December 31, 2011
Lightened the challenge of this day by spreading out cooking over the last few days. A pistachio cream pie and a Julia Child cream of cauliflower and watercress soup chill in the fridge. Wild rice and roasted goose and root vegetable should be, by comparison, simple this afternoon. DJ is making an eggnog which may slay all the senses and render my care unnecessary.
On K’s sudden impulse, we drove to Johnson City, Tennessee last night to the Down Home bar, to hear Doc Bonhomie, Russell’s band. The drive was seriously dark in both directions, but the bar was merry and the band were all excellent musicians, amiable and crowd-pleasing, with nary a faltering voice among them. They did largely originals which, while impressive, lent a sort of soft-focus monochromatic lyricism to the first set, after which one rejoiced at the hard-rocking vitality of the various covers and rock allusions in the second. If I were their manager I’d tell them, don’t do two college-boy soul-revelations back to back, at least not in a bar in Johnson City. Their skill in any case was amazing. That they got their start together in the ETSU chorus is everywhere (and splendidly) apparent.
Oh, anthems at the year’s end! One may always fiddle and adjust, and there may be whole vast areas of possible improvement to which one is simply blind, but forgiving that, I don’t know what I could do to make a better life for myself, a life for myself that I desire and dream of, than I have already, or am doing, in some cases almost from the beginning of it. What is left is for the universe, and were there any way to force the universe’s hand, I would have found it, having, there also, tried almost everything. Though I am not good, I am not the worst in the world at lying back and letting it all unfold, so that is the pertinent resolution here at the end. The universe thus far has largely wasted me, but one keeps in fighting trim, keeps one’s lines solid in mind, heeds distant cues for the moment when the curtain opens.
The cats make playthings out of my cast-offs. There is something there.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Thursday, December 29, 2011
December 28, 2011
Used my father’s rhyming dictionary last night. The intriguing question is what was my father doing with a rhyming dictionary. Once when I was writing a poem for some church contest, he took my ideas and put them into standard poetic form. What I wondered then, bur for some reason didn’t ask, was how he knew what poetic form was. An off-hand comment once revealed that his mother had written stories. I am wild to see those stories but they have been gone–I suppose–forever now.
Watched the Cuckor flick Holiday last night, the exact opposite of the Gold Diggers of close to the same time, almost perfectly realized, witty, intelligent, the hands of both Hepburn and Grant played with immaculate skill.
Cheetah, Tarzan’s chimp, has died at the age of 80.
Serious work on the concertina. Almost successfully beat out “Oh When the Saints Go Marching In” and "Twinkle Twinkle." My progress was thwarted at first because I was holding the thing backwards.I blamed it on faulty construction, not thinking for a long time merely to change hands. My senility is going to be awesome . . . .
Used my father’s rhyming dictionary last night. The intriguing question is what was my father doing with a rhyming dictionary. Once when I was writing a poem for some church contest, he took my ideas and put them into standard poetic form. What I wondered then, bur for some reason didn’t ask, was how he knew what poetic form was. An off-hand comment once revealed that his mother had written stories. I am wild to see those stories but they have been gone–I suppose–forever now.
Watched the Cuckor flick Holiday last night, the exact opposite of the Gold Diggers of close to the same time, almost perfectly realized, witty, intelligent, the hands of both Hepburn and Grant played with immaculate skill.
Cheetah, Tarzan’s chimp, has died at the age of 80.
Serious work on the concertina. Almost successfully beat out “Oh When the Saints Go Marching In” and "Twinkle Twinkle." My progress was thwarted at first because I was holding the thing backwards.I blamed it on faulty construction, not thinking for a long time merely to change hands. My senility is going to be awesome . . . .
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
December 27, 2011
Heavy rain, blown by strong wind. Beethoven from iTunes. Maud demanding her morning backrub.
Good Christmas Eve service at All Souls, if about as much as I could stand. Drove in the dark of Christmas morning to Atlanta. Was watching as the sun turned the southeast to the infinite reds. Big old red-tail in his accustomed tree. Can it be the same one all these years? Joyful time in Alpharetta. The Adam boys form among themselves an ideal brotherly community, and it was a joy to watch them and their friends together. They are a clan in every sense of the word. The probably have their holy objects and rituals, too, though they do not speak of them. Daniel chided me for staying up with the adults rather than coming down to the basement and playing with them, which I would surely have done had I been sure it would not have been an intrusion. Jon’s adventures in Thailand are good on so many sides, and breeding good as they go. I came away with, among other things, a set of harmonicas, which added to the concertina makes this a musical Christmas. To round it off, or to make it odder, I ordered a harmonium online. I have always walked through every door that opened, banging it against the wall as I came. L’s friends gathered for Christmas dinner. They were easier for me to relate to than in the past, not quite so churchy, even refreshingly ribald. Poor R was allowed to, even expected to, go through the litany of his past misdeeds, a sort of community confession, as though he had been the designated sinner. Drove home that evening, because the drive was so to be dreaded that I didn’t want to begin another day with it. Also, thought I might have a date, but did not, in the event. St. Stephen’s Day spent running errands, writing abundantly in local cafes, working out, sleeping off an unaccountable exhaustion that left me feeling, all day, like a tired kid. Not an unpleasant feeling at all. In fact, extraordinarily happy from Christmas Eve till this moment, and having no reason to expect immediate change. I have to stop thinking about my life in order to be this content; sometimes I am able to do just that.
Lovely stock market will allow me to pay off my December excesses.
– the ravishing theme of B’s violin concerto– soaring and melancholy at once.
Heavy rain, blown by strong wind. Beethoven from iTunes. Maud demanding her morning backrub.
Good Christmas Eve service at All Souls, if about as much as I could stand. Drove in the dark of Christmas morning to Atlanta. Was watching as the sun turned the southeast to the infinite reds. Big old red-tail in his accustomed tree. Can it be the same one all these years? Joyful time in Alpharetta. The Adam boys form among themselves an ideal brotherly community, and it was a joy to watch them and their friends together. They are a clan in every sense of the word. The probably have their holy objects and rituals, too, though they do not speak of them. Daniel chided me for staying up with the adults rather than coming down to the basement and playing with them, which I would surely have done had I been sure it would not have been an intrusion. Jon’s adventures in Thailand are good on so many sides, and breeding good as they go. I came away with, among other things, a set of harmonicas, which added to the concertina makes this a musical Christmas. To round it off, or to make it odder, I ordered a harmonium online. I have always walked through every door that opened, banging it against the wall as I came. L’s friends gathered for Christmas dinner. They were easier for me to relate to than in the past, not quite so churchy, even refreshingly ribald. Poor R was allowed to, even expected to, go through the litany of his past misdeeds, a sort of community confession, as though he had been the designated sinner. Drove home that evening, because the drive was so to be dreaded that I didn’t want to begin another day with it. Also, thought I might have a date, but did not, in the event. St. Stephen’s Day spent running errands, writing abundantly in local cafes, working out, sleeping off an unaccountable exhaustion that left me feeling, all day, like a tired kid. Not an unpleasant feeling at all. In fact, extraordinarily happy from Christmas Eve till this moment, and having no reason to expect immediate change. I have to stop thinking about my life in order to be this content; sometimes I am able to do just that.
Lovely stock market will allow me to pay off my December excesses.
– the ravishing theme of B’s violin concerto– soaring and melancholy at once.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
December 24, 2011
Cantaria Hans has died. I never knew him except when he was sick, but I think he must have been a kind and merry man. I’m glad he decided to spend his last days with us.
Lunch with SC to discuss the past and future of Cantaria.
Full day yesterday, which I rounded out in late afternoon by going to the café, sitting down without much expectation, and ended up writing. . . well, it exhausts to keep saying “the best I ever have,” but it was like the glory days composing “The Glacier’s Daughters” when the flood of words could not be stopped. That it should be going just as strong after forty years is a blessing I remember less often than I should.
Watched fifteen minutes of Gold Diggers of 1935 last night. I have to say that, especially when he’s not tethered by a strong script, Busby Berkeley is quite horrifying. Leni Riefenstahl is the nearest–maybe only-- comparison. The extras on the DVD praised his vision and technique, justly, except that it could be pointed out that vision and technique are neutrals, capable of serving either the skew or the straight. My repugnance is more instinctual than explicable. Only horrified fascination kept me the fifteen minutes.
Here is the oddest thing. I can call to inner sight every ornament that was on our Christmas tree back home, in perfect (I think) detail, even to nicks and discolorations. I saw them only once a year, and not since for forty years. My tree has its visible ornaments that anyone can see entering my house, but also those ghostly ones from long ago, hung as the palpable ones were hung, as though existing all in a separate and unbreakable continuum. I have learned the amazing, perhaps pathological, strength of my imaginative world back then–as perhaps now– and suppose that the adamantine retention of those images is part of it in a way that there is not leisure at the moment to understand. I long for them, but I don’t know why. That I yet possess them in this way is a blessing equally inexplicable.
Maud the Cat holds on to my leg, insisting that I pet her, insisting that I rub her back. She is not patient. She does not doubt for a second that what she desires will come to pass, for why shouldn’t it? It is so little to ask. It reminds me of me and God, except, unlike God, I reach out and hold her, rub her back, explain why it has taken me so long.
What if the purpose of us all were to teach God how to be a man? I would be content with that. It would suffice. He gets to try again, tonight. He gets to come back as a baby and try it all again.
My mother will not be making hot chocolate tonight and serving it in the embarrassing Santa mugs. My father will not be putting swans on a mirror lake under the tree in his mysterious way. My grandmother will not be preparing a giant feast for everybody. That “everybody” is dead or mad or scattered to the wind. I think I am here to remember them. And I do. The night is unimaginably deep.
A mallow blooms in my garden for a Christmas miracle. It is Christmas Eve and I am twelve years old, dizzy with joy, and no way to explain it.
Cantaria Hans has died. I never knew him except when he was sick, but I think he must have been a kind and merry man. I’m glad he decided to spend his last days with us.
Lunch with SC to discuss the past and future of Cantaria.
Full day yesterday, which I rounded out in late afternoon by going to the café, sitting down without much expectation, and ended up writing. . . well, it exhausts to keep saying “the best I ever have,” but it was like the glory days composing “The Glacier’s Daughters” when the flood of words could not be stopped. That it should be going just as strong after forty years is a blessing I remember less often than I should.
Watched fifteen minutes of Gold Diggers of 1935 last night. I have to say that, especially when he’s not tethered by a strong script, Busby Berkeley is quite horrifying. Leni Riefenstahl is the nearest–maybe only-- comparison. The extras on the DVD praised his vision and technique, justly, except that it could be pointed out that vision and technique are neutrals, capable of serving either the skew or the straight. My repugnance is more instinctual than explicable. Only horrified fascination kept me the fifteen minutes.
Here is the oddest thing. I can call to inner sight every ornament that was on our Christmas tree back home, in perfect (I think) detail, even to nicks and discolorations. I saw them only once a year, and not since for forty years. My tree has its visible ornaments that anyone can see entering my house, but also those ghostly ones from long ago, hung as the palpable ones were hung, as though existing all in a separate and unbreakable continuum. I have learned the amazing, perhaps pathological, strength of my imaginative world back then–as perhaps now– and suppose that the adamantine retention of those images is part of it in a way that there is not leisure at the moment to understand. I long for them, but I don’t know why. That I yet possess them in this way is a blessing equally inexplicable.
Maud the Cat holds on to my leg, insisting that I pet her, insisting that I rub her back. She is not patient. She does not doubt for a second that what she desires will come to pass, for why shouldn’t it? It is so little to ask. It reminds me of me and God, except, unlike God, I reach out and hold her, rub her back, explain why it has taken me so long.
What if the purpose of us all were to teach God how to be a man? I would be content with that. It would suffice. He gets to try again, tonight. He gets to come back as a baby and try it all again.
My mother will not be making hot chocolate tonight and serving it in the embarrassing Santa mugs. My father will not be putting swans on a mirror lake under the tree in his mysterious way. My grandmother will not be preparing a giant feast for everybody. That “everybody” is dead or mad or scattered to the wind. I think I am here to remember them. And I do. The night is unimaginably deep.
A mallow blooms in my garden for a Christmas miracle. It is Christmas Eve and I am twelve years old, dizzy with joy, and no way to explain it.
December 23, 2011
The possibilities of my expanded vacation days send me into unexpected adventures. I drove yesterday, for instance, to Hendersonville, thinking there might be some inimitable holiday cheer to be had there. It was warm, and I regretted my heavy jacket, but it allowed me to have cappuccino at an outdoor table on Main Street at the winter solstice. I had not brought my journal, and I feel naked just sitting in a café drinking without scrawling my little notes about the progress of the world. The guy in the piano-and-Jewish-holiday-decorations store showed me how he had souped up his electric pianos so that they sounded way better than they had coming from the factory. The cappuccino girl and I formed an instant bond. But I had the feeling that I had gone there for some purpose, and was moderately frustrated and not discovering that purpose. Now that I’ve written that, I suppose it’s the summary of most people’s lives. In any event, I passed the window of a music shop. In the window was a second-hand concertina that the talkative clerk said had been left there a long time ago. I bought it. I asserted it was my reason for going there. I’ve already discovered that there are differences between the English and the German concertinas (mine’s German), and different notes are played when the bag (if that’s what you call it) goes in from when it comes out. Awaiting my instructional manuals’ arrival in the mail.
Reading the bible in Italian from my Kindle as I tread the treadmill at the Y. Have made it to Genesis 3. Tom remarks on how odd it is to say the sentence, “I’m reading the Italian bible on the treadmill at the Y.” I’m all the time trying to translate things into Italian, which is working better than it once did, and I usually remember to double check the gender and the verb ending. Sia luce! Et cosi fu. Italian is not hard-edged enough to have been the language of creation.
The possibilities of my expanded vacation days send me into unexpected adventures. I drove yesterday, for instance, to Hendersonville, thinking there might be some inimitable holiday cheer to be had there. It was warm, and I regretted my heavy jacket, but it allowed me to have cappuccino at an outdoor table on Main Street at the winter solstice. I had not brought my journal, and I feel naked just sitting in a café drinking without scrawling my little notes about the progress of the world. The guy in the piano-and-Jewish-holiday-decorations store showed me how he had souped up his electric pianos so that they sounded way better than they had coming from the factory. The cappuccino girl and I formed an instant bond. But I had the feeling that I had gone there for some purpose, and was moderately frustrated and not discovering that purpose. Now that I’ve written that, I suppose it’s the summary of most people’s lives. In any event, I passed the window of a music shop. In the window was a second-hand concertina that the talkative clerk said had been left there a long time ago. I bought it. I asserted it was my reason for going there. I’ve already discovered that there are differences between the English and the German concertinas (mine’s German), and different notes are played when the bag (if that’s what you call it) goes in from when it comes out. Awaiting my instructional manuals’ arrival in the mail.
Reading the bible in Italian from my Kindle as I tread the treadmill at the Y. Have made it to Genesis 3. Tom remarks on how odd it is to say the sentence, “I’m reading the Italian bible on the treadmill at the Y.” I’m all the time trying to translate things into Italian, which is working better than it once did, and I usually remember to double check the gender and the verb ending. Sia luce! Et cosi fu. Italian is not hard-edged enough to have been the language of creation.
Friday, December 23, 2011
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