Le Diable Au Corps

I was blessed as a boy growing up in a small Iowa town with its elm lined streets, minimal car traffic, drugstores where there were soda fountains offering sundaes and sodas to customers sitting on stools.  But more than that the smallness guaranteed sociability, and still more than that the presence of the State University of Iowa guaranteed weekly symphony concerts, a season of theater, and changing exhibitions at the museum.  Ever Wednesday afternoon I went there to see a film series organized by MoMA called "The Film 'Til Now."  Not every boy gets the history of film from its very beginnings in the course of two or so years.  Even more extraordinary as I look back on that era was the presence in this small town, albeit a university town, of a movie theater, one of three in the town, called The Capitol, which showed almost exclusively current foreign language films, or films from the late thirties, missed because of the war.  I spent a lot of time there, never more than the week in 1947, I think it was, when I was there every day to see at least once if not twice the French film "Le Diable Au Corps," which featured Micheline Presle and Gerard Philipe as young lovers, he a high school boy, she a young fiancée, then wife of a soldier at the front in 1917.  The film records their meeting, their almost immediate infatuation, the tensions of fending off family, hiding from husband, and finally their desperate parting and farewell, she by now very pregnant by the lad, and her subsequent death in childbirth, the entire drama framed by the shots of her funeral at the beginning, occasionally throughout, and as a finale to the film.  I can vividly remember my teenaged self, the same age as the character Philipe was playing, sitting sobbing throughout the film, certainly after the first or second viewing almost continuously from the moment the credits began to roll.  For some reason the film sort of disappeared from circulation thereafter or only existed in a dubbed version, who knows?, but I have yearned to see it, as it unspooled in the theater of my memory, year after year, until just now I discovered I could get a restored print from French Amazon, and somehow in my excitement and with the shakiness of old age, I seemed to have hit the purchase button much too enthusiastically because I now own four prints of the film.  Last night we put it on.  Yes? Yes? you are asking breathlessly.  Well, first off, I must say I am not seventeen anymore.  How could she, the eighty three year old viewer asked himself, just after meeting the kid agree to spend time with him, and before you know it, sleep with him, when she had a very nice looking soldier boyfriend, not to mention a French bourgeois upbringing and a stern mother all of which must have militated against her impetuosity?  Then there was the revelation, for some reason not at all apparent at the time, that the two leads who were both born in 1922, looked very much to be the same age, that is, mature persons in their mid twenties.  He was certainly not the teenaged swoon I remember him to have been, although the actor did a very fine job of projecting the adolescent possessiveness, mood swings, and all the other features of that age group which to me in my dotage make them so singularly unattractive.  It would be the teenaged look, the wistful, tentative, yet impetuously passionate sense of the moment, that had to sweep this about-to-be married woman, i.e. someone soon to enter the prison of bourgeois life, off her feet, and Philipe the actor looked just as shopworn as Presle, unfortunately.  I wasn't repelled, but I was disenchanted, and as a stern old timer more or less agreed with the mother's grim admonitions to the feckless twosome throughout the film, until near the end, and when they were settling into the realization that she had to give him up, he had to go away, that the baby had to be born as though the child of the officer about to come home from the war, and all the drama of this impending separation took place against the shouts and whoops of joy for the news of the impending armistice and the end of the war.  I started to cry again, they  were so forlorn, such waifs in the grand rush of love and destiny.  Yes, yes, love is all, passion takes the moment, I could remember my knowing this to be so in Paris even if it were not quite so easily imagined in Iowa City.

The Bourgeoisie

Charles Blow has an article in Saturday's The New York Times in which he offers his statistical findings to the question of how people define their class in terms of their income, the point being to demonstrate that more and more people feel that their failing incomes remove them from a definition of "middle class."  My response to class has always been atypical, I guess, since I do not consider income to be the defining factor, but rather culture.  Of course, for someone in his eighties my view of things is probably so out of date as to be entirely invalid, but Blow's article set me to thinking of the question.  Two anecdotes are revealing.  Years ago I met a woman whose family had escaped Budapest in the 1957 revolution; she had settled in Palo Alto with her husband who conducted some sort of business while she taught art history at night school since she had no means to get an academic position such as she had had in Hungary.  On a visit to fellow refugees who had settled in Montreal and enthusiastically taken up a new life, she was mocked by them when she mentioned her resumption of teaching art history.  "Aber, Susie, nicht hier." they laughed, "Kunst ist nur für arme Leute."  Speaking German, itself, was telling since both sets of friends were native speakers of Magyar who nonetheless spoke German together, the language of culture and civilization back before the Second World War in the Hungary of their youth.  But those newly settled in Montreal could proudly announce that "Art is only for poor people."  Which is to say, they had learned in the New World, that money not culture is the sole defining fact of one's place in society.  The second anecdote tells of a night out at a drinks party given by a neighbor in our cul de sac of high end development homes in Palo Alto when I was a lowly, minimally paid assistant professor who nonetheless tapped into a bit of inherited funds to buy the house in this neighborhood.  A fellow who lived two houses away, whom we were meeting for the first time, exclaimed with surprise and ill-concealed contempt, that he found it amazing that someone in my position could afford a house there.  He himself, as his wife explained to satisfy my curiosity, was the golf pro at a nearby club. My WASP good manners prevented my saying aloud what I thought, but indeed it was my turn to be shocked that someone so uncouth and clearly ill-educated would be a neighbor of mine and live in one of these very fine architect designed homes.  My job at Stanford University was to offer courses in ancient Greek literature and culture for a generation who in my expectation would be the finest specimens of the middle class, the people who inherited the culture, paid for the culture, created the culture which in grand terms we call Western Civilization.  That expectation dates to fifty years ago.  How it has all changed!  The goal of the majority of students at the so called best universities is to study finance, or law, or whatever else will make them money, as though that were the end of it all.  And the very institutions aid and abet that ambition, denying any conceivable guardianship of the civilization and culture that historically they were brought into being to investigate and strengthen.  A quirk of circumstance has brought me into contact with a group of rich persons who have banded together to support a major institution of culture in a place where I live in the winter.  I had initially assumed that their principal allegiance was to the grand culture of which this was a part, but upon closer association of three years I have yet to hear them speak about matters of art, music, literature, philosophy, theater, all those things that I in my naivete thought was the point of living.  I think it is more in the nature of a rich man's club.  I guess I just can't get it into my head "Karlchen, Karlchen, Ach du lieber, Kunst ist immer mehr nur für arme Leute."

It's All In The Gesture

The Boston dramatist Ryan Landry has a made a play entitled "M,"which is both a very funny and very serious account of the workings of German Expressionistic cinema of the twenties and early thirties and a look into the artistic triumph of that art form, the great classic 1931 film by Fritz Lang starring Peter Lorre.  It is currently ending its run at the Calderwood Pavilion in Boston.  Among the remarkable features of Landry's piece is the constantly changing projections and designs of the set which are among other things immensely amusing as a contemporary ironic account of the German Expressionist style, but it is the unerring reference to language, gesture, walk, and talk that is constantly exciting for anyone knowledgeable of the medium and that era. Landry is a master at creating dramatic ironies, as he has demonstrated for years in his enormously amusing parodies, one might call them, of various famous theatrical personages or films.  Most recently he amused and instructed the public with the play Mildred Fierce.  That the usual venue for his offerings is a theatrical space in the lower level of a gay bar will suggest that he counts on a gay audience for his success, but whatever celebrity he achieved in that cohort has long since been transcended; he is for everybody, as was the late, great Charles Ludlam, whose Theater of the Ridiculous in New York early on rated reviews in The New York Times. Irony is key to the dramatic expression of both these gentlemen, the defining key to their authenticity, which is I suppose another form of Susan Sontag's famous definition of camp.  Irony is a powerful feature of the gay male accounting of things, perhaps the most significant.  The gay male sexual experience is of essence an exercise in irony, which no doubt accounts for the way in which that sensibility best expresses the gay male's projection of himself and the world in which he finds himself.  The act of sexual intercourse between two men, whatever interlocking body parts are involved, celebrates a biological act which is absurd: the orgasm cannot fulfill its destiny since there is no egg to which the semen can  travel.  Odysseus will never get home, because there is no home and no Penelope awaiting him there.  Not every sexual act, of course, ends in making a baby, for which we must be thankful on behalf of the already overburdened globe.  But the potential is always there in the majority of those moments of ecstasy.  For two males panting toward fulfillment, deeply engaged perhaps in the demonstration of not only sexual desire for another masculine body, but profound love and adoration for the partner who shares their bed, their explosions can be entirely satisfying, but somewhere sometimes in the back of their minds one imagines, (or, let's say this one imagines, having often contemplated the notion in post coital repose), the essential irony of the act must dawn on them.  For the longest time gay males were helped in their creation of life on ironic terms by the very nature of the society in which they lived, profoundly hostile to homosexuality and demanding the perfect assimilation to the larger society's aims and behaviors.  In recent years when "coming out" for gay males is almost as ubiquitous as a young debutante's night of triumph at a ball in the Plaza, the larger world could only marvel at the repressed gentleman's previous years of brilliant interpretation of butch, straight behavior, which as an exercise in irony, made every gay male's life a constant high drama of high camp.

It's Like This, Old Sport

I am getting myself ready to hear John Harbison's opera version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby by reading the novel itself, for the first time after many, many years.  The narrator, Nick Carraway, is given to saying such portentous things in a pretentious manner that I am quite put off by it, not to mention such obvious narrative devices as  the stand-in for God in the form of the billboard of the oculist with the all seeing eyes looking out at a bleak landscape which are inserted into the narrative lest we forget that this is serious stuff.  There is great symmetry at work here with the respectably wealthy Tom Buchanan, when he isn't spending his large inherited wealth on polo ponies and the like, is exercising his generous libido on his fleshy, vulgar mistress Myrtle, something worth the bother to try out sex with while his ethereal, elegant, and upper class wife, Daisy, is pursued by the arriviste, John Gatz, who has renamed himself Jay Gatsby, as he pursues great wealth, style, and grandeur, all of it to be capped by the treasure of possessing Daisy, who as we can understand from the start, is not the least bit capable of showing genuine affection for anyone, although she is not so wooden, cold, and mechanical as her girlfriend, Jordan Baker, whom the author seems to have introduced for symmetry to be there for Nick as a romantic possibility, who however is an unnecessary diversion to the plot as this reader began to waste time speculating if maybe Miss Baker was a lesbian all along. Myrtle, and her husband John Wilson, who seems to run a car repair shop, are the only two persons capable of showing any genuine feelings for others, even if it is tinged with excessive possessiveness.  Poor Gatsby can look at the expensive jewelry in the shop, so to speak, but, like all the nouveaux riches of this world, cannot ever really possess it.  Being in the nature of a swindler doesn't help either.  It is interesting to see how the MidWestern Fitzgerald reacted to the extraordinary wealth of the East Coast and its flamboyance, something still there to behold in contemporary Manhatttan.  Sometime later he would meet at Cap D'Antibe Gerald and Sarah Murphy, true aristocrats in everything they said and did.  He would use them as models for Nicole and Dick Diver, but never managed to encapsule or demonstrate their nobility of soul in their every act.  Reading the two accounts of their lives Living Well Is The Best Revenge and We Were So Very Young is a better, more honest  experience than anything Fitzgerald ever wrote about the rich.

Staying On

In "The Madrid" Edie Falco plays a wife and mother, so disaffected that she has left her family and moved to a small, cheap and bleak apartment in The Madrid without leaving the slightest indication of her whereabouts for husband, daughter, aging mother, and neighborhood friend.  The play is a rather dismal affair, and one could sympathize with Ms. Falco's character for wanting to get away from that bunch, but that is not the point, of course, but rather an investigation of the nature of suffocation in the family, or perhaps I should say, from the family.  It's all in the  perspective.  The  play brought back so many memories, first and foremost of a young couple, friends of ours, also with four children, husband working at his teaching career, wife at home with the kids until one day, when they were hitting middle school age, one night after dinner, she took off her apron, handed it to her husband and announced that she was out of there.  To everyone's astonishment she went to a distant city and enrolled in law school, and that was that.  In my forties I went about the country lecturing a lot, and suffered through many a faculty dinner party hosted for me, the speaker, and true to the custom of the time, sat between two women, usually faculty wives, often drunk, sarcastically commenting on the fruits of their elaborate educations which they had set aside for motherhood.  My own wife confessed to the children that she would have decamped herself if she had had the money, and later on and she had gone back to work as an architect, when I took another sabbatical year in Rome with the children, she stayed behind for work, and upon our return, she just could not face going back into that straightjacket of life as housewife.  Even if I had taken over so much of the housekeeping, there is something about the acculturation of women that lets them surrender to an enslavement unless they make the kind of dramatic move shown in "The Madrid."  I did not like being a father and househusband much, but I guess I always knew it was voluntary in a way it never is for women, and I had  taken on the role, not been born into it.  A dear friend of mine always quotes her mother's saying "A clean house is a wasted life."  The problem is that nowadays the escape routes are all too available, but as the play demonstrates at the end, they are ultimately foreclosed even for the adventurous by the powerful lure of the visible needs of children and parents.  Even the strongest will surrender to those bonds and go back home.  Years ago after a drunken row whilst visiting friends on the Cape I angrily got into the car to go away only to be advised by the many times married mother of our hostess who was also visiting that one relationship was pretty much the same as the next, and changing beds wasn't really worth the effort in the long term.  I turned off the engine and went back into the house.

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

The Ancient Greek tragic sense of life is revealed in all manner of ways, perhaps none more powerful than the ubiquitous worship of the adolescent male.  A youth in the flower of his adolescence is all the more tragic for being that glorious moment before the body begins its long, sad decline into old age and death.  Women whose chemistry give them the magical capacity of renewal through reproducing themselves from within their own bodies do not face the fact of physical extinction as males must.  At least this seems to be the truth of the ancient Greek male sense of things.  Coupled with this is the notorious socially approved custom of males in their twenties and thirties taking late adolescent boys as lovers.  Setting aside the fact that unmarried males would have little access to women for sexual purposes, indeed for much of any contact, and that women were so little valued that contact with them would not have been all that pleasing, one might argue that for males confronting their mortality as they sensed the inevitable fading of their powers, a powerful physical and emotional involvement with a beautiful youth was a powerful way to experience by proxy the splendor and vitality of masculine youth.  I was reminded of this on a recent evening whilst visiting friends whose seventeen year old son joined us for a few moments.   This was a lad whom I have known since he was a toddler, who more recently dazzled me as he shown out in all the magical beauty of a fifteen year old,  His perfectly shaped face had the slight fullness of the remains of baby fat, his skin glowed with the pink of health, his features were even and small, still slightly unformed, giving his overall physiognomy a magnificent grace, punctuated by roseate full lips, shining sparkling eyes surrounded with long full curving lashes.  In short, he was luscious, and his appearance was of a piece with his charming, warm, inviting personality.  When I now beheld him, he bounded forth a full foot taller than myself, grasped me in a powerful embrace, and looked at me from a face that had grown leaner, stronger, and more bony, punctuated by a nose grown longer, more pointed and assertive.  He had commenced to become a man, had shed that roseate complexion for whiter tones, had developed lips thinner and more commanding, eyes still warm and friendly but bereft of their shining.  In sum he had surrendered to the mortality that we all carry within us, at least I believe the ancient Greeks would have quickly sensed this, attuned as they were to the melancholy fact of the death of beauty.

The Justification of Existence

Dwight Garner's piece in the Sunday Review section of the Times describing Nora Ephron, Christopher Hitchens, Roger Ebert, and various other worthies filling their last months, weeks, nay hours, with significant creative activity fills me with dread and anxiety.  I keep thinking of my thesis director who was ever on the alert for hints of a slacker in me.  I remember him when I was twenty five, just starting on my dissertation, and my young wife unexpectedly died, and he said to me "Well, this gives you more time to work on your dissertation," odder words of consolation one cannot imagine.  I guess he detected the lounger in me from the day we met.  My childhood home lacked a father from the time I was six, so I really had no model for someone on the go all the time.  I have a feeling that my mother sent out the unstated notion that a male had to justify his existence, although she obviously considered that her bearing six children was more than enough from her, since my strongest recollection of her is sitting reading in the living room (household tasks were done by staff).   Sitting reading obviously led me to become a serious undergraduate, then graduate student, but my Doktorvater, as the Germans call it, switched the emphasis to "produce!"  If it wasn't a dissertation, it was an article, and then it was a book, and there seemed no end to this.  He once told my dearest friend and colleague, also his student, whom he chanced upon on the roof of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens drinking ouzo and admiring the sunset with his friends, "Well, Ted, drink it up or type it up."  To his credit Ted, brilliant raconteur and one of the laziest persons I ever knew, chose the former, even if it did contribute to his checking out permanently at 43.  I will never forget my Thursdays with Ted (a helluva lot more fun than those Tuesdays with Morrie, I'll bet), when we went to Woodside from out Stanford offices for two or three martinis, then on up into Portola Valley  for a late, late lunch in dappled shade and soft sun.  So here I am at 83 for God's sake, and no book or article on the horizon of my imagination.  Thank God, I have gardening to palm off as "something I must do," when in fact I find myself sitting on a bench lost in the perfume of the roses, watching the bumble  bees attacking the Russian sage and the variously colored birds swooping down to bathe in the three fountains that over-decorate our garden.  When first we built this lavish setting my daughter who came to inspect cried out: "Oh, Dad, this will be perfect for you here, you'll go out just like Vito Corleone in "The Godfather."

Springtime

The Boston Marathon Massacre, as I am sure it will come euphoniously to be known, has the ingredients to induce lasting sorrow in its remembrance, I mean such things as the two unemployed young male roofers , brothers, come to cheer on a pal, each losing a leg, and with it such vast potential for their future, the little boy coming to kiss his father at the finish line, blasted dead, and the horror of the thought of two young men, seemingly adjusted guys doing their athletic thing, attending to their studies, suddenly acting out a scenario that belongs in films of the insurgents in Iraq, especially puzzling in the case of the younger brother, whose high school classmates have tesitified to his charm, fun, happy go lucky smoking and drinking and popularity at the senior prom.  The manager of my favorite diner in Manhattan with whom I often exchange words on the world's issues thundered at me when I said I felt sorry that the younger brother seemed to have got under the influence of the older, the militantly religious one, "He killed a six year old boy.  Off he goes to prison, that's that."  At least I knew better than to get into dangerous terrritory of opining which I have the tendency to do that if religion is connected in any way with this tragedy it is yet another instance  of the awful, the terrifying power of religion to lead people to irrational angers, lusts, all kinds of psychic mayhem.  So as I brooded on all this I was walking up Broadway on the Upper Wesst Side and in the meridian, block after block, the magnolia trees were in full bloom, and later when I visited relatives in the splendor of suburban New Jersey where once had stood Teddy Rooosevelt's estate, we walked the streets and gazed at a myriad pink and white flowering trees, at the tender budding leaves of trees yellow green in their newness, reflecting the yellow forsythia at every other house.  My hosts pointed out gaping bare spots where once a giant tree had been laid low in last year's hurricane, yet the oncoming verdure was enough to obscure any sense of barrenness.  And I thought again how beautiful spring is, how glorious nature can present itself to us, and how the natural process does not care about the woes of the world, but goes on about its business of being beautiful, and how in the end that is nonetheless in the eye of the beholder, and I beheld and was happy.

What Do Yu Do When You're Retired?

My hosts at dinner last night are thinking of retiring and asked me what it was like.  I had to think; 1997 was a long time ago.  But, yes, I remember that no one called me on the telephone from the office, and the one time I communicated a piece of advice, the reply was "We always welcome your suggestions," an elegant way of saying "fuck off."  I moved back to Cambridge where Richard was already living in my house because he had taken a very wonderful job teaching in a first rate suburban high school.  So I became a landlord in New York until I could stand it no longer, and sold. Meanwhile we kept Richard's studio as a piede a terre, and spent all our energies, or rather he did, converting the two family house in Cambridge into a very large one family.  I say "we," façon de parler, since Richard's carpentry skills was doing all the work.  But let's say it was the first major distraction in my retirement.  Then we bought the house in Hull, January 1999, and that summer converted a large lot with nary a tree, shrub, or blossom on it into the beginnings of the shady elegant italianate rose garden we have today.  The summer of 1999 was a backbreaker!  And the garden henceforth is like an over energetic child who needs our parental supervision putting on too much weight (all that pruning), going out with the wrong people (where do these weeds keep coming from?) acquiring mysterious ailments (oh, the red beetles are back!). I was going to be 70 in 2000, and did not want it remarked upon, so I enrolled in a language school in Cuernavaca Mexico for five weeks, living with a family, not speaking a word of English the whole time, and spent the actual birthday with fellow students who were kept ignorant of the fact wandering around Taxco. Then a former student, now the publisher of Hyperion, suggested for a trade book a mock autobiography of Odyssseus which was totally fun to write, and I proudly saw it published in 2004.  2006 was occupied with writing up a chapter on Gilgamesh for a new edition of Ancient Epic Poetry which required a lot of preliminary study.  Just before the financial meltdown of 2008 I sold the house in Cambridge and we  moved into an apartment preparatory to moving into an old folks apartment to nursing home "experience." But that went bust  and so I  took some money and bought us a condo in  Sarasota FL and we started to prepare a life of "snow birds" as Richard retired with six months in the warm climate.  Turns out we love it; lots to do in  Sarasota, one of the most significant is hours at the gym!.  2011 I wrote My Husband and My Wives and that came out in 2012 and I did a few readings.  And in between Richard and I go abroad at least once a year, to Tokyo, one time. Paris, another, Sicily and so on and so forth.  As long as our health holds . . . . . .(we're keeping our fingers crossed!) 

An addendum to this morning's blog: New York

So here I am in Manhattan, and apparently able to write and send my blog.  The trip up, apart from some significant turbulence which continued until we touched ground, bounced a bit somewhat crazily and came to a halt, was routine, the walk from the gate to the skytrain exhausting because I was carrying a heavily laden--with all my paper files, etc.--briefcase on a shoulder strap, as well as an overnight bag with various electronic bits and pieces plus the pharmacy that defines my robust dotage.  The hour long ride on the A train to Columbus Circle is oh, so convenient, but oh, so interminable at the end of a flight.  I was interested in my reaction as the train filled up from stop to stop almost entirely with African-Americans.  After living in the de facto apartheid that marks Sarasota I was so intensely aware of the black faces that surrounded me, and embarrassed by the fact that almost until the train came to Manhattan the seat next to me remained unoccupied in a very crowded train.  A day spent on the streets of Manhattan restored me to a sane perspective, a reminder that most people are young, that the future belongs to those who mingle racially, that young gay men wear the greatest color combinations, dashing hats, and are proud of their dashing get-up, that I had forgotten how to maneuver briskly on a crowded sidewalk, that the immense baby carriages of all the young couples are here to trip up and send into oblivion all the old people living too long on their entitlements, that people are slim and beautiful and excited in Manhattan, that there are lots of well to do blacks, that the range of combinations of obviously sexually engaged persons is endless.  A visit to the International Center for Photography on 43rd and 6th to see Roman Vishniac's superlative photographs of the vanished world of Eastern European Jews and their village life reminded me intensely of the New York I first knew in the late forties, the city populated with those who had fled the horror of Europe, middle aged women in fedoras sat drinking "Kafe mit Schlag" in every corner shop, when I knew for sure that I wasn't in Iowa anymore.

A Feeble Attempt

I am late today because I can't square away the technology and I  don't think this will even go out on the internet.  More later if I am successful.

Goodbye To All That

We are packing up to leave Sarasota to spend the next sixth months in Massachusetts, and saying goodbye to a very full exploration of the culture for which this city on the west coast of Florida has grown famous.  We have taken in all seven  plays on offer at the Asolo Repertory Theater as well as the four student productions which in terms of finish and talent rank with the professional offerings on the main stage.  The complex of theaters range from an old Italian opera house brought over in pieces and reconstructed to a 1920's Glasgow opera house equally fancy and so unexpected in this Florida setting.  But then John Ringling had already set the standard for ambitious kitsch and true beauty with the Venetian palazzo he built for his residence on the Gulf and the lavish museum filled with European art of all the great traditions, and surrounding grounds he established nearby with outdoor gardens and walks adorned with high quality reproductions of some historic ancient Greek and Roman and Italian masterpieces.  His name is attached to another center for the arts here, the Ringling School of Art, one of the nation's foremost art schools, where a visitor can wander through a variety of galleries looking at where animation, advertising, film making, graphic design and illustration as well as the creative pieces on display are made.  A little south of this lies Holley Hall where chamber music concerts of the highest level are offered; these are supplemented by the international artists who perform at the La Musica festival in the spring which because it  overlaps with the Sarasota Film Festival keeps everyone on the go.  Next to Holley Hall is the large  Van Wezel Hall where we go to hear the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra with season tickets, almost always enjoying everything played, although admitting that we may be gay but we don't know anything about music--no cognoscenti, we!  Nor opera, which takes place in a grand traditional opera house, where this year we saw/heard a most thrilling performance of Floyd's "Of Mice and Men."  Who knew we would be crying over Lenny's fate sung in such modern music?  Nearby is the Florida Studio where we see more good stuff, this year, among other things, a production of "The Columnist" which to my mind was superior to what I had seen the year before on Broadway. I omit mentioning ballet since we do not go but the Sarasota Ballet puts on a great season, and visiting companies often come to town.  All these forms of culture are encouraged among the youngsters of the community, and there are performers of all ages on display throughout the year, the most noted being Isak Perlman's Foundation for Musical Instruction among the young.  I have saved for last what I took up last but have enjoyed the most, and that is the Wednesday afternoon Einstein Circle where someone of education, talent, and original thought muses on some issue, scientific, artistic, political, social, moral, you name it, and then the audience is invited to comment.  As a retired professor who has heard too many grotesque questions from the audience I have been amazed at the erudition, precision, and thoughtfulness of those who raise their hands to speak.  Well, now time to pick up the shovel and the hoe and do my garden!

Happy Birthday, Richard

Richard, my husband, is seventy years old today.  He was 46 when we became a couple, and I have to say he has aged very well.  Physically, in fact, he is in some ways in much better shape because he has taken up exercise at the gym in the years since he retired, and, as he does with every project he takes seriously, he is unswerving in his adherence to the plan he has created for himself.  He even amuses our trainer, who started him with a regimen of exercises, when he notices Richard with clipboard in hand marking off the data after each maneuver on the machines.  There is no doubt Richard is  happy to be retired after forty years of secondary school teaching, yet to my mind--and he would deny this-- he has replaced it with the exercise.  He is a man made for projects; in the course of the two plus decades we have been together he has made a large deck off our house in Cambridge which is one of the few features that the buyer saved in his complete makeover of the place, and at Hull he took a 20' x 20' sand filled kiddie area, added gravel, leveled the whole thing, and paved it with brick, and then erected a pergola on which we planted wisteria.  Ten years later his construction has not shifted nor sunk, and the shade produces a temperature markedly lower than the surrounding garden. He made his life a project from the beginning, getting from Staten Island on the ferry, on the subway up to City College realizing no body's dream but his own.  Then for forty years teaching at one high end school whether public or  private until he ended as the czar of all language instruction in the Wellesley Public Schools.  With all his languages we are always in Italy, France, or Germany!  Indeed, some of our happier moments have been traveling together in the real Italy, where in fact came one of my early revelations of this darling creature.  For a trip to Italy he decided to learn a little Italian, and in a month he spoke comfortably in whole sentences! By August when we went back to visit friends  they, with whom I had been speaking in my broken Italian for thirty years, were more often deep in conversation with Richard whom they would then ask to translate what they were saying for me! Me, the great speaker of Italian!  Still he was so glamorous speaking Italian who would not forgive him.  He was glamorous and flirtatious when I met him, and the years have not tarnished his luster. Two people growing old and older, the biggest challenge is spending so much more time together.  I was born to make conversation, along with giving lectures as a professional.  The two tendencies are devastating for someone to experience who is precise, of few words, and--ironic for someone in the language business-- not given to use language as a bonding mechanism. I must say he handles the potentials for boredom rather well, mainly by going into his room and taking up whatever text he is currently studying.  Whatever else, the old darling is always there for me, taking in stride my increasing slowness and frailty.  And, god bless him, he has taken up cooking and gardening, as my capacity to do both seems to diminish.  I cooked his dinner for twenty odd years, but now we live mostly on the delicious fish dinners that he, and he alone, knows how to turn out.  How odd it is to look back through the years at this handsome, vivacious man, and see him transformed into the ideal companion, the steady presence, the unremarkable phenomenon that adorns the room.  Le voilá that is my darling Richard at seventy, and of course seventy is the new forty.

Where Are We? Who Are These People?

We are in the process of packing up for the move north for the summer, and apart from the anxiety that always grips me as I try to keep my mental and physical lists coordinated, I relish the peculiar spiritual weightlessness with which I float out of my here and now context.  It is perhaps an awful thing to say but I am never more at peace than when I am standing in the passageway that leads down   onto my departing plane, no longer 'here' and not yet 'there.'  And this is a guy who lived in the same house for the first sixteen years of his life, as opposed, for instance, to my wife, a Navy child, who spent that same period of time moving every two years, including the memorable experience of  being evacuated from Honolulu to San Diego after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  Moving around is such an American thing to do.  I remember when I taught newly arrived immigrants up in the Bronx and I would recommend graduate school in Berkeley, for instance, and most of them would reply "But I couldn't leave my family."  My siblings and I live on both coasts, the south, the upper middle west, and have been together as a family only twice in the last sixty years, and I doubt we will ever          meet again. The first of these was to attend my mother's funeral, whose death cancelled the only motive for a get-together.   My  own children and grandchildren are as far flung as southern Florida, northern Canada. St. Louis, and New England, and every reunion is a major production, but I do enjoy them as they are sort of a rehearsal for my funeral with me still on the scene.  One moves into a neighborhood nowadays, but does not necessarily settle in socially.  After the parties of graduate school days in Cambridge, I lived with my second wife on a country lane in fake rural Connecticut in a 'dear little old house,' quite out of keeping with those of our stock broker neighbors.  They smiled if they passed by in their car, and that was fine and quite sufficient for us.  We lived in a cul de sac in Palo Alto with neighbors who were all in business or at least not education.  I remember one very drunken evening when one of them asked me how I could afford a house in that street on an assistant professor's salary, and another more intimate, but equally lubricated affair when the squarest couple on the block--to my mind, the most integrated--shocked me when they confessed through their tears how lonely they were after eight years residence, and how they had accepted a job abroad to escape it.  We moved back to Brookline, and we could see the neighbors eyeing us goyim and thinking "there goes the neighborhood."  Everyone smiled when out raking leaves but that was about it until one night a woman from a nearby house rang our doorbell and sought some kind of psychic shelter from whatever demons were going on over there.  She never explained, and she never had to, since we really did not know each other.  Chance meetings in the checkout lane at the nearby market was about the limit of our relationship.  Oddly enough, years later when I had moved back to Cambridge as a gay man, a woman from a nearby house came over in hysterics one evening with a long and quite unwelcome story of her marriage which thereafter never seemed to dim the luster of her smile and happy wave if we happened to be out getting into our cars at the same time.  When I first moved into that neighborhood everyone around me was a retired laboring class Irish Catholic.  Within ten years the entire group was dead, replaced by young marrieds with highly paid tech jobs whose concern was the pattern in the granite counters they were ordering for their kitchens.  The original neighbors had had loathsome barking dogs to warn them of intruders, the second set had shrill, shrieking, whining, children, who made me discover that getting older is not being able to tolerate the sound of children.  Now wherever I live is as a hotel where I know there are occupants of the other rooms because I sometimes hear a dim rumble from the television or the door to the corridor shutting.  Mutatis mutandis I see my neighbors taking out the trash, or getting the newspaper off the porch.  Who they are, I have no idea.  It's like walking onto the plane amid people.

Horace Odes Book !.5

I awoke with the horror of yesterday still with me, and decided to introduce something I was helping a friend with at lunch.  He vaguely remembered his Latin, and wanted to learn a poem.  I suggested Horace, and here it is with lots of help.  The meter is complicated but it is essentially three longs, then two shorts, then long, short and indeterminate.  Just try to hold the syllables with two consonants after a vowel longer than the others.  Just read along naturally, that is.  The language of this ode is so sensual.  Note how all the sensations bombard by virtue of the various words that are in grammatical agreement standing on either side of the couple. The boy and girl locked together (te puer), he’s slim, he’s surrounded in roses, he’s drenched in perfume, and when she’s named, it’s the same line as ‘down in the cave.’ and when he’s pressing himself upon her ‘urget’ the verb is set in the middle of liquidis odoribus, perfume is all around him and her.  Later on the poet says the boy enjoys you, Pyrrha, ‘fruor’ gets his pleasure from, the verb to me has that slight hint of the sexual pleasure that comes to each of us from our use of another, and at the same time with the line ending in credulus aurea, you have the sense of his basic confidence in his possession of her, as well as his belief in her high value ‘golden,’ and all the while thinks he has her sewed up tight for him ‘semper vacuam,’  ,‘always vacant,’ like a rental unit, she’s available just for him, typical male concern, and with that settled, rest of the line falls into place ‘always lovable,’ and that might not be what he would think to say if he wasn’t sure of her fidelity first.  But the male psyche takes over and the poet warns storm clouds a-brewing.  The sound of the Latin is glorious, the magic of the inextricable word order, the words all of them, like the boy and girl, locked together by their word endings and syntax.  Wow!

Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa

perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
   
      grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
   
      cui flauam religas comam,

simplex munditiis? Heu quotiens fidem               5

mutatosque deos flebit et aspera
  
     nigris aequora uentis
   
     emirabitur insolens,

qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea,

qui semper uacuam, semper amabilem               10
   
     sperat, nescius aurae
   
     fallacis. Miseri, quibus
intemptata nites. Me tabula sacer
uotiua paries indicat uuida
    
     suspendisse potenti
   
     uestimenta maris deo.  

What slim boy [gracilis puer]
with roses all around him [multa in rosa]
drenched in perfume [perfusus liquidis odoribus]
is at you,  [te urget]
Pyrrha,
down in some pleasant cave? [grato sub antro]
For whom did you tie up that golden hair [cui flavam religas comam]

simply done, but, oh, so elegant [simplex munditiis]
Poor guy, how many times [heu quotiens]
will he be in tears at [your idea of] fidelity [fidem flebit]
at how the gods have turned [against him] [mutatos deos]
and stare at the seas rough [et aspera aequora]
from dark winds [nigris ventis emirabitur]
just not used to this? [insolens]

who now enjoys you, trusts you, golden girl [qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea]
who trusts you always will be ready for him [qui semper vacuam sperat]
always a sweetheart [semper amabilem]
totally ignorant of that treacherous wind [nescious aurae falllacis]
All those poor guys for whom you turn on the charm [Miseri, quibus nites]

yet haven’t let get that close. [intemptata]
But the sacred wall shows  [sacer paries indicat]
on a votive plaque [tabula votiva]
me having hung up my clothes [me suspendisse vestimenta]
soaked by the powerful god of the sea. [uuida [potenti maris deo]

Time and Place

This afternoon a friend came to visit, making her way here from directions I had supplied her in an email.  Stopping at a deli to buy sandwiches for us all threw her enough off course that she called from her cell to get redirected.  Somehow I could not lift the fog of her confusion so I talked her through the directions that got her around two mistakes and to our very driveway.  We both congratulated ourselves for living in the modern world where there were cell phones.  It made me think of Odysseus as a lad when Homer describes him going over to the Peloponnesos from the island of Ithaka to visit his grandfather Autolykos where his return was a long time delayed as he lay abed recovering from being gored deeply in the leg by a wild boar.  Homer does not suggest that his father and mother grew deeply anxious at this delay; they simply waited out the days until he returned.  That was because there were no means of communication, so they had no choice.  In the 19th century my grandfather Wilhelm came to the States as a teenager and at nineteen enlisted in the Union Army. Twenty five years later he returned to Halle an der Weser, long since married, and a father of eight himself, to visit the family he had left behind all those years ago.  In the interval he had pretty much spoken English exclusively to the degree that the journal he kept of his return to the homeland is all in English. It is poignant when he remarks in this English on the day of his departure from the family home that he will probably never see his parents or his two brothers again, and he was right. Contrast that with today's immigrant into the States who can keep up with his family easily by Skype.  There is no reason for the next generation not to stay fluent in their grandparents' language. When I was eighteen I chose to go to work in New York and forego college.  My mother and I exchanged letters which contained news of our doings couched in the language and sentiments we felt to be suitable, the product of considerable thought and rewritings.  A telephone call would have been considered unseemly, a costly extravagance of money and emotion.  My friends today have daily texts, nay some have hourly ones, with their children off at college.  It would have been a ghastly intrusion if I had had to endure a cellphone call whilst I was writhing and panting in some or another forbidden and delicious passion.  When we lived in Brookline Massachusetts our children walked into the family home after school threw down their books, and disappeared with the neighborhood gang of 17 children ages ten to eighteen until it was dark and they reappeared to interrupt us at our cocktails.  We had  not really noticed their absence.  They went on extraordinary expeditions, those kids; once we learned they had gone on the city transit line to the furthest reaches of the system, a rough and tumble section, alighted, ducked under the turnstiles and come home.  One of my sons complains that his childrens' school sends daily emails to the parents detailing their childrens' every move.  After school athletics programs have every kid slotted into activities throughout the afternoon.  There is no place to escape to anymore.

Let's See If This Works Okay

For the first time I am composing a blog on my IPad rather than on my laptop, an observation that is no doubt entirely ho hum for most readers, but is meant as an apology in advance for what I anticipate will result in stilted, jerky prose.  As usual the technology terrifies me; last night when I did an experimental run, the thing died on me; its last words were a suggestion that I join a chat room where I could find other wounded warrriors in recovery.  My husband suggested in a mixture of kindliness and acid that I should look at the instructions, but I don't seem to have any, except I guess something on the screen I can bring up, but that's too hard for me.  Just as when I am cooking, I want the text in printed form, its pages flat out there beside me.  My problems have to do with hooking a keyboard on to this IPad, and finding that everything doesn't work just as it did on the lap top.  Plus these keys are so small, and my fingers, those pudgy short little arthritic stumps, weren't made for the task.  Flashback to First Grade and Miss Emma Watkins holding up cards each with a letter of the alphabet formed in perfect script, balanced on the line, with the appropriate bits above and below. We learned the Palmer Method---little Charlie was letter perfect.  Flash forward to 1964 sitting in my office late at night drunkenly moving my pen across yellow lined paper.  I was writing a book!  The pen I used was a Parker 51 given to me by my mother in 1942; when the ink ran out I switched to a Parker 51 of indeterminate vintage that I found in the grass of Harvard Yard one day in 1953 and only broke my concentration when it too needed more ink.  In the summer of 1958, desperate at having yet to begin writing the dissertation, six  years since I had entered graduate school and long after I was out there teaching, I sat down to write the thing in long hand, then typed, and sent off to my dissertation director the finished product four days before my wife gave birth to our second child in November. Once approved, the final version was typed by me because I had no money for a typist, all 350 pages with two carbon copies, the top copy of which had to be on 100% rag paper and contain no error whited out.  The first two books I wrote with my trusty Parker 51 which I then typed into a fair copy on my IBM Selectric which had some kind of spooled white out tape which could be struck over errors.  Thereafter my ex-mother-in-law, a saint, paid for typing, which was an absolute blessing except for the time that a very vague and "artistic" typist went to the mountains skiing in the middle of a job, and could not remember where she had left the manuscript.  Then in 1984, I believe it was,  a lawyer friend put me on to something called a Macintosh 128K.  It took me two weeks to master the rudiments of this new technology, crying all the while, swearing, and tipping back goblets of wine.  Now many years  later, the author of many more pages, I cannot at age 83 write more than a shaky version of my own name with the ball point pens that litter my desk drawer. All the pages are on my hard drive and if I think of it, backed up on my Flash Drive (Richard laughs at me for having referred to it as "that little wand"), and now there is something called The Cloud, but let's not go there.  I've mastered and been forced to discard several different writing systems, their idiosyncratic system of symbols for operating each program as obscure and illogical as the ancient runes; only recourse to the chat rooms created by Apple users to dissect problems and solutions are sometimes helpful.  Imagine if the automobile industry resorted to this kind of obscurantism!  Now the IPad. Oy!

Casting The First Stone

The well-known hostility of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia toward homosexual physical relations is always a challenge for me. He has, for instance, claimed that he cannot understand how it is permissible to take a strong moral stance against murder, but be criticized for finding homosexual relations equally morally reprehensible. I do not see that they are of the same category of behavior, the former being, an act of will, the latter of nature. In Catholic parlance the former is a sin, that is, a knowing contravention of the law of God, which I believe is the understanding of that moral category. Sin is often given an etymology that derives it from an Indo-European root of "to be," which is more obvious in the Latin forms esse, sunt, etc. In any case that would underscore the important sense that sin is a considered opposition, a positive defiance of the law of
god. One can contrast this with the well known ancient Greek word transliterated into our script as hamartia which is the noun for the verb hamartano 'to miss the mark,' referring to an arrow which the archer has aimed at a target and missed. The latter is an important word in Aristotle's Poetics often mistranslated as 'tragic flaw' in his discussion of the tragic hero's course of action. It seems clear enough that Aristotle is talking about human beings who aim for the good, but who for whatever reason mistake their aim or the nature of their action which thus ends for them in disaster. The ancient Greeks in general considered that human beings are good, strive to do the good, and 'evil' is thus not the creative force in the universe which Christians call Satan. Scalia, like so many others, must believe that gay males "choose" to have sex with other men. Obviously that is true in the particular instance, but even the merest superficial study of the subject demonstrates rather conclusively that gay males do not "choose" to be gay. Furthermore, most scientific studies, certainly incidence in twins, and in blood relations, would suggest that gay persons are innately disposed to their sexual desires, and thus cannot be judged for what is only natural. What is so disconcerting is Scalia's insistent
certainty in his thundering denunciations of gay activity. Here is where I feel impossibly tested since my instinct is to react in anger, although my rational reaction is to assign his attitude to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church of which he is a communicant, indeed a member as well of Opus Dei, the can we say band of zealots within that faith? Just as he is exhibiting nasty prejudice in his denunciation of homosexuality I can sense the temptation to surrender to the prejudice heard so often at
my mother's knee, that Catholics are slaves to dogma, that a lifetime experience of the Church and its history will turn anyone into the profoundest of hypocrites, and in fact find confirmation for my initial proposition in his alleged angry denunciation of a former colleague at the University of Chicago who claimed that his Roman Catholic beliefs
informed all his decisions.

Her Grace Wants Your Ladyship Resting In her Room

There is a story told of Lady Randolph Churchill while on a weekend visit to a ducal country estate.  Despite the printed program given her on arrival, listing the times for every event, she found herself casually wandering in the grand gardens of an afternoon only to have a liveried servant come out to say “Begging pardon, Your  Ladyship, but Her Grace has scheduled ‘rest in the bedroom’ at this hour”. Back in the sixties of the last century I used to do a lot of lecturing thither and yon around the country.  A major discovery that changed my way of life was the number of times I would be met at the airport by an emissary of whatever institution had invited me with a printout of the schedule of events during my two or three day stay.  Arrival at airport, such and such hotel, rest in room, cocktail reception at Dean so and so’s house, dinner, talk, back to hotel. Next day breakfast meeting with such and such committee soliciting my opinion, mid morning swim at university pool [something I always demanded]. lunch with students of classics club, and so on and so forth until my listed departure. I had never before beheld my life scripted like that, and I have never looked back. It means you don’t have to think and plan while trying to be “in the present,” as they say in some group or another.  Of course, this is a no-brainer for the Queen of England and other full time celebrity vehicles, but it is surprising how well it works for the little people, too.  But the preparation is all mine, of course, and when managing the schedule is the work of a brain well along in life, it can be gruesome.  I have recently been working on a series of trips which require scheduling, and if I were not completely aware that the alternative is to wander clueless day by day, I would not be doing this.  I am flying to Manhattan in ten days, there to see a series of friends, certain art shows, and attend some theater before taking Amtrak to Boston where I join my husband who has meanwhile driven up from Florida. I will be met and we will go to a new play by someone we much admire and then home to the seashore, where a month’s interlude of gardening and doctor’s appointments will ensue until we shall be off to London.  I have just been in the process of organizing our so-called “London theater week”-- or should I spell that theatre?--, an utterly grueling experience, because like the rest of the world centers, one can go nowhere without reservations.  Obvious for hotels, of course, but to be encouraged to make restaurant reservations over a month in advance because of the demand is daunting, since at the same time you discover that the two favorite theater pieces on your agenda are long since sold out that week and you must find alternatives that are worth the airfare to London.  Then there are four or five dear friends whose schedules you work to mesh with your own so that you can enjoy either a meal together or a theater evening together or a walk through, say, the British Museum.  Turns out that this last has almost no tickets left for the Pompeii Herulaneum show in morning hours and i won’t go after lunch. As I am in my dotage, I don’t think I would choose to be present at the Second Coming over a good nap after lunch. Still and all, the entire process is an exhilarating exercise in fighting off dementia as one balances days of the week, hours of the day, a mental image of the map of central London, a complete list of friends that are “must be seen.”  And now I have started on the birthday present for my husband’s seventieth--a ten day sojourn in Budapest--where we will stay on a dreamy island in the middle of the Danube, and go into the city center, when we can bring ourselves to leave the swimming pool, massage tables, exercise rooms, and shady walks and vistas.  Downtown Budapest has been restored since the end of the Soviet Era, and the advantage is that nothing was done to repair the ravages of war torn Budapest in that earlier period, so the glorious Art Deco and Art Nouveau architecture remained intact, just waiting to be spruced up.  Heaven!  Now all I have left is to plan the trip to Kentucky for my grandson’s wedding.

What A Friend We Have In Jesus

I recently read Does Jesus Really Love Me? by Jeff Chu,  an American-Chinese descended from ministers of the Southern Baptist faith back in China, himself a home grown Southern Baptist, a reporter, and very importantly, gay.  Chu claims that he is a relatively conservative person, and of course his faith is vital, if problematic.  The book is the result of a tour of the entire country, interviewing as many persons as he could about either their gayness, or their attitudes toward gay people from a Christian perspective.  I have some understanding of this stuff, raised in the Episcopal Church, and seriously devout, although I left the faith when our minister and I collided over the revelation that I was gay. It’s all described in the portion excerpted in the October issue of Out, (pp 45ff.) taken from my memoir, My Husband and My Wives.  Still I retain an instinctive regard for Christianity, plus, as a classicist I have the professional knowledge I have acquired about the great Abrahamic religions which I have needed to set into the historical context of the religions and cults of the Greco-Roman culture, which forms a considerable basis for Christian thought. And, of course, I am gay.  So I have been reading the book with far more interest than I would have imagined. My immediate response is one of horror. Protestant Christians are all liable to their founder Luther’s belief that he was unworthy, which can only encourage a gay Christian’s belief that his sexual preference is corrupt.  I find it extraordinary that parents can shut gay children out of their lives, for instance, because they have a stronger belief in the validity of a few sentences in a traditional book, I refer to what is often called, Scripture, which seem to doom gay persons to eternal damnation.  Or that there are people who confronting the myriad miseries in the world will expend all their energies into trying to ostracize and degrade gay persons and the dignity of their lives.  I know this is probably naive, but I cannot understand anything other than if there is such a thing as a loving god, or there is a god who is omnipotent, then either way he made persons gay and it must be okay.  Of course, ever since my late teens I have considered that anyone who lived through the time of the Holocaust would be quite right to repudiate the idea of a caring god of any sort.  Later as a classicist I much preferred the notion of an indifferent universe in which human suffering is at best the result of divine inadvertence or malice.
Recently my husband and I watched a Canadian film Incendies about the misfortunes of a woman caught up in the nightmare of clashing faiths, civil war, and warring males in an unnamed country--a stand in for Lebanon, which was torn apart by the civil war between its Christian and Muslim populations a few decades ago. Designed to make the brutality of war fired by the ardor of religious faith come home to the viewer, no ghastly detail is omitted, and for a wuss like myself it was a very difficult evening (and for quite other reasons it grated on my highly impatient husband who cannot stand the predilection of European-style films for lingering over the visuals of every detail and mood as the plot very, very lazily advances, and sometimes just disappears).  The early scene of the brothers of the main character as they shoot point blank their sister’s Muslim lover, and hesitate over whether they should administer the same “justice” to her sets the tone for confronting the fundamental brutalities of the Christians in Lebanon.  Later we watch as Christian militants set fire to a bus filled with half dead Muslim passengers, many of them women and children, and shoot to death a child who had escaped the bus.  The film is a meditation on the hatreds of the middle east that are born in religious affiliation and ethnic identification, and one’s first reaction is to thank whoever that we live in the United States.  And then I turned to Chu’s book.  It seemed to me that all the potentials are there for something like this in the USA, the same inflexibilities, the irrational faith in the irrational, the same angers that inflexibility encourages in the human breast.

Tonight We Love

I don’t think I had heard Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto for nearly seventy years before listening on Sunday when the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra offered it.  For me it is a virtue of the Orchestra’s programming that they play a lot of old chestnuts throughout the season, simply because in my obsession with being trendy once I left Iowa City at 22, I devoted myself to music I did not know.  So now it is a shock to hear Beethoven, Brahms, and in this case Tchaikovsky almost as though it were new music.  I remember that this piece was some of the emotional porn to which I turned as my teens began, to throb and sob at the dance hall version "Tonight We Love," with intimations of longing and ecstasy, or as I imagined them to be. Watching Casablanca did the same for me, or hearing Vera Lynn sing “We’ll Meet Again,” which itself brought forth freshets of tears in my mother’s eyes, as she compressed the events of the war in which we were then engaged with the one twenty five years earlier when she had lost her first husband.  At eighteen I watched mesmerized by grief and erotics as the gorgeous young Gerard Philipe played the teenaged lover of a married woman (Micheline Presle) with a soldier husband at the front in Le Diable au Corps, a desperate and doomed love affair, emotions that I reprised years and years later watching Vittorio De Sica and Danielle Darrieux in the waltz sequence of Max Ophuls’ The Earings of Madame de . . ., seduced by my love of Edwardian repression and hypocrisy in the minuet of manners with which these beautiful people act out their passion.(I agree with Andrew Sarris that this is the most beautiful film ever made.)  But Sunday as we came away from the concert, I realized first of all, that listening to this piece in a concert hall, the acoustics of which elicited the subtlest textures and tones in the pianist’s solo parts, made it something quite other than the source of swelling emotion in a teenager’s heart.  And let’s face it, at eighty three I am not a teenager. I suddenly stopped to realize that nowadays when I need to dip into the maudlin, I go in quite another direction. For instance, as the great mass of tired males at the end of the day light up their computers and hopefully their lives with scenes of naked women in orgy, I turn on yet again the YouTube presentation of Susan Boyle winning the singing contest with “I Dreamed A Dream.” It always makes me cry, as that dowdy middle aged woman, slightly daft enough or courageous enough to offer herself up to the condescension that poured out into her face, opens her mouth and produces such solid, authoritative singing, and she wins! she wins! she wins! And the song is by turns so sad and so hopeful, and such a statement of her own predicament.  Oh, the lump in my throat every time.  As the tears start up, I am so happy!  But wait, that’s not all.  I often also turn to, you won’t believe this, the Antwerp Train Station Flash Mob.  Why?  Because as I watch those crowds forming into rhythmic patterning, all of them looking like they are having so much fun, I suddenly can believe that there are no snipers, rapists, pick-pockets, mortgage brokers, investment firms, militias, and all the other desperadoes and betrayals that The New York Times,for instance, offers up each morning for our spiritual breakfast.  Ditto "Puttin’ On The Ritz," the Moscow Flash Mob, scenes again of precision dancing, some of it with real wit,  everyone smiling and laughing, beautiful young people, nobody frowning, nobody drunk.  Just to hear a Russian crowd singing “. . .rich as Rockefeller . . .” well, that’s another form of tearing down the Wall, when you come to think of it.  And if you want to play at being an academic and do heavy duty analysis, you can start with teasing out the meaning in the iteration of the Russian leader’s name in "Puttin’ On The Ritz."

Gilgamesh and Enkidu

Funny, with all this talk for and against gay marriage at the moment, and the frequent allusion to Adam and Eve, which often prompts the corollary observation “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” few seem to know of western civilization’s first couple, Enkidu and Gilgamesh. There seems to have been a historical king named Gilgamesh who lived around 2800 BC around whose name stories collected, and these were gathered together later on, and still later in the seventeenth century BCE they were made into a continuous narrative. [Naturally, I can’t stress strongly enough reading the final chapter of C.R.Beye Ancient Epic Poetry with a chapter on the Gilgamesh Poems  available from Amazon)  The Book of Genesis must be dated later, so, let’s say Adam and Eve are the second couple; who would have thought that the first affective twosome would be male?  I am not saying, however, that we have definitive proof that they enjoyed each other carnally.  We know this about the Genesis duo, because they went on to have Cain and Abel, at least you have to imagine that the First Children or First Siblings were spawned by maybe the Second (okay, maybe First) Couple.  Yet the story of Enkidu and Gilgamesh is worth knowing whatever your take on same-sex relationships, just because it is so unusual, and thus important in the constellation of archtypal depictions of humans together.
This King Gilgamesh rules Uruk brutishly, it seems, since the narrator declares no woman was safe from him. The goddess Aruru fashions a mannikin out of clay, calls it Enkidu who is sent to be the people’s liberator, he meets Gilgamesh, they wrestle, become inseparable friends. They go on a buddy traveling trip where their adventures include killing a giant,  Enkidu puts himself at risk when the goddess Ishtar’s sexual invitation to Gilgamesh is spurned and in her angry attack Enkidu mocks her and hurls a thigh bone at her head. That puts paid to his chances of survival, and the rest of the narrative deals with his death and Gilgamesh’s grief and desolation.  Never mind, there are other details but these are the basics. The interesting thing is the transformation of Enkidu.  Early on he is described as the animals’ friend, a hairy brute, a child of nature. Because he protects them, the hunters hate him.  Out of the blue the narrator says a father appears to a hunter to advise him to get Enkidu to the animals’ watering hole and set him up with a prostitute. Who knows where she comes from?  But we have to understand that she was probably a temple prostitute and not the equivalent of some addict in hot pants waving at johns on the Interstate; sex with her seems to produce a major spiritual and psychic change in Enkidu. The narrator insists upon the details, that Enkidu has incredible energy, he keeps an erection for seven days of serious fornication.  And then he abandons the animals to the hunters, goes to the city, takes up eating bread and wine, gets a hair cut, wears perfume--all this the narrator insists upon telling--sets out to do combat with the sexual bully of a king, then there is the wrestling, the friendship, spurning the goddess.  As Enkidu lies dying he curses the prostitute for taking away his life, as though spelling out the biological truth that once a male achieves orgasm he no longer has a function.  The two men are described as relentless cocksmen, but once they wrestle there is only that friendship, the sex goddess’s invitation, that is, sex with a woman, is spurned.  The two men become inseparables, leading a life of adventure. It’s sort of a Sumerian version of “Brokeback Mountain.”

The Admiral

Sunday afternoon at the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra performance I was reminded of my second wife’s father, whom I met when he had just retired from the Navy in his late fifties, separated from the service early because of serious physical disability, but with the title of Rear Admiral bestowed upon him.  His daughter and I were planning to marry, young people in our mid twenties, graduate students at Harvard, myself a recent widower.  That made me suspect in his book, as well as, I am sure, my obsessive intellectuality, tendency to argue points for the hell of it, and a certain pansy manner. I thought of him because I always remember early on in our relationship while a house guest in their New Hampshire home, when I had coughed (as I thought, innocuously) several times during the cocktail hour, he had said to me quietly, firmly, and pleasantly sternly “Don’t cough.”  When I remonstrated with “Sir, I can’t help it.,” he replied “Of course, you can; so stop it.”  Thereupon he explained how a navy officer was not allowed to cough, and it was something any man, gentleman, you name  it, could learn to suppress.  He taught me that afternoon--almost sixty years ago--and I have never coughed since, unless I had something serious stuck in my throat.  I thought of this during the exquisite piano solo portions of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1 in B-flat minor as the women in front of me barked out like terriers throughout.  I guess it has to do with age, but I am sensitive to so many sounds, whispers between members of the audience, the constant zipping and unzipping of purses (Jesus God, what are they after, those women?), although I have to say in this very large concert hall in three years I have only once heard a cellphone ring out.  Go, Sarasota!
The admiral was unusually handsome, and very shy; I thought he despised me but I later realized my verbal agility and mental acrobatics terrified him, and my instinct for insubordination, the product of a fatherless home, bewildered him.  i was sexually much attracted to him which mitigated the fear and aversion he otherwise aroused in me.  Later on we became I guess you could call friends when I realized that he had a very hard time reading.  He wanted to do miracle reforms of government in the little town where he and his wife retired, and this required reading and digesting journal articles and books on urban renewal.  The idea was crazy; this town was not going to be reborn, its inhabitants were blood descendants of seventeenth century settlers and nothing was going to change.  He just couldn’t read all that material, and so I went along with the game, read them myself, and sat to discuss them with him as though we were equals in our comprehension whereas in fact I had the material read and assimilated for his easy digestion.  Our moment of intimacy was when he asked me to accompany him to scout out several hundred blueberry bushes for transplanting at the farm.  On our way there, he stopped the car by the roadside to take a pee, and somehow I sensed that the moment called for me to perform as well.  We went over to a kind of gully, and all the way he leaned on me, because one of his legs was artificial and he had never really mastered walking on it on uneven ground.  I was terrified by this physical proximity and his dependence, this good looking man, so much an admiral and the father of my fiancée.  Then he fumbled with his flies, brought himself out and began to piss.  I realized i was to do the same, side by side two streams of urine pouring down into the same stream.  We were bonding.

Grading Papers

Yesterday’s New York Times brought notice of negative reactions to the automated electronic grading of not only multiple choice, but even short essays devised for the Harvard-M.I.T. online course. I don’t get computer-graded essays, either. I guess that is because what I always treasured in teaching--as much as I also loathed  it--was my interaction with students and their papers. Yes, grading papers in large courses can be loathsome;  most students are indifferent to general education courses which they view as a tiresome obstacle in the progress to their major field. It sometimes put me in mind of those horror story memoirs of people enslaved to assembly line jobs.  One after another after another, crude, indifferent, shallow, and hurtful to grade because so dishonest all around. Curiously enough, my first experience of college paper writing came about when as a sixteen year old I undertook to write a paper for a  former high school friend at university who was stumped by the assignment; as word got around, this morphed into a kind of industry for the two years remaining until I too went across the river to college, when suddenly the  whore became a nun. The experience, however, helped prepare me as a teacher.  Because I bought back some of of these essays which I resold as “used”, over time I got the chance to read a range of instructors’ comments on the margins.  It stunned me how very superficially most readers/graders treated these student efforts (of course, egomaniac that I am, these were my papers, my efforts).  Of course, it was utterly reasonable for the time; higher education was overwhelmed by veterans on the GI Bill. Overworked instructors were running a paper grading mill, and I was operating a paper writing mill. The experience influenced me years later in my assignment of essay subjects, which I tried to shape as some kind of immediate and close dialogue with what we (I) talked about in class. Smaller classes, however, with a decent assignment of papers, even when the students are not first rate, or perhaps especially so, can be wonderful; the youngsters have so many things to say, and sometimes a very piquant way of expression. There is so much you can do to help students learn to organize and articulate their thoughts.  It is the most satisfying aspect of teaching, and what a world of difference it would make if the student/teacher ratios could be reduced to take account of the potential intensity of serious interaction on an essay paper.  Perhaps the way out is by jettisoning the lecture course, really nothing more than a high class dictée--an educational necessity before the invention of moveable type in the 1450’s which one would think might have run its course. Once when teaching classes with mostly foreign born students, I had them number the lines of their essays, which allowed me to give detailed criticisms keyed to these numbers. I have to admit I practiced triage of a sort for which I might justifiably be criticized. I omitted this tiresome maneuver on the papers of those students I felt were hindered by their age or circumstance of moving upward in the American Dream. But what arrogance was that when I decided that a fifty five year old woman, newly arrived from Albania, say, burdened with her grandchildren, maybe working one or two jobs as a hotel cleaner, did not need to get the niceties of middle class English usage and style  A funny comeuppance came my way one day from an elegant young African who followed his first paper, which had been atrocious, and thoroughly corrected by me, with a second, flawless piece, clearly copied out from some other text.  When I confronted him with this, he quickly acknowledged that this was so, clearly pleased with himself, and to my amazement volunteered that he felt sorry for me, and wanted to hand in something that would be easier and more pleasurable for me to read!  What a gentleman he was, what a gracious demeanor!  You have to love students  like that!

Loquaciousness

It’s really no surprise how many old friends who read my blog make a joke about the improvement of encountering me in this electronic medium where with a click I can be turned off.  Of course, they are being witty, but I detect an underlying truth. Here at home my husband who retired five years ago has made it clear that he can take only so much conversation with me, and I think back to my second wife, a demonstrably laconic lady, who would deliberately turn to her reading, which I now see was her way of shutting out more talk. We have recently become friends with a former therapist, and I note that in our evenings of chit-chat together she will suddenly turn to Richard to ask him a question that draws him into the conversation.  She was a family counselor and I suppose on the alert for the family member who never gets his/her say. I am used to aggressive conversationalists, having grown up with six siblings, all of them voluble, loud, and witty, monitored at table by our mother who was herself no mean speaker.  So while some males have an instinct to go for the jugular, I go for the verbal opening. I well remember my second wife’s mother, another talker, who was once in conversation with me when her husband, a retired admiral sitting near us, cleared his throat in that way people have of demonstrating their intention to speak.  We paused, but inarticulate guy that he was, the struggle to shape his thoughts into words was going to take a bit of time, and we, having paused, proceeded to open up another volley.  The admiral was enraged, to which his wife said sharply: “Sweetheart, this is conversation, and you have to fight to get into it.”  I guess it’s true that I never tire of talking.  I remember once driving to Provincetown from Cambridge with a dear friend, another great talker, and all the way there, all the time at the restaurant where we ate lunch, and afterward strolling on the National Seashore, and then in the drive back we never stopped talking.  The next morning we both admitted that our jaws muscles were so sore from a day of constant motion that we could hardly speak. I was a university professor for forty two years, and lecturing is natural to me, an occupation that also habituates one to being the center of attention, as well as enjoying a certain built-in prestige.  All of which, obviously, encourages the tendency to run off at the mouth endlessly.  Naive and self-obsessed that I am, the rude awakening came rather late in life when a group of young people, chefs and hair dressers, were required to suffer my presence at an evening’s gathering because I  was a house guest.  After having politely presented themselves and made the obligatory verbal niceties, they none of them again acknowledged my presence the entire evening, and I thought of films of peasant life in Eastern Europe where the elderly toothless crone with a kerchief around her head sits by the fireplace in silence. On the other hand, my professional life required study and research which acquainted me with solitude and silence, which have become the essential elements of my retirement years.  In the first year after I stepped down, when the phone no longer rang, it was hard for me to comprehend that I was no longer needed.  At the time of the financial crisis we made the decision to create a permanent Massachusetts home in our house at the seashore.  It is lovely there, the garden is stunning, walking on the beach brings on utter peace of mind, but on the other hand it is extraordinarily lonely.  The other residents seem to be cut from some other spiritual and intellectual fabric, there is the sketchiest of public transportation, a town center which exists in theory more than reality does not harbor a bookstore, an art theater, or a lively tapas bar, all of which means a life of utter isolation punctuated by somewhat arduous trips on a commuter train to Cambridge from a nearby town. As I have adjusted to this new phase of my life, I have benefited from pondering what I remember of the memoir of Albert Speer, called Spandau: The Secret Diaries. My reader will no doubt find this odd, but the book is his account of how he survived the mental torture of twenty years, some of it in solitary confinement, in Spandau prison for his role in the Nazi atrocities. If one was born to be gregarious and loquacious, then learning another way of life takes effort.

The Play's The Thing

Sunday we go to a brunch to honor the third year class at the Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training.  Soon they will be going to New York as a group for auditions in front of talent scouts.  We will be saying good bye to the student we have sponsored for the last three years.  When we came to Sarasota we subscribed to the season of the Asolo Repertory Theatre, and discovered the Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training which offers four plays in the winter season performed by second year students. The quality of the student productions impressed us from the start, partly because their teachers were giving them some interesting plays, a stunning and tense Machinal, for instance, and a Blue/Orange that seemed to me--maybe I’m daffy--better done than the London or New York production I had seen. Last year there was an excellent  student production of Cheryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, one of my favorite plays, and not easy to do, since it requires playing different genders in each act.  For example, an exceptionally tall lanky guy who took on the role of the planter’s wife in Africa, did a performance of a woman that was also somehow a parody of a woman that was absolutely brilliant, and another fellow after having appeared as a native house servant in the first act, reappeared triumphantly-- male body hair and all--as the tiresome little girl child of the family. By contrast the Asolo Rep seems much more cautious in their plays; after all they have to think about selling tickets to eighty year olds from the Middle West whose notion of theater is probably derived from the Eisenhower era. Sponsoring a student costs us more than we probably should be spending, but we love doing it. Besides it gives us access to observe voice, movement, and singing classes, plus the all important chance to get to know our guy, as well his young colleagues. Spending time however briefly in the company or even proximity of energetic, talented young people is a remarkably rejuvenating experience for two old geeezers.  Our student has been a wonderful new friend, and we are delighted that we can follow a bit of his future from our vantage of being Manhattan theater goers. We saw him first as Jeff, the security guard, in a moving student production of Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero, where he demonstrated his remarkable ability to project character through the movements of his mouth and hands.  The student actors in their third year have the chance to be cast in productions on the main stage, working with professionals, and a few weeks ago we saw him when he appeared with the look and gesture of a matinee idol in that 1937 Pulitzer Prize winning play You Can’t Take It With You.   Because we know all the actors these performances are all the more interesting and thought-provoking, every time.  We are so lucky to be part of an added treat which is the occasional late night semi-staged reading of very recent pieces, last year, Dying Cities, for instance, and this year Will Eno’s New Town as well as Venus in Fur, which our student and a friend read heroically; recently some students did a staged reading of something old which was quite a very tough undertaking: the large cast revival of that 1920s Noel Coward favorite Hay Fever.   The young lady who performed with our student in Venus In Fur has a physical beauty and manner that recalls the great Hollywood film actresses of the thirties, a species of beauty and femininity no longer extant; she appeared this year as our student’s love interest in You Can’t Take It With You, and she, like him, could have stepped right out of an MGM production.  More amusing was her performance in a truncated version of Macbeth which the students took around to the local high schools.  I had never before perceived Lady Macbeth as Barbara Stanwyck or Rita Hayworth, and that was what she brought to this performance.  Because of the rehearsal schedule the students did not go home for Christmas and we asked our student and this young lady for Christmas dinner. By chance they had acted together in so many things it was a natural choice.  She sat next to me, and I have to say, it was a rare experience to sit so close to so voluptuous a beauty, whose intelligence, charm, and gracious manner was everything Santa could have wanted that day.

Brave New World

The March issue of the English monthly "Prospect" focused on a recent finding that a third of the babies born in Britain last year can expect to live for a full century.  There was a contributing essay by Garrison Keillor at age seventy, who has an exceedingly upbeat take on this prediction.  Keillor’s essay reads like those glowing accounts of exciting, new and active celebrity lives described in the monthly journal of the American Association of Retired People--you just know that Cher will still be striding the stage in her thigh high boots at Las Vegas when she's a hundred. But I thought immediately of Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” that stark, chilly, and deadly description of the intimation of our end.  I thought of Brian Moore’s The Lonely  Passion of Judith Hearne, the story of an aging alcoholic alone in rented rooms, or Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn, a kind of wry narrative smile evoked by four lonely office workers nearing the end of their time at work, or Evelyn Waugh’s short story “Bella Fleace Gave A Party,” in which an elderly woman waits with dance band and hired footmen for the guests who never arrive because she had forgotten to mail out invitations. And I think of the folks I have known in our building in Manhattan, the one on our floor, for instance, growing blind, and still somehow creeping out of her room, leaving a trail of powder in footprints, to feel her way to the elevator and down the front steps, turn left and somehow end up at the all night diner on the corner where she got her meals, and other shadowy figures alone in their rooms until one fine day they were carted off.  I think of my best and dearest friend with whom I spoke almost every day for fifty years who finally admitted to being ninety.  “Why did you tell me?”  “Because I am old now and I don’t care.”  It was the beginning of conversations on another plane.  “Charles, what do you think it is to die? I don’t think I’m ready to.”  “I drive to the store; I don’t care.  What am I supposed to do?  I would be a prisoner.” (This is California where there is no life without a car.)  “I need projects.  I need something to do.”  “These damn people around me, they keep coming in to visit me.  What for?”  (No point saying “They want to assure themselves you’re still alive.”)  “Charles, Elizabeth is dead, now I am the only one still alive from her wedding party. Everyone I grew up with in San Francisco is dead now.” And finally she as well at 97. I think of my mother-in-law who fell on the stairs at 98 that sent her into a sharp decline, her pain eased by morphine, who said softly one Thanksgiving when her daughter invited her to come to the table, “I don’t want to eat anymore,” and, God bless them, they upped her morphine, and helped her to take her leave.  I think of her neighbor, an old, old regal lady who lived alone, found one day by someone who noticed her absence at church, frozen on the floor, the furnace having failed. Let me be upbeat, sort of, in an anecdote that gives me comfort,  an extraordinary experience a while back at Sanders Theater in Cambridge at a performance of Bach’s Passion According to St. Mathew, almost at the end after the Evangelist has described the death of Jesus, when the chorus sings an impassioned, beautiful passage that recapitulates one of the great musical themes of this work, in which they call out for the Lord to be with them when they die. At that moment in Sanders Theater an old man three rows in front of us, let his head fall backward.  As we were soon to discover he had died.  I have always thought to myself “Old man, what a great way to go.”

Freedom and Restraint

Yesterday David Brooks wrote a bizarre column about gay marriage claiming that gays were a group of people willing to buck the trend toward unbridled freedom to accept the fetters of matrimony, restraining their individual freedom.  To begin with most gay persons I know want marriage so they can get the financial benefits that the institution guarantees, or access to hospital rooms, or some other freedom from whatever other restraint not imposed upon straight married people.  i know my partner of almost twenty years and I marched down the aisle so we would not have to pay an inheritance penalty meted out to unmarried inheritors of a partner’s estate.  I believe the Supreme Court is right now considering a suit brought by a woman who had to pay an immense inheritance tax on her partner/wife’s estate because the federal government did not recognize her rights as a spouse.  Brooks has an odd notion of social restraints in any case.  I think history shows that most persons with libidinous gumption will enter into adulterous relationships, marriage be damned, but they try to adhere to the maxim of the great Edwardian actress, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who famously advised: "Does it really matter what these affectionate people do, so long as they don't do it on the street and frighten the horses?"
Brook decries “the contemporary lack of restraint in a reckless pursuit of freedom.”  Decline in marriage.  More children raised in unsteady homes.  Higher debt levels as people spend to satisfy their cravings.  How about decrying the financial institutions of this country, the health industry, and the real estate industry and their reckless pursuit of profit which puts so many families at risk, breaks up the integrity of a marriage under the burden of debt?  How about government spending on infant day care as a way to ensure that toddlers have a healthy start in life?  How about a vast increase in the money spent on education from kindergarten to low or no college tuition  as it was before it became yet another financial burden from which young people are only released in their middle age?
Marriage, Brooks claims, is one of those institutions--along with religion and military service--that restricts freedom.  Well, if you go A.W.O.L. you eventually end up in prison, while, on the other hand, if you misbehave with a youngster, you are sent to another parish, not quite the same thing. Other than that, it's finally between you and your god what you do and what are the consequences.  No, gay persons want to get married in order to have a public, socially approved statement about the validity of their union.  And from that will flow the inherent decency and right for the teenaged adolescent to date a member of the same sex, drink one soda at the drugstore with two straws and go to the prom together with another gay person. It seems to me that young gay males are so promiscuous because society gives them no recognition, their relationships no social approval or sanctity, and they simply follow their biological instincts. I know that was true of me. What a day  it will be when two persons of the same sex can demonstrate public affection for one another without fear.  That will only flow from the ubiquity of socially approved marriages.  As it is, now the only reason I can feel comfortable walking down the street in Florida holding my husband’s hand is I am so old that passersby assume I cannot maneuver alone.

Life Is Good, 2nd installment

In the final years of the first decade of the twenty first century, as the financial institutions of this country collapsed from their own criminal bloat, my husband and I were forced to make drastic revisions in our plans for "the twilight years."  What we did was to take a bunch of money out of the bank targeted for plans now derailed and fly to Sarasota, Florida of which we had little knowledge other than that it was supposed to have "culture," and it was warm in the winter.  We blindly bought a condo big enough for a couple who wanted intimacy, yet individuality (i.e., 2 bedrooms, 2 baths) on the top floor with a galleria running the length of it, accessible by sliding glass doors; we knew we were not in Massachusetts anymore.  The move to sunshine was predicated upon the experience of the previous two or three winters, specific memories of not being able to cross the street from our apartment building's front door to the subway stop because the intervening space was literally a sheet of gleaming ice, of being marooned in our Manhattan apartment regretfully clutching tickets to Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center because the deep snow or melted snow turned to ice made locomotion impossible.  The problem was exacerbated by my recent decline in physical stability so that I needed a cane to get around.  The gloaming of old age seemed to be increasingly impenetrable.  But, Sarasota in the winter, wow!  First off, we found the Sarasota Bath and Racquet Club and our trainer Mike Vega, who has literally transformed my life.  Six months under his aegis, the cane was gone, I was walking not all that slowly to the Club from our condo, mounting the three flights of stairs easily, and shortly thereafter standing from a sitting position without support.  And it was easy to take the bus as I chose, and for the first time in years I could drive the car on quiet streets as I chose.  I was free and independent again, and the sun was shining and the breeze was balmy, and life was good.
Last month I flew to New York for a weekend of art where I saw the fabulous Abstraction show at MoMA, a dazzling wall of Kazimir Malevich, a chronological grouping of Mondrians, ravishing Delaunays from both husband and wife, and so on and so forth.  And then to the Frick to see a small but intense show of every Piero della Francesca in the United States plus a marvelous loan of a matching panel from Portugal.  I always thrill to Piero ever since I saw the singing angels in his Nativity in the National Gallery in London who illustrate what Walter Kaiser characterizes as Piero's "serene immobility." Then on to the Met for the exhibition of Matisse and his reworking of themes in his paintings.  The two versions of his Young Sailor painted within a few months of each other in 1906 , are always a dramatically thrilling insight into a great artist's sudden, dramatic aesthetic rethinking of color, shape, and detail.
So, there we have it, two bits, one large, one small, of a life that is good.