Courage and Bravery

Last week we watched a fascinating documentary describing contemporary efforts to simulate a bombing operation that took place during the Second World War when an English inventor figured out a way to get a plane loaded with a special cannister of explosives to fly extremely low over the water that was accumulated behind two of Germany's major dams, and drop them at the precise moment, speed, and altitude that would set them skipping lines stones a youngsters deploys on the lake's surface.  The cannister comes to rest right behind the dam wall sinks, detonates, and the wall is breached, water pours forth, and Germany's industrial might is severely compromised.  The point of all this description is to remark on the extraordinary daring of the young men who flew on those planes, more than just the pilots; many of them were killed by enemy fire since they  were flying low and in view, some had their planes upended by a miscalculated approach which sent up a fierce splash.  They all knew this was a possibility, saw it happen upon occasion, but they went ahead with the operation.  The survivors now in their late eighties all recalled that everyone knew the odds, none expressed anything other than the calm of knowing something that had to be done.  Last night we watched another documentary about the American special forces that went onto the island where the men who were imprisoned after the "Bataan Death March," were held, and in burst of gunfire and daring liberated the camp, and led, or dragged (many so emaciated and close to death that an exit was difficult) them off to freedom.  Again survivors both among the invaders and those saved, now in their late eighties reminisced about the event, exhibiting again the sense of what had to be done with extreme courage and daring--the men who crawled on their bellies up to the gates of the camp--and the men who struggled to survive first the march and then years of hunger and privation, now in their eighties, speaking with a calm about an extraordinary horror.  Stories like this always get to me on a personal level.  I was fifteen when the war ended, so obviously knew nothing about combat first hand, but three years later when I started college the State University of Iowa was inundated with men enrolling on the GI Bill.  There was an immensity of difference between them and me that was difficult to bridge. They were tough, gruff, direct in speaking to the teachers, often from a background that made them ignorant of the niceties of classroom decorum, or having had experiences that made them impatient with the very idea of it.  Conscious of myself as a gay male, and already having the societal idea of gay equaling feminine twisting me, I was again and again shocked to take these slightly older veteran as lovers, their bodies still marred with wounds of all kinds, their hunger and impatience and directness in bed reaffirming our culture's notion of macho male.  They didn't have any time for working out what "gay" was all about; they unafraid and indifferent and hungry.

Anti-Semitism

The European Union voted yesterday for delegates to their parliament and while it was good to see a healthy turnout, it was also disturbing to see that so many parties with official anti-Semitic policies made a healthy showing at the polls.  One would think that the horrific events of the twentieth century would have brought an end to anti-Semitism full stop.  It is of course an eye opener to review the Stalinist years in the Crimea and the Ukraine and the Nazi interventions in the latter to realize that the American present day official and commonplace horror at the Holocaust does not necessarily  translate to these places.  It was a surprise to us while visiting Budapest last year to find a very healthy hostility to Jews, alongside the equally vigorous opposition to gay persons, and of course to the Roma (which group we used to call 'gypsies.')  Russia, as I read frequently, is still a very anti-Semitic country, and as we know its President has vigorously cultivated ties with the Orthodox Christian Church which is dominate through Russia as well as publicly spoken out against any official acceptance of the validity of gay persons, gay unions, and gay identity.  The European rise of anti-Semitism is, I am sure tied up with the increase of Muslim immigrants many of whom nurse hatreds toward Israel which easily translate into more generalized hatred of Jews as it is to conservative Christian people who equate modernity with Jews as though they alone were responsible for contemporary cinema, fiction, art, and all the other features of modern culture which such people fear and resist.  Then there is the history of the Holocaust.  The late Tony Judt in his masterful history  entitled Postwar, in his last chapter of summation, talks about the remaining bonds that tie European peoples together now that the region as a whole is what one would call post-Christian, and he identifies the deep seated guilt throughout Europe for their common surrender to the murderous program of Nazi Germany, most of the other nations never having after the collapse of Germany in the Second World War, acknowledged their role in surrendering their Jewish populations to the murder camps of Eastern Europe.  It is an interesting idea, and one might identify resurgent anti-Semtism as less a protest against modernity as a means to purge this guilt by actively taking on its cause.  Whatever it is, it seems to me that one very very important element in our present day American-European world view is an active role for the Christian churches of all denominations to work actively to resist and root out this anti-Semitism.  They must acknowledge all of them their historic role in creating and favoring anti-Semitism over the centuries. It seems that active hostility toward the Jews was an essential ingredient in establishing the otherness and validity of Christians as something other, a not unusual behavior in forming new groups, but here with disastrous consequences stretching down through the millenia perverting and rotting Christianity from within.

The View

As I have said in another blog I have my mother to thank for starting me out as a young child taking a real interest in gazing at beautiful views.  Not every child has a platform built into the lower forking of a large tree with steps leading up into it and benches built on the sides where on can sit and take his ease and gaze off over the hills and dales of rural Iowa.  But then not every child is somewhat crippled from a fall and unable to engage in sports, for whom viewing became as they say a spectator sport.  So now we fast forward to this old gent at eighty four sitting in the elaborate garden he has constructed at the house which he and his husband have currently placed on the real estate market in Massachusetts.  He sits on a bench at the edge, holding his coffee, and gazing.  An hour goes by, and he has not moved, has not picked up reading materials.  No, he is simply staring.  Move the locale to Florida and there he is on the third floor of his condo out on the screened in deck gazing across the roofs, through the fronds of a giant palm at the roof of a mall department store and beyond into the blue, blue sky.  He holds his cup of coffee and stares, as maybe an hour again goes by.  I call this meditation although I realize I am not practiced in what I gather are systematic methods of meditation.  I just stare into the view that compels me out of my ego, as I like to think, away from my anxieties, off somewhere.  Not exactly an LSD trip, although slightly reminiscent of one, if I remember rightly the one and only time I participated in an experiment with lysergic acid at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, a paid guinea pig for Timothy Leary.  Looking off into space, you lose yourself.  It is a wonderful exercise for coming to grips with the inevitable delays of modern technological life, the wait on the tarmac, the failure of the signal system on the Red Line, the grid of traffic that delays your luncheon date for forty minutes, the list is endless.  The goal is to move beyond having a book to read, desirable as that is, of course, but no, one wants to surrender to nothingness, to stare into space, whatever the space, make it become blank.  The spring greenery of my garden, the rose bushes laden with impending blossoms, the poppies opening up their redness right now, have to blend into a seamless mass, ditto the sky and the roofs and the palm tree, as one is drawn seductively into the great beyond and the vast pool of serenity.  And yet . . . . and yet, there's disco.  I guess I should say dance, which for me began with the all-intoxicating, mind-obliterating boogie woogie, swing, the lindy hop, of the forties, went on into the twist and god knows what else at the beginning of the sixties and out and out disco in the seventies when I and a one of our female graduate students used to close the disco not far from Boston University night after night, when I was not out dancing at that giant disco which had been made in the space that previously held the Bunny Club, a dance hall where I first saw in a very mixed homosexual/heterosexual setting incredibly good looking males taking off their shirts when they danced with their dates and seemed to be sniffing something again and again off the back of their hands.  Disco, yes, I could have danced all night, and even now when I hear disco music I begin to vibrate all over, want to dance, want to lose myself in the rhythm, that beat, wow, even as I type I feel it.  Watching "The Normal Heart" and listening to the disco music and those gorgeous guys (were there no just plain looking males in the gay movement in Manhattan?  No wonder they could not keep their hands off each other!) I started to twitch in rhythm, much to the disgust of my husband who seriously believes that an eighty-four year old man who has trouble with his balance might move on beyond that.  Hey, I get lost in those rhythms.  It's as good as staring into space.  Just another exercise in the Dionysian.

The Normal Heart

We watched the HBO production of Larry Kramer's autobiographical story of mostly gay males suffering at the onset of the AIDS crisis, when almost nothing was known, and continuing to face a bewildered future as the Federal Government (under President Reagan who ever so cynically and maliciously avoided the topic even though one of his closest personal friends Rock Hudson was to die of the disease) did nothing to encourage research to halt the virus as it had done under the earlier threat of polio, also a virus.  It brought back tearful memories of so many friends and students who died young, full of promise, full of life, even a few casual lovers, whose example in one particular instance of courage in dying has remained with me as an inspiration.  I went to see him in his last days, setting aside an evening when I would be in San Francisco for a son's wedding, and he had dressed himself up in a suit, feeble though he was, and we sat on the floor, he cradled in my arms leaning on my chest, and talked for hours, about death and dying, he so young, and I only middle aged at the time.  Another former student, also an occasional lover, was marvelously in control of his humor, while out of control otherwise, who raced up the stairs of the house he had designed from the dining room, as his diapers began to fill up, hilariously exclaiming against his failure of prescience for not having a bathroom on the same floor as the dining room.  And yet another--I can't seem to stop--who ended up across the street from me in Manhattan, telephoned a mutual friend in California to say that he "was sick," and she urged me to investigate.  I found him covered with the tell tale Karposi spots, half paralyzed from a stroke, but insisting to me and his helper that he was planning to return to work the following day.  Two weeks later I sat at his funeral service among the large crowd of his friends from weekends in Fire Island, all of them  young, beautiful, so gay, so elegant, and so many of them so doomed.  The film portrays the politics of gay promiscuity of that era which, of course, was very much a cause of the rapid spread of the disease.  I never was part of the gay scene, back in Boston, a married man, or a recently divorced man, who, when I was young and handsome, had furtive homosexual encounters but later on much too old, too creaky, and too buttoned up to imagine even appearing on the beach at a place like Fire Island.  I once tried group sex in a gay bath but it was like going to my first high school dance, me completely shy and withdrawn watching the noisy clamor and action across the room.  Those who disapprove of the aggressive gay promiscuity of that era need to see this film and understand that these activists had to insist that their sexual inclinations for which they had suffered paralyzing retribution from family and society since they became pubescent had to be acted out; crude as it may seem, fucking with ten different guys a night is equivalent of Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus.  That  so many of them died for it, was a supremely cruel cruel turn of fate, that a Judaeo-Christian culture can all too facilely call punishment.  I remember at a dinner party of mostly New York performers in the various arts listening to a well known opera singer catching up with an old friend across the table whom she had not seen for some time, and soon silence fell over the table as first one then the other inquired about mutual friends was told of their death, one after another, all the bright young things of the creative life of New York City.  And you had to think back now and realize that just as Germany culturally died in its tracks and has never recovered from the death of all its Jews, so New York and the United States in general has suffered a tragic loss of refinement and creativity in the death of their gays.

Thucydides

Reading Mary Beard's new book, which in fact is not really new in the sense that it is a collection of reviews and articles written over time, and thus long since available to the attentive reader, is a wonderful review of what I once knew and taught. I have been reading what she has to say about Thucydides. He is an interesting specimen of ancient Greek prose, his work always contrasted with his predecessor, Herodotos, who as they always say, more or less invented history,  with his chattier more dramatic account of the events of the Persian invasion of Greece.  It's the first historical research we have, as he goes along telling what he has learned ("Solon said this, Creosus said that, the one of the Persians claimed . . . .").  Thucydides came along later in the same century, but now the big event was the Spartan military conflict with the Athenians, which Thucydides addressed in the context of the political career of Pericles and Cleon, and a few others, and gives a bravura crescendo describing the invasion of Sicily and the collapse of Athens  (although since the text does not seem to have a natural ending--broke off? or he died?) perhaps these events are misread as crescendo and finale.  Beard's review is focused on the writings of contemporary ancient historians, one of whom seems to want to find an implicit endorsement of the contemporary invasion of Iraq in Thucydides' treatment of Pericles failure to act early on.  I bring this up only because it is fascinating to me that historians invest so much into the text of this seeming witness to events all those millenia ago.  Yes, of course, Thucydides is talking about the events we know from other sources, and yes, he was a general, although a failed one and banished from the city, so he no doubt knew lots about the situation.  But there are certain items that I, as a literary critic and not a historian, find baffling and telling when I try to think of Thucydides as simply telling us the facts.  First, he announces to his reader in the first book that he was not able to be present and record all the speech making that went on in the period under his review, so he has taken upon himself to fashion what people might have said, from what he learned about their remarks after the fact.  Now, there is no way that one can understand the speeches in Thucydides' narrative as anything other than a fiction, and in searching around for the motive for making what on the basis of our understanding of the nature of historiography is entirely suspect, one thinks of the speeches in Homeric epic, a narrative very obviously true in one sense of the word and fiction in another.  It gives no problem because the hearer understands that he/she is witness to persons speaking in a narrative that is entirely the creation of the poet or what it was that inspired him--the oral tradition or whatever.  Thucydides advances his narrative on the same vehicle, that is, speeches from one or another person of this historical moment, and we read them as offering the motives for so much of the action described, and yet as we must know, they are a creation flying above the factual line, an evocation of the "meaning" of the moment, but in no way, the tissue of the moment.  That is artistry, creation, positioning, it is not the recital of facts. The question is whether one will liken these speeches to paragraphs in contemporary historians where they move from the facts they have been offering to a synthetic interpretation of them; perhaps that is the intellectual analogue, although that Thucydides puts his interpretations into the mouths of agents of the events destroys the distance the reader should have with the material.  But perhaps because it is the manner of epic narrative poetry it did not strike his readers as so peculiar.   Likewise when the Athenians hold their fateful parley with the Melians at which the fate of the latter is determined, ultimately their slaughter, an event momentous for the Athenians, as Thucydides make clear, in terms of their integrity as a culture and a people, the historian casts the facts of this event in the form of a dialogue, the one and only time in his narrative he does so.  There is no way that any rational person can read this as other than an extreme example of deliberate artifice, a determination on the part of the  writer to rise far, far above any claim to historical truth as he puts on what is essentially the essence of ancient tragic drama, that is the dialogue.  This is not history writing as we understand it, and what is more, Thucydides forces his reader to make this adjustment to something other than simple "reality," for whatever reason.  So I never quite understand what modern day historians are thinking when they consider Thucydides as simply a record of those ancient times.  That is hardly his first consideration, as he forces his reader into these adventurous engagements with reportage.  And because of this, I am far more sympathetic to the view long ago established by Cornford that the overall thrust of the narrative, its movement to Athenians so over estimating their power as to invade Sicily and thus to their defeat is almost consciously, but certainly unconsciously borrowed from the common development of action in tragic drama where hubris, or pride, is so pivotal in the oncoming destruction, rather than a neutral recital of fact.

Classics

I was startled to read in the latest issue of the English journal Prospect that in a poll of their readers asked to rank the fifty most significant intellectuals of the year 2014 Mary Beard a professor of classics at Cambridge and a frequent contributor to The New York Review, the TLS, and so on was ranked number 7!  To say I was startled is understatement until I reflected that the readership of Prospect is a pretty exalted bunch.  Beard recently came out with a collection of her reviews, lectures and essays entitled Confronting the Classics which, indeed, I have not done in a long time, being almost twenty years retired, so I got the book and dipped in.  The first piece Do Classics Have A Future? was intriguing if for no other reason that "classics" is a singular noun in American English because it means the whole business of Greek and Roman antiquity seen through their artifacts from literature to artistic representation whereas I guess for Professor Beard it means the very items themselves rather than the study of them.  I will always remember the high toned secretary at Harvard answering her phone with "The Department of the Classics."  For a little guy from Iowa that was about as good as it gets at Harvard hearing that!  the Classics, and don't you forget it.  Do Classics Have a Future is intriguing for a thousand and one reasons, not the least being that Beard has been spending too much time with the intellectual elite so that she actually believes there is a large audience out there who cares about the future of the knowledge of Latin and Greek and their contexts, a large group who desperately care that the allusions to antiquity to be found throughout art and literature since the Renaissance are there for all to catch and understand whereas the truth of the matter is that most people, certainly in the United States,  cannot even identify the number, names, or location of most of the fifty states, have absolutely minimal understanding of the Constitution and the intellectual habits and beliefs of the Founding Fathers (otherwise why would so many people go on and on about how those gentlemen wanted this to be a Christian nation? Ridiculous!).  Beard talks at some length about the nineteenth century preoccupation with classical studies at school and university as a source for the definition of a gentleman, and talks as though that had somehow changed.  Yes, indeed it has, in that now not even so-called gentlemen are encouraged to study the Latin and Greek languages and their literatures.  When I taught at Yale in the late fifties they were still pedaling the notion that a classics major would get you a job in the state department, but there were certainly very few takers for that proposition.  Can you imagine G.W. Bush dipping into Latin and Greek?  A deep knowledge of classical antiquity was once upon a time a very healthy antidote to the pervasive Christian view of things with which the western world is so dramatically tinged; it gave a framework for life, and explanation of its meaning, a solid foundation in tragic uncertainty in place of a simplistic reflex surrender to happy thoughts and amelioration through good works and prayer.  But very few persons have a considered view of the Christian truth of things anymore, so the pagan alternative does not have the same resonance.  As a male student of Latin and Greek literature in my late teens and early twenties I was never bothered all that much by the extraordinary subordination of the female in those cultures, by the constant emphasis upon the existential problems of the powerful oppressor class, by the natural resort to violence and the suppression of the underclass.  It all seemed so natural.  I will always treasure the ancient view of things; a tragic sense of life seems absolutely right to me.  But I do know that not enough of the comic sense of life survives from antiquity, like making babies, raising children, eating feasts, fondling breasts, fingering erections, laughing, lying on blankets eating grapes, and all the rest.

A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever

In order to make our house presentable as an object for sale we have followed the realtor's instructions and removed everything that "personalized" its rooms, and this meant among other things, the removal of the works of art on the walls.  It always seems pretentious to talk of having a collection; we are not the late Paul Mellon or any other grandee whose loans and gifts grace the walls of our country's museums.  Over time, however, I have been given, or bought, mostly easel painting from friends sometimes from strangers.  I happen to like the pieces, beginning with an oil very reminiscent of Max Beckman painted by my then twenty something year old brother in law who had recently finished studying at the Art Students League in New York City; this was somewhere around 1945.  I bought this for $45 in 1947 when I was living in the city.  It depicted two gaunt looking clowns or acrobats one of them holding a small hoop up to his face.  Later after my mother died in 1954 I acquired another by him,  an oil supposedly of my sister, a gift they had given her, or rather more likely imposed upon her, just as when they came to visit in Iowa they cooked us a meal of something they called "pasta" with lots of garlic in the tomato sauce.  This painting very much like a Roualt or maybe a Beckman, with some very nice blues in it.  I had a high school chum who went on to a career as professional artist and university professor of art from whom I received a marvelous painting he did when he was nineteen with lots of bottles, sort of a still life done as an abstraction (maybe influenced by Morandi?), although the placement of one of the bottles actually suggests (at least to my perfervid mind)  a flaccid penis with scrotum.  Later on I bought from him a very large drawing done after Giorgione's Fete Champetre, and . . .  Well, the list goes on and on.  The point is that over time I acquired enough pieces to fill the walls of a fifteen room house in Cambridge (not to mention the stuff I had to give to my wife when we were divorcing which I can see on the walls of my daughters).  I had to practice a certain amount of triage when my husband and I left that place and moved to the seashore.  Now they will all be going on to the walls of the condo in Sarasota and I am determined to put them up salon style, simply because I want to display all of them.  I tell friends that I will achieve the effect of the Palazzo Doria Pamphili in Rome, except of course that there the rooms are immense and the walls are tall and the pieces covering them are mostly masterpieces.  What I like about the arrangements of my walls are the juxtapositions, the arrangements of color, the suggestions of shape from picture to another.  In this respect I am a big fan of Dr. Barnes and so happy that the arrangements of paintings and other objects he achieved in the rooms built for his collection in Merion have been preserved in the new building housing the collection in Philadelphia.  Roberta Smith, I think it was, has made the suggestion that when the Metropolitan Museum takes over the Marcel Breuer building about to be emptied of the holdings of the Whitney Museum, the curators should plan something more adventurous than an obvious curated tour of their modern and contemporary holdings.  Since they cannot in any way compete with MoMA they might be more adventurous, for instance, hauling Baroque and Renaissance stuff out of the warehouse and putting up on walls against the contemporary works.  I wish that the directors of the Ringling Museum in Sarasota would once in awhile do the same with a gallery or two.  Their holdings are essentially what John Ringling bought from Mrs. Vanderbilt, I think it was, when she was going through a divorce, and she got it as a package she purchased from a French dealer. You can't escape the feeling of sameness.  It is a very good but not great collection, and if you live in Sarasota and it is pretty much the only game in town, the arrangement tires one.  I have a good friend who is a retired curator from the Met, to whom I posed this idea not long ago, over drinks one evening, and was surprised to discover how she was not amused, as though I had suggested disco at St. Patrick's or something similar.  I guess she thought it would not be a hang, but interior decoration.

Guardian Angel

I remember when I married my first wife her descriptions of living with her mother and father.  She was an only child, born to older parents with whom she had a kind of peer relationship in the sense of the three of them thinking of themselves as a team of three confronting the world.  It made her secure in a way it took me a long time to decipher; she was never worried about directives from on high, inexplicable mood changes from which she was so distant that they came as a complete surprise.  I was one of six living in a house of many rooms, peopled with not only my siblings but nannies and maids, cooks and cleaning persons supplemented by those who came in by the day.  Somewhere in the front of the house in the bedroom that had been my father's resided my mother, the nerve center of the entire operation, to whom these people reported, to whom we were brought daily in the afternoon for a salutation.  She occupied my father's bedroom because he was gone, killed in an automobile accident; his bedroom, his throne, there she was, the widow.  It was a household in which one could get overlooked; one of my older sisters attributes her good nature, her easy going manner, to the fact that, as she describes it, being "lost in the crowd."  As one of the youngest I was easy to dismiss and forget, and yet I was the second born male, if the fifth child, born to parents who valorized men as the makers and shakers for an audience of women.  Soon enough Daddy was gone, and I doubt that mother knew what to do with me.  Certainly no one threw the ball with me, no one took him fishing or horseback riding as my father was said to have done for my brother seven year older than I.  It wasn't much of a stretch for me to turn into a precious little sissy fruitcake.  They say I was darling, already at that tender age, witty and bright.  Seen from a different angle I could have been labeled obnoxious, and looking back I can see that this indeed was no doubt the verdict of several parents of children with whom mother approved my playing.  But I had a grown up friend and supporter.  As I spend my days now packing up this Massachusetts household for the move to Florida I have been organizing my things to put in boxes and come up with such treasured memorabilia.  They were all gifts of a woman named Lois Blanche Corder.  She  had been my father's surgical nurse, and as he advanced to the Head of Surgery at the University Hospital she became Dean of the Nursing School.  She lived in an apartment in the University complex to which she often invited me for dinner all by myself, picking me up and driving to her place, when I was perhaps in the range of nine to twelve years of age.  Unlike our house which, although grand enough, had the well worn look of a place through which so many passed on a daily basis, her rooms were elegant, smart, every object in them a well thought out aesthetic pleasure, the table linens fresh and crisp, the table service impeccable.  That is how she surrounded me on my visits to her dinner table; we did not talk of books and ideas at table; we talked of fine things, their provenance, their workmanship.  And she gave me gifts that seventy years later I still possess, which turning over in my hands now, makes me remember her, a small pewter letter opener, shaped like a Florentine dagger, with a stylized plume as the element grasped by the hand, a small leather box somewhere between red and brown, tooled with gold leaf, lined in brown silk, into which I was to place my "valuables"--I can remember her telling me this.  It still holds a number of my father's cuff links for evening dress, and the studs, and then from the sixties some sets of earrings for pierced ears only one of which I wore.  In addition she gave me a small metal serving dish, again pewter with a gold rim, with an elaborate Ottoman design.  What was a child to do with this?  I set it on a table, always on display, empty and useless other than providing the pleasure that good looking objects always inspire.  That I have no doubt was exactly what she wanted--that I have these objects of beauty at hand, that my inherent preciosity be nurtured and encouraged.  God bless her, I hope that she can handle that I have used the Ottoman serving dish in my kitchen as the place for heads of fresh garlic.  And thus I think of her every day, have done so for the past seven decades.

Der Führer in the Classroom

I woke up smiling this morning, thinking of the tragic sense of life, treasuring the fact that the ancient Greek word "tragoidia" from which it all derives means "goat song," a weird enough source for so great a subject, and the sort of meaningless but possibly deeply meaningful fact that one could cuddle to one's chest and mull over.  I am planning to teach a course on ancient Athenian tragic drama in a school for adults set up in Sarasota which is thriving enterprise with remarkable attendance in a great range of subjects from the sciences to the arts and to literature.  I have enrolled in a number of them but have almost always dropped out, so my project of teaching is fraught with no little anxiety.  There is a common thread that runs through the offerings of the courses I have found which is that the instructors promote discussion.  It stands to reason, of course; these are not children sitting there, but very very mature men and women of some accomplishment.  Hey, living into your eighties in excellent health, still able to stand on the tennis courts for hours or knock a ball around a field of grass, relaxed in the knowledge that you had been successful enough in life's earnings game to have made a very handsome retirement income for yourself, gives you the sense that you are something other than a callow youth picking his pimples sitting in the front row of his first college class.  A small portion of the faculty are retired professors, but more often they are simply another elderly person who has somewhere along the line just taken an elaborate interest in the subject he or she is teaching and wants to share this--shall we call it expertise?--with some others, and is generally much interested in what those who are listening to his/her remarks have to say about them.  That last was the reason I invariably dropped out.  I could not tolerate the chit chat, as it always seemed to be.  As an academic I have always enjoyed learning from someone who knew more than I and the only interaction I cared to have was if I had to, asking questions for clarification.  But that is not how these adult courses functioned.  The students came with interest in the subject, but little factual substance nor informed viewpoints--naturally, one would think, since that is why the students sat there facing the instructor.  Again and again I would hear their questions posed with a qualifying "it seems to me."  This phrase was the opening salvo generally in a home made disquisition on the subject which the instructor was developing.  I should be charitable, but will not be.  Persons not educated in the subject for which they have signed up, thirsting to learn more, are as a rule laboring under a burden of misapprehensions, ill formed theories, ugly untruths, everything else that divide the learned from the ignorant.  That is why they are squelched in college courses by the sheer weight of the system of authority.  In a college course, if a question is asked by a student, the first obligation of the professor to whom it is directed is, if necessary, to disabuse the questioner of the validity of the question.  Otherwise countless minutes are given over to wandering down dead roads.  But in these adult learning courses where everyone is equal, and learning is a pleasantry, and one's own thoughts may be the key to unlocking the group's conscious understanding of the subject, all is game.  It made me grit my teeth; in the classroom I believe in authority, research, published results, well argued theses, peer review.  It is also true that I believe in a relaxed atmosphere, wit and amusement, style and shine, but above all else I believe in authority.  Authority with entertainment.  A difficult combination but one I have always striven for in the years of own teaching.  So this is what I want to do again, and I will be vigilant and firm in editing classroom participation.  I can't wait to get on to the "tragic sense of life," first and foremost which goes against the grain of everything America stands for, to dig right in to the utter incompatibility of Christianity and ancient tragic theater, to rouse up the glories of the ancient Mediterranean sense of fatality, that wonderful grim world where women wear black always, because always they are in mourning for some member of the family, where death is the constant visitor, and there is nothing that will get rid of the ring around the collar.

Sarasota Or Bust

An old friend who just learned that we plan to move full time to Sarasota Florida emailed with a series of questions about the quality of life there (summer heat and humidity, white trash at every turn, distance from the Northeast, etc.), prefaced by a statement in mock anguish about losing the prospect of visits on the beach, lunch under the wisteria climbing on the gazebo, and so forth.  Well, the funny thing is that he had long since decamped to the warmth of winters in California and years later my husband and I had moved to the beach up here south of Boston, and the result of all this was that indeed we have very rarely met either for lunch or dinner in the last two decades.  He did not feel compelled to fly back for our wedding.  It is interesting that I note those who were present and those who were not and record in my Book of Memory their reasons for not attending.  One, a very dear old friend, felt that she had to attend a conference to lend support to a former student who was presenting; another, although she had long since known of the impending nuptials, chose to take on a conference presentation herself.  Withdrawal is very much the nature of growing older, and I do indeed recognize this, and therefore become neither enraged nor sad (although I am sure a psychiatrist would say otherwise), but rather disengaged.  What interests me is whether I turn away so as to spare myself further rejection or in recognizing their turning away, I simply surrender to a kind of human lassitude, a disinclination to pursue relationships.  When I was younger, certainly from my twenties through my forties, I could not get enough of socializing--lunches with colleagues at the university day after day, or with students, colleagues over for drinks and dinners.  I remember so well the years when I would entertain at sit down dinners for ten or fifteen, the laughter, the boozing, the food, and the nuttiness of it all.  It was supplemented by long, gossipy telephone conversations, giggles and laughter, nasty wit, and more nuttiness.  And all that came to an end--I wonder if it was tied in with the decline in libido.  One did not use the telephone, or at least I did not except to call one friend on the West Coast, with whom I spoke almost daily for fifty years until her death.  There was the internet, there was the email.  The cellphone has been my constant companion as I wait for that moment when the elevator stalls mid floor, the car swerves out of control and I am in a culvert, the trembling fingers dial 911 as the vision blurs, and the words slur, but in the interval I almost never use it.  It is not a thing that I find handy, too small, to hard to hear, to difficult to speak into, a sort of non thing, that's what I think of it, always threatening to sink down between the pillows of the sofa into permanent invisibility.  Then there were fewer and fewer email messages until I realized, like the guy with bad breath whom nobody wants to dance with at the junior prom, that everyone had decamped to something called Facebook, and it was joined by a variety of other systems, none of which I use or can quite imagine.  My four children and six grandchildren are in constant communication and know everything of each other's doings, while I have altogether lost touch.  That seems to be true of most of my contemporaries, who either do not know how to manage the new technicals of life or are not quite all there upstairs when it comes to remembering who it is they might want to communicate with.  So living one place or another does nor really matter for the sociability of it all.  Because I am a talker I once planned to get us admission to one of those residences for older people where there is the graduation from independence to dependence within the same campus and dinners with ten random persons nightly constitute the new village square.  The financial collapse of 2008 put that out of the question for which my husband was devoutly thankful.  And then there was Sarasota.  I speak to people on the next treadmill at the Sarasota Bath and Racquet Club, I speak to people at the morning buffets for donors at the Asolo Dramatic Student Conservatory or whatever it is called.  There's something agreeable and restful in the fact that we are all old enough that none of it or us really matters and the simulacrum of companionship is really quite sufficient.

Suffer the Little Children . . .

I have been reading Anna Quindlen's novel Rise and Shine, which I guess you would call a feel good woman's novel, although I was constantly filled with dismay and frustration by the behaviors of the minor characters who provide the background and ultimately resolve the narrative.  In sum, two sisters, Meghan and Bridget, orphaned young raised by their Auntie Maureen, are described as they are living their lives in their forties in New York City.  As you may gather, there is an intense Irish Catholic feeling to the story although no one is the least bit religious.  But it manifests itself in the subject of children.  Bridget works in the Bronx in a welfare office having to sort out with a mass of women clients their manifold woes in terms of finding rent, clothing, custody of their children, protection from the men in their lives, whose fathering gives them the right to physically abuse the women constantly.  The women are described often if not always as much out of control and always by virtue of the heavy and constant demands placed on them by the unexpected babies in their lives, which they have produced from a myriad of fathers and almost never by any grand design.  They are women to whom I want to counsel abortion, and as I read the novel, the fact that no one brings up abortion made me want to scream.  The pregnancies never once seemed to me anything other than disasters, even the "charming"  we have to believe unexpected pregnancy at 43 of the maiden lady sister, Bridget, the director, almost simultaneous with the shooting of the other sister's remarkable son leaving him paraplegic following his intervention into the benighted lives of some of the thugs his aunt is responsible for up in the Bronx.  The shining prince is shot down by the spawn of unthinking sexual intercourse but the disaster is redeemed by auntie's producing, of all things, twins (that's when you know Quindlen is dishing out treacle).  It took me back to the years I taught at Lehman College in the Bronx where my classrooms were often populated by the much more successful sisters of the women who were the victims (no, I must call them clients) in this novel.  But their lives were dominated by child bearing none the less; there the women who were in class at age thirty, mothers at fifteen and sixteen of babies by whoever, now watched over by the grandmothers while the women tried to put some middle class structure into their lives by getting an education, who went home to a household of children where they were going to be doing their homework; there was the exceptionally intelligent young woman who was accepted to law school who asked for a year's extension for entrance so she could have a baby in the interval, and when I explained that law school was so intellectually challenging that motherhood was out of the question, insisted that after twenty two she would be too old to have children!  There was the oh, so bright young woman whose interests would be met by a graduate program I knew at Berkley who rejected my encouraging her into that because it would be unthinkable to leave the confines of her immediate family.  These women all saw themselves as something other than an individual, free to make a destiny, able to focus on something other than the flesh and blood that was family, to my mind, the woman's eternal dilemma.  By chance yesterday a young lady friend once the girlfriend of a young cousin of mine came to visit and help me with the gardening while we talked.  She is in her late twenties, exploring a career in broadcasting journalism, and beginning to have the kind of success that merits national prizes and awards.  She has had a couple of candidates for serious men in her life since my cousin and we talked about them at length, and how at this stage of her life, she could not possibly think about a relationship that would confine her into marriage and motherhood.  Her sense of her self as an individual, as someone who needs to make her own choices, was so refreshing to listen to after being mired in the impossible stew of the tangled, tortured, confused, and misguided lives of the women whom Bridget was responsible for in the novel, and again and again I wished that Bridget's office were offering the counsel if not of the virtue of abortion then at least concentrating on the absolute disaster that unplanned and reckless flirting with motherhood brought into society.

So beautiful!

When I was a wee lad my mother used to pack us children into our station wagon, as many who were at hand at any given moment, and take us for a drive.  In the 1930's there were many fewer cars on the road (although ironically one was available to have a head-on collision with the car in which my father was riding--actually probably because neither driver was paying close enough attention to notice the proximity).  Taking a drive was a pleasant diversion, not the nightmare we know today.  At intervals she would vaguely pull to the side to stop and exclaim: "Children, children, look at the view!  So beautiful!"  And we would look out across the gently rolling hills of rural eastern Iowa, and know that it was indeed beautiful.  A professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop once remarked to a colleague of mine that it was "just like Tuscany."  I am always grateful to my mother for sharpening our instinct to seek out beauty in the views we confronted--she took us to Maine, to the Rockies, to Vermont before the gas rationing put paid to such excursions.  This morning, whilst my husband and I waited for friends on the ferry out from Boston, we sat staring at the blue sky, white clouds, glittering water, and the myriad islands of the Boston outer harbor.  In the last thirty or so years I have spent a great deal of time staring out at the Atlantic or Hingham Harbor, at sunrise or sunset, always glorious in sunshine or clouds.  The mother of my children introduced me to the glories of tramping through an extended deep second growth New Hampshire forest, the surround of green and the dappled sunshine.  My instinct is, however, strangely enough for the streets of Manhattan, looking north from Columbus Circle, or standing in Central Park and gazing out at the skyline.  I cannot get enough of the urban scene.  Standing in the Carousel, for instance, to the west of the Tuileries Palace and looking out in the direction of the Place de la Concorde or standing at the western edge of the Pincio and gazing out over to the dome of St. Peters pink and orange at sunset.  More than nature's treasures those are my preferred views.  Still, nature's colors can be ravishing.  I once lived for a year where I could sit on the edge of a portico to which my house was joined and have an afternoon cocktail while looking over to Mount Hymettus slowly turning that delicious delicate purple which marks the end of the Mediterranean day.  I am even a sucker for the petit urban view, looking out from our terrace in Rome down into the gardens below or over across the rooftops of the city of Rome.  Rooftops are one of my favorite defining features of views.  We live in Sarasota in a condo which is on a third floor in an unpromising building set between a school parking lot and a mall parking lot--well, more or less--but I cannot get enough of sitting in the late afternoon watching over the roofs at the clouds turning pink, staring northwest at a lone palm tree that stands as a marker against the blue sky, at the roofs of a mall department store that gives exquisite definition to the evening.  Or standing in the morning, The New York Times in hand, mouth agape, as the sun peeks up over the marvelous lines of the roof of the public school next door.  I never tire of the colors, the line.  It's all wonderful!  (I still hear her voice "Children, children". . . .).  Don't you go to the beach, we are asked constantly.  Well, no.  I prefer sitting there on the third floor looking at the sky against the roofs.  Can anything be lovelier?

Resolute Youth

When my maternal grandfather was a very young man, his mother died, and his father, married a second time, and started another family.  As those things so often happen the first born son did not get along particularly well with his step-mother, and took it upon himself to leave home and set off for Boston.  He was living in Gorham Maine where his father had received a land grant; the family had immigrated north from Truro on the Cape.  The boy walked the 104.50 miles (which MapQuest calculates as a 41 hour hike), and family legend has it that when he arrived at the Boston Common he sat down where now there is the Public Garden and dangled his feet in the waters of the Charles River estuary to soothe them after the long walk.  His counterpart, my paternal grandfather, arrived from Germany as a teenaged boy with his cousin in the mid 40's of the nineteenth century, and knowing no English made his way to Chicago, perhaps by walking and working in fields along the way for shelter and food.  He got his citizenship by enlisting in the Union Army when he was 19, and his education by apprenticing himself to a Chicago businessman, and became enough of a success to sit on the Oak Park School Board and have a local grade school named after him. When he was in his mid forties he went back for a visit to Germany.  The journal he wrote of the trip was in English; one wonders how well he communicated with his father.   He died young in an accident, and left a small estate and lots of progeny who had to be farmed out since their mother did not have the means to raise them all.  The oldest sister Hannah took over a good deal of the housekeeping and mothering.  An older boy who had gone through the University of Wisconsin and their law school, and was now in practice in Chicago supported my father as an undergraduate at Wisconsin, and the family story is that my father, who became ardent about acting and wanted to do a theater major was summoned to Chicago by his older brother and warned sternly that he would not pay for acting, only something practical.  Howard became a surgeon.  When I was fifteen I ran up an enormous bill at a record shop while I was a student at Andover.  Mother made me pay it off by working on the building and grounds crew of the public school system two summers.  I knew later on that this had been a good thing when I was denied a scholarship my second year in graduate school at Harvard and I set forth and got a job as a night watchman at Jordan Marsh, a Boston department store.  Harvard students were not supposed to work, and many of them had no idea of hourly wage labor.  I well remember at a reunion my wife's dancing with the man who married my nominal "girl friend" of junior high school days, and talking later of his telling her about his car tow business, when I suddenly realized that she had never talked socially with someone like that nor herself ever worked at all other than as an architect.  Her parents gave her a small trust fund when she was a teenager so she would never have to pester them for money for her clothes, books, etc.  It was these trust funds that her best friend at Radcliffe always talked about when she reminisced about my wife and her classmates, she herself from an Italian/Irish working class family who had worked every summer for the money she took to Radcliffe as her spending money.  I have taught at Yale and Stanford and I have taught at Lehman College up in the Bronx; the challenges to my Lehman students not only with their working to raise money to live on, but their obligations to help support the family if not with money then with time spent performing tasks, has always seemed to me such a miserable and unfair barrier on the road to success and for many students from ethnic groups other than Anglo Saxon and thus obviously or latently disparaged a subtle or not so subtle hint of their incapacities.  When I went to university the GI Bill was in full gallop and classrooms were filled with men who were being decently supported for being there and thought themselves second to none for what they had done for their country which then brought them into the classroom.  They were so much more at ease because the GI Bill was not unlike the present day expectations of the bourgeoisie: they have a right to try for excellence in education.   That's the way it should be for everyone. 

Saturday Night in Boston

It is quiet this Sunday morning, the sun promises to make its appearance up out of the horizon line of the Atlantic Ocean soon; last night as we were making our return, driving our car from the subway stop the moon shone down bright and round and interesting with a smudge of shadow removing what would have made a perfect sphere (do I mean sphere?  that is a circle, isn't it?  well, whatever is the shape of the moon when it is full).  I am not exactly shell-shocked, but not at all recovered from last night's Boston hours. so frightening, so alien to what I experience in urban situations, New York, Paris, Rome, and of course in contrast with much smaller, sedate, predictable, slow moving Sarasota, Florida.  We chose to go to a theatrical performance of a group that is famous for its stylized, campy parody of well-known narratives.  Last year we saw their "Mildred Fierce," performed to great acclaim in the East Village, and have been following their emergence in the Boston area from a peculiar dramatic taste of a bunch of gays into a well reviewed hilarious seriously silly dramatic piece available to everyone, although its performance venue on Boylston Avenue in a gay bar called The Machine suggests its more focused origins.  We set out from the south shore knowing that transportation would be an ordeal, but willing to make the effort.  Drove to Braintree, parked in the MBTA lot, boarded the train, and as we were happily ensconced in our books, heard the dire but forgotten news that we would have to board a shuttle bus at JFK for two stops to Broadway.  As I have already described, this is a painful ordeal for me since there is a painful series of stairs, up and down, more than once, no escalator available.  We were perplexed by the size of Saturday afternoon's crowd going in town, it was immense.  And then we noticed the Red Sox paraphernalia worn by the subway riders and our hearts sank, knowing that we would share space with them all the way.  Park Street where we were to wait to board the Green Line for Kenmore Square held a grimmer surprise; traffic on the Green Line seemed only to be loading on one of its two antiquated tracks, the crowd was immense, the wait was going to be long, the pressure of the bodies challenging.  Somehow my wonderful husband managed to position us near a potential door opening, and more or less using me as a ramrod jammed us into the humanity trying to board and into a seat.  Bravo!  The crowds surged to enter, the loudspeaker told them to stand back so that the doors could shut on the overloaded cars.  Somehow people were pushed back, doors were shut, and the train creaked forward, only to confront at the next stop an angry throng who were determined to board but a train already full.  Doors were opened, people pushed and shoved, finally relented, the doors shut.  I could only think of Calcutta or anywhere in the third world where public services are so pathetically meager and the crowds are immense.  Somehow we disembarked with the crowd at Kenmore Square and were swept along in the direction of Fenway Park in a vast throng, from which at the last minute we separated and went to our restaurant reservation and on to the theater.  The horror of it all was that the Red Sox game and our theatrical event ended at the same moment.  We were totally unprepared for what we confronted when back out on the street, the crowds of people surging out from the stadium blocking the streets and sidewalks and serious imposing mass upon those who were not flowing in their direction.  It was dark, young males hopped up on the extra testosterone by their identification with athletes in a sports event, bounded around, shouting exuberantly, smoking cigarettes, bumping into one another with joyous abandon.  We were terrified, and feeling lost.  At Kenmore Square the back up of people waiting to enter the subway station was immense and frightening; where were the police, or the MBTA staff?  There were no taxis available in all the surging crowd.  Nothing to do but walk. But where? To South Station?  We set out, then I had the thought at Massachusetts Avenue to take a bus in the direction of Harvard Square and get on the Red Line and pursue our original objective.  But, of course, the bus when it finally came along was filled to the overflowing with patrons of the BSO which had also just let out.  Empty taxis heading to Cambridge would not stop because of the weird law that they can only pick up fares in the city where they are licensed, in this instance, Cambridge, so must remain empty.  Finally we hailed one who was willing to break the law and we got to the Central Square Red Line stop, fighting our way through still more crowds of people, now all of them energetic, young, vital and moving at speeds and with an abandon that reminded me that I was a candidate for a nursing home.  The return to Braintree had the exceedingly frightening moment when the crowd riding up the escalator (yes, they have up escalators, just not any going down) to board the bus was jammed into the crowd already filling the sidewalks at the bus stop, and I was terrified that if I were to lose my footing I would be trampled to death.  A real problem, and the three or so MBTA employees standing down below shouting directions might have been more effectively employed.The psychological makeup of parody, irony, doubles entendres which had been reinforced in us from our theatrical experience, so completely at variance with the raw energy human energy of the night, shattered us completely.  We left home at 3:30 for an hour and one half evening's entertainment preceded by an hour and a half of drinks and dinner at a fabulous restaurant.  We got home staggering from the struggle and the pain at a half hour after midnight.  Boston in the evening?  Never again.

Saturday Morning

It is early morning, the rain is beating down on the house, and although I cannot see this at the moment, knocking down the stands of luscious tulips that have made the various garden boxes glow.  That is in the nature of spring in New England, bouts of quite cold weather, making the experience of the garden a challenge, interspersed with torrential downpours and strong winds that leave whatever you might have braved the cold to go to look for in the garden utterly destroyed.  And once you have digested the salutary lesson on the impermanence of all things, Nature provides a coda to the so-called spring season with the onset of cruelly hot and humid days.  The sense of helplessness that these events inspire is augmented this year by the unremitting process of "depersonalizing" our house which we have now nearly finished at the behest of the real estate agent who insists that this process will make the place no longer a dwelling but now a house instantly salable.  I feel uncomfortable in these empty rooms, the depersonalizing has worked so well, that I no longer really sense myself to be anything at all. Perhaps then it was a mistake today while waiting for the arrival of this morning's New York Times to browse through back issues of The London Review and the Times Literary Supplement which have been piling up as I am otherwise so energetically engaged, and which have been stored away in a dresser drawer for fear they too much betray my personality and would offend the real estate agent.  So I have been having what is off and on a depressing feeling that occurs when I read these journals, the feeling that I am more and more losing touch.  For one thing I find the prose more and more impenetrable or burdensome, either not comprehending all that I read or not carrying to make the effort to understand.  The feeling of inadequacy derived from that experience is augmented by my realization as I go along that I am not going to remember the titles of so many items of real interest, titles of books that I should make some effort to get hold of to read.  I am not going to make lists because in the process of clearing out my desk in the past few weeks I have come across envelopes filled with three by five cards with lists of titles taken from my reading from the past four or five years, a defeating discovery, equal to the realization again and again as I read back issues of these journals that I have not discarded that I have read them previously.  This morning in fact I was reading the review of a biography of Richard Haggart only suddenly to grow dimly aware that I had read another review of this book which had led me to buy it for my Kindle, that is, my flying, subway riding, train going, and waiting in doctors' offices reading, and indeed I had read all or part of it, none of which could I remember.  And I have just  read a glowing review of Claudio Pavone's account of the Italian civic breakdown in 1943 now translated into English and know that I would love to read it, but know that I will not, I will lose the reference to the book, and I am too much in transit right now to organize my thoughts, and then as well, I would probably forget what I had read in it shortly after the reading.  These are melancholy thoughts, the rain continues to pour  down, I will find something light to eat for breakfast and pack up the last of the DVDs and maybe then I will feel better.

No Backward Glances

Past the point
of no return -
no backward glances:
I remember so well the first time-twenty or thirty years ago now--when I first heard them singing those words in Phantom.  Actually I have a lot of funny memories of that musical since one of the ballerinas lived in our building, and for a time, one of the phantoms lived there as well;  they were always vocalizing in the afternoon just like all the other performers, making the building a kind of music box. She it was who arranged on the occasion of my husband's birthday, not only to get us splendid house seats for the performance, but arranged--it must have been her--to have the ballerinas come down to the apron at some point in the performance and mouth the words "Happy Birthday, Richard" while the show was going on.  When later on in the evening I in my wonderment asked her how that came about, she said quite casually that the audience were all Japanese tourists and they would not know what was happening.  In any case, when I first heard those lyrics I thrilled to them, lost in the exaggerated narcissistic wonder at my own splendor as being the natural and obvious subject of a major song in a major musical.  Breaking the rules in a small midwestern town when you are sixteen, becoming a pariah, simply by asking the boys of the high school if I could relieve their sexual tensions, even if you are only even a teen-weeny bit self conscious makes you know that you have crossed some boundary, made yourself in some way a non person or a person with whom no one could any longer identify.  I think I knew this from day one, the day I had an encounter with a tough so called "no good" "bad boy" of the town, knew that I had crossed the point of no return, moving into a land where the proper, upper middle class, white bread world in which I was raised did not figure.  Yes, point of no return.  Yes, no backward glance.  I became a notorious cocksucker, if I may use the parlance of the street, and no way back from that, back to the charming little boy who was his mother's jewel and treasure, no, past the point of no return, and she never forgave me for the disgrace I loaded onto the family.  But somehow I had already discarded the Judaeo-Christian notion of sin, that idea of the willing transgression of the laws of god, where I do not know.  But, yes, I did not feel that my taking a boy's penis into my mouth somehow offended the god, whoever he, she, or it was,  which they were only too happy to oblige, and usually with a minimum of derogation and hostile notoriety.  And later on when I for whatever reason married a woman and continued my excursions into the male erotic world, and she died, and I married again and fathered four children, yes, I had certainly passed the point of no return, but, no, I did not feel doomed or damned by this, as the narrative arc of the musical Phantom implies.  Now here I sit aged eighty four, and I have no backward glances, thinking back to the point of no return, and maybe finally I have to say that it seemed so natural that despite my religious upbringing, despite my mother's pieties, I never noticed that I was doing something out of the ordinary.  Could that be true?  My tingle when I hear the song says no.

Identity

Out neighbor across the street like so very many  residents in this town hangs a large American flag from his porch.  But he also pairs it with an equally large national flag of Italy.  His surname is indeed Italian, as is true of a large percentage of the population of the town.  I was therefore surprised when we moved here and set up on the front of our house an amusing plaque in the Italian language, and found that this produced absolutely no response from him, either of recognition, or of connection.  The same could be said of all our other Italian-American neighbors.  I am not sure what being a Italian signifies.  I do know that one day when another neighbor brought us freshly caught and filleted cod, as was his kindly wont, I responded by offering to give him some smoked salmon.  A look of horror came over his features.  "That's pink, isn't it?  I don't eat pink fish," he exclaimed.  "It's delicious," I said, "a great delicacy.  You know smoked fish, lox, it's something that Jews particularly love."  "I'm not a Jew, I'm Italian," he said, the horror at having to eat something smoked, pink, and a treat of some other ethnic group clearly mounting.  Visiting the country does not seem an option, much too expensive for most folks.  The one couple who went for two weeks on the beach in Puglia, where the Italian-born husband hailed from, were back in a few days.  Neither could tolerate the locals; she who had never been before to her parents' birthplace did not like what she found ("So loud, so rude") and claimed that he had quite forgotten how much he did not like his former compatriots.  And they were always quick to claim that they were "Italians," not even "Italian-Americans."  Some distinctions die hard.  A former student of mine, the daughter of a couple who spoke Yiddish when they didn't want their children to understand, had a habit of characterizing what some persons twenty or thirty years ago might call "average Americans," as "real Americans," (the contrast being with, obviously enough, herself and the rest of her family).  According to the last census, the town contains one of the largest concentrations of persons of Irish descent.  Around me it's pretty much all Italian, although if you continue down the street for a couple of blocks you are suddenly confronted with shamrocks as a decorative motif to the houses.  About ten blocks away is a rather large and beautiful synagogue signaling the third ethnic group of the town.  Persons often remark that there is a dramatic paucity of African-Americans, Asians of any kind, or Latinos, and wish to ascribe this to discrimination.  I used to think that myself until I realized the fact of the matter is that the families of these earlier immigrant groups who settled here were large and tightly knit.  No one has moved away and the urban space is limited.  As in many small towns the truly unifying cultural cement is the local public school's athletics program, particularly high school football, the stars of which are featured regularly by photographs in the local weekly newspaper.  The various town governing boards to which the members are elected are predominantly persons born and bred in the town.  A year or so ago the issue of cronyism was much in the air, people noted that almost no one not born here was elected to any office, more specifically that veterans of the high school football team seem to predominate.  But perhaps at last their opponents will be able to make use of the growing contemporary disenchantment with football as more and more players turn out to be somewhat permanently befuddled by blows to their heads.

A Trip Into Boston For Opera

Yesterday was Mother's Day for the millions, but I went to the opera, the final performance of Boston Lyric Opera's production of "I Puritani."  I had never seen it, do not often go to the opera in Boston since Sarah Caldwell ended her spectacular if ill managed reign, and had never heard this bel canto masterpiece in the theater, knew it only from the recording of Maria Callas, who was party to the revival in interest in bel canto some fifty or sixty years ago.  It seemed like a good idea; my younger daughter was game to go with me.  It was an extraordinary trial, and I suppose we have to say a testimony of my love of culture.  You can perhaps get a better sense of why the gentry on the South Shore seem so philistine; it is so very very difficult for the culture bees to get into their pots of honey in Boston.  No commuter train on the weekends, a response say the MBTA to comparatively lower interest, one of those chicken or the egg things, and the Red Line which first you have to get to over roads that are narrow and clogged with madmen steering and putting on the speed whilst glued to their cellphones, well, the Red Line, as usual, is "undergoing repairs on the weekend" requiring its long suffering, patrons, to leave the train and enter a bus at JJK for a two stop ride to Broadway where the train starts up again.  This festive jaunt combines the push pull crowded hilarity that attends any out of the ordinary excursion involving the young with the honest to god exhaustion that is the result of going up and down, down and up, narrow crowded subway station stairs, and of holding on in a torture of crazy balance as the special buses lurch and speed their passengers on and around the corners.  I suppose being eighty four in this mix means that my point of view can scarcely count as representing the norm and what is more perhaps suggests why I should stay home abed in situations like this.  But there is no other way to get from the South Shore to Boston and dammit, I thought after two years that damn subway repair would be finished.  Clearly age and experience have taught me nothing.  Still the opera, though a mixed bag with two males whom I found slight and one who was strong in voice and gesture, was altogether made beautiful and compelling and brought me to tears again and again in the great bel canto arias of Elvira gone mad with what she perceives as the betrayal of her lover.  From those few words you can guess that the plot is as loony as they get, made even wilder and more fun by a directorial decision that at the end when the star crossed lovers are reunited and it turns out Arturo will not be executed because the Catholics and the Protestants have signed an amnesty and there is a general reprieve, and any rational person is suppressing yet another giggle at the improbable turn of this nutty story, the director  will have none of this all around sappiness and the losing lover Riccardo reaches into the folds of his cloak finds a sharp and glittering knife and plunges it into the back of Arturo who is deep into an embrace of Elvira, and the curtain comes down.  Take that, you happy ending!  Take that, Arturo, if you think for a moment that I, Riccardo, have any of the customary gentlemanly qualms at stabbing my opponent in the back! A fine solution in keeping with the crazy milling about throughout the opera's action of a chorus of soldiers with shiny helmets and long shiny pikes doing their darndest to suggest, at least to me, the sexual desire  a-foot by their penis-like accoutrements, who appear in scene after scene where romantic intimacy and mad desire are afoot, and in an rational assessment they would be otiose.  Their female counterparts who bound about like Wellesley girls on May Day, although here cloaked in bright red--mad desire?, hymens shattered? hard to say--perhaps are meant to suggest the erotics bubbling up in Elvira as she grows deeper into mad infatuation and then sinks into her madness.  The mad scenes are worth the show: Bellini's bel canto music is intoxicating, Sarah Coburn is beautiful, a strong actress who delivers mad and sad and miserable and lost with powerful gesture with consistently great vocals and looks a bit like Carrie Bradshaw which makes the over the top quality of this bel canto moment seem an entirely probable action of the girl next door.

Downsizing

As I recently wrote, our real estate agent asked us to remove our personality from the rooms of our home as we readied it for sale.  On the surface of things this task was made easier by the fact that we were moving "our stuff" into a space considerably smaller and already half furnished, so we really had no choice but to--and here I use the trendy word--"downsize."  When you are in old age, everything is about downsizing, including your stature; I who once measured in at 5' 9 1/2" now stand meagerly at 5' 6".  I have had some experience of downsizing in the last decades, personally and sympathetically.  It all began when I was divorced and moved my own things from a fifteen room house in Brookline, Massachusetts, that I had shared with my family for long enough to build up a stash of treasures typical of the anally retentive personality.  The upstairs apartment of my newly purchased two family house in Cambridge simply could not contain what I wanted to bring to it, and so I was a frequent visitor to Goodwill for months on end.  Years went by and I was joined by another man, soon to become my husband, for whom I took over the downstairs apartment and we were back to fifteen rooms, three or four thousand books, walls of paintings, an entire room given over to clothes.  He bristles if I call him a pack rat, so I will say it here, and perhaps he will not read this, usually does not, tired as he is just from my talking to him (at him?) at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  In any case, at this time I got a serious lesson in downsizing when my sister in Woodstock New York had to enter a nursing home permanently, and I had to empty her house where she had lived for four decades.  In her later years there she had not been able to manage the stairs so the upstairs rooms and closets were dust covered stashes of just everything that she had casually told visitors and cleaners to take up there.  I trembled and teared up as I went through the mess, identifying again and again the evidence of glory days and tragic days, days of sadness, days of laughter; it was all there under the grey-brown dust. Downstairs, sorting through her papers, her books, her clothes, I was stymied by what to save, where to save it, knowing that she would never leave her new place of residence again, and yet that she was completely sentient, and wanting things.  Like the framed Chinese prints which she angrily insisted were being stolen from her by my son when he casually and kindly mentioned that he would find them a home.  At the same time I was busy helping my daughter clean out her grandmother's country property--house and barn--which had been in the family since 1735.  If you wanted to see impressive clutter, go through a generational history contained in the closets and barn storage areas of this place, from Philadelphia Chippendale dining room chairs that were a gift from Benjamin Franklin to a mahjong set from the Dowager Empress in Beijing to a box of Christmas cards received evidently during the decade of the seventies.  Months went by agonizing over the destination for all this what I in exasperation sometimes called "crap."  Then my ex-wife died and I helped my daughter clean out her stuff, and then Richard and I moved out of fifteen rooms in Cambridge to a five room apartment, and from that into a little condo in Sarasota Fl along with a weekend house treated suddenly as our main residence in Hull Massachusetts.  Now we are leaving the latter and concentrating everything into the Florida property amplified by the purchase of the condo next door.  There are fifty paintings, more than a thousand DVDs, hundreds of books, and, you know, I thought we had thrown out almost everything in the last few years, but discover that I am a sucker for Brooks Brothers knit boxer underwear.  I could outfit the US Army!  We are working night and day removing our damn personalities from the place.  Oh, antiseptic is hard to achieve, but we'll get there!

Depersonalizing

So here we are in our Massachusetts home, one block from the ocean, far enough in and high enough (although still in a flood plain) that probably the waves won't reach our front door until maybe the late decades of the twenty first century.  Not exactly my worry!  We have contacted a real estate agent who went through the house and grounds exceedingly carefully, oohed and aahed over the garden, seemed very much to admire the house and the disposition of its rooms, and finally in consultation with her colleagues who came along for the viewing, settled on a selling price which exceeded our wildest expectations.  It was then, when we had signed a contract, and she was setting out the schedule for the coming weeks of the showing, and hopefully the very immediate sale, that she sternly told us that it was necessary to "depersonalize."  I have been involved in the sale or purchase of at least twenty properties in my lifetime, and this was the first time I have been introduced to the concept.   To depersonalize is to rid the house and grounds of anything that suggests you.  This way the prospective buyers can fantasize themselves immediately in possession of the rooms, madly, wildly, and creatively decorating the spaces without any thought for the personality you had tried to impose on the place.  First thing, said the real estate agent, must be to get rid of all the art works that show nudity.  I understand that there are people out there who don't want to see two naked males kissing.  In fact, I do not have any depictions of that scene.  But Giorgione's "Fete Champetre," of which I have a large and truly beautiful sketch by the late Keith Boyle? Giorgione's nudes are as familiar to us as Whistler's mother, for god's sake.  No, said the agent, persons walking through the house will be deeply offended, and by a miniature copy of an ancient bronze of Apollo standing of course in the altogether not less than by a whimsical contemporary landscape in which the hills in the foreground actually from a different perspective resemble the ass and flanks of a sexually indeterminate human being.  Actually I guess I could understand.  We were not in Cambridge or Manhattan anymore, Toto.  But then all the framed photographs of my nearest and dearest, lots of them, maybe forty or fifty scattered about my study, on the walls, and on the counters.  The agent claimed that this profusion denied to the prospective buyer any chance of fantasizing him/herself in the place. After a time we were ready to remove a rather large and spectacular collection of art so as to make the place "accessible." I became increasingly balky as I realized that these pieces had to be covered with bubble wrap and stored in our neighbor's garage absolutely immediately so that we could proceed to the business of showing.  For the past three hours my once ever so nimble fingers have been cutting lengths of bubble wrap, wrapping framed photos, going through the torture of pulling sections of tape and getting them onto the folded bits without entirely destroying the integrity of the package.  Tomorrow I will reduce the books on display in my study,pack up the disks shelved in our living room, and most important put all my medicines into a weekend shoulder bag that I can hide away from the intrusive persons doing the open house in some not too distant future Sunday. Luckily all the sterling silver is already in Florida; the prospective buyers are welcome to our stainless!  It is Massachusetts so we don't anticipate that our obviously same-sex married status will offend prospective buyers; in Florida it would be a different story, and one would have to be prepared for obvious contempt or disdain.  Ah, well, warm winter weather compensates for a multitude of sins.