"One more story derives from the demise of my tree. The tree blew down in July, and of course nobody knows when my granddaughter Allison and her husband Will will move into this old house, extending one family's residence since 1865. They will take over here when I die, but now I was able, with the help of a windstorm, to give them a wedding present that should last awhile. When I was a boy, elms lined Route 4, but by the time Jane and I arrived, Dutch elm disease had killed them all. A few years ago, Philippa told me of newly bred elms that were immune. She and I conspired, and acting as my agent, she bought a new American elm, and after the great stump was removed a slim four-foot elm sapling took the maple's place. Philippa and Jerry, my son-in-law, planted it on a Sunday early in September while Allison and Will and I looked on. It was Tree Day, which I proclaim a family holiday. For now the elm will require watering, three doses of three gallons a week, applied by my helpers. The sapling came with a bronze plaque inscribed to the future tenants, to be affixed to the elm's eventual trunk. I am free to imagine another grandchild swinging from another branch of another tree."
— A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety by Donald Hall
https://a.co/5GbOTqz
Monday, May 30, 2022
Donald Hall on Garrison Keillor
An Old Hermit Named Garrison
"Saturday nights Jane and I used to listen to Garrison Keillor doing A Prairie Home Companion. With pleasure we read Keillor's stories in The New Yorker. We heard him speak a daily poem on his public broadcast Writer's Almanac. We did not know him. When Jane was diagnosed with leukemia, she received from his Minnesota office a package containing four cassettes of his monologues. How did Keillor know that Jane was sick? He has always known everything about poets. He's also stubborn. Once I was doing a textbook and asked his permission to reprint an essay. He refused because my publisher belonged to a conglomerate, one branch of which had published an unauthorized book about him. I prettypleased him, addressing him as "Garrison." He wrote back briefly repeating his decision and addressing me as "Mr. Hall." Later a friend of mine wrote Keillor offering him a prestigious American poetry award, explaining that the honor was for his service to the art. In a handwritten letter he expressed his gratitude, included an inscribed copy of his latest book, and refused the honor. He pointed out that he wasn't a poet. These days the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and Poetry Daily display a different poem online every twenty-four hours. Whatever the appetite for a daily poem publicly displayed, clearly it is satisfied. Keillor's Writer's Almanac repeats itself digitally as well as audibly—but before the digital universe, for decades, only his radio Almanac delivered a poem coast to coast, 365 days a year. No one has ever promoted poetry so widely as Garrison Keillor. Keillor also promoted poetry by drafting poets as guests for Prairie Home Companion, until he retired in 2016. Billy Collins performed seven times that I know of. My total was three. My first appearance celebrated the 100th birthday of Keillor's St. Paul homeboy F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the show's St. Paul theater. I came equipped without a script but with a schedule—when to arrive, when to eat, when to rehearse—and backstage I found an improvised cafeteria where I assembled my supper. I awaited rehearsal. There was no rehearsal. No one told me what was I supposed to do. Then I discovered: every Saturday night Keillor appeared to make up the show as he went along. For actors performing skits, and for the soundman's genius, during the week Keillor must have given a hint. Daily, when he drove from his house to his workplace, he daydreamed his monologues. When he performed them, he watched minutes elapse on a clock, adding or subtracting to fit the time remaining. For his Fitzgerald birthday party he invited a bunch of writers, mostly novelists, and sat us in the theater's front row, before a ramp that led up to the stage. I heard Keillor speak about Fitzgerald's great novel, then announce, "I'm casting Donald Hall as Jay Gatsby." It was the first I had heard of it. He handed me a script, gave me directions out loud, and everything turned out all right. With Garrison Keillor, everything always turns out all right. On my second visit, I was his main guest, and before the show he asked me to come watch him shave. Yes, he shaves for his radio show. As he plied a straight razor he told me that during the program we two should say limericks to each other. Did I know any? I said I knew one that wouldn't do on public radio: There was an old hermit named Dave Who kept a dead whore in his cave. He said, "I'll admit I'm a bit of a shit, But think of the money I save." He said it was fine and dictated another for me to say after I had finished with Dave. We would perform our limericks after a musical interlude, first me and then him. During the show, as the band slowed down just before our limericks, Keillor changed his mind. "Let's go back and forth," he told me. "We'll one-up each other." It came out all right. The last time I did it, the show was at Tanglewood in 2008, the year I turned eighty, and Linda drove us to a motel in Lenox. Midafternoon we climbed onto a rattling bus to take us to the Tanglewood auditorium. It was eight times the size of the St. Paul theater, and every seat would be occupied by a western Massachusetts summer bottom. Another two thousand fans sat on the grass outside, listening to the show through speakers. Half an hour before things got started, Keillor approached Linda and me. Linda had never observed his actual face. It bulges here, it bulges there, possibly assembled from spare parts. Any sense of menace vanishes as soon as he speaks. He caresses whom he addresses. He spoke of books I had published since our last meeting, then warmed up the audience for twenty minutes. He didn't need to warm anybody up, but he liked warming people up. Half an hour into the show, staffers lugged me across the stage, set me on a chair, and Keillor kneeled down beside me to chat. I said my poems, staff carried me back to Linda, actors did a skit. Then Inga Swearingen, a pretty young singer, did three songs. A cappella, she sang "Summer Kitchen," a twelve-line poem of mine about Jane. She made up the tune and I loved every note. After the intermission I said more poems. Garrison asked me if I kept livestock at the farm. I told him no and then corrected myself. I had a cat. Garrison noted that it was difficult to milk a cat, and my handlers carried me back to Linda. When the radio show stopped at seven, Garrison didn't stop. He walked around the auditorium saying goodbye. The inside crowd straggled out, and the outside crowd filed in. He had talked for two and a half hours, from warm-up to show to first farewell, and now he extended himself another thirty minutes, singing variations on "I'm tired and I want to go home." Then everybody went home."
— A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety by Donald Hall
https://a.co/4FyfssX
"Saturday nights Jane and I used to listen to Garrison Keillor doing A Prairie Home Companion. With pleasure we read Keillor's stories in The New Yorker. We heard him speak a daily poem on his public broadcast Writer's Almanac. We did not know him. When Jane was diagnosed with leukemia, she received from his Minnesota office a package containing four cassettes of his monologues. How did Keillor know that Jane was sick? He has always known everything about poets. He's also stubborn. Once I was doing a textbook and asked his permission to reprint an essay. He refused because my publisher belonged to a conglomerate, one branch of which had published an unauthorized book about him. I prettypleased him, addressing him as "Garrison." He wrote back briefly repeating his decision and addressing me as "Mr. Hall." Later a friend of mine wrote Keillor offering him a prestigious American poetry award, explaining that the honor was for his service to the art. In a handwritten letter he expressed his gratitude, included an inscribed copy of his latest book, and refused the honor. He pointed out that he wasn't a poet. These days the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and Poetry Daily display a different poem online every twenty-four hours. Whatever the appetite for a daily poem publicly displayed, clearly it is satisfied. Keillor's Writer's Almanac repeats itself digitally as well as audibly—but before the digital universe, for decades, only his radio Almanac delivered a poem coast to coast, 365 days a year. No one has ever promoted poetry so widely as Garrison Keillor. Keillor also promoted poetry by drafting poets as guests for Prairie Home Companion, until he retired in 2016. Billy Collins performed seven times that I know of. My total was three. My first appearance celebrated the 100th birthday of Keillor's St. Paul homeboy F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the show's St. Paul theater. I came equipped without a script but with a schedule—when to arrive, when to eat, when to rehearse—and backstage I found an improvised cafeteria where I assembled my supper. I awaited rehearsal. There was no rehearsal. No one told me what was I supposed to do. Then I discovered: every Saturday night Keillor appeared to make up the show as he went along. For actors performing skits, and for the soundman's genius, during the week Keillor must have given a hint. Daily, when he drove from his house to his workplace, he daydreamed his monologues. When he performed them, he watched minutes elapse on a clock, adding or subtracting to fit the time remaining. For his Fitzgerald birthday party he invited a bunch of writers, mostly novelists, and sat us in the theater's front row, before a ramp that led up to the stage. I heard Keillor speak about Fitzgerald's great novel, then announce, "I'm casting Donald Hall as Jay Gatsby." It was the first I had heard of it. He handed me a script, gave me directions out loud, and everything turned out all right. With Garrison Keillor, everything always turns out all right. On my second visit, I was his main guest, and before the show he asked me to come watch him shave. Yes, he shaves for his radio show. As he plied a straight razor he told me that during the program we two should say limericks to each other. Did I know any? I said I knew one that wouldn't do on public radio: There was an old hermit named Dave Who kept a dead whore in his cave. He said, "I'll admit I'm a bit of a shit, But think of the money I save." He said it was fine and dictated another for me to say after I had finished with Dave. We would perform our limericks after a musical interlude, first me and then him. During the show, as the band slowed down just before our limericks, Keillor changed his mind. "Let's go back and forth," he told me. "We'll one-up each other." It came out all right. The last time I did it, the show was at Tanglewood in 2008, the year I turned eighty, and Linda drove us to a motel in Lenox. Midafternoon we climbed onto a rattling bus to take us to the Tanglewood auditorium. It was eight times the size of the St. Paul theater, and every seat would be occupied by a western Massachusetts summer bottom. Another two thousand fans sat on the grass outside, listening to the show through speakers. Half an hour before things got started, Keillor approached Linda and me. Linda had never observed his actual face. It bulges here, it bulges there, possibly assembled from spare parts. Any sense of menace vanishes as soon as he speaks. He caresses whom he addresses. He spoke of books I had published since our last meeting, then warmed up the audience for twenty minutes. He didn't need to warm anybody up, but he liked warming people up. Half an hour into the show, staffers lugged me across the stage, set me on a chair, and Keillor kneeled down beside me to chat. I said my poems, staff carried me back to Linda, actors did a skit. Then Inga Swearingen, a pretty young singer, did three songs. A cappella, she sang "Summer Kitchen," a twelve-line poem of mine about Jane. She made up the tune and I loved every note. After the intermission I said more poems. Garrison asked me if I kept livestock at the farm. I told him no and then corrected myself. I had a cat. Garrison noted that it was difficult to milk a cat, and my handlers carried me back to Linda. When the radio show stopped at seven, Garrison didn't stop. He walked around the auditorium saying goodbye. The inside crowd straggled out, and the outside crowd filed in. He had talked for two and a half hours, from warm-up to show to first farewell, and now he extended himself another thirty minutes, singing variations on "I'm tired and I want to go home." Then everybody went home."
— A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety by Donald Hall
https://a.co/4FyfssX
Saturday, May 28, 2022
Thursday, May 26, 2022
"A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety"
"Jane Kenyon was my student. She was smart, she wrote poems, she was funny and frank in class. After the term ended, because I knew she lived in a dormitory near me, one night I asked her to house-sit while I attended an hour-long meeting. (In Ann Arbor, 1970 was the year of breaking and entering.) When I came home, we went to bed. We enjoyed each other, libertine liberty as much as pleasures of the flesh. Later I asked her to dinner, which in that decade always included breakfast. Often we saw each other once a week, still dating others, then twice a week—then three or four times a week, seeing no one else. One night we spoke of marriage. Quickly we changed the subject, because I was nineteen years older, and if we married she would be a widow so long. We married in April 1972. We lived in Ann Arbor three years, then left Michigan for New Hampshire. She adored this old family house. For almost twenty years I woke before Jane and brought her coffee in bed. When she rose, she walked Gus the dog. Then each of us retreated to a workroom to write, at opposite ends of our two-story house. Mine was on the ground floor in front, next to Route 4. Hers was on the second floor in the rear, by Ragged Mountain’s old pasture. In the separation of our double solitude we each wrote poetry in the morning. We met for lunch, eating sandwiches and walking around without chatting. Then we took a twenty-minute nap, gathering energy for the rest of the day, and woke to our daily fuck. Afterward I felt like cuddling, but Jane’s climax released her into energy. She hurried from bed to workroom. For several hours afterward I went back to work at my desk. Late in the afternoon I read aloud to Jane for an hour. I read Wordsworth’s Prelude, Henry James’s The Ambassadors twice, the Old Testament, William Faulkner, seventeenth-century poets, Raymond Carver’s stories, more Henry James. Before supper I drank a beer and glanced at The New Yorker while Jane cooked, sipping a glass of wine. Slowly she made a good dinner—maybe veal cutlets with mushroom and garlic gravy, maybe summer’s asparagus from Jane’s plot across the street—then asked me to carry our plates to the table while she lit the candle. Through dinner we spoke of our separate days. Summer afternoons we spent beside Eagle Pond on a bite-sized beach among frogs, mink, and beaver. Jane lay in the sun tanning while I read magazines in a canvas sling chair. Every now and then we would plunge into the pond. Sometimes for an early supper we broiled sausage on a hibachi. After twenty-three years of an extraordinary marriage, twenty New Hampshire years living and writing together in our double solitude, Jane died of leukemia at forty-seven in 1995. Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. At eighty-six, I was sick and thought I was dying. Twenty and twenty-one years ago, every day of her dying for eighteen months, I stayed by her side. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last February I grieved again, this time that she would not sit over me as I died."
"A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety" by Donald Hall: https://a.co/2hVlB1O
Donald Hall-"My most notable musical moment"
"Everyone who practices an art should love and live with another art. One learns about one’s own work by exposing oneself to a different passion. Mentioning a second art does not imply competence in practicing it. In eighth grade I flunked art, which was lamentable, because in art class I sat beside Mary Beth Burgess and I was sweet on her. Music is totally beyond me. My most notable musical moment took place on Ken Burns’s Baseball. He interviewed me about the game, about loving baseball, not about playing it. I had hung around major league players, writing books and essays about them, and for Ken I came up with twenty anecdotes. Then he asked me to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” telling me that all his interviewees would sing it. Ken Burns’s charm could persuade a monkey to breed with a daffodil. At his urging I tried singing “Take me out . . .” and heard my pitch waver capriciously up and down. Tuneless, ashamed, in my disgrace I forgot the lyrics. The highlight of Ken’s Baseball series, I swear, is the image of my mouth hanging open wide and silent. It looked like brain damage. In editing, Ken paid special attention to this image by holding it for two or three beats. I love painting, sculpture, sketches, and watercolors. I have my own collection, mostly prints and posters—Blake, Arp, Warhol, Marie Laurencin, de Kooning, Man Ray—and my favorite pastime is going to museums. Myself, I can draw one thing only, and I do it when I sign my baseball books. I draw a circle, with half-moon semicircles inside it, with a few short lines cutting into the semicircles. The perpetually lopsided circle (I am not Giotto), decorated by expressionist stitches, leaves space for dedication, autograph, and date. It was always poetry and not much else. To avoid math and science I took a classical diploma at Exeter—Latin and Greek, Virgil and Homer. At Harvard I majored in English but concentrated on poetry courses, avoiding prose when I could. One day, I don’t know why, I wandered into the Fogg Museum and found an exhibition of Edvard Munch. I was stunned by the power of this literary painter, and I went back and back to The Scream and its siblings. Two years later the same show turned up in Paris, at the Petit Palais, and during a long vacation from Oxford I walked every afternoon to see it again. It began my museum life, which lasted and extended. Years later I wrote a New Yorker Profile of Henry Moore and interviewed other English artists, from Barbara Hepworth to Francis Bacon. I learned lots about painting and sculpture, but maybe I learned most about poetry—for instance, by hearing Moore quote Rodin, who quoted a stonemason: “Never think of a surface except as the extension of a volume.”"
Essays After Eighty" by Donald Hall: https://a.co/a2CyVv8
Thursday, May 12, 2022
Restoration
May in middle Tennessee! pic.twitter.com/MoH1xK3iB9
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) May 12, 2022
Sunday, May 8, 2022
Five Books (@five_books)
Helping you discover the best books of 2022: https://t.co/JDlUuEGru6 …
#books #books2022
(https://twitter.com/five_books/status/1523299181590310912?s=02)
#books #books2022
(https://twitter.com/five_books/status/1523299181590310912?s=02)
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