So we’re almost done with the projects that brought me here. Today is my last day in Ithaca, which makes me very sad, but you can always return to Ithaca. Penelope is always waiting for you here, along with memories of Telluride, rivers, waterfalls, rocks, falling leaves, friends, and the mixed joy and extreme sadness of being an intellectual, whatever that may or may not mean from one moment to another. I never feel like myself more than in this town.

It was snowing last night as we walked home and I saw snowflakes on the ground and on my jacket, looking like crystal beads or tiny models of chemical molecules.

Yesterday, I finished the draft of 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS. 25 pages in 12-pt Courier. Its intertwining plots are now like this:
– Oedipus at Colonus
– Medea
– Oedipus at Colonus
– The Wasps
– The Persians
– The Wasps & The Persians, simultaneously (staggered, and so on)
– The Persians and Antigone
– Antigone
I hope with all my heart that it makes sense to the folks in Indy, because I don’t know how to make it make more sense without directing it. At least I had some great collaborators – being able to have the privilege of rewriting and restructuring the greatest dramatists who have ever written is always satisfying. This made me remember how much fun it was to work on the script for LYSISTRATA, how I felt that each new translation I wove into it brought me closer to the original and to the spirit of the Greeks’ work.

Amina continued work on the web design for UpstageProject – we are almost at the point of being able to launch the blog. I’m going to try to write a manifesto of sorts for its launch, too, as Heidi Julavits did for THE BELIEVER – something about why we think the world needs this website now.

I’ll be in Los Angeles tomorrow, after months away. I was reading Ursula LeGuin this morning, from her book DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, and she quotes Carolyn See writing in GOLDEN GIRLS:

“Where did those girls walk? They walked for miles in the center of the city…They walked northeast and down a long sweet incline to where Griffith Park Boulevard and Los Feliz and Fletcher Drive met…They walked the old streets, Hyperion over to Vermont, stopping at the grocery store at …Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard…walking the width of the town they knew, over to La Brea…and then another long, long walk home.”

And then LeGuin writes, “Those streets are named for the love of saying their names. The girls walk in love.”

It will be very strange and wonderful to see those streets again. To drive on Franklin Avenue between Vermont and La Brea, my NOTE corridor. I’m happy here, in Ithaca, but it’s the happiness of a place you’ve never risked a long time in. It’s a vacation happiness. Los Angeles – Hollywood – Los Feliz – Woodland Hills – NoHo – SilverLake – Franklin, always Franklin, between Vermont and Virgil, between Cahuenga and Western, is home. And that’s where I’ll be, tomorrow afternoon.