Painted early, alone in the building for a long time. Came home and attacked the south edge of the backyard, now a tangle of ivy, which I will make into a garden. The sheer mass of all that ivy is remarkable. I carried load after load way in my arms. A shovel will not avail. You must start with a pickaxe and work up to the spade. I went to different nurseries the last few days hoping to buy trees, but there was nothing to buy. The bare ground once covered with plants and trees made me sad. Even the nurseries have winter. I planted two volunteer hemlock seedlings north of the house, because there is always shade and I know they can grow in the shade. I might dig them out in favor of something else, but if I don’t I will tend and prune them so they don’t become the spidery, squat horrors I chopped out this year at such expense. They are beautiful in the forest.
Out to Warren Wilson to see Middleton’s Women Beware Women. Both the play and the production were better than I expected. WBW was one of the plays I skipped in London, so it was good to have another chance. The Warren Wilson students trooped in in their bare feet and blond dredlocks, the girls with furry legs and the boys, almost to a one that night, petite and hairy and escorted by two or three girls each. They were a disrespectful audience, but also an attentive one.
Coffee with TB at that noisy bus on Biltmore. He confides that I’m one of the “older gentleman” he takes as a father surrogate. Flattering, mostly, though when is it that one begins to think of oneself, or begins to tolerate others thinking of one, as old, or even “older”? I’m probably delayed in this as in many other things. Toured the downtown galleries, which all looked pretty much the same. Was wanting to buy something, but every price tag turned into a percentage of a flight to Europe, so I passed on.
Night. Another spectacular moon rise. Can’t tell whether what I’m feeling is sadness or exhaustion. Bach on the CD. How to tell a friend that what he has planned for himself will not happen? Maybe this is the source of the exhaustion. But then, I’m not without an examplar. What I planned for myself did not happen, and if someone had told me decades ago, toward the end of saving me the trouble, I would not have believed them.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
February 16, 2011
The Bourse has bought the NYSE. This is wrong.
One of my students came to class tipsy. She giggled through “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” I was going to make a statement about students in general, but realized all my present examples are her– how class becomes a variable and not an absolute, that if it is convenient to schedule a meeting during or have three or four brews before, well, why not? On the other hand, I don’t remember having a greater percentage of engaged and eager faces staring out of the rows at me, a higher level of participation in class discussion. I suppose coming drunk to a class on the Romantics is not altogether inappropriate, but it would have been better had it been Keats.
Meeting about accounting for the Cambridge trip. The level of fixation and anxiety is fascinating, the clear assumption that accounting for every penny is all that matters, and the rest of the activity is but an incident which, for a day or two, irritates the balance of the books. No one has spoken to me once about the educational experience, only about receipts. On the other hand, our business personnel are patient and kind. I think they’ve been told I’m sort of a wild man who will disregard everything they say, or explode in their faces if the wrong thing is said. I’ve expended a lot of energy avoiding the reputation I got anyway.
The Bourse has bought the NYSE. This is wrong.
One of my students came to class tipsy. She giggled through “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” I was going to make a statement about students in general, but realized all my present examples are her– how class becomes a variable and not an absolute, that if it is convenient to schedule a meeting during or have three or four brews before, well, why not? On the other hand, I don’t remember having a greater percentage of engaged and eager faces staring out of the rows at me, a higher level of participation in class discussion. I suppose coming drunk to a class on the Romantics is not altogether inappropriate, but it would have been better had it been Keats.
Meeting about accounting for the Cambridge trip. The level of fixation and anxiety is fascinating, the clear assumption that accounting for every penny is all that matters, and the rest of the activity is but an incident which, for a day or two, irritates the balance of the books. No one has spoken to me once about the educational experience, only about receipts. On the other hand, our business personnel are patient and kind. I think they’ve been told I’m sort of a wild man who will disregard everything they say, or explode in their faces if the wrong thing is said. I’ve expended a lot of energy avoiding the reputation I got anyway.
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