::Thursday, August 23::
School
starts, with the little ones. Thoroughly unremarkable the days are being. It’s
been a long time since I’ve worked a 9-5 job, or experienced “the tyranny of the
working week.” This evening I index 30 pages for Dr. Manetsch, and listen first
to Bach and then to the Braves and Bob Dylan. Pleasant. Much much more tired than I ought to be.
I
try to write but there is no time. There is no time.
::Saturday, August 11::
Today
Jenni is sick and sleeps in, so I keep Aiden all morning. We go out into
Highwood. A lovely morning, the first of the Fall mornings, cool and bright,
and Aiden sings in his stroller. In the park we meet a Mexican man named José,
with his boys Frankie and Carlos. Aiden throws a ball with them and laughs.
José tells me gleefully that Frankie is called pelos because at six years old he already has hair on his chest and
back. He pulls up his son’s shirt to show me. José has six children and says that
is the difference between American families and Mexican families, that Mexican
families have more children. I can’t disagree. We wave goodbye and José shakes
my hand warmly and seems sad to say goodbye. It was a human connection and we
are both sad to see it end. Maybe I will see him again, but probably not.
In
the afternoon I read over Dr. Manetsch’s manuscript, very slowly, and read some
of Chad Walsh’s anthology of post-WWII poetry. The forties and fifties. Lowell,
Auden, Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren. I’m thinking about focusing on it in
graduate school. It’s at the intersection of so many things. Directly
derivative of modernism, but distinct from it; just preceding modern critical
theory. Poetry and the public had not yet been completely separated, and poets still
spoke for their generation to some degree. I’m thinking about studying Lowell.
::Thursday, August 9::
I come home in the late afternoon from meeting Dr. Lundin to find the house clean
and the windows open, Jenni and Aiden asleep in the bedroom, while a soaking
rain falls outside in gentle sheets. I put on some of Beethoven’s quartets for
piano and strings and lay on the couch, in and out of sleep. I can’t remember
being so perfectly happy.
The
meeting with Dr. Lundin is very encouraging. He turns out to be affable enough,
if a little dignified, but he warms over the meal and by the end is
demonstrably, almost drunkenly, communicative, free with sweeping advice, rambly,
and very reassuring. I drive home listening to Sound Opinions on Blonde on
Blonde, my favorite Dylan record. “Visions of Johanna” and “Sad-eyed Lady.”
That thin, wild, mercury sound.
Dr.
Manetsch and I make up. Not that we ever fell out, of course, and he denies
being aware of any awkwardness. Very gentlemanly of him. I’m still confused
about what happened exactly. He was very, almost aggressively, critical of my
paper and I got flustered, and later emotional. In trying to explain it I
misrepresented myself, and placed myself without meaning to outside the bounds
of evangelical orthodoxy. I still don’t think the paper was so terrible. Weak
in places, of course.
::Wednesday, August 8::
Dozing
in the armchair I have a brief but vivid dream of someone being shot violently.
I wake to the phone sounding a text, from Nate, about the film “Blue Like
Jazz.” Never read the book and never had the slightest interest in reading it.
Nothing
at all today. I sleep late, eat granola and listen to Garrison Keillor. Do some
emailing. Feel inexplicably lethargic and unable to leave my chair or stay
awake or do anything. Jenni asks if I’m depressed and I am adamant that I am
not, that I have never been. Read Cheever and Chabon and doze while Aiden plays
happily and aimlessly.
Jenni
and I watch “The Hours,” mostly because it’s mentioned in a Luxury song. I find
it trite and pretentious. I don’t like movies that depict writers writing, or
composers composing, especially famous ones, and especially with so much
affected profundity. “Of Gods and Men” is the only movie I ever need to see ever again.
Read
Chekhov’s stories. “Easter Night,” as perfect a story as I’ve ever read. But I
didn’t appreciate it as such, not like I might have once. I recognize it’s
perfection, it’s attainment of certain of my own hard-won ideals, but that
recognition is almost clinical. Am I really this unfeeling towards art, or am I
just not young anymore?
