January 31, 2013

Stood in the yard in the cloudburst, trying to dig a channel to keep the rainwater–which was coming like the Columbia down my steps and across the patio– out of my cellar. Now, there’s no evidence that it was going into the cellar, but it’s one of those notions you get, and you don’t check the actual status of the cellar because if you do and it’s as bad as you think it is— maybe I was just releasing pent-up energy. I flushed a mole, and was sorry, for of all the creatures who are bad-off in the deluge, he is the most bad-off. Where could he possibly go? The water was inches deep even on the flats, for a few minutes.  I was willing to scoop him up and protect him, but there was no way I could convince him that was the safer path.

Exhausting Wednesday, waking Thursday not particularly rested but still ready for it. The cleaning ladies come today, and why that is such turmoil I can’t explain. Guests in class yesterday to hear about The Bacchae, a play which I thought I understood until I taught it this time.

I want a cosmic pie to fly into the face of everyone who says there’s no point in making gun regulations because “criminals” won’t obey them. What regulations DO criminals obey? Why have any laws at all? Besides, it is not criminals who do the most shocking harm, but sad teenagers and desperate souls. Sad and desperate have a cure and an end as long as you haven’t shot everybody and yourself first.

January 30, 2013

Wind high in the before-morning air. A native English speaking student in my creative writing class–who wants to be a writer–reveals she doesn’t know there is a difference between “me and “I,” assuming the “I” is used to start a sentence and as an intensifier. A sentence such as “You must leave I to continue growth as a human being” struck her as perfectly appropriate. “I never had grammar in school,” she said, “the school I transferred from did it late and the one I transferred to did it early.” The other students explained gently to her while I huddled in a corner and wept.

Interviewing of candidates for the two vacant positions. How inexpressibly horrible to be on display like that, especially if departmental interest has turned away from you in the first five minutes, through no fault of your own. I have agreed to so many independent projects and senior theses! Students appear at my door with sheaves in their hands and I have to scramble to remember why. One young lady is comparing Dr. Who to Peter Pan.

January 28, 2013

Discouraging dreams. One was of exerting myself for a friend (it was Tommy the musician, oddly enough) over a long period of time, and then, when things weren’t going fast enough for him, having him enumerate the ways in which I was a bad friend. Both of us were in an acting class, and we went, after the argument, to our acting finals. The performances were in a forest over steeply rolling hills, and on the crest of each hill was an open space for performance, sylvan versions of the Medieval play carts. The actors were strewn down the hills waiting for their parts to begin, and I realized I had not been cast in any of them. The teacher mumbled something about waiting to see who didn’t show up, but I was crushed. I suspected Tommy of sabotaging me, or even worse, didn’t suspect him at all, but rather a more general antipathy. The forest was very beautiful. In the dream I didn’t worry about how anyone could be heard or seen.

The people at All Souls gave me a “God’s Helping Hands Service Recognition Award” during the Annual Meeting. Physically, it’s a rock-green tile with an image of the tower cross on it. It made me glad, over a ground bass of confusion. I was satisfied I was completely invisible there. The achievements cited were, mostly, two decades old, but in any case the level of my surprise would no doubt gratify the givers. DJ got one, and Amy, and Janis, et al.

Paul asks me if I want to be in The Mikado. The immediate answer is “no,” but I want to be doing something.

January 27, 2013

Watched the moon rise last night. I was lying on the couch, where Sunset Mountain fills my whole window. The moon’s ivory rim appeared behind the trees. It rose two circumferences before it broke free of the trees, rising behind a translucent hill after clearing the opaque one, then sailing clear and round into the sky. It happened that  I was watching a DVD at the same time, which included the rising of the moon. Until I turned the light on to write, my study was slashed by contrasts of moon and shadow.

A spider died on my bathroom floor. When I saw it, it was already being visited by tiny dark ants. I decided to let it lie and let the ants have their way, for they were doing the job nature gave them. Ants surrounded the body, carrying–I suppose--bits of it up the wall to the top of the bathtub, then along the rim of the bathtub to a crack or egress which must be there but which I never found. It must be a tremendous meal, for this has been going on, now for two days and a third night, now ending. A bigger ant would simply have hoisted it up and carried it away. The ant palace must be close to my wall, to keep active through the recent deep cold.

Reading Lord Dunsany’s wonderful book, My Ireland.

Went to the café yesterday intending to write a certain kind of story, and wrote exactly that story. It seldom happens that way. It was little boys out with dad for breakfast, or little boys out with mom for breakfast Saturday, and very beautiful, and my envy was very much mixed with blessing.

My Facebook page shows me a person I don’t entirely recognize. My “friends” are a liberal and anti-Republican lot, which I recognize, and also quite arty, as I am. But they are also bitterly anti-religious, which I suppose on one level I am, but on very many other levels vehemently am not.

Signed out of church today, but there were broad hints that I was going to get some sort of prize– I forget what prizes are given during the Annual Meeting, since I seldom go– and so to gratify both them and me, that’s where I’m off to in four hours.

The spider was alone when I first went into the bathroom and turned on the light. Almost immediately the first ant came, as though they too were waiting for the light.

January 26, 2013

Classes cancelled yesterday for an ice-storm which, here on this ground, never came to anything. Spent time luxuriating in the warm house and then cleaning up debris in the yard, piling stones into fewer, larger piles, and the like. The heat was good in its time; the chill was good in its time. Went to the café and wrote a play for overlapping voices–or at least I think I did. Will know when I open the notebook in a few minutes. Zach reads two of my recent stories (the ones which won prizes) and gives me excellent and unexpected, and quite persona, critique. I never think my stories are about me, but he saw that these, anyway, are. I actually can’t think of what I did with all that time. The Y closed, so there was no workout. A big check came from a magazine.  Maybe I just took a break. I was thrown off by having slept till it was broad daylight. This dark morning I’m back on schedule.

January 25, 2013

Two odd things this morning. One, I overslept by four hours, losing the time I call my first day in this bifurcated life. Two, classes have been cancelled. The sky glowers, but not a flake has fallen on the land I can see. However, am not going to pretend to indignation. A day off is a day off. Those four hours were taken up by vivid and persistent dreams, with a theme, I thought, but also with an underlying image of water. One I remember pretty well was about living in a beautiful old city on a river. I was associated with the theater there, and the theater too was beautiful, with royal blue interiors. Up river from the city was the lair of monsters, and when the monsters stirred they disturbed the river, and the city flooded in a gentle, rather attractive way, the water just appearing as a sort of crystal medium. People could and did attend the theater with water up to their shoulders. The water must have tilted or something to accommodate the rake of the house, though I think of that now, and it wasn’t in the dream. Water is always blessed in my dreams.

Seeing candidates for positions in the department. I pity them for the gauntlet we put them through. Thank God I went through that only one year.

January 23, 2013

Woke from one of my rare overtly sexual dreams. Went with a couple of buddies to a sex club, where different themes were developed in different areas. We bought cokes and got naked and all, but the action seemed to be thin and invariably at some distance from where we were, like a zoo where all the animals are way up in the rocks. There as some contact, but it was more about lying around on blankets in cold, modernist architecture. You’d think sex would be better in a dream.

Watching DVDs of the TV show Fame, wondering at its awfulness, recognizing that it awfulness comes from falseness, as much awfulness does. Not one emotion or situation or “valuable life lesson” is genuine, but rather what one was “supposed” to see and feel. If I could bother to obtain the discs, I would show it to my classes as a demonstration of how intention–rigid intention, anyway-- damages creation.

Got my green Holiday Crunch shirt from the Y, my third. All in the t-short drawer is well.

This is the demon keyboard. I can’t type a sentence without 2 or 3 typos, typos which I swear I have not made, but it has. There, whatever I typed, the keyboard rendered it as “typsos.”

Brief quarrel with a magazine about “hard” editing of a story they will publish, and in fact gave a prize to. They’re actually right, but the sense of ambush and futility doesn’t wash away with the mere recognition that things are well. I think the sadness comes when you sense the Muse has misled you, though of course you must blame it on somebody else.

“Ellse” my keyboatd typed. My “keyboatd” typed. I swear it is not me.


JS in Capetown says Amazon is giving The Sun in Splendor away free. I sigh and decide to let it be.