October 30, 2012

Snow on the ground, deep-voiced wind in the air. Bruce H swims to his car on Manhattan, which is underwater and a total loss.

We had our Highlands Fair in Humanities last night, where the students brought food or games or mechanical devices from the 19th century and told their stories. It was delightful. Makes me think that more time should be spent on the history of everyday things, when we know it. In the middle of one young woman’s presentation I thought of those sewing patterns my mother used to make clothes, the flimsy brown paper you attached with straight pins. They had to have started sometime, for some reason. One young man had built a bike out of spare parts, and told us the history of bikes, which seemed to have been more trouble than they were worth through much of their history.

Shocking polls have Romney pulling ahead, if slightly. I never worried about this election, much, because Romney’s status as a liar and plutocrat and cynical opportunist (or at least the public face of a cadre of cynical opportunists) was so clear. Pundits credit the debates for a rise in that man’s popularity, which is astonishing because most of what he had to say was simply made up. Maybe America is flattered when someone cares enough to lie to it. On the simple daily level, he will be a worse president than Bush. I can’t imagine such a victory– it’s like the rabbit voting for the fox–but the world is often enough unimaginable.

Four gigantic financial demands all at the same moment. Of course. Two futile, one unnecessary, but one goes through the motions.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to be satisfied with something? I made eggs and bacon in my newly seasoned cast iron skillet. That was satisfying. Sleep was satisfying last night. The sound of the heat kicking through the registers is satisfying. I found this pullover in my closet that’s very comfy. That’s about it for now.

October 29, 2012

Big opossum on the porch this morning, eating the mess the birds leave at the feeders. Moaning wind, roaring and cracking in the distance, the garage light continually on because it thinks the wind is a body passing. Not yet dawn, so if my garden is blasted or intact cannot yet be known. Harvested the last eggplants yesterday. The vine is covered with blossoms, as is a volunteer cherry tomato in the backyard. The pink terrace roses are blooming; this little inclemency won’t bother them.

JB phones from New York to say that the subways and airports and Stock Market are closed, but also that they want to do The Loves of Mr Lincoln as part of GayFest in May. Would that be all right with me? Of course it would. It’s not what I expected, exactly, but on what grounds I was to expect one thing rather than the other is difficult to tell. I haven’t figured out what my producers’ thinking is, or what timetable they’re working, and I can’t ask without a certain petulance coming into my voice–which comes from panic–so I resolve to keep silent and encourage what happens to happen. Any production is better than no production, and I can see great good coming out of it, and the worse coming out of it would be nothing, which is where we started, and no loss at all. So, New York in the spring. That is well. Lincoln is in the air right now.  At this moment, the big excitement is meeting the actors who will play the parts. I have always had excellent luck with actors. Almost always.

Prospect of getting the roof fixed after last night’s rains. Bitched my head off on the phone (in my gentle way) but the prospect of anyone on the roof in this storm– Frankenstorm they’re calling it–is even more distressing. But, this is going to be my season for letting happen what happens. No trying to steer the world’s course for a while.

Too much singing yesterday. Hoarse. Croaking at the cats like an old lady

October 28, 2012

Strange light this morning, I suppose of the city lights under fog. It’s dimly clear as dawn, though dawn is two hours off.

Two students from twenty years ago, Scarlett and Bill, take me to lunch. They are both successes, she a lawyer in Greenville, he a teacher in Rhode Island, father, mother. They are still the kids I remember, with more force and less scatter in their personalities. We reminisce. We catch up. Some of their teachers are gone, some dead. one fired for embezzlement, some endure. Both have staked their claim on wide lives, and both do me the honor of not only setting up the lunch, but crediting me with a role in their lives. I eat too heartily and too spicily, and lose the lunch in the holly thicket north of the Renaissance Hotel. Keep the memories.

Brought the potted plants in, though it has not yet frozen or even frosted. The golden trumpets blare seven feet above the ground. Most of my potted plants were orphaned in the studio by Jason, and I think of him when I water them. Filled the winter bird feeders. Took down the hummingbird feeders. Dug up weeds and planted a quincunx of lilies. I do not have luck with lilies, but we’ll see.

Another thought on the literature which my students recognize and I despise: it is the apotheosis of the nano-second attention span. No two thoughts are tied together, and no bundle of thoughts is ever required to form a story or an argument or a complete observation. They are a heap of stones in the desert: some of them are quite striking, but they never make a pyramid. This is not thought of as a deficit, but as the way things are.

One maple in the parking lot behind Starbucks flames in surpassing reds. I thank it every time I pass.

October 25, 2012

I continue to figure why I find the works chosen for the autobiography class so disappointing. None of them is good; no part of any of them is particularly good (though they’re beautifully bound).  Finally I realize that the mediocrity is not accidental. These texts represent the apotheosis of post-modernism, which is to say the theory that there is no “better” or “worse,” but only a community of witness, all perspectives and levels of achievement being essentially equal. My opinion formed in the last five minutes is as good as that of a scholar who has pondered the same question through his life. The most witless poem is valuable if someone values it, and the reasons for the valuation are irrelevant. This includes, of course, the author, whose ineptness or error is validated if he buts avows ineptness and error were his intentions. No one has the courage to say that this is boring and that idiotic, for if one observation passes through the refiner’s fire, so must they all. Art becomes a circle jerk. Politics becomes just what we have seen during this campaign, an orgy of ignorant convictions based on the apparently inalienable right to have ignorant convictions, and the belief that all convictions, ignorant or sublime, are on exact par. My ignorance is as good as your wisdom. My sloppy crap is as good as your elegant, skilled and well-considered prose– even better, for am I not “keeping it real”? To their credit, my class is having these same reservations, if expressed more tentatively. They seem to be astonished that, given the opportunity of free expression, some clearly choose to slur or babble or profane.

October 23, 2012

BC says, “You still watch movies on DVD. I love that about you.”

Kipling’s Kim in Humanities. It’s a far better book than I thought it was. I don’t think many in the class actually read it, so my lecture assumed the problem of conveying meaning in a contextual void. But, at least it was meaningful to me, and perhaps I communicated some of that. The book should strike modern readers favorably, as it is about diversity, though it doesn’t hold to modern shibboleths concerning diversity. We think we must admire diversity without judging it, without comparing one thing to another, and when we catch ourselves comparing, the thing least like ourselves must be preferred. This is a tenet of faith rather than a method of cognition. Kim compares merrily, accurately, shamelessly, and therefore his perceptions are sharper and more useful than ours can be. The book is also about choosing. If you choose a straight path, you are no longer free to wander; you have lost part of the potential of your character. If you do not choose the straight path, you lose power and are never anybody in particular at all. I cherished it as a boy without knowing exactly why. I was already on the path–though I didn’t know it–and Kim’s prolonged freedom seemed exhilarating. For a while I wanted with all my heart to be called Kim.

My students point out that I am to do two readings in coming weeks that I had completely forgotten about. Naturally, they conflict with everything else. These same students, in class just today, finally affirmed that obscurity and randomness are not necessarily virtues. I blew in my head the horns of triumph.

October 22, 2012

Woke wrong, neither rested fully nor spent enough still to sleep. I’d gone to bed quite early, so maybe I was trying too hard. Woke to a terrible dream. There had been a long war between me and a monster which took various forms, and I had to overcome it in each form. I ran home to Ohio and was living in my old house, and it came there and took the form of a teddy bear. I had to fight the teddy bear. I almost lost, and was lying in the front seat of a car  beside the ruins of it, when I looked over to see it was getting itself back together. A narrator’s voice came on and said, “The thing was getting healthy again before his eyes.” I grabbed the reconstituting teddy bear and slammed it to the garage floor, praying, “O Lord, let this one thing die forever!” Of course I woke trying to figure out what one thing in the light I meant. The list of potentials is too long.

Turbulent Cantaria rehearsal, many things in many directions. RH, a former student from Phillips Exeter, of all improbable things, has joined the group. He was part of my inner circle there. I haven’t had the chance to ask him how he got here. He was Harvard-bound the last I knew, and then was living in New York. The man the boy grew into is very plausible. I could see the one in the other the minute he identified himself.

October 21, 2012

Revised Man in Flight. I don’t know why it entered my head to do so, but doing so induced the realization that it’s one of the pieces ruined by the “development” process. It languished for nine years after the reading in Manhattan, where Ben and his Fat Chance Productions did their level best, but gave exactly the wrong advice, which I–in an impulse of cooperativeness–followed. Readings and productions of my work have taught me much, “development” has been invariably counterproductive.

Blazing, blameless days.