4 August 2004

At long last, I have replaced the disappointing 1990 edition of Chambers's Biographical Dictionary with the superior 1968. A kind of object lesson in the exhaustion of a franchise. It is wonderful that the 1990 editors managed to add figures from thirty more years in 200 additional pages and to deprive the work of its pith, like a laboratory frog. Says the 1968 dustwrapper: "The CBD owes much of its reputation and appeal to its policy of clothing the bare facts with human interest and critical observation...in a style that is at once compact, spirited, and readable"--all qualities that have evaporated in the 1990 version.
I have re-read Edwin Arlington Robinson's sonnets, collected in 1928--most of them abject failures, stuffed with dead phrases or ill-balanced images, but for "George Crabbe" and the conversational "Tilbury Town" poems, the latter very much in the manner of Hardy's "Satires of Circumstance" (surely their model). Yet we respect him in his very sourness, bitterness, refusal to play along with Pollyanna (a new cultural and publishing phenomenon in his day). Bless him for reminding me of the shining word "hansel"--this in the midst of the muck of the incompetently opaque "Never until our souls are strong enough..."
Monday, in GG's absence, I led the evening dance, the Amherst dance that is held, for the last part of the summer, at Whately's Dance Barn. A rather small crowd, much sapped by the enervating heat, but a fine little group--"All Saints' Day" (the David Ashwell dance) and "The Country Farmer" (my interpretation) equally well received--equally gratifying to introduce a worthy dance and to have my own work praised. FZ and TS and I had a long and gratifying gossip after the others had gone, roving from the demise of relationships and how we all differ in our efforts to save face when they do--to comparative nutrition and longevity, American and Eastern European. No matter how we romanticize the hearty simplicity of the peasant's life, our choices are on the whole better, at least if one cares to live beyond forty-five.
Tuesday to Boston--to my home dance in Jamaica Plain: there is no place, as Dorothy said, like it. CVM and I leading. One of our dancers brought a handsome bitch who rejoices in the name of Tulip. Tulip had certain remarks to make in her own language as we reviewed our figures: as JO'F and danced "Wa' is Me" together, I murmured to him, "*She* has a lot to say." "Yes," he said: "I wasn't aware before that this dance was a bark-arolle." Tulip's utterances were so intermittent and--dare we say--*editorial* that there was no sense in shushing her or putting her out. When I taught in the second half, and Tulip sang out, I would say, "...and everyone bark!" Which they dutifully did. No place like it, Dorothy.
That evening off to SS' house in Newton, where all of her very handsome and presentable were in residence, D fresh from New Zealand, coffee-table books, datebooks, albums, and half-unpacked bags everywhere. In the morning to Dedham for a little late coffee with LB.
Luncheon with TP and HR: T's brother in rapid decline with ALS, and her family frozen in horror around him. Meanwhile, T's other brother--no doubt grieving in his own unhelpful way--has been preparing for a footrace for the over-50 set, and in his efforts to diet down to his fighting weight, lost consciousness at his girlfriend's apartment. "*Marrrk*," TP said to him over the telephone, "Mom will *not* survive this if you croak before Steven."
TP, to HR on the difference between New Jersey and home: "Many of the people we've met in New Jersey are really hoping to avoid felony conviction. Many of the people we know in Massachusetts are really hoping for the Nobel Prize."
B joins us late in the lunch, fresh from the sanatorium and her suicide attempt, the unhappy fruit of her long, depressed, depressing association with T, whose neediness, evil temper, and catastrophically poor health have resulted in an untenable and finally abusive situation for B. With a certain degree of reluctance, I agree to accompany TP and HR to T's apartment, where B's cellphone--a real link to some future that might include a job and an apartment--is being held hostage. HR rides shotgun for B; I ride shotgun for HR, trying to pull myself up to my most menacing 65 inches, shaded glasses confrontatively left on. T is as angry at us as she is at the woman who is leaving her; her life and health gradually worsen, yet her catalogue of miseries is hauntingly familiar, unaltered in tenor if refreshed in substance from its last airing in my presence, three or five years ago.
In the car, the four of us wonder whether T understands her own cruelly manipulative gestures. "I'm sure she does," says TP; "she's a bright girl." "So I have always heard," says B. And I say, "But she hasn't been able to apply her wits to the art of living."

1 August 2004

Delibes' very fine ballet-score Sylvia on my little CD-player; Delibes has been rather underrated, or simply derided for the local-color follies of Lakme. TWB laughed at my affection for Delibes; he said it was the sort of music his grandmother liked--but he was quite wrong in that, as in so many things: Sylvia and of course Coppelia are really outstanding--here is the confident grandeur of the opening march.
Friday, a party in celebration of J and S' recent marriage, their dance friends and a former neighbor gathered around, J and I comparing notes about the merits and grave woes of academic life in the present moment, both of us fearing for the future. She warned me that I ought to have modest goals, but I tried to assure her that--at least so far as my use of this degree was concerned--none could have goals more modest than I, and that I have Plans B, C, and D in store. I brought a handful of brilliantly solar-colored flowers--drenched yellows, sanguinous reds, enamel oranges-- and crackers and cheese--certainly the humblest of offerings. One of these was a Gouda, and as I set it down, I said, "Trader Joe's assures me that this Gouda has a 'nutty, mature flavor.' So, for the record, do I."
Saturday afternoon to a suitably mad dancing-master's gig: four-and-twenty darling young ladies, who had spent the rest of the weekend in a light bath of "Jane Austen" culture--genteel drawing, bonnet-making, and a host of other activities that would doubtless have made Austen herself wild with boredom. They had made their own gowns--rich and fantastical extravaganzas, well beyond the means of Austen herself, more in the Bingley or de Burgh line--and knew nothing of the forms or traditions of the dance. With some effort, and a good deal of repetition, we danced "Heartsease," "Ore Boggy," "The Comical Fellow," and "Freeford Gardens," I bellowing over the sound system, directing the traffic, walking up and down, stopping and restarting. All of us liquefying--I in my tuxedo, they in their silks, cottons, and unspeakably modern cotton-poly blends. They, despite the general condition of glassy-eye that prevailed in the room, assured me that they had had a grand time.
Away to dinner with EC, who made us a simple and irresistible dinner, he, despite cares of his own, offering his splendid supports. Today, off to the movies with PK--the eminently forgettable Catwoman, a kind of study in the supplementation--overthrow? of actors by computer-animation, or perhaps just a long commercial for the forthcoming computer game. Halle Berry's computerized doppelganger, however, somehow did not move as a character sufficiently constrained by gravity, supernatural powers notwithstanding--she began to look like "Frieda's boneless cat" on heavy stimulants.
Ah, the theme of Sylvia!--the great theme of Sylvia, the fanfare of les Chasseresses, Diana's Academy for Bloodthirsty Young Ladies. If only Wagner had written music so fine for *his* aggressive nymphs, perhaps it all would have turned out better for Wotan's family, and the world would not have ended in sad rubble after all.