Margaret Thatcher

I have been reading Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, or at least the first volume which will take us up to the Falklands War.  I am not much of a political person, enough to get through The New York Times every day, and read Truthout often but not always, as well as articles that deal with politics in such publications as The New Yorker Magazine.  I somehow feel that whatever happens is way beyond me.  I am also not very good at understanding economics, having never studied the subject formally at university.  Since public life is nothing but theories of economics clashing with one another I am very sorry for this, although on another level, I can’t bear to think about the subject even as vague as it is for me.  Moore’s biography requires a great deal of understanding of economics, macroeconomics, monetarism, supply side, finance, and on and on. The exciting feature of this biography is its detailed exposition of the day to day confrontation with the issues of governing that make up the life of a Prime Minister.  Fascinating!  I marvel that Mrs. Thatcher, trained as a scientist, mastered economics sufficiently to hold her own in discussion with the experts and her ministers.  Perhaps I am misled, but I am struck with how even handed Moore seems to be in presenting the Prime Minister.  His range of quotation from those who observed her and worked with her is extraordinary and one is left with a very detailed picture of the situation in which she found herself, her challenges, her ideas, her blunders, her successes.  On one level she comes across most definitely as a shopkeeper’s daughter with a strong sense of propriety, an unwillingness to move outside and beyond the culture in which she was raised.  She is always the outsider among the Tory party’s aristocrats, she has an instinctive empathy with lower middle class people and their aspirations.  She was raised as a Methodist; she was not an intellectual, so she did not stray far from the strictures and structures of her religion and her childhood home.  Her strength and her failing was that she thought that there was an answer and that she had it, coupled with a housewife’s concern to make things neat and tidy. Economists say there has to be a trade-off between equality and efficiency; she clearly voted for the latter, and enraged the public who cared first and foremost about the quality of citizens‘ lives.  She was tough and strong, but then again vacillating, and sometimes wildly emotional.  She drove her associates crazy, but there were legions of them who admired her immensely.  One doesn’t get the sense of a lot of love, but there is no question about her devotion, her sense of duty.  She took refuge in her ideologies, but could be argued out of a position.  She loved to dance, she loved clothes.  The story of this particular Prime Minister that Moore has to tell is fascinating, this lower middle class small town girl landing,  good looking woman that she was, landing into the midst of a group of males whose education at single sex English boarding schools made her a monstre sacré whether she had that in mind or no.

Writing A Novel

I want to write a novel.  This is not the first time the urge has gripped me.  In fact, I have written four novels, I believe, none of which have been published, although I cannot claim that I am like some unsung Milton or whatever the expression is, unknown in a country hamlet, since from the moment I published my first non-fiction book on ancient epic poetry with Doubleday I have been introduced to numerous people in the publishing industry, have dined with publishers, editors, agents, all of them of great renown.  Of the books that I have published the first "went over the transom" as they say, i.e., not solicited by Doubleday, the second commissioned by that outfit, the third suggested to me by La Terza in Italy, the fourth solicited by the author/editor John Gardner for a series he was contemplating, the fifth born from an idea in the head of senior editorial staff of Hyperion, and this sixth and last picked up as a second thought after a twenty year hiatus by a publisher and editor who had been shown it and rejected it in the first instance.  But no one wants to publish my novels, although almost all of the welcoming and helpful people engaged in those other publications were kind enough to read my manuscripts.  I am sure they read them in the first instance because they recognized that I knew how to write and were thus trolling for new fiction.  But, since such a large variety of people in the business politely declined, I have to believe that I don't have the chops for fiction, although one more sympathetic than the others once said to me that if I were to come by his office, he would be happy to sit down with me and go over the list of agents and select those who might like my stuff, and so after months, maybe years of submissions and rejections I might strike pay dirt.  I have known persons who submitted a manuscript for inspection to agents and had it rejected twenty odd times before finding one who would take it on.  It is not that I would hate the repeated rejections, although I am not good with that.  I have a friend who is an actress who for the past fifty years has faced that over and over again in audition, who despite it, gamely goes out again and again and indeed finds work, but oh, the first polite moment of rejection.  I find that hard.  "This is a great story, but I don't think we have a niche for it."  "You characters come alive in the very first page, but somehow, the implications of their story is lost on me." "This is more like Junior Adult fiction, not for us, and, no, I really can't recommend anyone who does that sort of thing." I don't send my stuff around, I don't self publish.  Why?  I am lazy for one.  I want to write and send the stuff away and have someone else deal with it.  Then, I am a serious ecologist, well, of sorts, and I am not sure the world needs these works of mine, cluttering up the environment of the mental/aesthetic life of the community.  But, there's another story brewing in my head, a shameless rearrangement of the facts of my life which I covered in last year's memoir.  I am getting to the point that I want to write it.  I may have to stop these blogs for a few months.  My career calls!

Less Is More

My happy days on the Cape began and ended with a wait on the dock at either end for the ferry. It was in such shocking contrast with the the rest of the experience that I cannot erase it from my mind.  It has been several years since I was in Boston’s harbor area, where the old overhead highway has been replaced by a grand pedestrian boulevard covering over the traffic tunnel below ground.  Quite splendid and many blocks long.  Any sense of majesty, calm, or grandeur, befitting a great and historic city like Boston, is immediately destroyed by the absolute hordes of tourists milling about waiting to board tour buses or filling the shops and cafes of a more or less designated tourist area, that is, the famous Quincy Market, designed for them to get a sense of “history” “old” “historic” and all the other things that come to mind when you think Boston.  Of course, tourism is a major source of revenue for Boston and New England and we cannot fault it; I guess one must just stay away.  It happens the world over.  I think of the crush of humanity being marched mindlessly through the Vatican Museum who came not for the treasures on display therein but because Dan Brown’s novel talks of it.  Well, it helps pay for the cost of the architectural treasures, so be it.  I left  Provincetown on the very same ferry on which I arrived four days later, but this time proceeded by a long lunch and stroll about the town. Driving to the dock parking facility required driving through the throngs filling the streets of a density and indifference to the car that reminded one of any major Indian city.  Then we joined them as we walked to our restaurant.  The crowds of visitors were overwhelming, back and forth, to and fro, densely packed, looking at nothing really, registering the look of “Oh, here we are in famous Provincetown.”  Indeed, the shops and houses along the way were dressed up to be so quaint or so camp that it more or less defied rational looking.  Provincetown is one of the gay meccas of the United States, and the jubilant crowd was rejoicing in the decisions handed down the day before from the Supreme Court.  It was good to see so many gay men and women walking hand in hand with the ones they loved, or embracing them publicly. It was also amusing to contrast the Boston tourist crowd, usually groups of four, mother and father bulging with fat, and two tubby tots with hands full of candy working on the avoirdupois and the Provincetown male couples, dressed so neatly, such trim bodies, such elegance, perhaps a little bit over done, but working to preserve a look of youth and beauty, but overall, we shuddered. It was just the crowds, the milling.  Less is more, said Mies

Holier Than Thou

My childhood home was peculiar as all must be, and one of its marked idiosyncracies was that no one ever mentioned salaries or pay.  This was immediately the result of the fact that once my father died when I was six years old, there was no member of the household who held a job and took in a salary.  So the one adult, my mother, had no one to whom she would naturally speak of earning a living.  More to the point, my mother never talked about money, not just earning but paying out.  We never discussed the price of things then or as I grew older.  It was “ill-bred.” She never suggested that the paper route which I took on at the age of 12 or 13 would be a good source of income for me, I don’t remember her even remarking on the money I made from  it.  Having a paper route, she told me, would be character building.  When I ran up a huge bill at the music shop while I was at Andover, she was properly irate, and required me to work the two summer vacations thereafter on the buildings and grounds crew of the public school system to pay her back.  From this I discovered the notion of a paycheck, reinforced when at the age of 18 I went off to New York City and worked as an office boy to support myself, so that when I returned home to attend the local university I took a job as an admissions clerk at the state university hospital’s orthopedics/pediatrics departments twenty hours a week afternoons Monday through Friday.  And when later Harvard University withdrew my scholarship, I went off to work as a nightwatchman for six months until they reinstated it. I don’t remember, however, shopping around for a job that paid the best.  I accepted my first teaching job without knowing the annual salary; it was never brought up nor did I inquire at the interview. So it’s clear that I did not go into teaching for the salary, never related what I did to what I earned, really, and that was my attitude for the next forty years, never tok a job for the money, nor while teaching at University A did I lust after the salary offered at University B. I found all my satisfaction and esteem from performing a service to others.  That may sound soupy, do goody, smug, but it is true.  I have never in my life thought of how I might profit from what I did in any real dollars and sense way.  I cannot imagine what it must be as a doctor in a practice that has fee for service where prescribing more tests is a way of boosting the income, ditto the lawyer who introduces another complicated wrinkle that will double the billable hours.  In sum I cannot imagine having done what I did for the money in it.  Of course, one expects this of Wall Street traders, bankers, and the like; money is all they  know, although I am probably discounting the adrenaline high of such work which makes it so sexy. And I seem to ignore that my pension is funded by forty odd years of their cutthroat derring do so that I can say ever so smugly: “Whatever else it is nice to have spent one’s life at doing a service for other people without thought of your own advantage.”

Happy Days On The Cape

I am enjoying happy days in Wellfleet staying with a friend who is doing a gig at some summer psychology institute.  During the morning hours when she has been teaching I have been tootling around town by car with another old friend with whom I used to visit to get a reminder of the place I last saw twenty or thirty years ago.  The outstanding piece of history was still there where I had seen it all those many years ago in Truro’s old cemetery, the gravestone, small, slate, curious, easy to miss, from the eighteenth century of my direct ancestor Jedidiah Lombard.  He is descended of Thomas Lombard who settled in Dorchester in 1630, and then moved the family on to Barnstable, and then on to Truro. Friends in England have sent me photos of his ancestors’ graves in Tenterton in Kent, England.  As the expression goes, we go way back.  The weather has been unseasonably hot and muggy, so we sought out a largish pond whose water at first seemed might give me hypothermia, but then by the time I had swum out to the diving raft was refreshingly cool, clear enough to see the bottom.  Upon my return to our towels on the shore I was happy to see that two slim waisted, incredibly beautiful Italian boys, probably college students, had arrived in their chic, form fitting, swim trunks, with which they showed off to their advantage bums and baskets in that unselfconscious way of Italian males who know that they are exceedingly beautiful and desirable, and that God had made them that way from the start.  Last evening the psychology institute gave a drinks party to which I was also invited.  It took me back to the days of my academic career when such get-togethers were a commonplace for me.  I’ve lost the ability to circulate, I discover, really can’t think up any small talk, and thus grab people into a conversation about a book or political act that goes on to long.  I quickly lost my taste for it all, and noticed that though I had stood up well, I was getting definitely shaky after an hour and wished I had a cane, or could lean against a table.  Pretending that I had an important cellphone call to make I slipped out on to the spacious porch where a cool breeze made the place an alternative to the air conditioned interior.  I suddenly realized that there is a great virtue in being in your eighties; no one expects you to stand your ground at parties, slipping out to abject anonymity is okay.  The odd thing was a whole bunch came out one after another and we had a rump party at which we all got into an act of demonstrating athletic prowess, me standing up without holding on, some young charming woman, turning herself into a pretzel and then unfolding and bounding to her feet.  A good time was had by all.

A Little Anxiety Goes A Long Way

I spent Sunday evening fretting over the events of the day that lay ahead.  I had been over everything I needed to do before presenting myself at the dock in order to take the 2:00 PM to Provincetown, an entirely new event in my eighty three years.  Yesterday I rose early at 5:30 am, sure that I had not enough time, but then there it was despite the hysteria of efficiently going through my exercises, making breakfast, washing and shaving, treating lovingly the remaining hairs on my head which I can arrange into a back combed feeble man's simulation of those disguising helmets old ladies get their hairdressers to lacqer on to their heads.  And, wow, in all the frenzy, I was ahead of schedule.  And yet my heart pounded: 8:30 and I've to to get a move on for the commuter train coming at 9:05.  It's only a few miles away, observed my husband.  But what if there is heavy traffic?  With a sigh of understanding he got out the car and off we went.  The train was on time, but sometimes there were almost intolerable pauses at that place between Weymouth and Quincy where they had built but one track and we had to wait for the outbound to pass us.  Predictably the train came to a halt, and I tried to ignore the passing minutes by examining the trees leafing out in the backyards of the houses we passed.  And, lo and behold. despite my fears, there we were in South Station only two minutes late.  I drew my breath.  Now was the crunch: T to Cambridge, walk to the cobblers for my repaired sandals, get to Mt Auburn Hospital for an 11:30 appointment, get back to the Square, get to the dock.  This prospect meant: should I take the bus to Mt. Auburn or a taxi?  the age old anxieties arose--the unpredictable slow progress of the bus versus the unacceptable cost of a taxi (As a depression child, but reared in very comfortable circumstances, I had never lost the era's moral objection to "taking taxis.") Taxi won out, and I was 45 minutes early at the doctor's office.  He is fond of me, and prone to gather all the extra minutes from other patients' appointments into a longish visit with me so we can discuss literature and everything else.  We started early but then I  began to grow anguished even if we were talking about my latest book which he had on his Kindle to show me; time was passing!  I have to dash, said I. Off to Provincetown.  But of course, he gave me a knowing look.  No, no, it's not that I am gay; I am visiting friends in Wellfleet. Dash, dash to the harbor.  But once outside the hospital door, the depression mentality took over, gulping with fear and daring, I took the bus.  At the Square I got the T, downtown I made the numerous changes that only Boston's loony transit system could require to go a distance I could have walked in happier days.  And there I was, panting in the humidity and heat at the dock--two hours early!

In The Shade

A friend called me from the Coast today and we chatted for 45 minutes, something I will rarely do, except with those whom I have known intimately for years, so that the absence of the physical gesture can be filled in by my memory.  We chatted, but she wanted something serious, my advice on what was troubling her these days, an inclination to let things go.  It concerned her.  She is sixty five or thereabouts, employed part time, whether to fill time or her pocketbook, it's hard to say.  But she has noticed that she often is uninterested in pursuing what she knows are worthwhile activities.  For instance, a friend recently berated her ever so gently for claiming to be deeply concerned about environmental pollution, but not willing to get out and demonstrate against the pipeline.  What does it mean? she said.  I am eighty three, said I, and I do not demonstrate, what is worse do not read the relevant newspaper articles to follow the pro's and con's of the issue.  I am dropping off the map, so I was not the one to give an answer.  Today has been very hot and muggy, and my husband and I sat under the pergola shaded by the wisteria, entertaining two friends for a (well, if I do say so myself) fabulous chicken dish of my invention, followed by an exquisite strawberry tart with perfect pastry crust (brought by one of our guests), along with a nice enough white wine.  I have been suffering for over a week now with horrendous arthritic pain in my knee and leg, a very new experience for me, but as we all know the common fate of old timers.  I can't seem to get beyond the pain, and sink back into the indolence of the delightful meal in the shade of the wisteria.  I have created a scene of extraordinary luxe, calme et volupté which agreeably challenges the random sharp pains that shoot through my leg and knee.  So I am not the least bit comfortable, in fact suffering rather much, but adapting myself to the illusion of goodness by living in the fantasy of the lovely day, maybe a Renoir day in the shade of the wisteria, with the delicious bits of chicken there on the platter before me.  I am supposed to go to Manhattan in ten days time.  It will be my July visit, but it will not make up for days lost when the pain was simply too extreme to go there at the beginning of June.  I went for three days last week, and in fact I am just back, because I very much wanted to see a friend in her recent play, and I was going to test the waters.  It was so difficult to get  about in my pain, I felt so buffeted by all the busy, hurried, laughing, happy young people about me, afraid maybe, certainly disinclined to go back.  I doubt that I will go in July despite the blessed relief of getting away from all the local village idiots who feel compelled to shoot off Fourth of July explosions for days on end.  My husband is scheduled to have a serious medical procedure shortly.  That will concentrate my attention, and I will feel some real purpose attending to him.  I won't have to think about anything.

Too Much Sex

The following is a review of my memoir posted by a customer on Amazon:
“Absolutely disgusting! It was an autobiography written by a neighbor who has written
many books. I'm sure this was the worst one. I can hardly face him now.
Hard to believe people lived lives like that. Don't bother reading or even
selling it.”  Well, I have to say I told her when she inquired at the time of its being  published that it was probably not the book for her at eighty seven years of age.  And I have to say that in the introductory chapter I put in a warning coupled with disclaimer when I said that there might be more descriptions of sex than the reader wanted, but that I wanted to make it clear what a young gay male back in the forties grew into.  In looking back over my life what was obviously the most remarkable, I guess, was that out of the blue, when I was twenty one I met a fellow student at the university and one hour later asked her to marry me, which she agreed to do even though she knew at the time that my sexual history was entirely with males. And so on and so forth, ending in a second marriage and four children.  But what I did not quite get across was that no boy in 1945 in small town Iowa had the vaguest idea what was happening when he suddenly felt a powerful attraction to the boys around him.  My mother, the Edwardian belle, was forever telling my older brother: “Don’t kiss a girl unless you are engaged to her.”  She told my sisters to keep themselves pure, and she was only thinking about extensive necking! All the boy-girl movies of the era showed soft focus flirtation, moving into sweet kissing, shared sodas at the local ice cream parlor; I knew all I needed to know about all that, but was not ready for the sudden overwhelming rush of desire for another boy. But I looked at a boy with an erection in the shower at Andover, he suggested doing something about it, and I did, and that was the beginning of a long time experimenting, trying to find where the social role for my heavy panting and frequent orgasms was to be found.  There was no template in those days, and the memoir is among other things an interesting (at least I think so!) account of wandering through the valley of temptation and surrendering every time because there was no objection nor rule against it.  About twenty years ago when I was a director of a graduate program I had to interview each of the new students. I well remember my personal shock when I casually asked a young fellow from California how he was getting along so far from home, the usual baloney, to which he replied quite casually, that he was very much settled in, and indeed had started to date a fine fellow who was also in the graduate school. I who was a veteran of more homosexual encounters that I could positively count up, was shocked, really, truly, not like Captain Renault speaking to Rick in Casablanca, but truly so, at first that he could simply say such a thing, and then that he was without an agenda, that it just seemed like a perfectly normal thing to say.  And there you see, Gentle Reader, the difference between my youth and this young man, and why or partly why my story to be told at all had to have those erotic details.  Now I just have to figure out how to make this clear to my neighbor when next I see her this winter.  Lucky thing is her memory being what it is the chance of her remembering having read the memoir is doubtful.

Sunday Morning With The New York Times

I have been reading the Sunday edition of The New York Times since 1952.  I used to sit with my next door neighbor in Cambridge while my wife slept in, my friend, a student at Harvard Law, I, studying the classics, both of us deep into the pages of the wedding announcements.  We were both Midwesterners, fascinated by the elaborate structures of East Coast society as revealed at Harvard, in Boston, and Manhattan, and there to be studied in the Times. We sat there over our coffee, taking turns, one of us reading out the details of some one of the couples featured in the pages describing weddings, while the other guessed where it was placed.  It seemed to us that in those days the listings were organized by the editorial staff’s notion of social superiority, so the bridal couple’s details mattered--Greenwich over Scarsdale, East 73rd over West 73rd,  Brearley over Spence, Harvard over Rutgers, and of course St. Thomas over St. Vincent Loyola and naturally pulling up the rear the Temple Immanuel on Fifth Avenue. She or I would begin reading a new listing and the other, as soon as sufficient markers were mentioned that could assign a page location, would shout out the page number.  It was fascinating how often we got it right.  Father, bank president, groom and bride with three names at least two of which were surnames, products of Groton and Miss Porter’s School,a residence in one of the towns of the Main Line, a wedding at St. Thomas or the Cathedral of St. John the Divine--Bingo! First page.  Nowadays wedding announcements are an agreeable melange of ethnicities, locales, professions that seem to have been put together by computer, yes, the way it should be, I suppose, but hardly fun to read. Who cares about these people?  You can read the same sort of thing in the Podunk Evening Herald.  Then to turn to the rest of the Style section nowadays is to encounter the same sort of celebrity one gets in every other contemporary publication.  Who cares about pretty young men and women who are children of film agents, proprietors of magazines, distant relatives of former presidents, all of them out at the latest glamorous--and what is glamorous?--hot spot nobody has heard of except those in the world in which they move, asked the old grouch.  I guess all the “old money” is dead or refuse to come out at night. I rarely recognize a name in Bill Cunningham’s society photographs let alone the events these people are attending (God bless the Rockefellers, such a huge family you can always count on one turning up.) The first section of the Sunday paper has a Sunday tone, come to think of it, unlike the weekday pages of news where the editors have done their utmost to gather up every conceivable horror story of war, mismanagement, chicanery, all of which is designed to arouse the itch for control that animates most readers who are otherwise engaged in various projects to save some aspect of the world.  Sunday’s first section is far more chatty in the presentations, more like reading a magazine, the only problem being you have to get into maybe the fourth paragraph before you get the sense of what the article is all about.  I find myself skipping more and more pages to get to--what?--who knows?  I guess it’s time to call the whole thing off.  But then what?  I remember an Italian husband of a friend on his first visit to the United States who remarked: “You don’t need Mass here on Sundays, you have The New York Times.”

Off To The Big City

I'm going to NewYork City for a couple of days at noon today, and I am not sure that I will wrestle the techology of my IPad into place so as to attach the keyboard it, plus go out to a public spot with WYFI.as I believe they call it, and get the appropriate signal to send my blogs off for the next three mornings.  I have been told that there WYFI at any Starbucks, rather obvious actually when you see their clientele, all youngish, lean techies sitting for hours over their silver dime-thin computers.  I never feel comfortable among them, not that I could easily find a place to set my gear down.  In the world of Manhattan where pencil thin pants, cashmere sweaters clinging to male chests which must be measured still in twenties of inches, clash uncomfortably with a 44" chest, 36" waist, tufts of white hair here and there, better I shuffle off to MacDonalds, which, startlingly enough, also has WYFI.  Getting to the city will be feat enough, and I cannot quite conceive of rushing out again immediately to find my neighborhood MacDonalds, a restaurant I am too resolutely much of a snob ever to have entered before.  I am going from Hull to Quincy for a doctor's appointment en route. Good enough, but the commuter train stop at Quincy has no escalator, and I am quite sure, no elevator, and a very tall set of stairs, tortuous for one who damaged himself in London and now sports the daily, unremitting shooting pains of arthritis. A new phase of life, a new set of existential complaints.  Last year it was all my friends going into early dementia; well, I have said goodbye to them, and now will say hello to constant pain.  I cannot get out of my mind a memory of the thirties which is the ranks of elderly men and women trudging home from their working day in my hometown (it was the depression, few had cars, the city had a minimal bus service), their ankles often conspicuously swollen grotesquely, their gait shuffling and lopsided, limping.  And the horror of it is they were probably only in their fifties.  I remember our old cook rubbing her hands and if she thought no adult was about moaning ever so softly.  Oh, those hands, some nights when our nursemaids were out, she came as a great act of kindness to massage my crippled body, and I would cry out in complaint at the rough texture of her skin which since six in the morning had been every day immersed in the hot waters of dish washing or down in the basement helping with the laundry.  Back to Quincy; so I must climb those stairs, then after the appointment, heading to Boston, when later I go to get on the Red Line subway, down another set of stairs I will be required to hop gently to spare the pressure on my knees.  Once in South Station I will want to avoid the pain of standing in line forever for the Acela so I will ask the Red Cap to take my little tote with Sarasota Public Library on it--my luggage, so to speak--but he will take it for a few dollars (Oh, the squalor of the bribe!  I always offends me) which allows me to board early and settle myself in my feeble pained state before the hordes begin to confuse me. I may not have dementia but I am moving that way.  When I get to Pennsylvania Station I have to fight my way along that narrow platform overloaded with people and luggage until I can find an escalator, thank god, they have them here and there in that pit of confusion.  And this time I will go up to the surface and get into the cab line.  After the stairs in the tube station in London ruined my knees by waking up the sleeping arthritis I shall simply take my children's inheritance and spend it liberally on cabs.  I've even convinced my husband whom I must escort to Brigham and Womens for a heart procedure some one of these days next month at 6:00 am that we shall hire a car and driver.  If we are going to live in the desperate wastes of ex-urban Boston then we must give ourselves a few breaks

The Piano Bar

The old man who lay dying in the last episode of “Nurse Jackie” was alone, and to make up for it several of the staff were at his bedside.  Thor, the gay ward aide, noted that he recognized the old fellow from nights at a gay piano bar at which he had been one of the amateur singers.  Then Thor, visibly crying, cleared his throat, and told the old man what an inspiration he was to Thor.  That he had lived through the years of his youth in the humiliation of the closet, and constant fear of exposure, that he had been part of the crowd who stormed the police outside of the Stonewall Bar, that he had suffered and cried as he watched so many of his cohort die of AIDS.  That he had been brave, strong, and gracious, never surrendering to the hate and ignominy that the greater world might want to dump on him.  It was a very moving speech, and of course it had to remind the viewer with any sense of history how different the world was now for Thor and his younger friends, contemplating dating as teens, marriage as a normative goal, children perhaps, certainly a life of friendships as a public phenomenon.  I could not help but think of how the fateful decision I made at twenty one to marry, not as cover under which to hide my gayness, but openly to a knowing woman whom I cared for, removed me from the life of a gay male.  And I mean “gay” the piano bar, the AIDS, the Stonewall raids, the affinities and friendships forged in Fire Island and Provincetown and the Castro.  No, I was home sitting in a big chair balancing a martini in one hand and reading Good Night, Moon to a phalanx of yawning tots.  Thor’s pean of praise, as they say, made me feel sad and wanting.  I wasn’t there when it counted, I wasn’t manning the barricades.  When critics say that my memoir “is not gay enough” whatever that is supposed to mean, I guess it means I wasn’t there when it mattered.  I was too young to serve in the Second World War, and excused for medical reasons for the wars that followed.  So I wasn’t there with all the guys at the landing at Salerno, Normandy, and, yes, thank god, and yes, most told me they wished they hadn’t been there, but when the crowd stands around the piano and sings and the memories of day of yore flood the atmosphere, I am not there.

Biff, Bam, Bang, Bang!

I remember so vividly the moment in The Long Goodbye when someone rakes Elliott Gould’s cheek with the jagged end of a Coca-Cola bottle.  It was shocking, and what struck me at the time, was that the gesture was gratuitous; it did not explain the action or advance the plot, it was only there to churn the spectator’s stomach. Gratuitous violence seemed to me thereafter to be more and more a fundamental of Hollywood studio films, culminating in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction which I despised for what everyone else loved about it, the stylized violence delivered as some kind of witty ballet.  So much filmed violence truly upsets me whereas I am supposed to see it as brilliant parody, or allusive, oh, there are numbers of critical words to describe these films.  All I see is “violent.”  My son begged me to see The Sopranos and it wasn’t until I was convalescing from surgery in its second year that I asked my husband to go to the video shop and bring home some it.  We were instantly hooked--the acting was so brilliant--, and watched it year after year until that baffling ending, although I have to say that somewhere along the line, I felt as Odysseus who can say in the Iliad sometimes warriors get their fill of killing and have to take a break. After that I could never look at anyone killing another person again, nor punching them  out, not look at cruel, ugly behavior.  Everyone I know loved The Wire, but I could only  take a few episodes.  I have become such a nervous weakling that I cannot even revisit films I once loved, Klute, for instance, I get too frightened just thinking about the menace in that film.  And so it goes.  I could name a dozen others. I do not want to be complicit in the sadism, the violence, the sexual relish of killing. My husband sits in another room with his own television watching Dexter.  I don’t even want to watch Homeland.  I don’t care about somebody who is bi-polar. Twenty years ago it must be by now I did sit through in horror and terror watching that horrendous rape scene in Boys Don’t Cry, but I did that as an act of bearing witness for the historical figure Brandon Teena who chose to be a man and was punished for it by the males in her life when they discovered she was a woman.  A terrifying film, but so important, like the nightmare films of the Holocaust. But I know that I have cracked somehow.  The other day we were at the cineplex, we sat through an endless series of advertisements for some upcoming television shows, plus a vast number of previews of coming films.  I was struck dumb by the fact that what passed before our eyes was one after another stabbing, shooting, slugging, women knocked to the ground, cars driven into the ditch and catching on fire, men keeling over in some kind of pain or another.  Let me out of here I kept thinking.  Then to wait for the commuter train in Boston’s South Station where giant television screens rehearse the dangers in every moment from the neglected bag, the suspicious person, the negligent cop, and on and on.  They should be handing out Valium is all I can say.

Oh, Photo, Oh Flower, Which Is The Greater Reality?

Yesterday before the rains came Mathew Mead arrived to photograph the garden, principally, the roses.  He creates magazines in the Time Entertainment Series which either have a theme like Halloween or Christmas, something like that.  He was shooting my garden for the April 2014 springtime issue. (When he suggested that someone on his staff would interview me somewhere along the line, I thought to myself sooner than later, well, considering my age.) It was fascinating to watch him work, the way he would examine the myriad of blossoms throughout the garden, and decide which were worthy of his attention.  We gave him permission to cut what he wanted and he brought them to the table under the pergola where he arranged them with various props he had brought with him, vases, baskets, and so on.  I was fascinated at how distant he managed to be from the material, and yet how extraordinarily intimate and luxuriant his photographs were.  He gave us a copy of his latest magazine, an issue devoted to recycled treasures, which is to say what you can make out of the stuff you get out of garage sales and stores like Goodwill.   The genius of his invention was extraordinary, truly breath-taking.  Page after page of suggestions for re-using ratty old tables, shabby mirrors, mismatched dishes, odd pots and pans, on and on, all transformed by Mr. Mead into the most ravishing items, clever, useful, and truly beautiful, which would adorn a palace as well as a home.  Part of it, of course, was his ravishing photography.  The items were always in rooms of such dazzling whiteness, the colors always in such exciting contrast with each other.  Dazzling, exciting, yes, those words conjure up what this is all about, what some call “shelter porn,” I believe.  It was so seductive to be led to believe that one could take junk, and at no great expense transform it all into items for magical rooms of pristine elegance.  Forget about gross Target and Ikea and whatever; from now on, unusual items, interesting combinations, hand made for idiosyncrasy and specificity.  And don’t think about your own lack of imagination, your manual clumsiness, your laziness, your willingness to let the bits and pieces from all these yard sales sit in your garage until whenever.  Like the horny guy contemplating the naked women in his porn magazines, it’s just a matter of time until some chick just like these is going to want him!  Yes, him!  As I lost myself in wonder and desire beguiled by these so beautiful photos of so many beautiful pieces in so many artful rooms, I quite forgot why it was that I have spent the last few years throwing out all the heirloom pieces that generations of forebears have finally dumped on me.  It’s the dust.  Where are the maids?  Think of something like Downton Abbey where we see the maids dusting the rooms, every last one of them, and every single item in them, before the grand folks rise from bed.  All those glorious items that I have been slavering over in the photos, everything in my house soon surrenders to obscurity under the dulling patina of dust, but that is the glory of Mathew Mead’s photographs, their glamor is forever.

Erotics On The Silver Screen

Last night we watched Murnau's Sunrise in which a manly country bumpkin (George O'Brien), much in love without realizing it with his demure wife (Janet Gaynor), is seduced by a female city slicker up in the country on vacation.  She improbably enough persuades him to murder the wife by drowning her and go off for a life of fun and lust in the city.  Once out in the boat hubby does not go through with this, although rousing such suspicion in his wife, that when they get across the lake, she tries to flee.  The upshot is that they both somehow get on a trolley improbably running out in the woods and go into town.  There ensues both comic and heartwarming episodes of them cutting it up in the big town. Eventually they go back, wife nearly drowns in an enormous storm,   Improbable is the word for a great deal in this film, except when the rescuers bring the lady back to her husband who is sunk into the depths of grief, their reunion, their palpable deep gentle love for each other is so radiantly displayed on both their faces, especially his, that the scene sinks indelibly into one's consciousness.  I can't get it out of my mind, and it makes me think of other cinematic moments of erotic emotion that have remained with me.  For instance, Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich in Morocco.  She is a nightclub entertainer, he is serving in the French Foreign Legion.  At the nightclub he sits in the audience before the stage when she enters from the side, and approaches a table, at which sit two couples.  She takes a flower from them, leans over and kisses one of the women on the lips firmly and longer than she should, then saunters to center stage, where after a bit she throws the flower to Cooper.  He is young in this film, and beautiful, and compellingly androgynous, shy, and available.  He takes the flower and puts it behind his ear, completing the image of the coquette improbably enough in Foreign Legion drag.  It is a stunning scene of gender role reversal, equaled by the extraordinarily lunatic ending when the Dietrich character decides to follow her man into the desert, and there is Marlene in a shining, sinuous evening gown, with gold high heels, setting off into the sand. But you can fantasize the grit of the sand as the Legionnaire's rough hairy body just as you can her shining sandals and silken dress as the soft, perfumed nakedness she will offer him. Flash forward in time to find Fred MacMurray as an insurance salesman waiting in the front hall of the home of a would-be client, whose wife played by Barbara Stanwyck, has been informed by the maid that he is there to see her.  As he waits, and in a voice over talks of his immediate seduction by the wife, we see him dipping his hand into a fish aquarium, and feeding the fish, a dazzling,  wonderful violation of space,  and entirely wet.  At which point Phyllis Diedrichson enters at the head of the stairs, coming down step by step in fabulous and oh so fake or maybe just dyed blonde hair (who ever thought of Barbara Stanwyck as this kind of blonde?), a gold ankle bracelet jangling in the rhythm of her descent, glittering as the camera lovingly moves over her ankles and legs. The trouble has begun; the film is Double Indemnity.  Flash forward much later to the first great gay tearjerker as we watch Jake Gyllenhall wait outside the house of the man he has been making out with up in the mountains and greet Heath Ledger in one of the most ferocious, hungry, desperate, strong man to strong man embraces possible,  almost seems a fistfight or some manly act of aggression until the passion strikes you..  Such desperate and sweet and hopeless love.  Who can stop the tears?

Harvard And Oprah

Oprah Winfrey received an honorary degree from Harvard University and gave the commencement address.  As one expects from Ms. Winfrey, it was inspiring, as she called upon the audience to struggle and persevere, overcome doubts and obstacles, find their inner strength.  Her own life story is the great lesson that lies behind all her presentations.  A black child born into poverty, of dubious parentage, with none of the security financial, familial, or psychological, that middle class children so easily take for granted, Ms. Winfrey overcame these obstacles, and with a remarkable determination began to take control of her own life in her teens.  The story is well known.  She is now one of the richest women in the world, a major philanthropist in the United States, a celebrity of heroic proportions. an inspiration to all African-Americans, and as seems to be the case, not only a beautiful woman, but a lot of fun, too.  At least her Commencement Speech set a new standard for folksy, down home, direct speech from a platform where the standard has almost invariably been elevated, cerebral, and transcendent, or at least the speakers often seemed to set out for that, whether they made it or not in every instance was another story.  Ms. Winfrey is a professional celebrity, a category of person which now sets the tone and makes for the content of almost all television broadcasts of current events.  For someone of my age I found it disquieting, that upon this august occasion in that historic arena, what was being celebrated was pluck, personality, and intelligence when I really always expect to hear an encomium of one sort or another to learning.  That may sound terribly pretentious, but on that day the Yard was not only filled with men and women who have given their life over to the accumulation, assessment, and transmission of knowledge but has as its southern boundary the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, the second or third largest repository of books in the United States, the stored knowledge of the world’s civilizations, and a building I can never enter without experiencing a frisson of awe at what it represents.  It is a wonderful thing that Ms. Winfrey has turned the inspiration of her life story into a vehicle for others to overcome their doubts, hesitations, and feelings of inferiority, just as it is wonderful to think that this young woman has gone out there and made hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars. True enough, she has the same non stop aggressive drive which makes Harvard University what it is, and when it comes to money, Harvard is second to none in the overflowing coffers of its endowment.  And sometimes one does have the feeling that President Faust and her administration is very much caught up in the glamor that Harvard can exude, its very own fabulous celebrity and extraordinary material standard which one cannot help but note everywhere here, despite the University’s constant call for more money.  So in that sense Oprah Winfrey was the perfect speaker, and her down home delivery may have set a very agreeable template for commencement speakers down the years ahead.

Puttin" On The Pretty Frocks

As a male who finds other males sexually attractive, I can sit on the sidelines of the human heterosexual comedy and observe.  Something that always fascinates me is the women I meet who depend upon a male’s appraising erotic gaze.  Back in the seventies a colleague went to a conference in San Francisco, her first visit to the city, and came back thoroughly demoralized.  She was a beautiful, sexy woman, and a great dresser; “not one man even looked at me, they looked right through me,” she complained exhibiting real distress.  It was the first time that I had realized that women actually liked it when men gave them the eye.  Very recently a no-nonsense girl of the eighties, now about to turn fifty, startled me by observing with melancholy that men only cast a glance in her direction nowadays when she was walking with her teenaged daughters.My mother was an Edwardian belle who was always cautioning my sisters about the malignancy of the male erotic gaze.  Not that she would have phrased it so.  “Watch out for the mashers,” was more her style, “don’t expose yourself,” not that of course she meant something like flashing, but more modestly indicating too much notion of the body underneath the clothing.  I remember her describing the day in 1910 her father met her at the train in Chicago upon her return from boarding school in Boston.  She was sporting a new style, the hobble skirt, and as she descended the steps of the train, her foot and ankle were exposed through the opening, there for the “colored” train conductor assisting the passengers to feast his eyes.  Her father was enraged and scandalized.  Years later, in another of her anecdotes, she used to chuckle over her initial experience of Iowa City, when my father insisted that she put some fabric into the extreme décolletage of the gown she had chosen to wear to her first reception among the university faculty.  So she obviously dressed with some attention to display.  And yet this was the woman who was counseling her daughters on exposing themselves to the erotic gaze of men on the street.  It’s like the business of wearing a skirt.  I have never understood why when pants were deemed appropriate for women on formal occasions, any woman would continue to expose her legs. It is certainly the case that when my architect wife returned from motherhood to architectural practice, she never once in all the years that followed donned a dress, for any occasion, work, weddings, funerals.I know that one of the minor erotic joys of my life is gazing at men’s legs when they wear shorts. Imagine the pandemonium in the office if males were showing off their marvelous hairy thighs and calves.  I have never known males, myself included, not to assess women’s legs when they are available for viewing. And nowadays the fashion of so much opening in the blouses.  It immediately colors my sense of the woman.  The Muslim notion of covering a woman from head to toe to spare male sexual excitement at all times is to my mind ludicrously extreme; some women really do prefer it, I have been told.  But through greater familiarity and proximity males can become habituated to women at an early age so that they lose some of their exotic and thus provocative aura.  My daughters hung out in their youth with their brothers as well as the boys of the neighborhood, and I remember once suggesting one of these boys now a grown man as possible husband material, and my daughter laughed and said “He’s like a brother, Dad, for God’s sake.”

Rituals

Last night my husband and I were watching--dare I confess it?--the season's final episode of Nurse Jackie. We have been fans of Edie Falco for many years, but I must say the storyline has grown exceedingly tired for me, although not for my spouse.  As a recovering alcoholic, sober for thirty years, he takes a keen interest in others' struggles for sobriety, and this season we have watched Jackie reach the end of her first year, quite a triumph.  In earlier seasons she has been shown dipping into the pills in the hospital pharmacy, making out with the pharmacist, in fact, to improve her chances for gaining the access she needs.  The tension between her honest attempt to be the best possible ER nurse possible, and we see her in action plenty of times, where her intelligence, quick, sure judgement, and her boundless compassion are magnificently on display, and her need to medicate herself was indeed dramatic and moving, although I had to ask myself from my own years working in hospitals how it was she could be so always spot on in her reactions when she must have been glazed over one way or another in reaction to her little pills.  Now she is working on sobriety, an admirable goal, but I have found it tedious going.  For whatever reason she feels she has to enlist the attention and sympathies of all her friends and family, many of whom--her older daughter and her former husband--are thoroughly disgusted with her.  My feeling is go for it, Jackie, but don't tell us all about it.  It's a boring subject, your daily psychological stance vis-a-vis mood altering drugs, and if you are going to speak up, let's talk about some of the other things that must engage your obviously so intelligent mind.  My husband is disgusted with me, claims that because I have never been addicted, have not knowledge of addiction, I cannot understand her focus.  I claim no, I do understand, yes, it must be all consuming for her, something to which she must constant attention.  But do we all have to hear about the struggle?  Struggle qua struggle is not interesting.  How does this impact on Jackie's sense of life, her daily thoughts about the other people in her life?  She has become just too self-obsessed, as her daughter angrily claims often, and I am with that little fourteen year old.  Yes, shut up, Jackie.  On the other hand, toward the close of last night's program an old man dying alone of cancer tells Jackie that he was born a Catholic, and as she would know, that never leaves you, even if you leave the Church.  At last he calls for someone to give him the last rites, and asks that Jackie do this, which is evidently permissible in that religion.  She hasn't been to Mass in a long, long time, but the next scene we see her at his bedside with the book of prayer, with the water, anointing him while intoning the ritual.  I was deeply moved, as I am by all Christian ritual, atheist as I am, a holdover from my days as a serious Episcopalian altar boy.  My husband at my side, a seriously lapsed Catholic, snorted with impatience that all the people on the screen who had for very good reasons dropped the practice of their Catholic faith, and his husband next to him, a thoughtful and serious atheist, could surrender so completely to the words and gestures.  "That's what I want at the end," I said in a choked voice.  "Oh, God," he said in exasperation.

The Party's Over

Harvard University reports a dramatic decline in students choosing to major in some one of the humanities, as well as generally lower enrollments in humanities courses.  We live in an era in which making money is an all-consuming passion; the economic decline accompanying the Great Recession has not ended,  and it has rattled everyone's nerves.  The pundits insist that no one can succeed without a college degree, students are convinced that they must study something that is somehow technical so that they can justify the enormous sums of money spent on their education.  "Technical" means knowing specifically how to do something, some strategy, technique, system.  Spending time understanding Cinquecento painting, or learning to parse the obscurities of Pindar's Odes is not the same thing.  Humanism started in northern Italy as Petrarch and others began to order their prose after the style of the Latin of Cicero and his colleagues; they no longer were simply interested in studying the grammar of the ancient languages, they wanted to assimilate the style, the mental habits, the very being of their Roman forebears; they were coming out of the enormous all pervasive intellectual fog and spiritual debilitation that the spread of the Christian Church throughout medieval Europe had induced.  Humanism was the antidote; that body of knowledge became in nineteenth century Germany a kind of science, "klassische Altertumswissenschaft" as it was called, which was imported into England and North America.  In England "classics," however, became something else, more mystical, more of a form of social identification.  The English upper classes, or rather the males of that class, learned Greek and Latin, studied the classics as their posh private schools because it was that knowledge which was to set them apart from the middle classes where boys were intended to go on in the professions or business.  Upper class boys with their Latin and Greek were destined for the upper echelons of diplomacy, imperial service, the military or the church.  A knowledge of the literature and cultures of Greek and Roman antiquity was a private language which this class could use as short hand when talking to one another.  The literature which was the focus of their study was all about males who dominated, heroes, gods, generals, Achilles, Agamemnon, Alcibiades, Apollo.  It was not ever focused on the skivvy in the kitchen or the stable boy walking the horses.  In point of fact, the stories that dominated this literature steadfastly avoided a look at those who had walk-on roles in life's stage.  In the United States of America without so rigid a class system nor the relentless need to sequester and denominate groups, little by little the study of antiquity opened up to notice that, yes, there were women whose stories were maybe back stories but which nonetheless determined the shape of the foreground if sufficient imagination were applied, yes, there were all manner of marginal men and women, some from alternative ethnicities, whose attempt to move center stage was consistently repulsed.  Somewhere along the way, the heirs of the great unwashed became the principal cohort studying in American colleges, and their need to know more about the abusive, exploiting class and their psychic needs declined.  That was the beginning of the end for the humanities.  The great psychic, social, intellectual dramas were just as real and immediate in contemporary art whatever the medium; humanism of the last two millenia was just too expensive in every way to try to retrieve or maintain.

An Afternoon On Tremont Street

My husband and I had doctors’ appointments, one for me in Quincy at 10 or so in the morning preceded by an appointment to have x-rays taken, and one for him near Kenmore Square at 4:30pm.  We decided to go together, “make a day of it, a fun outing,” the words still ring in my ears, although I forget which of us uttered them.  A search of the downtown Boston movie houses revealed that “Before Midnight” was the only acceptable film available, and since we had seen the earlier two films that Delpe and Hawke had made, and had been keen on taking this one in, the projected “outing” just got more fun.  The appointments in Quincy went smoothly, I learned many new and important things about arthritis in my knee and hip, got a cortisone injection, and sailed forth with the confidence of the guy I used to be before the awful explosion of pain in my left knee on our trip to London a few weeks ago.  We stopped in South Station simply because we were hungry and we like the grilled cheese sandwiches that are made by some concession in the train station’s waiting room.  Onward we went underground again to Park Street Station.  Armed with the knowledge that my leg and hip pains had been the direct result of too much stair climbing in London’s tube system, I resolutely determined to take escalators and elevators.  Park Street seemed to have but one measly elevator to get to which required maneuvering through a quivering mass of humanity standing precariously on a much too narrow platform between the north and southbound tracks, but find it we did, and joined the queue which consisted of among other things a young mother with one of those modern baby carriages the size of a mini pick up in which the tiny tot seemed almost lost.  With some ingenuity we all managed to board the box which carried us up to the level of the Green Line.  Here the crush of humanity resembled downtown Delhi at its peak.  Clearly no train had appeared in some time to haul off any of those waiting.  Was it the rain? Boston’s underground trains can get temperamental on bad weather days.  We had noticed on the train ride up from Quincy that the rainfall was increasingly dramatic.  The cold damp seemed to be overriding the cortisone shot in my knee, so I suggested we walk to the movie theater near Boylston on Tremont.  Outside in the rain, wind and cold, the only pleasant distraction as we tried to move along under our umbrellas was glancing at the Boston Common which in its springtime planting resembled an ambitious square in any major European city.  (As an Italian friend of mine said when first visiting me in Boston “Why do Americans make such a fuss about going to Europe when they can get the same effect by coming to Boston?”)  It was the first time I had walked along Tremont Street in maybe twenty years so I was not prepared for the dramatic increase of the student population in that area.  I guess the little old Boston ladies have all died with none to replace them; the Boston I once knew, something that always seemed so stable from 1945 until the end of the twentieth century, was evidently gone.  We entered the movie cineplex to find a great crowd in the lobby, whether sheltering from the driving rain or organizing to go in groups to some film was unclear.  They all seemed to be fifteen years old tops, and as I glanced at the array of titles on offer, I saw that except for “Before Midnight” this was indeed a center for teen action films.  After we had taken our seats in the darkened auditorium we were treated to--assaulted by is better--advertisements for television shows of varying degrees of gore and violence which were followed by previews of coming attractions for movies I did not even know existed let alone would consider going to.  Twenty minutes of unbearable views of violence, sounds of violence, abrupt visual and audial transitions, violent in themselves, almost undid me.  Then at last the film which brought us back to our senses, to civilization, urbanity, intellectuality, taste, tact, goodwill, ending ironically in the verbal psychic violence of a deeply committed married couple.  Thank you, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke.

My Meeting With A Millennial

The internet went down in the big storm on the coast last night, and along with it, in the sweeping, driving rains that pelted our yard, down went the peonies, the stately black iris just making their debut, the taller branches of some of the rose bushes heavily laden with masses of blooms, the large open white poppies with the black centers, oh, all manner of things, which I have inspected from the window, but decline to visit closely, since it will be a mess, and it is one of those moments when I would prefer to pour concrete over the entire area and go for bits of sculpture thither and yon, indestructible (of course, I would have to design and make it).  But now the internet is back up and here it the blog I had made for today, my verbal sculpture, as it were.  ****
My husband chanced to see a yard crew working next door and called across to establish a protocol for dealing with the climbing hydrangea which covers a fence dividing the two lots.  In talking with the foreman he suddenly thought to ask him to come by to consider taking on our place and quote some rates to us.  Last evening he arrived in his shiny black pickup truck.  He was a young fellow, how young we did not immediately grasp, tall, handsome, commanding.  Unlike so many young persons today, he looked each of us directly in the eye as he firmly shook hands, standing comfortably, casually, but commandingly before us.  He walked with Richard through the various shrubbery and garden beds, me trailing along behind, and they talked garden needs, fees for doing this or that, estimations of frequency, the whole lot, in which the young man kept up a firm overview of what was the issue at each juncture of their observations of the manifold aspects of keeping our grounds and garden in trim.  Then I, who wanted to gauge him myself as a person who would deal with the flower beds as I would want it, spent a few minutes pointing out the major weeds, all of which he knew by sight, which would be what I wanted him and his crew to handle, leaving alone the great variety of other growing things, since I do not like to worry whether flowering plants will be correctly identified or pulled as possible weeds.  He understood exactly what my concerns were and reassured me that they much preferred the less is more approach whilst weeding amongst flowers.  We agreed to take his crew on in the framework of the estimated costs of various activities, weeding, hedge trimming, mowing, etc etc, when he had indicated that they would not do their tasks routinely but only when the various growing things needed tending, which means of course weeding all the times, privet hedge trimming once a month perhaps, showing an admirable understanding of the nature of his work and the needs of his clients.  As we were considering a first date for his crew he remarked that the following weekend he would be busy with his brother’s college graduation celebrations, and we casually asked him when he had graduated college, only to have him reply that he was just entering his senior year at the local town high school.  We were amazed at his maturity, his gentlemanly behavior, his social skills, and even more so when he explained that he had started his gardening work three years earlier and was pleased that it grew enough that he could bring in friends and have a real “business.”  Well, then if he is seventeen, he must have been born at the close of the twentieth century, so he is one of those celebrated Millennials or Generation Y.  All I can say is “What’s not to like?”

Winging It

I love the old academic joke that goes:
One academic meets another and asks “Have you read James Joyce’s Ulysses?  “Read it?” replies the other, “I haven’t even taught it.”
My teaching career began in earnest when I was first hired as an instructor at Wheaton College where my principal obligation was to lecture to sixty five young women on the subject of ancient Greece from the arrival of the Myceneans into the mainland of present day Greece down to the death of Alexander in 323 BCE.  That was a lot of centuries for me to cover, not to mention melding all into “the big picture.”  Trouble was I knew next to nothing about ancient history, and faked a knowledge of it because I needed the job. I stayed up nights reading James Bagnall Bury’s history of ancient Greece,  jotting down names and dates which I desperately tried to stitch into some kind of quilt that made a picture.  I was very unsuccessful; at least half the class dropped it at the end of the term.  Problem was I could not loosen my grip on the facts, like a climber scaling the face of a cliff and hanging on desperately to any rock outcropping available.  I was a bore.  A few years later I was teaching one of the sections of a freshman honors course at Yale University where I was leading my ten lads through some of the masterpieces of western literature, again way out of my depth, since I had been studying ancient Greek and Latin literature exclusively for as long as I could remember, and really knew nothing else. I had consulted the reading list before the term began, and noted that every title was familiar to me, and indeed most of them I had read in either school or college so I was confident that if I had to wing it at all, then what could go wrong since we never spent more than a couple of sessions on any one work. But when we got to Moby Dick I was stymied by the author’s verbosity, could not bring myself to read beyond the first half of narrative, lost as I was like a swimmer in the roiling turmoil of the waves of a storm tossed sea.  Oh, those sentences, they never came to an end, oh, those endless facts, detail upon detail, where was Ernest Hemingway when you needed him?  The director of Directed Studies was the famous Maynard Mack, a very august presence in the English department who chaired a meeting of all us instructors once a week to suggest the direction we might be taking in the course.  The ease with which my colleagues in the English department tossed off observations about whatever author we were discussing filled me with terror and self-loathing.  I was having such a hard time faking it.  And Professor Mack had a kind of subtext for the course which he hinted at, but firmly, as senior faculty members have a habit of doing.  Everything somehow had to suggest Christ Crucified.  Easy enough with Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, an approach I thought nonsensical but still doable, and of course you could slot any Christian work into that world view, but Moby Dick?  I mean I knew somebody got it in the end; was it the whale or Ahab?  Was it man who was Christ crucified in his fight with nature, or was it Nature which stood in for Christ crucified the victim of humankind’s rape of the natural world? You see my dilemma, and how it was like dancing on eggs somehow to suggest either possibility without denying that it might be the other.  It was a relief to read the boys’ papers and learn what happened at the end.  Dumb of me not to think to get a plot summary.  Shortly before I retired I was asked to direct a dissertation for a student in Comparative Literature whose supervising professor had gone on emergency sick leave.  Because my field was epic poetry, and I was supposed to be so learned, endowed chair and all, it did not seem to anyone a stretch that the dissertation subject was Cervantes’ Don Quixote.  Egad,I'd never read the blasted thing.  Well, here we go again. . . . .

Thanks For The Memory

Every evening when I go to my room, I meditate on the events of the day, on the items I have read in the newspaper or in some one of the journals to which I subscribe, conversations I have had with friends or neighbors, and I think of something about which I might create a blog.  But I discovered some months ago that almost without exception everything which I am able to set out in vivid prose in my head in those evening moments of retrospection have vanished completely from my consciousness when I awake in the morning.  It’s not that I only remember vaguely, no, it is that the slate has been wiped clean: there is no memory whatsoever of anything I thought or fantasized the night before.  I know now that if I don’t write down something explicit the memory cannot be reconstructed.  This loss of memory is dramatic because it is not like a film of some sort has settled on my thoughts, no, not at all; they have completely vanished, as though they never were.  I thought of this the other night when we were in a cab with a friend talking over the London musical “Top Hat” from which we had just come, and I was exclaiming over the brilliant first number of the show which all three of us had applauded and whooped over when it ended, and our friend had no memory at all of it, in fact was quite hazy about anything that had occurred in the two hour production.  As  she herself knows and will tell you, she has the early stages of senile dementia.  Am I far behind, I wonder.  Do I always remember people and incidents from the night before?  Yes, I do.  But thoughts, the ideas of the evening, they will not return.  Last night I watched the film version of Margurite Duras” “The Lover” with Tony Leung, as the wealthy Chinese playboy living in Vietnam who becomes besotted with a teenaged French girl played by Jane March.  The action of the film is essentially the story of their chance meeting, instant attraction, and his deflowering of her that evening, followed by scenes of their intense passionate encounters until circumstances force them apart.  The sexual splendor of these two actors, their uninhibited surrender of their beautiful bodies to the camera and photographer, is constantly elegant, projecting passion born of a psychological desire for closeness.  Nothing about this sexual sensual film has the slightest trace of pornography.  It is interesting, because while I cannot remember my thoughts, I could narrate and describe the visuals of this film almost scene for scene.  One would think that for someone who made his living from writing and speaking for over forty years, words rather than images would be paramount  Yet I must struggle to read the articles in the many journals to which I subscribe, sometimes having to re-read passages which I don’t get on the first take, and again so many of them are forgotten so easily that I will often pick up from the table a discarded, London Review of Books, let’s say, and be intent on my reading when suddenly it occurs to me that I have read the article a day or two earlier. 

Teaching and Learning

Once upon a time a friend of mine while serving as a graduate assistant grader at Harvard received a paper from the demonstrably brightest kid in his section on the nominal subject of the common varieties of critical response to some one of the plays of Euripides, I now forget which.  In this paper the student had constructed a drama which took place in the “green room” of the theater where Euripides’ play was being produced for the first time.  Ignore, of course, the temporal incongruity--a modern day theater as substitute for the ancient Athenian amphitheater, indeed the presence of the retiring room where professionals might be found at intermission.  Concentrate instead on the drama in which a number of critics argued bitchily and proprietarily over their assessments of Euripides’ play.  The student had caught perfectly the linguistic and intellectual habits of the members of the Harvard classics department, had suggested in this collocation that they stood in for the variety of mainstream criticism.  The paper was an eccentric intellectual tour de force that only a truly sympathetic reader could have appreciated.  How would the remote control online grader/reader in the MOOCs course being proposed as the salvation of American education have responded to something like that, if indeed it was a human being and not a computer reading the offering?  Or what would be the on-line computerized reaction to the very bright, very eccentric Boston University student who gave me his paper one day late which he brought to my office on a tray carefully folded to fit between the top and bottom of a hamburger bun sitting on a plate between three milkshakes, one red, one white, one blue, to celebrate the impending bicentennial celebration the following week?  How would the computer course coordinators have dealt with my surprise appearance in a 100 person lecture course in a New Hampshire college classroom where I was scheduled to give a major endowed lecture that evening at the moment when the class was starting their reading of Euripides’ Medea, and I, asked to say a few words off the top of my head, gave one of the most impassioned assessments and interpretations of that play that ever occurred to me, which fifty minutes later ended and after a moment of astounded silence on the part of the teacher, the students, not to mention the impromptu speaker, was rewarded with a standing ovation and bursts of cheering?  What about the extraordinary difference in classroom behaviors in an ordinary freshman class at Lehman College up in the Bronx where the students are still getting around to understanding that a high school class where the object is to defy and upset the teacher is not going to happen at the university where the gravitas and knowledge of the professor demands an intellectual obedience which translates itself immediately into a certain adult behavior and posture in the classroom?  They only get beaten into shape, as it were, by the harsh questions tossed at them by the professor, by his hauteur, his froideur, his insolent disparaging of their ignorant responses.  They learn that adult intellectual life is not a joke, not a game, that learning demands constant respect as they had never seen before.  The computer does not teach that.

Our Garden

When I retired in 1997 I searched for an engrossing project, and settled on making a largish flower garden.  My husband was agreeable to the idea that we buy a small house down in a seaside Massachusetts town where once before I had spent time, provided that the property had considerable space for a garden.  The place we found was perfect; we took possession in January and began working the outdoors in May.  The previous inhabitants had enjoyed the large outdoor space of maybe 150' square as a play space for their children.  Their only embellishment was large 20' square sand box substantially made with railroad ties behind the house in which they had set play equipment.  In the months of their absence this had become a giant kitty litter box for the area's cats of which there were many, especially feral ones, often quite beautiful which shyly moved in the shadows and had the devastating habit of killing all the song birds.  Richard is a great and enthusiastic builder, and perhaps he cares little for gardening, but he can help establish the architecture of a grand garden.  His first project was to make four large raised beds 6'x12' which are too wide for doing anything easily in the center but we only realized that after the fact.  These were set two by two six feet apart forming a giant square with grass space intervening.  Somewhat later we laid down stone slabs as pavement, and then he ran wire underground to come up in the center where we erected a large fountain which continually spills recycled water down from several successive basins.  It is some kind of phoney cheap substance molded and vaguely suggesting Italy and the Renaissance to us.  In the heat of August he set to work on paving over the sand box area filling in with foundation stones and paving with fake brick, working ever so slowly and carefully so that ten years later the surface has never sagged nor tilted.  Over this he erected a pergola on which we at once planted wisteria which now blooms in great profusion of white, pale lavender, dark blue around the middle of May and once these blooms have died and fallen to the ground the area beneath becomes the shadiest coolest spot around in summer's hot days.  The property was surrounded by a hideous metal fence waist high inside of which we planted a succession of japanese lilac, forsythia, lilac, buddleia, arborvitae, and privet, and a relatively long fence covered with climbing hydrangea.  This provides blossoms in the spring in succession in some places, and dense privacy in others.  In one bed we worked to make the yellow spring daffodils, jonquils and yellow tulips predominate among which later spring up hibiscus, purple aster, and a marvelous plant the foliage of which is gorgeous, but which I cannot name; in an another box we have a giant Lilian Austen rose bush and in front a yellow Julia Child, the rest of the box is filled with white and purple iris, a giant sage bush that blossoms purple right now, farther from the house we have boxes with the taller things, one with six foot tall yellow Cone flowers, a sturdy prairie flower that stands together with white Phlox David, both of them with strong enough roots to hold their own with the other, in front of them are the most beautiful white poppies with black centers, ravishing!  At some point I got carried away and added long narrow formal strips filled with peonies, pink poppies, more roses and more sage, and then in yet another flurry I made a square area for nine rose bushes some of which have died and been replaced with boxwoods, which are the solution for the aging gardener, as they require little care and are always beautiful, alone or in groups.  The arrival of coyotes meant the end of feral cats and the renewed sound of song birds.  Early in the morning I take my coffee out to a bench near the fountain and sit listening to the plash of the water, and the early morning bird calls, take in the various perfumes emanating from all around me, contemplate the nature of growing things, and the beauty of the flowers making their appearance from May to October.  It is an agreeable retirement project.

Rape

The recent news of party rape among the students at West Point makes me ask myself once again how it is that a young woman could trust males to the extent of going to that off campus house. Whenever I express this sentiment, I am attacked.  I don’t know why, and need to be instructed. When my husband and I exited the theater last Saturday night in London at Piccadilly Circus there was an enormous crowd of young men celebrating the results of some soccer match, and just looking at them, their height, the breadth of their shoulders and chests, their muscles, the shining intoxicated eyes, their drunken smiling mouths made me want to get out of the area instantly.  While I have a hard time understanding Russian soldiers on the march toward Berlin raping every woman whose path they crossed, young, old, whatever, I can more easily understand the problem of sexual control.  I remember very well in bed with a young man with whom I was having a very casual but fun relationship at a time when we were on a trip to New York City, and we had already had sex twice on that day when I once again penetrated him, bending his legs back to do so, and he said “You know, I really don’t feel up to this again,” and I ignored him, and then he repeated what he had said, but I was too far along on the orgasm train to pay him heed, and I just pumped away to conclusion.  I apologized, and he wasn’t really angry, because he himself understood the loss of control at that moment, but clearly he thought if I had responded by withdrawing when first he asked then I could have, and that was right.  I remember another time when I was in a bed with a guy I had just met through friends and we were in his hotel suite and he asked if he could enter me and I said no, because it had been a long time since I had something like that, and so we went along, and then he asked again, and he was such a nice guy, and so sexy, and by chance such a celebrity American athlete, that I said “okay.”  Well, indeed, it hurt, and after a moment or two it hurt more than maybe I really wanted to endure, but then I realized he was well along on the orgasm train and was probably not going to hear consciously, and he wouldn’t stop, so I thought well, it isn’t the end of the world, and let him go on to the end.  One night when I was out buying some cigarettes back in my high school days,  I met one of the star athletes of the school with whom I had had lots of encounters, and we chatted for a few moments, and then he looked me in the eye, and kind of crazily demanded that I give him some satisfaction, and when I said “no, not tonight,” he grabbed me by the shirt, ripping it, as I squirmed away, and ran out the door, jumped in my car, and fled.  He pursued in his, and it was only by some really crazy dangerous maneuvering (turning off the headlights, going down a darkened lane, making a sudden turn) that I eluded him.  I pulled over, shocked and terrified; he was always mild mannered, he had never done anything like that before. 

A Clean House Is A Life Misspent

Fecal transplants is one of the new boutique health procedures which may be counter intuitive to lay persons but as described by Mary Roach in her new book Gulp it seems to make for a new healthy gut.  It means putting a healthy person's intestinal bacteria into a sick person's digestive tract. Makes one laugh to think that maybe it is possible to make a case that there are positive medical reasons for rimming.  I remember when we had little children and two large golden retrievers and five black cats.  The dogs lay about licking their private parts with an obsession equaled only by their bestowing big wet tongues on our tots' mouths and faces.  Their golden hairs mingled with the black cat hairs to make a kind of angora sweater like cover on all the pillows on our sofas.  When toddlers were still crawlers they edged across the kitchen floor through the spill from cat dishes and dog dishes which seemed to be everywhere.  Maybe they even sampled bits and pieces.  I do know that when they could walk their habit was to take a handful of kibbles out of the fifty pound bag we had in the back hall, but snacking on kibbles, our pediatrician told us, was a good thing, since they were devoid of any of the sugars and salts that the food industry uses to beguile and destroy us at the same time.  These youngsters are now healthy hearty men and women in their early fifties.  My wife and I were never keen on keeping house, and I was happy to learn from a friend whose house is immaculate, that her mother, a woman of my age, and, thus, one would assume, that old time kind of housekeeper, always told her daughter: "A clean house is a life misspent."  When I was a teenager I was obsessed with long hot showers, the perfect location for serious masturbation, and I am sure why all boys who resist washing up to their pubescence take up long showers with a vengeance thereafter.  Long hot showers were abandoned by my husband and me when my doctor brother, then our dermatologist told us that a shower once or twice a week is best, that water destroys your skin, and it's enough that the aging process turns you into bits of tissue paper clinging to bone without giving water its clout.  I suddenly  discovered that kind of musky smell I have always found so sexually attractive when standing around males who have been working hard, and while I had certain misgivings about the auto erotic nature of my new love of my own smell, it made not bathing take on another attractive aura.  I already picked up the habit of not shaving every day before the cute young male models made it the facial style of the day, although in my case the grey and often white hairs sprouting from my face say "homeless" or "bum" rather than "stud" which is why, I guess, that store detectives sometimes follow me in ritzy Fifth Avenue stores.  The other day Stanley Fish wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times about getting rid of his library of many thousands of books.  I did that about a decade ago, moved into smaller quarters, and find that the big fight it so keep from piling new things into the house.  So hard not to be a shopper, hoarder, accumulator in the heart of the consumer society.  The only virtue to "things" is they can be used to hide the dust on counter tops.  Ah, well, . . . .

Ivy League On-Line

For those who know Harvard Professor Greg Nagy, about whom Nathan Heller writes in some detail in his recent New Yorker article on MOOCs, there must be the supreme irony that Nagy, the Homerist who insists upon the theory of oral poetic performance constantly in flux until the Hellenistic age of the text in contradistinction to his great rival M.L.West who argues for a written text for the Iliad and Odyssey as early as the seventh century BCE, is so keen on the possibility of video DVD versions of his celebrated lectures to his students, wanting above all else a fixed text, not only that but one that will survive his own lifetime, even as he tries by putting off retiring as he reaches demonstrable old age, to make no room for younger, alternative interpretations of the ancient poems at Harvard.  Nagy a very witty and simpatico gentleman would be the first to smile at this observation, I imagine, without denying its fundamental truth.  I shudder to think that Nagy on Homer will continue through the ages as the definitive "take" on the poems (which the prestige, ubiquity, and low cost of MOOCs will ensure), simply because I have always agreed with my great Harvard teacher Arthur Darby Nock, who used to remark often enough that literary takes on ancient works are like women's fashions, they change with the year.  So personally I really think it would be a good thing to retire Nagy on Homer which is now pretty much showing its age in any event.  The fact that my meager scholarly or critical offerings on the subject of Homer scarcely made their way out of the showroom to the catwalk for one evening is not a factor (he said, clawing the air, snarling through his put on smile) in this assessment. Criticism and discussion of texts belong to the age in which they were born; they present the ur-text which has no life really beyond each century's grasp of it.  It is not too ridiculous to say the the poem is simply the reception of it.  This is all a very complicated critical and scholarly subject, of course, which leads me to think of the unwashed thousands out there ready with their laptops to take in the highly refined and sophisticated perceptions of this elite faculty gathered for the project.  I am reminded of the times that I, the Distinguished Professor of Classics at Lehman College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (whew! how pretentious can you get?  Very, believe me, would be my husband's reply, if he were here at the moment), taught a Tuesday evening three hour literature course up in the Bronx which I agreed to do since I had no young children and no pressing need to be home.  I remember two aggressive, uncouth young women angrily demanding to know why my course was the only one available at the hour which they had set aside out of their work week to go to school.  Sorry, not my fault, I didn't make up the course catalog, was my meek reply.  They were not happy campers throughout the term, considering it absolute nonsense-and voicing that opinion more than once-to sit through what they considered utter twaddle, although they were bright enough to do what it took to get B's.  Then there were those parents whose baby sitter failed them just as they were coming to class who brought the little seven to nine year old along, requiring the child to stand next to their seat in class for three hours without complaining! They were often Mexican with obvious Aztec, or Olmec or Mayan features and I considered how those cultures had valued stolidity, and I realized that I was in the presence of it then and there.  In the end I could not tolerate it, so I bought several boxes of crayons and drawing paper, to hand out on those desperate occasions.  The two classroom scenes I have conjured up required the masterpiece theater performance live, in the room, the compelling animal presence of the speaker, whose various asides if they did not completely repel, managed to convey perhaps some of the eternal fascination, nay even glamor, of a man who lived for learning and literature.  I know that the televised version of Cher's Las Vegas gig is endlessly thrilling, nay, captivating, but I don't think anyone speaking on Homer on a video can compel the same surrender.