May 31, 2017.

Unearthed a legless lizard as I was planting coreopsis in the back. It squirmed so frantically I covered it back up before I could examine it as I wished. In addition to the coreopsis, some radical weeding. My Mexican has not come, and the yard is a jungle. This irks me long after it would irk most people, but eventually the irk arrives.

Marathon, Trojan rewrite of The Falls of the Wyona to meet a deadline that had been changed even as I struggled.

Terrible prayers at the dim stars last night. If I were God I would obliterate me–which is, sometimes, the desperate end of the design.

Early to the gym, where I saw Brent. Excellent painting in the pale blue morning.

May 30, 2017

DJ’s birthday and Memorial Day picnic at Jack’s last night. Had more fun than I usually do, perhaps because I started drinking right away. DJ has to sit down and lever himself up the stairs. One stands helpless.

Working on fiction. One crabby, unprofitable hour at the studio.

Email from F, wanting my help in getting H’s next projects underway. It is like someone asking van Gogh to help get them into a gallery. I decide on silence, rather than a blast of fury that so much resource is expended on the daydreams of a person with little understanding of her world, and no real talent, other than the talent to persuade other people to create for her. And then, in my case anyway, to leave them not only violated but uncompensated. A fraud in any light, her one virtue is the affection of a patient and rich man, and though I don’t begrudge her that, I think she should be content with it, and not try to present herself as an artist in a world where real artists must claw their way

May 29, 2017

Review of Gatsby in Mountain Xpress:

The Roaring ’20s embodied in F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby is an era of romanticism that still resonates in pop culture nearly a century later. Perhaps it was the Prohibition era, or jazz, or the rise of strong women in society. Haywood Arts Regional Theatre’s production of the relatively new stage version of this legendary novel runs through Sunday, June 11.

Playwright Simon Levy’s script is lean and fast-paced.  There have been great film adaptations that linger in the minds of viewers — Levy’s script is cinematic itself, giving us rapid scene changes and sometimes shifting location for only a handful of lines of dialogue. Such is the case when Gatsby and his newfound companion, Nick, take flight in a small airplane. Director Steve Lloyd eschews a sense of realism and, instead, dazzles the audience with rear projections and shifting lights to accommodate the flourishes of the script.

Charlie Cannon plays the enigmatic Jay Gatsby with a boyish charm. It is easy to imagine Cannon being right at home in the 1920s with pastel suits, flappers and bootleg booze. Gatsby is a war-hero-turned-wealthy-playboy. Or is he? An air of mystery surrounds him. The lengths to which he will go to win back his lost love, Daisy, drive the story.

Kelsey Sewell’s Daisy is a fiery and independent woman trapped in a marriage to Luke Haynes’s menacing Tom Buchanan. Daisy is far from frail, but also not as independent as she would like to be. Sewell walks that delicate edge with grace and ease, making her Daisy neither victim nor heroine in this tale. Meanwhile, Haynes gives Tom equal measures of arrogance and entitlement, which allows him to indulge notions of white nationalism and haughtiness due to his wealth.

Sarah Lipham plays Myrtle — the working-class wife of George Wilson (played by David Anthony Yeates) — who has found herself lured into the lifestyle of the rich and want-to-be famous. She’s having an affair with Tom. Wilson is vaguely aware of it and is desperate to make enough money to divert Myrtle from the temptations of Tom and his wealth. Lipham is great as the petulant and indulgent Myrtle. As Wilson, Yeates gives us a deeply troubled man driven toward desperate acts to regain control of his spiraling life.

David Hopes plays Meyer Wolfsham, Gatsby’s confidant, and gives the character the perfect level of sleaze and suspicion. His machinations are never clear, but he is helping Gatsby pull strings via money and influence.

Laura Gregory shines as golf champion Jordan Baker. She enjoys the opulent lifestyle her fame brings, though there is a cheating controversy that follows her, threatening to ruin her reputation. She finds herself paired with Daisy’s cousin Nick, whom Gatsby seeks out to help him in his plan to win Daisy back. In many ways, Nick is the conduit for the audience into this world, serving as the moral compass amid the easily bent morality of most of the characters. But Silas Waugh‘s choice to play Nick in a manner that would be better suited for film builds an awkward distance between the audience and character.

In the end, it is a show of style over substance — and ultimately that works in the favor of this cautionary tale of excess and ego.

WHAT: The Great Gatsby
WHERE: HART, 250 Pigeon St., Waynesville, harttheatre.org
WHEN: Through Sunday, June 11. Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m. $25

*

So, it’s 8 AM and already I’ve caught up with email and made the picnic potato salad.

It’s hard listening to the radio on Memorial Day, so much of the programing is solemn and sad, memorializing those thousand thousand beautiful faces ground into the dust.

May 27, 2017

Whenever I see “new” theater, I come away with the conviction that I am trying too hard.

C worked out hard during the day, and was excited for the pool scene, where he could show off his massive arms and be the “most jacked and juicy” Gatsby that there ever was. The hilarity in the dressing room was based on replacing each use of “old sport” or any other form of address with “dickless fat-ass.”  It was funny every time. The boys are essentially pre-literate. None of their information out of school comes from reading or what one would call “high culture,” but from popular music and movies. How often do they listen to or see these things? They can sing any song anyone of them can mention, tunefully and word for word, and quote long passages of movies, some of which I saw too, without the impulse to remember them at all. It is a verbal culture, intensely historical, in that they have taken Star Wars and Marvel Comics as their own story, and can recite the persons and chronicles by rote. In this it differs not from what one supposes the relationship of some everyday Greek to the gods of Olympus to be. I love them. I love being with them, though my quite different knowledge base puts me on the periphery of most conversations. Right now they are the only compensation for a round trip to Waynesville to blather out fifteen lines.

May 26, 2017

Yesterday I closed the windows and let the furnace come back on. Today it was back in season. Went before light to the Racquet Club, where I encountered Brent and realized that the agitation in me the last few days is at least in part sexual tension, which I hardly recognize as itself anymore. But, it is energizing, so it is welcome.  Painted well at the studio (sexual energy again?). Steve stopped me on my way out and observed that I had a huge gash in my tire. “Did you hit something?” he said. Yes indeed I had, in the darkness on the highway, but such is my nature that I didn’t check to see what damage was done, assuming that being allowed to keep moving was enough. So, unscheduled trip to Reece’s Tires. Here is the odd thing: the day was so beautiful, so perfect in peace and appearance that waiting for them to replace my tires was rather an opportunity for revery than an imposition. Watched a harvestman cross the concrete and find shelter in a crevasse. A man from Madison County struck up a conversation. I liked him immediately, as one likes someone who is, as near as is conceivable, one’s opposite. He rather looked like me–both of us blond and ruddy and small-- but his life was almost inconceivably unlike mine. If I hadn’t had context I might have misunderstood much of what he was saying– “tar” was “tire” and so on, but most of the things we discussed we could see, so it was well.  As ever, one reveled in the dramatic mountain-masculinity of the workers there. They stand very close to you, but look away so that the closeness is not off-putting. Their voices are low and calm, hardly above a growl. They move like powerful boys. They do not smile. They squat beside your car and contemplate its woes. What they do to men who like men is probably wholly unintended.

Invited to read for Best American Poetry 2017 in New York in September. I said “Yes.”

Theater last night, JC’s new play Malverse. The room was practically empty, but put it down to it being a Thursday night. The level of acting at the Magnetic approaches impeccable. JC wants to have coffee and discuss the play, so I paid morbid attention.

May 25, 2017

Drowsy, rainy day. Did some much-needed manuscript submitting. Months had passed since I sent out a play. Painted some in an old crowded, symbolic mode, but made better by my improvements as a draughtsman. Theater tonight. I’ve grown used to falling asleep in front of a late-night TV movie. Hope I fight that off tonight. A nap of heroic dreams, in one of which I was driving a dogsled through ice storms to rescue somebody. It was a magic sled, and there were no dogs.

May 24, 2017

The catalpas are in bloom. Catalpas mean “Ohio summer” to me. They are also unfulfilled longing, for every nursery I turn to says they’re “invasive” or “out of fashion.” Maybe I’ll travel with a spade and dig one up. Went to the studio, did more work than would seem to fit into the hour I spent there.  S was sad and so hugged me. I am his dear friend when he is sad. The days divide so that I forget I write in the morning. I open the notebook to find pages needing transcription onto the computer. Some of them are good, some to a degree I hardly recognize. Outside, the amazing rain keeps coming down in its amazing volume. A giant white rose rides the front garden like a ruffled moon.