The Golden Years

I have just finished reading an online communication from AARP which showcased twenty five celebrities in the their seventies whose photos reveal that they are remarkably well preserved.  This follows upon The New York Times Sunday Magazine issue with a title something like "The Fountain of Youth," in which a number of persons are featured who are well into their seventies and eighties who are still running races, writing books, making new discoveries, oh, any number of remarkable triumphs in which they defy the natural expectations of their age.  Except that the idea is that theirs are the "natural," whereas the rest of us are pikers, cannot manage to achieve any of these triumphs.  This goes hand in hand with The New York Times' shift in their Sunday issue to focus on persons and places and housing tp which there is no way that the average person would have any access.  Now, of course, one must not imagine that their readership is the average person, and of course they focus on New York City and its environs, but still the lavish decor, the expensive houses, the ravishing gowns of the persons photographed at society events all these things are so beyond even the well-to-do average New Yorker.  I have a friend in New York who says that she and her husband live on half a million dollars.  They are in my estimation "very comfortable" but not wildly "extravagant," and clearly they could not live the life that the Sunday Style, Housing, Travel sections envision.  But forget about money.  What I resent is the present day emphasis on the very limited group of people who defy the expectations of their geriatric cohort and make it seems like the rest of us, the slow, the halt, the lame, and the retired are at fault for not being engaging, and engaged, and up to the mark with new ideas and job plans.  Yes, I do get out to the gym, yes, I do walk without a cane, yes, I travel often to Europe, yes, I keep up with the latest, and I am in some sort of way enjoying life.  But I feel more like a latter day Norma Desmond remembering the heartwarming and enchanting hours with my glorious children when they were youngsters, the wonderful parties, the martinis one after another, the great classes I taught when fate delivered so many bright students, and, yes, the fantastic sexual partners that enkindled many an otherwise lacklustre afternoon, and I am in a kind of a funny way waiting for my comeback call from the studio, but unlike Norma I know that it will never come.  So I do indeed resent all these glistening people of seventy five or eighty all these enchanting pent house apartments in Manhattan gleaming and sparkling and listed at ten or fifteen million, and all the exciting recipes, and restaurants, and new bars.  I know that the paper's readership does not want the somewhat drearier truth, so I guess I should cancel the subscription

Making My Way Around Manhattan

My last visit there was a little scary, because I was so insecure on my feet.  Midday, still somewhat off balance from the jet lag I went down to Times Square to get tickets for a play that evening.  On the 59th street platform waiting for the train there was some delay with the result that an inordinate crowd of people were gathered to enter and exit.  These people, almost all of them much younger than I, seemingly much taller, with bodies strong and muscular, outfitted with back packs and large purses or totes, flowed furiously to and fro and I discovered that my declining body mass, height, and general frailty left me to be no more than a tattered leaf blowing in the autumn winds.  I was reminded of a friend my age who absent mindedly followed her instinct to crush herself into the subway car as the very last person and the next stop the crowded disgorged knocking her to the ground and breaking her hip.  I stepped back and waited for another train which indeed came soon and had far fewer occupants.  Of course the stairs to and from the platforms is always a challenge because young people run up and down the stairs letting their baggage bump out at whoever is nearby, and no one is being mean, it's just that when you're young in our culture you don't see or care about the little old people hanging for dear life on to the railings on the stairs.  Of course many people have long since given up riding subways for the dubious pleasure of standing for hours waiting for buses.  In Times Square the mass of movement was equally terrifying, and I vowed that when I returned that night for the theater I would find a more circuitous route to the theater to avoid 42nd Street and 7th Avenue.  This I did and took a cane for good measure and the trip was successful so much so that when I left the theater I walked in the pleasant Manhattan night all the way up Sixth Avenue  to 57th Street to catch the crosstown bus.  The next day I was coming from the Metropolitan Museum and waiting for the M11 to take me down Columbus.  When it came I had to laugh.  There were two ladies with walkers taking the right front side for the elderly and handicapped and I grabbed the last on the left, between two challenged walkers with canes, and then another fellow got on who was so unsteady and determined to sit that he pushed and shoved--there was nothing else to do--between the ladies with the walkers.  Meanwhile two sets of the new Upper West Side parents got on with their giant baby carriages which also seemed to  carry half the tot's wardrobe and luncheon aboard. This took some manuevering just to get past the walkers and canes at the entrance, and then just some space to shut the contraptions up and stow them under the seats.  But the great thing was nobody got exasperated.  Life is now lived very much i slow time on Manhattan buses which pass through the neighborhoods where children are coming into existence and old people are not dying off.

Disgraced

I recently saw a revival of Ayad Akhtar's "Disgraced" in New York which is resonating in my brain still.  It is the story of a young successful lawyer on the way to making partner married to an artist who invite some friends who are also colleagues over to dinner.  He is the son of parents born in India, although due to the Paritition his mother was actually born in what is now Pakistan.  He himself, although a nominal Muslim, is not practicing because his education has left him deeply skeptical of the claims of all religions.  His wife is a pretty blonde WASP of no religious conviction either.  The story turns on her urging him as a liberal Upper East Side American would, to join a group of lawyers who are raising a defense of a Muslim cleric held on charges of terrorism.  He is reluctant to do this, not wanting to get the "taint" of being a Muslim around his office which is from his perspective a den of Jewish "old boys" whose sensitives toward Israel, as he sees it, would not take kindly  to Muslim intervention.  The WASP can't see the dilemma, the Muslim realizes that he is tarred with that brush if he does not always leave no doubt of his indifference to that faith.  A young angry nephew, alienated by America, and newly aware of his Muslim identity,  browbeats him into doing what the wife has been urging.  The friends who visit are a Jewish art dealer who is promoting the wife (and at a Paris art association outing sleeps with her) and his African-American wife who is also a young person on the make in the lawyer's office.  Too much scotch turns the evening ugly, with snide ethnic comments all around, terrible anger, and ultimately a hideous moment of out of control wife beating.  It is a very sad playing out of the theory of the Marked and the Unmarked where the WASP, the supreme Unmarked in our culture, urges her husband into a dangerous identification with a Muslim cause which has nothing to do with him but she thus "marks" him as Muslim, and thereafter his Jewish bosses do the same for that same association, thus profiting his fellow lawyer the African-American woman whom he "marks" as using the fact she is a "woman" and an "African-American" to leap frog ahead of him in promotions.  I have given a bare bones recital, but in the dramatic working out of every person's fight against someone else's definition, all the while making each his own definition of the other, you get the play's important story.  A long speech by the young nephew radicalized and aggressively Muslim about how his kind will never fit in is really the cry of the young immigrant as he confronts the aggressive energy of the older receiving population which insists upon defining each new person with a mark of identity as they struggle to make one of their own.

Home Again

The trip to Greece was wonderful in every way, far more than I imagined when I thought it up.  Despite the constant evocation in the press of a country on the skids, dirty, desperate and graffiti-encrusted, I found the downtown parts of Athens where we walked to museums and archeological sites, full of storefronts filled with goods, people well dressed and going about with animation.  I was most of all surprised at the change of attitude in those who must serve the foreign tourist, what we would call the hospitality industry, I guess. Unlike their exceedingly dour bretheren of yesteryear, they were almost uniformly young, attractive, outgoing and friendly, spoke excellent English, and exceedingly helpful.  Two young males I remember  best (naturally!).  One, a waiter on the rooftop restaurant at the Benake Museum, a very young fellow with serious mein who was just in his offbeat way cute enough to win our hearts, gave us serious advice on the Greek wines on offer, announcing that he was in his own way an "oenologist"-his word-. compelling enough that the young glamorous member of our party had to be restrained when she wanted to give him her address in the States.  The other, in a small town in the Peloponnesos, was the evening attendant at a very interesting museum of modern scale models of Archimedes' various inventions who in a sort of unblinking Asberger manner, lectured intelligently on the items, in a very good English which he claimed to have learned on his own because "the schools are stupid," all the while brushing the unkempt hair out of his unbelievably beautiful eyes like any techie in Sunnyvale.  The monuments we saw filled my heart as I wanted them to with a powerful nostalgia for glorious trips and stays in Greece from yesteryear; I even staggered up to the heights of the ruins at Mycenae on the arm of my cousin, amusingly enough inviting applause from other tourists seeing so old and feeble a specimen shambling along!  I invited a delightful young couple, archeologists, to a dinner on a roof looking up at the Parthenon shining bright in the night light, and we talked of times we had known together and the archeological world of which they were part and my own desire to see Greece on this trip one last time before I died,  and the young man congratulated me on speaking frankly of my anticipation of death, saying that his father dead that past spring had not managed ever to bring the subject up, nor his mother who sat daily with her rosary beads.  I don't think you can study ancient Greek literature for very long before realizing that death is the great subject the Greeks found to write about, implicitly cancelling out life's meaning and thus endowing those who make this discovery with a burning determination to live every moment to the fullest, to know that every choice and gesture counts here and now, since they have no real future.

Greece

On Sunday I am flying to Greece for ten days.  I imagine that this will be the last visit of my lifetime, and I wanted to see the monuments and the museums for one last time.  It was August 1962 when I first went, and I will never forget the blue of the sky nor the sharp, clear light that made the edges of buildings so startling.  The architecture of antiquity is more about light than one might imagine.  From that time I have always loved the food in Greece, I used to enjoy the simple service of restaurants, everything so unpretentious.  I loved that the waiters were always asking if you liked the water that they served out in the villages, where every town's water had it own taste.  I loved the waiters in the small eating places counting up the numbers of pieces of bread the customer had taken from the common basket when toting up the bill. I loved that when you called for the bill and the waiter said "immediately," it was a kind of signal to relax since it would never ever be coming soon.  And I truly believed that was because the Greek restauranteur somehow thought he was genuinely the host and hated to impose a bill.  I remember once when on a trip to Delphi I waited later and later for the bill, finally got fed up and left, and the next day as I was walking through the street the waiter came out of the restaurant with all geniality to hand me last night's bill!  I loved evenings from the terrace where I stayed in Athens when I lived there looking at the extraordinary light sunset purples  soaking into Mt. Hymettus.  I hated the cars in Athens, the grotesque custom of parking on the sidewalks when other space was not available, hated the smog and thank god that I lived above it.  I enjoyed the random company of a great number of young men, just chatting them up on the street, to which they responded, at times quite well aware of my preternatural fondness for young male flesh.  The taxi drivers I learned to avoid, since as a group they were the most devious in setting their charges.  Shop keepers were stern, the bread was always weighed, a kilo was a kilo and that's what you got, even if it meant cutting a piece of another loaf and shoving into the bag, the lamb roast had extra bones added to make up the weight whether you liked it or not.  Service with a smile was an unknown.  There was a stern honesty there just as the classical lines of the architecture and the light.  Times have been very hard for the Athenians in recent years I have heard dire tales of the poverty's degradation of the city ("it looks just like the south Bronx did twenty years ago now"), and my husband is not going with me because he cannot face seeing that change.  Well, I am going for the Parthenon in sunlight, the Parthenon in sunset, the agora, the theater of Dionysos, oh, I can go on and on.  I will tell you all when I come back and start up again sometime after October 26.

Life Is Really Not About Reading Beautiful Poetry

Occasionally I open the junk file of one of my email addresses, and read the stuff sent there.  The range of subjects is small: penis enlargement offers, treatments for male impotence, and notices of unexpected funds, legacies, etc., usually in some country in Africa to which unaccountably enough I am heir or legatee or whatever.  In its own way it reminds me of the drive up the east coast of Florida and into Georgia and the Carolinas, where there are two signs that alternate with each other along the route:  Sex Shop and The Bible Saves.  I know that the times that I have overcome my intellectual scruple and bought a lottery ticket I went about in a delirium of expectation in the days remaining before the drawing, so pleasantly anticipating the grand house, the first class accommodation on international flights, grand gifts to my children and good friends.  So I suppose it must be the same for the man anticipating the arrival of a package containing the penis enhancer, envisioning how different he will suddenly appear to his girl friends, and the guys at the gym, or the impotence treatment, same thing.  And they are no different from the pleasing sensations that the thought of a roadside stop at a sex shop can induce in a weary traveler, just as those spiritually tired and heavy laden can imagine that a new and heavenly path will be open to them.  On the other hand, I once knew a fellow when I was a university student, and how I met him I don't know, but he was either recently discharged from the Navy or still on active duty, all I remember was his wearing navy whites whenever we met, or when he had his clothes on.  Other times he was nude, sometimes in the company of several male friends of his, and what was remarkable and I have never forgotten this.  He was well over six feet tall, or maybe that just seemed true to me who was only five eight or nine, and broad of shoulder, handsome, a bold aggressive feel about him, a real guy, for sure.  And, yet, what amazed me was that he had the smallest penis I have ever to this day seen, and still more amazing he seemed indifferent to this, had no hesitation displaying this dramatically miniscule item.  And then there was this with whom I used to swim a kid about two decades younger than myself.  Although he was, as they say, very well endowed, he seemed entirely indifferent or unaware of the package he had on display.  One day throwing caution to the winds I remarked that I wished that I could come out from the showers to the locker room with a similar display, and to my surprise he calmly suggested that I should take the occasion while under the warm water to rub myself ever discreetly so as to produce some engorgement and my goal would be achieved.  Who, I thought to myself, would imagine that he had ever envisioned such a strategy?

Public Urinals

Today's New York Times news article featuring the arrest of two males for lewd behavior in a public restroom took me back to a long ago day when males who were sexually attracted to other males were desperate for venues where they could advertise that interest and find someone congenial with it.  Public lavatories were the place where a man who quite naturally has his penis out of his unzipped pants and in his hand could with a little adjustment and restraint turn into a man with an erection which he is stroking, the transformation suggests an entirely other agenda.  That's lewd behavior in the eyes of the police and get you days in the poky.  When I was eighteen and living in Manhattan, a rube from Iowa, sights of such men in public lavatories frightened me, either because "they didn't do such things in Iowa" or my own attraction to stroking erect penises came into play and scared me.  I tended to repress any attraction and moved on out of the urinal area.  As I grew more sophisticated I grew to understand that lots of lavatories were simply de facto meeting places for men who had nowhere to go to meet another male sexually.  These were the deeply closeted males, in a rigidly repressive society, the fifties, for instance, who might desperately crave even the merest hand-penis or mouth-penis contact to satisfy a deep well of desire, men who could never make so open a statement of desire as to walk into a gay bar.  Sad and desperate but all very true.  As a professor who used many a public toilet I can remember in the sixties the ground floor mens room in the Stanford University Library where the excessive foot traffic suggested other uses, the Boston Public Library's ground men's room where someone with a legitimate call to urinate sort of had to fight his way through the assemblage there for other purposes, the fourth floor of a certain classroom building at Boston University only in the evening, which I discovered once when I was teaching a night class on that floor. Nowadays it is sad that there are males out there who still cannot understand that it is now okay to meet other gay males socially and proceed to the dating game from that.  From the ones I have known these are male so damaged by their families, so thoroughly made to hate themselves and their desires that they have made a complete separation of their personalities and daily comportment from their homosexual desires.  A quick orgasm and out of the place has a kind of sordid logical alignment with the quick dump one can take in the stall of the same room, then relief, clean up, on to big and better things.  The orgasm should never be left behind dismissed and forgotten, it should be the beginning of a whole new life. But then there are the "happily" married men, along with their wives "pillars of the church," whose brief moment of ecstasy in the stall stinking of urine has to make do for the other side to the relationship they know at home and support on Sundays. All so sad.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Because the reviews of Knausgaard's My Struggle have been uniformly enthusiastic, in many cases, ecstatic, I was curious to sample it.  Although so far there are six volumes, each hundreds of pages long, I took the plunge.  The author is writing a detailed account sometimes in recollection otherwise contemporaneous with the events of the daily life of a man named Karl Ove Knausgaard, and the reader may presume, if he chooses, that the author and the protagonist are one and the same person.  Which may, indeed, be true.  I did not swoon nor surrender to the narrative in the course of the first volume; it is a strangely dispassionate description of everything he experiences, everything, every movement involved in spreading butter on bread, for instance. Still, I was sufficiently curious to finish it and pick up the second. Knausgaard is a Norwegian writer who lives in Stockholm with his wife and children, or at least that is what we read.  I cannot say I like him at all; he is self absorbed to an incredible degree.  His is the life of a new father who has undertaken to stay home with the baby so his wife can finish an advanced degree, at least that is the circumstance of the first and second volumes, although in the second we get the background of his meeting Linda, her pregnancy, and his decision to stay home with the baby.  He wants a life of disorder, claims that is what is the essence of Norway, condemns the excessive need for order and control he finds among the Swedes.  He and his male friends drink an extraordinary amount, sometimes what we would call binge drinking, and experiences again and again what we call blackouts, considered in our culture to be a symptom of alcoholism.  Nothing of that crosses the mind of Knausgaard, and while he sometimes feels guilty for his drunken binges, and his wife seems often disgusted, they never discuss drinking as a problem. But then perhaps that is the essence of marriage, that long suffering silence in the face of intolerable behaviors, the inevitability of enduring. Hh tells us that his father drunk himself to death, literally in the last couple of years of his life, while living with his aged mother, who seems to have accepted the situation passively.  His wife has suffered from extreme depression, suicidal impulses, the sort of disorder that one would imagine, I at any rate, would lead one to consider several times over whether marriage to such a woman, however charming and lovely she might  be, was a good idea.  On the whole, for an American the novel is intriguing, for presenting persons of artistic talent and intellect, who never summon psychology as a means of analyzing their situations, who often deliver abstract maxims, philosophical truths, as somehow relevant to the human condition, more especially their personal lives.  So far the best scene for me is in the second volume,  the long account of the birthing of their first child, an intimate scene of childbirth, which impressed me mightily because I was not allowed to be present at the birth of my children (not that I would have wanted to be!).  I very much read along with real empathy the many many accounts of this male who grits his teeth and undertakes parenting and childcare to the degree few males ever do, because of a pact he made with his wife so she could finish school.  Any male who has become a father will find this a redeeming struggle for the poor guy.

Aesthetic Chastity

From my long association with classical antiquity I have formed an ardent attachment to symmetry, restraint, order, tradition and its revision.  Thus I am thrilled to be able to go back to the source, the city of Athens, even if most of the monuments have vanished or remain as hardly recognizable fragments.  Nonetheless, the Parthenon temple is whole enough to force the viewer to surrender while at the same time sufficiently damaged and partial to excite the most extreme passion at the loss that time inevitably exacts, the Parthenon simply standing as part for the whole of that difficult life experience.  The archaic sculpture of the Acropolis is another aesthetic of restraint to which I immediately surrendered once I had seen it.  And at the time of my discovery of antiquity my wife in those years was teaching me about the aesthetic of the Bauhaus, and I read antiquity into the Seagrams Building and other testimonies to that style being thrown up at that time.  A few years after my Athenian adventure, I went to live in Rome, and discovered that, although I found so much of the painting in that city hard to take, I was intoxicated with the Baroque in architecture and in city planning, and of course I had to realize that despite my mother's constantly shouting out: "Charles, you're not Italian, you're not Jewish, stop waving your hands around like that when you speak," I was born to flamboyance as surely as I was born gay.  Walking through Rome demands that you stand up and act the part, you are definitely on stage, just as the sinuous curves, carved everywhere demand a sensual response.  I knew that I was not in Iowa anymore, not in Boston for that matter.   Still,  what I most of all love in our own time are the glass boxes, Philip Johnson's Glass House, or the Beinecke Library at Yale, not to mention a million perfectly decent houses, libraries, music halls, what have you, erected in stern understated while overstated--the essence of the Parthenon--style.  But of course the very, very funny thing about the marbles of ancient Athens, which delight us for their fragmentary nature just as their their cold stone whiteness chastens us and demands that we grow up, is the fact that the ancients painted the marble surfaces.  The Parthenon was a melange of maroon, gilt, and green. You even get a suggestion of this on the archaic sculpture of the Acropolis because it was buried early on and not brought into the destructive force of weather until very recently and immediately rushed into the protection of museums.  It's like learning that Plato invented rock-n'-roll. 

The Ruins Of Greece Seen From More Ways Than One

Planning a trip to an area where there is considerable poverty always exposes the traveler to the uncomfortable sensation of feeling uncomfortably comfortable in the midst of a sea of want.  In the last few years the economic collapse that has spread from the outrageous and criminal behavior of America's banks and major financial institutions has devastated the economies of southern Europe none more so perhaps than that of Greece which entered this period of extreme economic uncertainty with an economy in every way already frail by virtue of the outright lies with which their leaders managed their entrance into the European Union's economic framework and the commonplace tax evasion and other anti social economic behaviors which have been traditional in this country.  The unemployment among the young is staggeringly high; things don't get better and the people in Brussels are calling for ever greater austerity, not the best recipe to get the ball rolling again.  Add to this the large number of immigrants, refugees from countries of Africa where living conditions and brutalities make it imperative to escape; anything elsewhere seems better.  There is no love lost between the Greek nationals and these mostly unwanted guests who compete for social services or more to the point begging on the street or taking the bottom level job.  They say that parts of Athens look like the south Bronx of the eighties, that there has been minimal upkeep on buildings and storefronts in the area of Omonia Square and further out by the National Museum of Archeology.  As someone whose reverence for the contents of that Museum is passionate I do not look forward to seeing this disbasement.  I sometimes wonder at the new Niarchos Foundation project by Renzo Piano which is building a gleaming elegant new musical hall and national library south of the city  center on an abandoned race track.  Tarting up that tacky part of town is all to the good but it will shift the notion of "desirable" ever farther away from the Museum of Archeology which ought to be the very center of people's interest.  The Greeks of antiquity created a culture which, as we all know, is the fons and origo of western civilization (so alright, your Latin is a little slow this morning; just wanted to introduce a catch phrase for your pretentious ripostes at cocktails this evening [the wellspring and origin].  Following the adoption of the Christian faith the Greeks moved radically away from things heathen, and thereafter even more so when they became subjects of the Muslim Turks who conquered their territory.  The people of this area slumbered in ignorance of their noble past until a few bright lights aided by European romantics such as Lord Byron liberated them from Byzantine control emanating from Constantinople now Istanbul the capital of the Muslim country Turkey.  The Greeks' increasingly passionate embrace of antiquity in my view is more kindled by the profits envisioned from the tourist trade than any honest understanding of what this legacy is and or appreciation of what the culture was.  The sad state of the National Museum of Archeology is just a symbol of this neglect.

The Bidet

One of my four sisters has been exceptionally kind in the last sixty or seventy years in introducing me to everything that matters in life.  She was the first and for many many years the only member of my family to meet head-on my obvious desire for sexual relations with males; I was probably fifteen at the time and she nineteen.  A year later she taught me to jitterbug, for which I have been forever grateful since I so love to dance, and learning to do that made me the envy of all my high school classmates at a time when I could have easily been dismissed as a creep and a queer.  When I was eighteen we were both living in New York, and she took me in hand and down to MacDougal Street, in those days lined with what we would now call gay bars, took me in and sat there to the side for a while until I overcame my shyness.  A half decade went by until we reconnected; it was on the occasion of my marriage and she sent us a crate for a wedding present containing what she called a "bidet."  This was 1956, and I don't think either I or my wife knew what the word meant, just that my sister now married to a wealthy man in Palm Beach obviously would think up something extraordinary and glamorous for a wedding gift.  The object remained in its crate and in our attic, and went with us as we moved to New Haven and Palo Alto and back to Massachusetts, forever a mystery.  Still and all when we began traveling to Europe I did indeed discover what a bidet was and that it was for something other than washing out one's underthings in the hotel room, as so many Americans naively believed was its primary function.  When we were divorced, the bidet went with me to my new house in Cambridge and I hired a carpenter and plumber to build me a second bathroom on the top floor and install the bidet.  As I now knew from living in Rome a bidet is a very handy device far beyond the cleansing of a woman's private parts following intercourse.  Europeans all knew about the possibility of washing up one's bum in a bidet without having recourse to taking a daily shower.  Oh, the joy of it all, not to have to get one's hair wet, not to have to wet the entire body, just to be able to smell sweet again after the morning's dump.  Time passed and I moved away from this house and my beloved bidet to a place much more American and, alas, without a bidet.  Then it was, at age seventy or so, after I had had prostate cancer, and a treatment with radioactive pellets shot into that organ, I began to notice a definite new and not terribly pleasant aroma arising from the crotch.  On my follow up visit to the oncologist I complained of this, and he shook his head mystified, but it so happened that he had invited a medical student who was specializing to be a urologist to sit in on the appointment who immediately said: "Oh, that's 'old man's smell.'  We were just studying it yesterday."  I thought to myself that this kid would fail Bedside Manner 101 if I were handing out the grades.  But there it was: Old Man's Smell.  And I no longer had a bidet.  One of life's great inventions, I recommend it to my readers, one and all.

Guys And Girls

The Roosevelt documentary is compelling in every way; the three members of that famous family featured in this exposé that lasts for hours are all so vital, human, and in each in a different way vulnerable.  We have just been watching the part where Eleanor Roosevelt learns from a stash of love letters written to her husband that he has been having an affair with her former secretary.  It is noted that from all accounts Mrs. Roosevelt never got over the hurt and despair that this revelation caused her.  My immediate reaction, as someone who was grossly unfaithful long ago in heterosexual marriage, was why did Franklin keep those letters?  Who is so arrogant and cruel to imagine that they might might never be discovered?  Someone who just is not alive to the deep sensitivities of possession and fidelity in many spouses, or, as many psychologists suggest, someone who wanted the information somehow or another to be transmitted.  I was reading in the Globe this morning the quoted remarks of a young gay male married to another fellow who remarks that he and his husband have an "open" marriage and tend to use condoms if they are having sex with others.  As a male who has spent years of my life closeted while working with a variety of straight males in different situations involving different classes, I was always struck by the extraordinary amount of sexual energy these fellows evinced while encountering attractive women on the job, and I remember so well the numerous rumors about affairs as well as the late night boozy confessions of many guys of their extra marital exploits.  Before one suggests that "men are just like that," you have to think of Teddy Roosevelt in this same documentary, who I don't believe was unzipping his pants in the same way as his cousin.  So it isn't as though all men were lotharios.  But a lifetime of associating with men makes me believe that conjugal fidelity is not such a big deal as it is with women, and especially I think husbands are prone to stray when their wives are in their most sexually unattractive phase, late pregnancy, early motherhood, and breast feeding.  But the interesting thing that I take away from the gay husband's comments, which by the way I have heard many times over elsewhere, is that a sexual act by one's spouse outside of the relationship is not so threatening.  I think for a lot of males sex is sex, starting from their early teenaged mechanical masturbation to relieve genuine physical tensions and sometimes discomfort.  So sexual intercourse is just sexual intercourse.  Certainly the accounts of soldiers in various armies lining up to be "serviced" by prostitutes suggests that, and somehow from my experience of women, limited as it is, does not suggest to me that there would be the same line of women waiting for male prostitutes.  A corollary thought is my shared anguish of the fantasized male prostitute who has to face a line of hungry women with that very dubious instrument for constant gratification that nature has given him.

Dollar Signs

Watching the documentary about the Roosevelts is a salutary reminder of a class of people who lived in a world where money was not talked about.  The established old families did not mention money, partly because they had a lot of it and didn't need to worry, partly because their tendency was to play down display even if they also believed in the finest ingredients and stuffs for their dinners and their possessions.  That ethos pretty much dominated the better East Coast teaching institutions; when I was interviewed for my first job neither I nor the Dean who interviewed me nor my senior faculty colleague who brought me to the meeting thought to mention what salary was attached to the job, and i never learned my annual salary until I figured it out from my first pay stub.  I never heard my mother mention money, certainly nothing we ate or did ever had a price tag attached to it.  When she took me on our annual trip to Chicago to buy new clothes I don't remember cost as being remarked upon when we dealt with our man in Marshall Fields. Nowadays everything is monetized.  There is no picture that comes to the attention of the newspapers that does not have a recent auction price or estimated future one attached to it, as though this were a significant feature of its definition, as important as the artist's name.  Houses are always introduced with their presumed selling price rather than any serious attention to what makes that dwelling desirable or aesthetically pleasing.  A college education is defined by the thousands of dollars of debt a student will acquire, and there is always rumbles of concern that he or she should be directed toward fields of study that will "pay off."  All of this is perfectly understandable since money does indeed make the world go around, yet, on the other hand, there was a class of people in this country who managed by virtue of their personal wealth to manage to refrain from monetizing everything that crossed their path.  Now the country belongs to the nouveaux riches who are intent upon thinking entirely in dollars, and with them goes the mad giddy expenditure that is constantly featured in The New York Times.  The price of stock is considered far more important than the product made, the benefit to the country, or the welfare of those employed to do the work: a company is not thought of as a social, political, environmental asset to the country, but rather simply a source of wealth whose stock is party of a money game played by its owners.  Street after street in Manhattan and London are lined with luxury apartment buildings where units cost in the tens of millions and the inhabitants visit only a few months a year.  The major attraction as reported by the press is the outsize price.  I loved the woman from a posh New Jersey suburb whose husband had bought her a thirty million dollar weekend getaway in the city where as she exclaimed "I can see Central Park" and Bergdorf's is only a few blocks away." What more could one want in God's world, especially when the needy are tucked away out of sight?

The Body

I was captivated by the photos in the Huffington Post of the celebrities gathered for George Clooney's wedding in Venice, he so handsome, his bride so beautiful, Venice so glamorous, and his celebrity friends, what a strange collection.  Anna Wintour I would not have thought as one of them, but there she was photographed in two different outfits during the various festivities.  I was struck to see her in a simple sleeveless dress, although it is indeed a line of which she is fond, because for the first time I realized that she was perhaps a little old for this.  She was photographed in the awkward exertion of getting on or off a water taxi, not the most graceful moment in a person's life, and where her arm extended from her body, it was clear to see that her skin was loose against the bone structure, a common problem as we age, but not one that is usually made available by the clothes we wear.  I find it amusing to watch my arm when being pulled up through one of those power dryers in public restrooms because the skin is so loose that it ripples and billows in the powerful air currents.  I first noticed this once weeding in the garden bending over and looking back between my legs, noticing the skin of my thighs hanging ever so slightly loose as though I had on panty hose which were much too  big for me.  It is really rather grotesque this flailing of the person without actually removing the skin completely from the body, but I have to admire the athletic ladies of the bath and racquet club where I work out weekly.  There are dozens of tennis courts there, and a corresponding large group of regulars playing tennis from dawn to dusk.  As a group the women are well dressed well coiffed ladies in their high seventies and low eighties whose game is ferocious and steady, and none of them in their crisp white tennis shorts and shirts is the least bit bothered by the loose skin on their arms and legs which has a kind of life of its own as their owner's limbs move vigorously through the tennis game.  As an ever larger group of prosperous, healthy, active persons live into serious old age they present ever newer forms of physical well being.  Faces wrinkled with healthy skin, featuring clear, attentive eyes set deep in a mass of crows feet are as beautiful as an athletic arm with its loose skin.  Surrendering to botox and surgery turns a living person into a corpse, and it seems so strange that persons in the class for whom having "work" done is de rigeur don't recognize that fact.  Well, a smooth face, surgically altered so as to be devoid of expression or personality has the advantage I suppose of hiding life's tragedies and disappointments, and maybe that's easier for those confronting a long life in the mirror.