July 30, 2020

Obrecht on the CD. Good lines for basses.

I think the sunflowers are flying apart, but it is goldfinches taking off.

Former students are posting photographs of their grandchildren.

July 29, 2020

AGMC want to feature bios of its members. Here’s mine:

1. Where were born?
2. How long have you lived in Asheville and why did you move to Asheville?
3. Choral/choir experiences.
4. Career/work.
5..Family.
6. What ever you would like to say about your partner, husband, lover or most unusual "friend''.
6. One thing--unusual, funny, meaningful--that most people don't know about you.

I was born in Akron, Ohio, and have lived in Asheville since July, 1983. I moved here to take a position as Assistant Professor of English (then Literature and Language) at UNCA.

I started singing in the 7th grade when I somehow screwed up the courage to audition for the Hyre Junior High choir. I was a soprano. Somehow during that time I divined (without actually being taught) how to read music. Sang all through high school, branching out into Boys’ Glee Club and the Madrigals. By then I was a bass. The Madrigals were great because we got out of class and sang for local businesses and professional meetings. Sang through college, where I began to appreciate the concept of repertoire, and to understand what I liked and why. In graduate school in Baltimore, I sang with the Goucher-Hopkins Chorus, the Goucher-Hopkins Madrigal Singers, and got my first paid gig at the Second English Lutheran Church, about a block from Johns Hopkins. I sang for the Baltimore Opera, at which time I performed for Aaron Copeland, met Rosa Ponsell and Bidu Sayao. Long story. . . . In Syracuse I auditioned for a group called Pro Musica, which specialized in ancient & Renaissance music, and which performed old form full sung masses at the Church of the Saviour. It was then I began my love affair with ancient and Renaissance music, which has not abated. Sang also for a group called Schola Cantorum, which concentrated on the more secular side of things, Monteverdi and old opera, etc. Coming to Asheville I began singing at All Souls in 1988– following in Jack Parsons’ footsteps– and joined in the creation of Cantaria, as it was then. Did stints with Asheville Choral and Symphony Chorus.

I just ended 40 years of teaching (37 of them at UNCA), while before and after that time I am a writer. 

I have a sister who lives in Atlanta with her second husband, three nephews and a niece. My niece is expecting her second daughter in Colorado. I’ve been doing genealogy and, believe me, there is more to it than that, but we’ll save it for another time. 

OK, what leapt into mind when I read the question was. . . let’s call him T. We were both heavily into theater, and I’d come to watch his plays, and he mine. Though this says nothing good about our concentration, we’d manage to blow a kiss into the audience, hoping we hit the general direction where he sat in the dark. That’s hard to do in something like Macbeth.

I am an open book. Everyone knows everything about me. But let me admit to a couple of guilty pleasures: Jackie Chan movies, YouTube videos of hunting feral hogs, vanilla anything.  

Standing in my garden at twilight. A turkey cock struts along the fence. A rabbit nibbles over by the sunflowers. Since I’ve never seen him do anything but graze the grass, I’ll suspend my war with the ground hog for now. Thrushes and catbirds flit from one branch to another. It is a kind of Eden. I’ll try not to do anything to break that trust.

July 28, 2020

Distant thunder. Good work on Horses

Have been gifted with various surveillance cameras over the years, decided to set them up today. They do not come with the SIM cards without which they are useless. You don’t just plug them in somewhere. Some unexpressed wisdom caused me to ignore them all this time.

Re-started my Learn Italian” program. The boy is swimming. The girls are swimming. . .

The genealogy of the Keenans in BN allowed me to trace Sam-Sam’s descent from Columba, Bann Keenan’s vanished son.

July 27, 2020

Huge labors on All the Tired Horses. Cut 40,000 words that didn’t belong, working hard to get back where I was.

Went to Dick’s to get a bb gun. They were sold out. That was the hand of God, to spare me from spilling innocent blood. Did get some repellent that is supposed to irritate varmints until they vacate.

T confessed himself confused by the characters in Beautiful Necklaces, inspiring me to draw up a genealogy.

Ate corn on the cob for the first time in many summers.

July 26, 2020

Dream about K this morning just before waking. I was living in a gigantic, creepy palace where I had some sort of residency. Much of the dream was about wandering around the palace (palatial in size, but creepy and run-down). My assigned bathroom was really remote and down many flights of stairs, and when I finally found it, I turned around and saw K on a ladder in a sort of alcove, sorting gorgeous, gigantic Christmas tree ornaments. The walls and floors were covered with them, all sorted by color, red and purple and blue, but mostly gold. I surmised that he was famous for his Christmas trees, and remarked, "You must have one whole tree just for the golden ornaments."
"Yes," he said, very sadly. "One just for gold. People said you could see the golden one flashing all the way to Weaverville." It was winter and I assumed he was taking them out, but he said "No, putting them away, putting them all away," and from the ladder delivered this long, Shakespearean soliloquy on putting the Christmas ornaments away.

Checking the spelling of Phillips Exeter (two ll’s) I ran across articles saying that Rick Schubart and George Mangan, whom I knew, were charged with sexual misconduct there. Learned that Lane Bateman, big news for a while, is dead. I keep forgetting that people who were my elders, even slightly, as I grew up are likely to be dead. Lane lent me his apartment in his absence, and recommended videos that he kept under his floor. I never looked at them. Those were the ones that sent him to Federal prison.

July 25, 2020

Mother’s birthday. She would have been 96. She has been dead 46 years. It’s absurd. What did she think of me when she died, when I was apparently a failure living in a trailer, working as a janitor in Ithaca? It’s one of those things I cannot think about.

The combination of quarantine and retirement does odd things to my perceptions. I live so much in the world of the Ideal-- literature, art, conversations with the glorious dead, the characters I’m creating as I write--that actual people, with their slowness, their indirection, their scattered or invisible purposes, irritate me a little. I do remember this from times before, especially graduate school when I was conquering poetry and living in my little Platonic retreat on Madison Street. But then I was also sexually active, and the hunt for and seduction of sexual partners brought me back to a state of civility.

July 24, 2020

Misty day, probably between rains.

Zoom meeting of the All Souls Endowment Commission. Jack is a sublime explainer, but a certain rancor governed the meeting anyway. I believe that to be a reaction to the unnecessary secrecy of goings-on there. An impulse of indirection becomes, after a while, a reflexive failure of candor.

Working hard on the rock-and-roll book, a foundational tone for which I discovered two days ago. Sat by the river writing, while horn worms inched across the page.

Nephew David advises me on firepower (non-lethal) to bring against the groundhog. We decide on air-soft, with which David and Daniel used to shoot each other when they were teenagers. Carrying on a family tradition.