September 29, 2018

Morning was given over to poetry. Then downtown to perform for Pride. The day was glorious, and the performance not so painful as it might have been. We couldn’t be heard. We can never be heard. Tenors in the front row with the mics against their mouths can be heard. I did hear a recording of my solo, and I have a shocking big voice. The plaza was full of happy people in extravagant costume. I complain at the prospect of it, but the thing itself is sweet and good. Bought the best lemonade that there ever was in the world. Tried to buy a parking sticker at the hotel, but the man gave it to me free.

Home to gardening, and now, in darkness, back to poetry again. Tried to put together a book of travel poems, except that it will not cohere. My Irish poems are song-like, simple, unlike my other work. Not only that, they name the names of lovers, something I had forgotten, so long has it been since I looked at them. I was a different man in Ireland. That’s what I wanted.

September 28, 2018

Beethoven from the radio downstairs. My students are giving their class presentations, and they’re by and large horrible, superficial, disorganized. Every year someone does Gesamtkunstwerk without bothering to take even a stab at German pronunciation. I blame their high school teachers for instilling in them the notion that the least is enough, without really knowing if they’re at fault. Perhaps I’m at fault for not exploding in their direction.

Evening, returning from the garden covered with dirt and scratching mosquito bites, but having done yeomanly. Every year I think I’m going to plant an ocean of daffodils.  My big handsome bullfrog gave me full sight of himself at the pond’s edge, disappearing only when I turned my eyes away.

September 27, 2018

Trip to Eden brothers, hungry to buy all the seeds, all the bulbs.

Meet-and-greet with our majors yesterday. Festive. It’s always surprising to hear oneself praised.

Last Men’s Chorus rehearsal before Pride. We forget that in that din no one will hear us at all, let alone the little nuances we try to put into the music. All I want to do is put on a tuxedo, stand in a line and sing the best music in the world. We’re donning diamond tiaras and singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” doing a kick line, waving flags. I’ve managed single-handedly to hold off the burning batons and evening gowns, but how long will that last?

September 26, 2018

Woke from a strange dream. I wanted to include a new element in my painting– wind. Wind made visible. I gathered from the air tiny bits of tornadoes and hurricane and attached them to my canvas and incorporated them into the composition. Sometimes they whirled and sometimes they were just gray cloudy masses. As I painted, an old fashioned gypsy-like caravan rolled up on the lawn nearby. The caravan was occupied by a pretty young girl. She invited me inside, and her caravan was filled with books and clouds, the same bits of clouds I had been collecting. She offered me tea. One thing led to another, and soon we were having sex. I did not forget who I was even in the dream. I reached down to see if I were really aroused, and I was. We made love four times, it being important to her to do it in four different positions, facing the four cardinal directions, which seemed significant to her. When I woke my body was still–notably–aroused.

September 25, 2018

Bill Cosby, the symbol of wise manhood once, sentenced to jail at the age of 81. Nothing better illustrates Fortune’s inexorable wheel.

Kavanaugh, who looked like a sure thing behind the shield of monsters such as McConnell, may have to withdraw from consideration for the Supreme Court. One would think even corrupt men could choose a guiltless one and avoid the sturm und drang, but like will cleave to like no matter what.

The President is laughed at in the UN General Assembly. At least publically he is too stupid to comprehend the humiliation. I want to live to hear him say the words “I am a failure. I am a buffoon whom the whole world either laughs at or reviles.”  Any variation on that would do.

Continued miraculous enthusiasm in my playwriting course.

This semester’s comprehensive exams the worst I’ve ever seen. Someone let them think they needn’t even try. It’s partially our fault. Lazy and irresponsible programs such as Humanities cynically allege that they are teaching “skills” rather than “knowledge.”  This gives students the idea that if they answer correctly the question “do you feel that you have a sense of the history and significance of (fill in the blank)” they actually have mastered that subject. That they have mastered anything. What I wrote to my colleagues:

OK, for what it’s worth, here is my take on the badness of the comps this semester. Part of it is rhythmic and passing; it was just an off semester. Part of it is we don’t get to transfer students quick enough to prepare them. Part of it is an attitude that has crept into education (not us, so much, but so prevalent all around us that it is hard not to be tainted) that we should be teaching skills rather than “things.” Theoretically, this is fine, but it is almost never what happens. When lazy or irresponsible programs (such as the current iteration of Humanities) say “we’re teaching skills” what is meant is that they have given up on teaching actual subject matter and are satisfied if the student can answer positively a set of vague and useless queries such “do you feel you have a general understanding of the course and significance of” whatever the issue is. “Teaching skills” sounds excellent in conversation, but as it manifests in this university at this time, it is an admission that one has given up on–or failed at–teaching subject matter. Of course we are tempted by the current assessment culture into framing things exactly that way. Since there is no real way to assess the value of writing, or understanding, a poem, for instance, a rickety fiction grows up in which the student is encouraged to assess her own feelings about her progress as a scholar. Do you have the skills necessary to understand “Leaves of Grass”? God forbid if she should ever be asked actually to EXPRESS or PROVE her understand or appreciation of it.  Details, facts, names and passages are thought of as being fussy or elite in some way, and to be done without if a student can be confident in an abstract air of attainment. To me, this is the deliberate avoidance of academic principles, wherein the general is ALWAYS founded upon and derived from the specific. You do not have a general feel for the Harlem Renaissance unless you can quote Langston Hughes. You have no general knowledge of the Roman Empire if you can’t speak specifically about at least a few emperors. You have no useful general understand of literature if you don’t know what century Tennyson wrote in or what a dactyl is. There is no skill without application. There is no understanding without specific analysis. I do not mean to be excoriating US, because I think we’re as blameless in this as you can be in a community given over to it. I mean to say it is our task to hold the line and teach the way we ought to, and not be dismayed if we are, from time to time, a shock to our students. That’s what we ought to be: a shock and a correction and an open door.  

September 24, 2018

Wordsworth this AM, maybe the best I’ve done on him. Mike Oppenhein took photos of me in the Botanical Garden in light rain. He said the gray soft light was perfect for a portrait. I couldn’t take my eyes of the infinity of native flowers.  Terror House magazine in Budapest takes my Budapest poems– which I submitted by email last night.

September 23, 2018

One of my favorite days of the year. Who knows why? Maybe something wonderful happened on September 23rd.  Cleaned the pond filter, released a pinkish-goldish fish that had come out with the gunk. Hacked bamboo. Weeded a little. Dug holes for daffodil bulbs, not accomplishing what I meant to. Progress on Sam-sam. Regretted something with all my heart, but was unable to pin down exactly what it was. Miss Sam. I hope things are going as he planned. Watching Jason on Face Book. When I knew him he wanted to be a better-and-better artist. Now he has become a professional VET, nursing a never-ending grievance, which though genuine will not uphold him. One shrugs where only God can see.