Thanksgiving In New England

My husband who is not always one to want to travel said:" let's go be with the family in New Hampshire on Thanksgiving".  We decided we would gamble on the weather.  I have spent many a late November weekend at the farm in New Hampshire for well on to fifty years, and I didn't remember much snow.  We flew to New York a week before and went to every museum conceivable.  I was in my mink jacket and thankful as an evil freezing wind whipped up and down those avenues.  We saw the Cubist show, saw the Matisse cut-outs for a second time (first was at the Tate Modern in London), saw the marvelous Natural Disaster show at the Museum of Natural History along with every single school child in the city.  God, what a nightmare!  Learned later that they go away in the afternoons, so that's the time to go.  Wish a similar disappearing act could remove the crowds in Times Square where we went on Saturday night to a performance of Stoppard's "The Real Thing," which I have to say was as bad as Ben Brantley claimed.  We paid two hundred fifty something dollars for two seats at the back of the orchestra, half the time couldn't hear a line, as American actors tried to be English, brittle and clever, and left at the intermission.  Well, nobody held a gun to my head when I bought the tickets, and I always say after every Broadway fiasco "never again," so I have only myself to blame.  Then Tuesday we hopped on the Dartmouth Coach to Hanover NH where dear friends live. We planned to take them out to dinner at seven o'clock at the new restaurant in the Hanover Inn.  And then we got to Hartford, and from that moment until we were on the ground again in Sarasota the day after Thanksgiving, it was one strange misadventure after another.  There was an impending huge storm, and to escape it, people were leaving for the holiday on Tuesday instead of Wednesday.  From Hartford to Springfield the Coach sat in an immovable mass of traffic, or more or less immovable.  We got to Hanover minutes before eight o'clock, and our friends forewarned were just arriving, the restaurant had moved the reservation.  All was well, great food, lots to drink, and general merriment.  We were told that the blizzard would commence at eleven in the morning on Wednesday, and I have to wonder if the Weather Channel and Mother Nature work in sync nowadays since, that was when the snowflakes started.  We were to have a second meal with the friends at their historic farm; the meal was moved to two in the afternoon from evening because of weather's threats.  Driving there was a madness.  They live at the top of a steep steep and winding sandy very narrow road with deep ravines on either side and no protective railing.  Oh, the slipping and the sliding.  We were in a rental with no snow tires and no four wheel drive. We even had to deal with meeting another car and nearly went deep into the ditch.  Noble husband plowed on, skidding and sliding but making it, hoorah!  A glorious meal, lots of fellowship, lots of great wine (Thank God, husband is a teetotaler!), and off we were sliding down the hill again in total darkness back to the hotel.  The next day packed and off to my daughter's at the historic farm (been in her mother's family for seven generations now).  Made it to Concord with one and sometimes two lanes cleared on the interstate, the snow had stopped and sat heavy heavy--very wet snow--on the trees making for a very beautiful drive, but very claustrophobic.  Daughter's house is not the historic farm property but another newer place situated prettily enough in a deep ravine, which is down a steep and curving sandy driveway.  Another moment of sheer drama and we were there.  Knowing that there would be no liquor at this event, I had prudently bought a demi bottle of red wine which I drank before we arrived.  All was well save that the power had failed and the dinner was delayed until three.  But the magic of the assembled group was such that hugely entertaining conversation ensued until that time and continued at the festive board.  When darkness descended we had not yet reached the pies set out on the side board, so there was a little bit of rapid eating at this point.  I should say that a power generator was keeping us warm, or sort of warm.  I guess people from Florida did not call it warm.  Back at our motel in Concord, early to bed with a four am wake up call.  At five on the road me to the bus station, hubby to the car rental agency to drop off the car and where  a cab was arranged to pick him, and we made the six am bus.  Barreling along the interstate to Boston when suddenly snow plows loom on the road, a complete barrier of them going at maybe twenty five miles an hour stretching across.  Oh, the suspense of it all, oh, the relief when they turned off at Manchester.  A half hour later or so we were arriving at the terminal at Logan, and through security  and quietly collapsing we waited for the plane and of course there was all the deicing and so no and so forth, but we left finally, left the ground, flew on, and then there we were whew! back home in Sarasota, sunshine and warmth.

Der Rosenkavalier

I have a dear friend who is enjoying a semester long sabbatical from his teaching obligations, spending the time in Berlin, where he is earnestly studying the German language.  Of course, as a classical scholar he learned that language in graduate school so that he could easily read one of the major languages of scholarship.  So why this study? So that he can learn German well enough to understand the words sung in every one of Wagner's operas while being performed, especially the Niebelungenlied  which he considers the single greatest achievement in culture since the beginning of time.  And this is a man intimately conversant with the masterpieces of Greek and Roman literature!  Shocking, and nonsense, is all I have to say.  Furthermore if you have to go to something Germanic I opt for Der Rosenkavalier.  Now most persons would find this nonsense I suppose.  But I am transfixed whenever I hear the duet between Octavian and Sophie when he presents her with the rose (he is as custom demands the surrogate for a rather buffoonish older somewhat impecunious aristocrat who hopes to marry the beautiful young heiress who pursues the old man's suite with a gift of a silver rose; he is the rose kavalier, get it?).  The duet is one of the most sublime moments of harmony I can imagine, intoxicating, and obliterating the ego of the listener who loses him/herself in the music.  It so happens that years ago when I first suffered a severed attack of kidney stones, and suffered the pain beyond all others, I was waiting for the time to go to my appointment with the doctor who had prescribed for me over the phone Demerol.  This I had staggered to my pharmacist to pick up, groaning and moaning with the pain, and now I was sitting at home waiting for the Demerol to take effect.  I was listening to the opera and trying to conquer my feelings, when suddenly the moment arrived for that magic duet when the beautiful Sophie and the handsome young Octavian (sung by a soprano as well) meet, and the sopranos soared up up into the stratosphere of high exquisite notes and just then the Demerol kicked in.  Music has never been the same for me since, and no other piece has ever captured me as this opera has, that scene and then again the great trio at the end.  Not only that but instead of a heavy handed saga of gods and goddesses, pathetic in their helplessness unlike their Greek counterparts, one has the delightful story of a beautiful woman in her thirties who is having a love affair with her nineteen year old ravishingly handsome cousin--what a setup!--who has the humility, good humor, and graciousness to recognize the moment when the boy has out grown her, and then even more glorious to stand together with him and his new young and beautiful love interest (who has rejected the older suitor in favor of the bearer of the rose), wish them well, and depart the scene. It is the stand-in moment for that day when we retire, renounce, and ready ourselves for end. a sequence of events of far greater significance and humanity, about which the Countess has sung so nobly, so wisftully, so beautifully in the first act.  Call me frivolous, childlike, certainly no great student of music, but there you have it.  I'll take Der Rosenkavalier any day of the week.

No more words from me from now until probably Sunday the 30th.  I am off the frozen wilds of New England.

Thanksgiving On The Farm

We're going to celebrate Thanksgiving with a host of relatives at my older daughter's house situated on a sixty acre portion of "the farm," the ancestral property of my late wife's family who settled on it in 1735.  Before I married into that family my life was peripatetic and rootless since my family moved when I was sixteen from what had been "our home," and emotionally remained so.  I love driving the windy roads through to the town center past the cemetery where generations of my wife's family are buried and her own ashes have been deposited.  The ancestral house  and giant barn which belong to my other daughter look onto a small pond where I have spent many summer hours with my kids splashing about.  It will be an exercise in nostalgia to be there again.  We shall have time to walk in the woods, hundreds of acres of them, bare of their leafs, me in my mink jacket for the cold, deploying a noise maker so as to ward off the drunken weekend deer hunter up from Boston illegally walking through the posted acres, who will think me a target animal.  But there will be a sad feeling mixed in with the pleasure of it all.  It was there on that farm in November of 1955 that we two young people decided definitely to get married.  I was being presented to the family, the parents, the brother, the sister, the infant nieces and nephews.  I had no family to give in return, happy to be welcomed if indeed that it the word into the somewhat reluctant and certainly restrained and cold bosom of this family.  The Admiral, my prospective father in law, looked upon me with confusion and suspicion. me a widower of only three months, proposing marriage, a male who talked in a constant flow, who waved his hands for emphasis, who was witty, used big words, so over educated, something so well, what? fruity about him.  But my fiancée and I were in love.  Big Time.  And then, of course, the years rolled by, those early days of martinis and love making, those constant walks looking a architecture in city after city, she telling me everything the learned in architecture school with such passion, I will never forget.  We decorated one habitation after another in the strict geometric principles of Bauhaus, edge of sofa lined up with edge of table across the way, chair exactly precisely across from door and so on and so forth.  I have never lost the ecstasy of precision, of compulsion.  But my flamboyance grew to grate on her, my compulsive talking; she was a quiet person, incredibly secretive.  For all her Yankee high minded moralism she was a terrific liar, a good match for my insistent fantasizing of events.  Well, it all ended in emotional death, separation and divorce.  The kids said we each were so much happier then.  Twenty years in the gulag?  No, I don't think so.  Going back to the farm reminds me of another emotion, and although I will be having a wonderful time, there will be that feeling of regret which the barren grey sky, the leaf-less trees, the winter dead grass will monumentally augment.

Reading Matter

I subscribe to a great many journals, among them, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books.  I have a large table next to my reading chair where these are deposited when they arrive awaiting my perusal.  Since I travel a lot, and when at home, spend countless hours at the gym, these tend to pile up unread, especially because when I become enchanted with a novel, I suspend all other reading projects to plow through the narrative.  Thus it comes about, as is now the case, that I have a neat pile of the TLS, the LRB, the NYR, not to mention The New Yorker Magazine.  Daffy as I am, I have opened almost all of these when they first arrived, glanced here and there among the pages, and then scrupulously placed them on the pile.  Today was an occasion to give the pile some attention, and I have been reading for many hours.  And, of course, what always happens is with me yet again today.  I sometimes have only the merest memory of what I dimly perceive I have read before, while most of the time every issue seems to be virgin territory.  This leads me to the melancholy fact that I might as well stop reading them altogether since I cannot remember enough to justify the effort and the expense--subscriptions to these journals are not cheap!  Yet, I continue to subscribe and to read from the piles of back issues, for I have the fond belief that as I read, the facts and opinions I have digested go into some undefined pool of intelligence in my brain, so that when I talk or read still further this encyclopedic knowledge--somehow not available all the time to my conscious mind which must stutter and sputter in conversation trying to recall the facts of the matter under discussion--underlies the broad strengths of my discourse.  Total baloney, but comforting, nonetheless.

Photographs On The Wall: My Family

Friends down here in Sarasota are forever getting on the plane, heading north to be with "the kids."  Other are in constant communication with them through texting.  My children and I pretty much leave each other alone except for the big occasions.  We couldn't stop talking and laughing together for four days, my daughters and I, when we went to Cape Breton in September for my granddaughter's wedding where we met up with my son, father of the bride, who's a pretty fierce talker as well, who has the added burden? joy? of looking like the spitting of me as I was in my fifties.  But most of the time I am a father alone with his photographs.  And they are wonderful ones.  Those on the wall bring them from their teenaged years into adulthood and middle age.  There is a delightful shot of my two boys setting off with the rest of us for our first neighborhood bar mitzvah ever, and at the time they had long hair to their shoulders and below.  There is a hysterical photo done in a photo booth of my second son, his wife, and their four progeny, crammed together and all in their best expressions.  I choke up whenever I look at it.  And wonderful shots posed formal portraits of each daughter in middle years with their delightful husbands, photos that capture the same formality and enduring love that one sees in those Victorian posed shots.  Then on one wall I have posed my older daughter on the cusp of adulthood, so beautiful and shy, and above her a photo of her aunt who had the same name and above her her great aunt, my favorite aunt, and my mother's best friend who was the one who first held that name in our family, and the resemblance is there to see from great aunt to great niece.  If this were not enough I have the girls setting off for a protest march in the seventies their packpacks loaded, I have the younger son holding his new born first baby looking entirely mystified.  And in a surround to all these there are my sister and my brother, and even my mother, and a wonderful shot of my father whom I never knew because he died so young looking into the camera dressed to go hunting,  My mother is a painted miniature of her when she was in her early twenties, my father in his hunting gear must have been mid forties since nearby is a formal photo taken on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, and he was killed in a car crash four days later.  And there am I about to be eighty five looking at all these youngsters.

Friendship

I never thought it would come to this, but at this stage of my life, well, indeed for the last ten years or so I have compulsively covered the walls of my study (when I lived in Massachusetts) and my bedroom and bathroom (down here in Sarasota) with photographs of my family and relations, but more than that photos of friends.  I look at them often.  This morning the face of woman now dead caught my eye, a woman who was a close friend for fifty years, and,  though bereft of her company as of so many others, I bask in the glow of the memory of that psychic and spiritual (never physical) intimacy.  And thinking of her made me think of Palo Alto and that moved my mind onto another figure, a true mentor, uncle, brother, older by seven years whom I really got to know while teaching at Yale and who was hugely instrumental in my going to California a year after he had gone out there.  He, too, is dead, died young at 43--from this perspective so very, very young, like my first wife who went at 26, also of a heart attack--but the thought of him produces in me the warm glow of a child who knows he is loved and protected; I didn't have a living father, caring brother, either, so his caring presence was all in all to me in those days.  And my first wife, also a friend, a dear friend with whom I never stopped talking, until of course I finally did; the conversation ended when her heart stopped beating, only twenty six years old, what a warm, and lovely woman, vanished in the late afternoon, after a day of merriment, deep serious conversations, and horitzontal intimacies, vanished, as a thief in the night takes away the family jewels.  There is a photo of us walking down the aisle, but somehow it was all so long ago, so different a world, before I was a professor, before I was a father, before, before. . . . and somehow too unreal to think the married couple of those long ago days actually had actually inhabited this planet.  I look in another direction and I see two lovely young women smiling at me from just above my desk, not quite so young in real time, but we were all young and laughing then, and we still laugh now when we get together, and the sight of them gives me bubbles of joy.  They say it is a tiresome thing and a waste of time to be nostalgic, move on they say, but I am not convinced the occasion is ripe for making friendships like those in the world I live in now, a new city, a new environment, associations with people carrying like myself the baggage of treasure of the experiences of a lifetime. As a friend of mine once said thirty years ago now, I believe, when going with me to a cocktail party of people we neither of us knew well, said: "I should have printed out an autobiographical sheet, because I sure as hell am not prepared to go through my life story with new people at this late date."

Living A Lie

We watched "Brokeback Mountain" tonight again, and a different kind of sadness overcame me.  The first time I was crying for myself, I think, but this time I grieved for all the damaged lives that such repression causes in a society, all those sad women, the broken hearted parents and of course, the severely frustrated males, not just sexually, but so much more emotionally.  It is a film about bankrupt lives, and those of us who live in the supposedly more enlightened coastal areas have no idea of the privations of persons out in the rest of the country.  And yet, even in these parts, I have two friends of long standing who are so damaged, one by his family's stern disapproval and withholding of any respect, the other by his life long inability to tell his parents why he is not married and will not give them the grandchildren they beg for whenever he comes for a visit.  I once sat in a discussion group of elderly gays in Manhattan, who were all working class stiffs who in retirement, owing to their meagre funds, had had to move in with a relative, usually a widowed sister in Queens, it seemed.  It seemed that they were all Catholics, and so there they lived a life where never once could they acknowledge their feelings, never once have a gay friend to visit, really because in a long life of repression and deceit they had never made a network of gay friends.  Coming to these meetings once a month was their only escape from a totally unreal existence.  All these people in hiding. How long, oh Lord, how long?

School Teacher

I cannot praise school teachers enough.  My experience of them is not limited to the years I myself sat in class, nor the decades watching and listening to my children as they returned from their daily schooling.  No, I have even substitute taught in more than one school room, once for a period of several weeks, once when I was asked to take on for a term the course of a teacher who left.  I am a college professor so I understood the bare mechanics of standing before a group of persons younger than myself and delivering information, information hitherto unavailable to them.  Anyone who knows school teaching will already by laughing.  The information, yes, sounds like a college professor, yes, get up there, open your mouth, and deliver the facts.  As I discovered, there was so much more to the experience than that.  The first thing I discovered is that young people en masse are unnerving to face.  They are in motion, they squirm, they cannot sit still, as opposed to college students who have somehow miraculously over the summer from school graduation to college entrance, have learned to sit still, and pay some sort of attention.  Many youngsters in school have a tendency to act out; seasoned teachers expect this and know how to accommodate it and soothe the child.  The person running the classroom will oversee her charges and note their various psychological states.  The school is there to help children develop the skills of learning which are many, and are acquired in different persons at different speeds, and are impeded or encouraged in different ways by various human psychologies--children are not at all alike.  For a college professor who was used to impersonally (perhaps wittily, cleverly, warmly, and sympathetically, but still neutrally) dishing out the facts and nothing but the facts, this was like playing a pinball machine, there was so much to attend to all the time. I failed at the basic task which is known as controlling the class.  That does not mean intimidating them nor tying them down, it means having the miracle capacity of engaging with twenty intellects and personalities and the same time and offering encouragement and restraint as needed.  It is an immense challenge, made all the more so when the youngsters come from homes where there are severe emotional problems whether from the desperation of too many work hours and too low pay, a dependence upon alcohol or drugs to make it through the day, any number of pressures that appear in hovels and appear in mansions.  No child is immune.   I stuck it out for three weeks when I was the substitute teacher, I quit after ten days when I was hired as a replacement for the term.  School teaching is a skill that requires not only intellect and knowledge, but a commitment of heart and soul and extraordinary subtlety.  No wonder teachers burn out; yes, either refresh them or replace them, but never, never underestimate the extraordinary demands of the job

The Opacity Of It All

I spent some time at the exhibition of Ronald Lauder's Cubist collection at the Met, and followed that up with buying the immense, heavy catalogue which I dutifully lugged in my suitcase back down to Sarasota so that I could study what I had seen.  Turns out that I find the essays hard to understand, and that, coupled with my lifelong resistance to Cubism, is making for a dead experience.  I love a Braque painting of rocks and trees in the Lauder exhibition, an intimation really of the Cubism that was to be, and I love certain Cezanne paintings of villages whose geometric edges play with the artist's tendency to dab paint on in little jabs which make rhythms of squares which taken together hint again at the Cubism to come.  But those guitars, or human features, completely redone, so that it becomes a puzzle to work them out, spare me.  The catalogue does not help me.  Am I just growing more and more resistant to making meaning or am I becoming less and less able to understand words?  Atul Gawande's latest book I devoured and now use it as a yardstick to measure my own slow decline.  I think I just understand things less well (although I understood Gawande's book well enough).  I bought T.J Clark's Picasso and Truth a while back and find it impenetrable.  But then last night at the restaurant where we went to eat, the young, very young it seems to me, maitre d', clearly an American, very beautiful indeed, well painted and well tressed, spoke to us in a slurred manner that I catch from time to time when passing teenagers in the mall, or hearing slice of television somewhere or another.  It is, I guess, a new manner of speaking, and I could not understand a word she said.  Not a word.  Well, these are all disconcerting thoughts combined this morning with reading a number of very unfavorable reviews for Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, which I have spent about two hundred and fifty dollars for two tickets for our coming week in New York.  And Stoppard is always so hard to understand.  That and a lousy production and the two hundred fifty dollars.  Thank God, I can think of my sessions with my trainer and my improved balance and find a modicum of joy and happiness.

Helpless Youth

I have so far read three volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard's autobiographical novel.  It is a treat to read about young boys and their adventures, especially for me, who was never a young boy like that, if only because my accident took away the wild mobility that boys once upon a time enjoyed.  The other side to his account of his youth is the prison of his home where his exceedingly angry and cruel martinet of a father ran a tight ship, and meted out severe physical punishments for the slightest infractions.  It was a place to walk about about always in fear.  For those of us who grew up in a considerably more relaxed environment it reads like days in the gulag.  I think of my own children growing up much more loosely and one anecdote always comes to mind.  I came home one night around ten to find the table laden with dirty dishes, evidence of a large scale party, and indeed as it turned out my son, then fourteen, who later became a successful chef, had invited a bunch of his boy pals to a dinner party.  There were goblets with the remnants of the wine, their were the ash trays with the finished cigars, there were the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, the pots and pans.  This had been a banquet.  Not a sound in the house.  I walked upstairs and went to my sons' quarters, turned to their bathroom where the light was on.  I spied a figure stretched out on the floor with the bathmat on top of him, a boyish looking person so clearly one of the guests.  I knelt down to say "Hello, I'm Charles Beye, Willis's father.  Can I help you?" and from under the bath mate the muffled voice "This is Willis Beye. Go away." I am also reading the trilogy by Elena Ferrante describing a Neapolitan youth in the slums of Naples right after the Second World War.  It is the account of one girl's voyage away from the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness of people who only spoke dialect and thus were imprisoned in their ghetto and her friend who was left behind, always presumed to be the brighter, but clearly more self destructive.  The descriptions of the rituals of this slum world, the fierce demands of family, the male sense of power and domination, of sexual predation, all in the name of "love," is an ugly story.  The narrator who is the girl who got away is excellent at describing her fear in social situations, her ignorance, her continued timidity as she rises in social class through her use of Italian instead of dialect, her education, her success as an author.  The complete disconnect with the world of her parents, yet her occasional encounters with them, is a marvelous story; they are so brutal, demanding and determined to misunderstand her in every way.  American novelists never seem able to write about the world of poverty, hopelessness, ignorance, anger, and impotence with this kind of secure pitiless vision.  It is another kind of growing up from what we most of us know.

Housecleaning

We have a cleaning woman who is an excellent aide for our cluttered, dusty, confused household.  My husband is compulsively neat but hides things away for sakekeeping which he then cannot find and lets things rot in the refrigerator rather than discard them.  I am someone who leaves everything in piles where I can remember where everything is rather than putting items away into drawers and cupboards and desk files where they become lost to all eternity.  I just found the swim suit and goggles I took to Greece last month after a desperate search of a week after I finally had the inspiration to go to the trunk storage and look through the exterior zipped pockets of the piece I had traveled with and there was the stuff.  And it had been smart thinking that put them there!  I knew that I was taking a trip at Thanksgiving that involved a stay where there would be a swimming pool!  Today the cleaning woman, a former Marine I might add, comes to clean, and as is the case over the years we have spent hours in a frenzy of "pre-cleaning."  That is the true virtue of having a cleaning woman: become reacquainted with all the bits and pieces of your life that have to be stored away so as to make counters available for cleaning, floor surfaces ready for vacuuming.  I discover so much of my life every other week this way.  It is also true that I am inclined to squirrel everything away in locations that are often completely counter intuitive and so it might take me weeks to rediscover them.  But no doubt about it cleaning day is a vast reorganization that otherwise would never happen, and so, I suppose, that is a Good Thing.

The Old Grouch

The Huffington Post had a long article on subway dancing in New York City which has to do with African-American boys who board the train and perform elaborate and very acrobatic dance steps as an exhibition for which they then pass the hat.  I am all in favor of young people finding legitimate ways to earn money, and I am a big fan of performance, a regular attendant at all kinds of spectacles.  But I like to choose my event, not have it thrust upon me.  More than that I, like a lot of other people, like to read on the subway.  Say what you will about  the "broken windows" theory of policing the city in Mayor Giuliani's era, but I really liked not having to put up with a steady stream of people telling their woes at full volume while panhandling, and now I really do not like the intrusion of the dancers.  Quiet is always better it seems to me when confronting yet another street musician.  I do not want music wherever I go.  I cannot imagine walking around with buds in my ear streaming in a constant sound.  Yes, it is possible to think with that distraction, but how much better to have the thinking apparatus going about it business in stillness and calm.  Isn't it enough that my personal silence is broken by the interior horror of tintinitus --or however you spell it?  Then again I have to remember in the long gone days of my youth when I was in high school sitting at my desk in my bedroom concentrating on my homework--and doing very well with it I may add--whilst listening to "Fibber McGee and Molly"  and other half hour comedy programs right at my side on the radio sitting there on my desk.  So it's maybe an issue of becoming frozen in time, or the grand change that overtook me when almost forty years ago now when I had a boyfriend, a kind of young genius, who was deeply offended by my casual use of classical music as background for my daily living and insisted that we either listen to the music altogether focused or turn the music off.  I grew to love silence then as I had never understood it before.

A Glass Of Wine Or Two

In the English version of "House of Cards" the prime minister's brother is a dreadful drunk, always getting into bad publicity, and in one scene as he is being hauled off yet again, he says to the police "I don't know why I drink; it must be boredom."  My youngest sister, a decade or so ago, retired quite young,  and thereafter sat at home where she ballooned to immense, truly immense proportions.  Once when I was out in Iowa on a visit, she said to me that she thought it was boredom that had led her to eat so and put on the added pounds.  Boredom, existential boredom, is a difficult foe to confront. I was raised in a home of a gracious witty mother who nevertheless insisted subtly, only by implication, on the utter meaninglessness of life; she made that clear.  In the weeks since I have returned from Greece, I have eliminated alcohol from my diet, first because of the surgeries for skin cancer, and then because I was suffering from such extreme acid indigestion despite taking Omeprazole, and more recently added coffee to the list of prohibited foods.  Giving up coffee took me a couple of days to work out the withdrawal symptoms; then it was as though I had never tasted it.  Still without it, there was a gap in the performance of breakfast.  I have yet to find a suitable replacement.  As for alcohol I am desolate without cocktails or glasses of wine in the late afternoon, and it is not intoxication I crave, because in fact alcohol, the very small amount I was drinking, still made me feel ever so slightly unwell.  It is more that alcohol softens the edges of the stark crushing boredom that has gripped me every day around twilight time.  I was a different person in Greece as I reverted to the me of twenty or thirty years ago.  In the company of jolly companions I downed glass after glass of white wine at lunch and dinner, bottles and bottles, laughing and joking and paying no heed to the increasingly obvious acid indigestion this was kicking up.  I have not had so much fun in years.  Life was brilliant, there was a sparkle to everything I said, handsome young waiters seemed inevitably friendly.  My companions danced the handkerchief dance one night with two or three of these beauties and I wanted to cry, but instead ordered more wine.  I was having fun, fun, fun.  Tums, malox, nothing seemed to help me as my stomach complained louder and louder.  Now I am back home, happy in a way to be under the surgeon's knife and then in recuperation with slowly dissolving stitches.  Thereafter I will have my tragedy course to prepare, and we are traveling north for Thanksgiving.  But the truth of the boredom is there, like the wolves at the edge of the forest, or the bacteria waiting to invade. 

What's A Poor Guy To Do?

Today there is a newspaper report of a fifty something year old man arrested for lewd behavior when passengers on a tour bus looked down to see him sitting in his truck masturbating and reported it to the state troopers.  First of all, poor guy, he pulled to the side of the road, responsible driving, right?  Lowered his seat, totally proper and inconspicuous and who would imagine that a bunch of tourists on a bus who should have been looking at the landscape, for god's sake, that's why they chartered the damn thing, peer down into his truck.  It reminded me of a conversation I once had at a cocktail party in Los Angeles with a charming handsome young lawyer in which I brought up the eternally to me fascinating observation of an urban environment where people think nothing of driving such vast distances, to go to a party (at which we were, my hosts in LA having driven for at least forty five minutes over freeways to bring us to this gathering), and he waxed philosophical about the Los Angeles driving and I sputtered on mounting real indignation at such things as the daily traffic jams on the Santa Ana Freeway and he replied that yes, it was true, and it was his route home, and yes, he actually liked the daily stoppage.  This was the years before cellphones, so there was still a chance to have a solitary existence, and so he could revel in his being alone, no boss to talk to him, to wife to talk to him, to kids to get on his nerves, the traffic slowed to a call, he has his favorite cds on and good music coming out the speaker. He smoked some dope, calmed down, and usually masturbated, all in the peace and quiet of his journey home.  Way to go, bro!

Interpretation

In the center of the Petrie Court at the Metropolitan Museum is a statue of a male nude, probably from the fifteenth or sixteenth century.  The figure is handsome, well built and sports a very well proportioned penis which protrudes gracefully from his body not too ostentatiously but still with conviction.  I used to remark on this when I walked by with friends.  Once I was there with my cousin and after I had shown her the statue, she told me I should photograph it with my Iphone, which I then did.  Directly thereafter she said that I should use this photo as the screen saver or whatever it is called for my phone.  Of course, I had no idea how achieve this technological feat, but of course she did being of the younger generation.  So thereafter whenever I started to turned on my cellphone the beautiful body with the marvelously sculpted penis would be the first thing to appear.  If someone were to catch a glimpse of this, as sometimes happened in tight proximity such as in planes on the tarmac or in the subway, I considered that this person might imagine I had a photo of a naked friend or myself, and not the whole body either but a focus that was centered on the groin.  So I was somewhat embarrassed, and a little careful whenever I had to use the phone in those situations. One day my phone would not activate when I had returned from Europe so I went to the Apple store in Manhattan on Broadway, got an appointment at the genius bar and went for the meeting.  When I handed the young techie the phone he quickly gave it back saying primly that I would have to activate it past the point of the photo, that he did not want to look at personal porn. Here I was this old old fart with the very proper youth, and was on the verge of blushing with shame when I had the presence of mind to say in my best professorial voice: "That is a statue in the Met, in the Petrie Court," to which he replied "Oh, excuse me, I didn't look at it closely."  Well, he was faking it, since I doubt he would have known one statue from another, and I was faking it since Petrie Court or no, it was still a photo centering on the penis.  What was definitely art in the Petrie Court was probably porn on my cellphone.

Energetic Lives

As I sometimes do I am reading three books at once.  I was deep into the third volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's life story, when I suddenly felt I could not stay one more minute with pre teenaged angst no matter how interesting it was.  And I was the Sarasota Library to pick up a book on Berlin of which I had recently a very favorable review, and my eye fell on a life of the Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, and I checked it out, figuring that this would be about as far as I could go from Norway.  Hugo Vickers, the author, is one of those fluent campy English writers whose perch is always inside the milieux of the aristocratic highborn.  The tone is that of a very well educated lady's maid whose concern is to protect the family and maintain the proprieties.  Vickers tells a tale of a woman much misunderstood, and it moves smoothly through her Southern childhood, many marriages to the last decades as she sat in their estate on the edge of the Boi du Boulogne and she began to lose her marbles.  Lots of gossip.  Then, to round things off, I picked up at the bookstore a biography of the Russian dissident, Stalinist fan, total nut, Manhattan thug, and heavy duty sex pot named Eddie or Edichka Limonov.  It reminds me of why I am dubious of all the Russian immigrants who poured into this country since Russian loosened its exit policies  Otherwise it is an astounding record of audacity, not the audacity of hope, but of impudence, pugnacity, and hormonal energy.  Knausgaard entitled his six volume piece "My Struggle," and that's what you could say about all three.  What tenacity, what yearnings, what triumphs!  Now I must begin to read the texts of the tragic dramas I shall be using in my course; I need a lot of refreshment after all these years of retirement.  More struggle, more audacity from Oedipus to Clytemnestra.  The same but different.

Fathers

I am into the third volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, the monumental fictionalized story of his life in six volumes, and in this part he returns to the world of his youth (he is seven in this narrative) whereas he started the first volume at the time the narrator was in his thirties with the death of his father whom he hated and who was indeed hateful, even if in other ways he was a tormented man who deserved the narrator's pity.  Sometimes it seems he also gave him his respect.  In this volume the father is endowed with all the authority one generally finds accorded to male figures who are the parents of children.  Father as the head of household.  Karl Ove's father is a brutal, cruel, cold authoritarian figure who punishes without mercy, will never hear of explanations for behavior, always suspicious, demanding the rituals of family love so as to justify his position.  He appalls me and I am always amazed that Karl Ove, although he fears the man does not expect anything better, does not expect his mother to intervene.  As I have remarked in another blog, I was struck in the film "Boyhood" by the indifferent and selfish father of the boy who is the protagonist, by the cruel, tyrannical and brutal step-fathers his mother inflicted upon him without ever seeming to stand up for her son.  My father died when I was six, and when he was alive I lived primarily in the nursery and rarely saw him.  So in effect I had no father.  I cannot imagine living in a house with an adult male figure, certainly not if they in any way resembled these men.  I had no father, and yet I became a father of four.  What kind of a father was I?  I remember any number of wonderful times, of adventures--we have traveled singly and together in any number of countries--, of dinner parties, conversations with every one of my children, singly and in groups, anguished talks, anxious talks, everything.  I have spent hours laughing with them.  I can distinctly remember getting angry with them.  But in what sense was I a father?  a head of the household?  As children did they tremble when I walked in the door?  What authority?  What special love?  How did I invent myself as a father? Most important did I make the rules?  lay down the law?  set the stage?  I fear that I saw family life too much as a party and not enough as a corporate enterprise. Last month when I traveled up to Canada to my granddaughter's wedding not only was I the oldest person at the gathering, I was very clearly the grandfather, just as last year at her brother's wedding and even more emphatically when the grandparents had their special moment of introduction into the ceremony and my husband and I walked down the aisle and took our places, I was a grandfather.  But I was in the company of three of my children so I was also a father.  A father?  I wonder how they the children see it.  But do I really want to know at this late date?

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

The other day I saw the British film "Pride," about the historically true situation when Margaret Thatcher was trying to starve the striking Welsh coal miners into submission, and a group of gay males in London, perceiving that their plight and that of the miners were similar began raising money for their cause, selecting a small village at random to be their beneficiary.  The miners of this little town at first resisted money from such a source, and the film is about the growing appreciation, understanding, and downright affection between the two groups.  It ends with the miners chartering three or four buses and coming to London to march with the gay males in a Pride parade.  It was at that point that I burst into tears in the cinema, such is my still unquenched yearning for straight, ordinary guy guys to give me respect and love.  And then the tears started to flow again today when I had a few minutes to kill and I watched and listened to Emmy Lou Harris, Dolly Parton, and Linda Ronstadt sing "The Sweetest Gift (A Mother's Smile)," all about a mother loving and forgiving her convict son even as she has gone on to heaven. Behind the tears was the wish that my mother had loved me like that, accepted me for being gay, looked down from heaven on her dear boy.  The tears gushed and gushed.  I quickly typed in Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette and heard the two of them go through the doeful repertoire of "D.I.V.O.R.C.E.," "I Don't Wanna Play House" and all the rest, and every regret I have ever had about my role in my failed marriage surfaced. It was a narcotic, there was no stopping me now  I went on to watch Susan Boyle triumphing in the talent show with that song from Les Mis, tubby middle aged woman that she was, and oh, so great a moment for her, and vicariously for me. Misfits of the world unite and triumph!  Finally, knowing that maybe this would be overdosing I watched the series of stills of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan replace each other as her voice sang out the song "Diamonds and Rust," and marveled at the two of them in the glamor of their youth and the freshness of their love affair.  And so I cried and cried at the sense of rueful regret and gentle yearning in the lyrics and in her voice.  Well, all this narcissism was not what Virgil was talking about with his famous "sunt lacrimae rerum," but, no matter what, there is nothing like a good cry to clean the nasal passages and clear the head.

When I Look At You My Heart Goes Pittypat

Colleges everywhere are wrestling with the etiquette of dating so that the partners, if they wish, may move onto sexual intercourse totally consensually.  Advice columns still have women writing in to say that their male colleagues make suggestive sexually charged observations on their physical appearance loudly and impertinently.  On a more serious level I have listened to presentations two years in a row now of women who run an agency to protect young female children at risk from enforced prostitution on the streets and in the massage parlors of Sarasota.  Through it all I marvel at the intensity of male sexual desire, not that I don't know it myself, from once having been a young virile fellow, but somehow when you gather these facts together from everywhere the thought becomes what is normal what is not.  In my own experience males almost universally are aroused by photos of sexually attractive women--many men need images in order to masturbate with maximum pleasure--and I think less from my experience and more from hearsay that the same would be said of images of sexual intercourse, and that goes for internet video representations.  I know that thirty years ago the owner of a dvd store in my upper class seriously academic neighborhood told me that the most profitable rentals were for porn to men, night after night after night, and I began to notice the heavy traffic of single men along about eight o'clock in the evening. They say internet porn is the most heavily trafficked area of the web. Women complain that males hit on them as they are out walking, males complain that women wear blouses without brassieres and low decolletage, women retort "it's my body, it's my right."  Women cannot sense the extraordinary surge in desire that accompanies a sudden glimpse of breast, inner thigh whatever, or in the case of the gay male, the sudden revelation of a thick well formed penis in the next urinal or the beautiful thighs peeking out of tennis shorts of the guy sitting nearby waiting for the court.  That's just part of being male.  Gay males are so used to repressing the feelings, knowing that they will be beaten or imprisoned--well, used to be true--if they act on that sudden surge of desire that they are at an advantage to the straight male who nowadays must see what he thinks are invitations everywhere one turns.  Ironically enough as I was listening to the presentations about the horrific conditions and threats that young girls face in the Sarasota area from predator males from would be pimps to active johns, I kept thinking that maybe the Muslim male apologists for the imposition of the veil were right: women need to be protected from male gazes.  And yet the challenge in our society is to remain open and free, and at the same to acknowledge that male sexual desire is a given in most every encounter, but manage to get males comfortable with repressing it, for decency's sake--their own among other things-- and for a woman's sense of security.   The first thing needs to be a more open acknowledgement that sexual desire is what fuels males most of their waking time.

Irony

It is the very essence of the professor's lecture style, certainly mine, in any case, so fearful was I that what I was saying was not being given the proper skepticism from my audience, since I, long before post modernist criticism was fully aware that the material I was offering for all the assurance of my years of study was in the end just so much opinion.  Mocking yourself while talking can be very off putting to those in your hearing since they are thus put off balance and don't know what to believe.  It is very unfair, but nonetheless, the very essence, as I say, not just of my delivery but of a great many people in the humanities.  It's just that no one is really sure that any of this is true.  I was made very conscious of my tendency to irony recently while traveling with some friends one of whom has the mental habit of an extremely literal mind.  So that when I would highlight the ironic stance by exaggerating in what I thought was an entirely obvious way some "truth" or another, she would respond anxiously inquiring as to the validity of so monstrous a misstatement rather than recognizing what I was doing at the outset, ah, poor lady.  It seems to me that gay persons have an especially ironic manner, that this is a tradition deriving from the years when gays were mostly in hiding and therefore everything they said on some level was a lie, and hence the motive to contrive to render truths ironically.  I have also often argued that gay males' incapacity to reproduce from the act of homosexual intercourse, undermines the orgasm, which at some level ought always to be understood as a biological act, and makes gay lovemaking however, emotionally and physically sincere, meaningful and rewarding, is on the teleologically biological level ironic.  The fact of the matter is that the ironic manner can end up being endlessly boring.  Think of George Sanders in "The Picture of Dorian Grey," or practically in every other film he was ever in.  The very master of the ironic stance.