My Mind Is A Blank

I am approaching the second meeting of the course I am teaching for eight meetings.  It is an overview of the dramatic tragic productions put on at the Greater Dionysia in Athens during the course of the fifth century BCE.  These texts are commonly just labeled "ancient Greek tragedy," which is okay as far as it goes but not really specific enough.  Well, enough of that; the inner pedant is speaking.  Each meeting lasts one hour and twenty minutes, and I am trying to recover the technique I possessed in my heyday of talking for that length of time from a conception filled out with all the appropriate details without recourse to text or notes.  It derives from the years in which I played roles on the state requiring me to memorize long swatches of dialogue.  For forty years the technique served me well, and I could range back and forth across the front of a classroom talking eloquently on texts and adducing facts and theories relating to them without having to peer down and shuffle through notes.  The whole idea was in my head; indeed, when sometimes picking up the subject at any point  in a conversation outside of the classroom my mind quickly found the substance that was relevant to the moment.  I have spent the last weeks assembling the ideas, reading the texts, and Friday I will be talking about Sophocles' Oeidpus the King and to a lesser degree Oedipus at Colonus.  I woke today thinking I can't remember my lines.  Yes, I know the plays but the details, the specifics, the nuances that I had so carefully teased out two weeks ago from my reading of the Greek text are gone from my head.  Luckily I wrote them all down as a precaution.  But that special sense of readiness which made the years of my teaching such a wonderful experience just is not there.  After twenty years, it has all changed.  I am going to take a break from writing this blog to concentrate on thinking out my reactions to the text for the course.

Martin Luther King Day

I know it's MLK, Jr. but it has always irked me that such a great figure in our history has that little verbal tic at the end of his name, even if, of course, it is true that his father was a powerful figure and deserves whatever attention is rightfully his by having a son named after him.  Be that as it may, I cannot stand the "Jr."  Yesterday was the holiday, and in Sarasota I only really became conscious of it, when I wanted to get some books at the public library and found it closed.  This edifice is in what passes for the center of downtown Sarasota, and suddenly I realized that it was damn quiet around there.  And still my mind was blank as I wheeled away off toward the University to the north where I wanted to do some paperwork in connection with the course I teach.  Halfway there I remembered that the University was going to be closed that day, and so turned back and went, as I so often do, on a small side street to avoid the fast moving packed lanes of the main drag.  Too much quick reflex action for me!  The area through which I was about to drive was home to most of Sarasota's African-American population; if it were not for the fact that a number of white persons live around there as well I might be tempted to call it a ghetto.  When I first moved here, I was surprised that one never saw a black person in our neighborhood  super market, neither a customer nor an employee, check out clerk, bagger, whatever, although in fact these positions in supermarkets down here are taken by superannuated white people who probably all have pensions from something else and this is an add-on.  As I drove yesterday I came to a smallish park and it was jammed; across the street a parking lot was filled.  Everyone there was black.  There was a kind of platform erected and I could see speeches were being given.  Yes, so this was the Martin Luther King Day celebration, a species of the apartheid he tried so valiantly and eloquently to destroy.  When I was teaching back in the day, so many of my white students were so proud of how they were offending their parents with their so-called radicalism.  I bought into it, do doubt about it, if only in growing my hair down to between my shoulder blades.  But the real radicals back then were the African American students who sat at the counter in that lunchroom in Greensboro North Carolina on February 1st 1960, a historic date that started a revolution, a first step toward a major integration, still so sadly incomplete over a half century later.  It obviously hasn't gone all that far if America's most famous and distinguished black man has a holiday named after him which nobody is going to observe except his own people.  Students read "Letter from a Birmingham Jail, " or the "I Have a Dream Speech," and then go back to their lives.  I do the same.  On Martin Luther King day maybe things are different elsewhere in this country.  The south, after all, is the south.  But I was ashamed as I drove past this park.

My Bad

Damn! Forgot to post again yesterday morning.  Up at the crack of dawn, worried about the reaction of the student to whom I sent an angry email about his talking and phoning in class, about the pages I handed out without page numbers which I and the students collectively mixed up in as many different variations as six pages can get.  Anxious about getting ready for our cleaning lady, the former Marine, tall and blonde and clearly no nonsense.  Anxious about an expedition upon which I planned to embark as soon as the CL arrived: a walking expedition to visit a new acquaintance.  We met him at a brunch, he is a widower, his husband of thirty seven years died a few years ago.  Lo and behold, he lives nearby.  Mapquest said one mile of walking would put me at his front door.  I penned a note, he replied with an invitation to stop by.  I was a nervous wreck.  What if I got half way there and was not able to make it any farther?  What if I fell?  At nine sharp I set off.  I budgeted three quarters of an hour.  I remember walking from our apartment in Rome near the Villa Torlonia down the Via Venti Settembre across the Tiber through Trastevere and up the Janiculo Jill to the American Academy or from our house near the Bayshore Highway in Palo Alto into the heart of the Stanford campus.  Each of those must have been four miles at least.  A little tiny mile?  Nothing.  Well, it took me thirty two minutes, the visit was a pleasure, I stayed thirty minutes, I declined his offer of a ride home and set off in my sturdy shoes.  Two weird things. One was the sidewalks along the way, perfectly made, devoid of cracks, but set into the radically sloping sides of the roadbed, clearly never ever meant for anyone to walk on, so Sarasota, where the idea of a person on foot is as quaint as using a bow and arrow.  The other weird thing, which indeed I remembered from my other moment in the burbs, id est, life in Palo Alto CA, was the perfectly manicured lawns, the one storey houses, the perfect plantings, the quiet, the absence of cars, children, adults--it was a holiday and no one seemed to exist.  Except for the women out walking their dogs.  At the sight of me they froze.  Hey, ladies, I am not black, I am not young and husky, I am a retired professor with a big pension, relax!  A few more years and they will all be packing heat and walking could be fatal.  But, come to think of it, I will probably be dead by then.  Thank God, my husband and I chose to live in the squalor of the proximity to the mall, the traffic, the people, the noise.  To be in city noise is very heaven, isn't that what Wordsworth wrote?

Back In The Saddle Again

I was going to open with "hard to believe it," but upon reflection I guess no,  it was all too inevitable that sooner or later given the chance to stand before a classroom and speak I would do so.  This time as a volunteer professor in an academy for mostly elderly people wanting to get off the golf course for an hour or so a week.  My stint is only eight weeks long, so not really the most profound thing I have ever done. I kept joking that this would be my "Norma Desmond" moment, but pathetically enough, it sort of is.  Eight hour and twenty minute sessions.  The first threw me off my feed I must say.  First off, I forgot that I would have to go to the central office to pick up the stuff they had photocopied for me.  And there I met a woman rushing in to drop my course because she said, until she discovered that I was in fact that instructor, the instructor in the room was dreadful.  Who could this person be, I asked myself as the normal confusion of an opening day was turning into psychic pandemonium.  Well, of course, the registrar or whoever in his/her infinite wisdom had changed the room assignments only in the preceding hour, and there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing.  It was only because a dear friend, a local academic habitué of the university, was by my side and guided me to the correct place that I did not lose it completely.  But the result was that I failed to perform the opening day administrative rituals along with handing out my photocopied material without taking the time to number the first ten pages, and within a very few moments I was so flummoxed that I ended up with my personal pages in as much disarray as my students.  All very unnerving for a grand control queen in the classroom whose teen years in theater had always guaranteed that every first day of class would become opening night on Broadway.  And just to make it all perfect, two old men sat in the corner in the back, the one having called the other on his cell, to shout out, obviously deaf as a coot, the correct room number, and other directional items, and the late comer to enter in full voice thanking his friend for the information.  I lost it, sad to say, but they were both so deaf that my shrill faggy huffing and puffing and outrage was altogether lost on them.  The subsequent hour was really quite good I think it is fair to say, as I both amused, instructed, and at the same time soothed my inner self.  The psychic effort was immense and I was entirely tired and shocked to discover that what I had certainly assumed was a good hour and a half of tense making lecturing was actually something about fifty five minutes.  And I had twenty five yet to go!  Ah, well, I wrote the talkative old fart an angry email telling him and friend to withdraw or change their ways.  My husband insisted that I could not address him as "you deaf old bastard."  Although he did say from the experience of twenty years teaching troublesome teenagers "you've got to nip their misbehaviour in the bud."  I'm ready to quit.  Seven more meetings.

All Was Not Well In Denmark

It's eight o'clock at night, and I have forgotten to post the blog this morning and now I am sitting at my computer after leaving the last few moments of a Danish film about Queen Caroline and her mad husband in the eighteenth century.  Somehow I had read that it ended happily when the queen and her lover poisoned her stark raving mad husband the king, but, no, as the film unrolled she and her lover were in fact tricked and lied to and cornered and the end of the film was very, very unhappy, and so I left the room as my husband murmured "wimp!."  All too true.  And I am devastated.  And it is just a film even if true to history.  Where is my critical distance?  What does it matter this love affair?  I want tap dancing, disco, smiles and laughter.  Ah, poor Caroline, poor Dr. Struensee, and those sad children.

The Naked Self

I recently attended a talk on the subject of the various failures of the contemporary American medical system.  One signal feature the speaker offered was the patient's presumed loss of dignity in the consulting room, one example being being that healthcare workers address patients by their given names.  I find this illustration odd.  The consulting room is not the same as a social event where societal patterns are reinforced, one of them being the use of surnames.  The consulting room is all about efficient action to increase well being, and I do not think it is in anyone's best interests to have to labor over the extraordinary variety of pronunciations of surnames in the USA. My given name is Charles.  I was raised in a very rigid class structure, and would have been startled to hear my mother addressed as Ruth by other than her intimates.  I as any pompous young professors was intoxicated with being addressed as Professor Beye, but not so pompous as to imagine the title and I were inseparable.  I will never forget when I once had to welcome various administrative figures into a meeting and one woman introduced herself to me with "How do you do?  I am Dean Smith," to which I could not resist replying "What an unusual first name!" and she didn't get it.  So if the hospital personnel want to call me Charles, okay.  The other feature stressed in the talk was the loss of dignity and person hood when wearing a hospital gown, presumably because there was none of the security of undergarments,  too much flesh showing through the cracks, that troublesome gap with the ass showing through the back, who knows?  Yes, it's nudity with a little cotton/poly cover.  And yet the diagnostic and healing process is focused on my body not my personality, and I may as well bare the flesh to make it easier.  I guess perhaps a lifetime of nude sexual encounters with a wide range of people has left me if with nothing else at least a sense that me nude is able to talk to another person clothed without a sense of loss.  And anal penetration is hardly going to be a surprise.  There's nothing like a digital exploration of your prostate up your rectum to put things into perspective, especially if you are otherwise engaged in a lively friendly conversation with your oncologist/urologist.  Since I have sometimes been connected with doctors from teaching hospitals I have been asked if I would mind if some youngster sit in the examination and in fact on more the one occasion participate.  So I have had a second digital examination from some sweet young thing (female; I have to say that because I get even more gushy over the cute young guys) while my doctor stands by talking about what the sensations the tip of her finger is encountering possibly mean.  It's like suddenly finding yourself in a stall in the mens room in speeding train at three in the morning pulled in there by a handsome rugged pullman porter who thought a connection of bare flesh between us might help to while away the midnight hours.  It's really all the same, I figure, so just relax.

Cleaning Up

I have been lying in bed in the dark of the early morning thinking of my day, trying to muster the mental energy for the final organization of the papers I will be using in the brief lecture series of eight sessions that commence on Friday.  On the one hand, what could be more reflexive action than talking of ancient Greek tragedy to a group, something I have done possibly thirty or forty times in the past years, yet, on the other,,--oh, that Greek insistence upon symmetry in thinking--it has been twenty years before since I stood before a class.  So the tingles of excitement and dread are animating, what? to jump up? no, to burrow deeper into the sheets in the darkened room and fantasize doing things.  My desk top is where I shall work, and at first I must confront the various papers lying on it.  This is always a moment of ridicule, should my husband become privy to my plans.  He points out that i have no organizational skills, or rather in his words, am a mess.  There are perhaps twenty to thirty notes to myself, flyers needing to be looked to, bank notices I can't quite yet absorb, that sort of thing, and since I don't really use a folder system they remain out and about for me to spy when the impulse to think about them grabs me.  This, my husband notes, is what is called "poor organization." But as I lie here I cannot help but think of him, Mr. Neat Desk, Mr. Former Assistant Superintendent of Schools.  Let's turn to the dining room table or better yet to the kitchen, to the refrigerator.  In the cold closet we will find the remains of oyster stuffing from Christmas dinner, of a dip from the same meal, of a variety of cooked and discarded items from other moments, all sinking into decay, which he cannot, no cannot throw out.  What is more the counters have small portions of well wrapped Italian Christmas bread now rigid as a board, the table we eat at has a large BJs bought container of peanuts now going stale,  I could continue this survey but you get the drift.  Here we see another form of organization which I handle with the disposal in the middle of the sink and the trash barrel by the door.  For some reason he is free to remark in condescending tones upon my desk's disorder, but woe for me should I bring up the rotting masses that needing discarding.  Throwing away food, profligate behavior, waste, the dread spectre of waste, and all I have done is point out some mold on a tired old fruit dessert that really needs to get shoved.   Neither of us can let go, but for each very different items are at stake.

The Straight And Narrow Path

It is fascinating to discover how many males who are vigorous opponents of gays turn out to have a hidden homosexual portion of their sexual repertoire.  It does indeed seem what so many claim that men who are nervous about their sexual orientation or deeply ashamed by it will act out their fears by vigorous public opposition.  I think the same could be said about the militant jihadists intent on blowing up the world, their murderous assaults everywhere covering a deep insecurity at the prospect of the modernity of the western world and its implications for their own personal life.  It is strange to me that the majority of Muslims who are entirely  secure in their beliefs and their interaction with the evolving global culture of modernity to not stand up and object, reject, seriously lash out against these terrorists.  I treasure the present Pope for saying in some discussion about issues with which the Catholic has doctrinal arguments "Who am I to judge?" giving the lie to all those puritan orthodox rigid narrow minded knee jerk religious zealots who insist that their road is the only road and no other path shall be trod.  He spoke as a human being where judgement of others can be set aside, where love and acceptance must be the norm.  In the same vein I will always treasure the response of Pontius Pilate reported in one of the Gospels who replied to Jesus when he said "I come with the truth"  "But what is truth?"

No Accounting For Tastes

My husband and I have a running battle over the film we will choose to watch through out television monitor after dinner most evenings.  He wants action film, science fiction film, I want dramas involving human reactions to each other.  Last night we watched "Hotel Rawanda" which depicted a truly horrendous human event, I kept running scenes from the Holocaust through my head, and deploring how the world yet again turned a blind eye to the massacre.  But I could not become engaged in the film, I did not find the development of the Don Cheadle character rich enough neither as he evolved into the savior of the refugees nor in his relationship with his wife; in the first instance his tendency to make nice as befits a luxury hotel manager motivates his humanitarian tendencies--let's keep things neat, quiet, and nice; and as a husband he was so strikingly like a modernized European or American as was the wife that that oddity was a character treat needing exploiting for me.  In sum the mass murder was horrendous, the failure of the UN and the west ghastly, the hotel manager and those who assisted him were heroic.  I didn't need the exposition in a two hour movie.  The night before we watched the Ivory-Merchant "Heat and Dust" in which a contemporary English woman's search for her ancestor's life in India is interwoven with the drama of that woman's entering as a bride into the life of the British colonials, her gradual rejection of it, and her surrender to the local Nawab, a shocking event in the rigid structured society of that time.  The film which drove my husband mad features, first of all, incredibly beautiful interiors and gorgeous clothing, then a very slow development of the heroine's revolt against her life in India, her gradual enchantment the Nawab, all of it couched in terms of personal beauty as both these actors are seductive and glorious.  The psychological reaction to everyone party to this growing attraction is well developed as is the parallel experience of the granddaughter in her Indian exploration of a historical fact and her own inner growth and development.  For me the story was interesting, although none of these people "mattered" in any way on either the world's stage or the smaller place of a little kingdom in India.  My husband claims I always like to look at movies featuring upper class people. I have to admit I like the refinements, details, and subtleties of conventional repressive manners among the so called upper classes, I like to watch the way they play out.  On the other hand, proof that I am not the star fucker he insists I am, I can scarcely endure that soap opera "Downton Abbey," so many gauche, vulgar, obvious behaviors coupled with such lack of imagination, and downright stupidity.  And for all his man of the people stance, he is glued to "Downton Abbey."  Curious

Girls

Someone told me that the Hannah Horvath character in "Girls," was informed at the end of the last season that she had been accepted into the Iowa Writers Workshop at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City.  Since that is my hometown, although now mostly a faded memory of the thirties and the forties, and SUI as it used to be styled, my alma mater, and faculty of the Workshop, such as Paul Engle and other legends were family friends, I felt obliged to take a wee interest. My husband and I had been much intrigued at the start of the first season, having only the most minimal contact with the type of persons depicted, but fascinated that such people were objects of interest, and also, of course, startled and charmed by Ms. Dunham's fearless display of her tiny tits. But we grew bored and disgusted with the young ladies, and stopped watching. Some of my projected fun collapsed when I learned that the administration at Iowa banned filming on the campus; still I was curious to see how the character would behave herself even in a faux Iowa and an imagined Workshop atmosphere.  To get ready for the Iowa experience we overcame our distaste  to try a few of the final episodes, .  The four girls have grown even more tedious than they were in years gone by, having become--hard to believe this possible--even more shallow and self-obsessed than before.  One named Marnie, the pretty one of the bunch, has kept her nice girl personality that goes well with her stunning looks, and is evidently so desperate for approval that she takes up with the former boyfriend of one of the other girls, not for a relationship but to get some sex with complicated motives.  Nothing like fucking a friend's boyfriend, someone you have known well from a different perspective, and better yet barging into his apartment and telling him to put up or shut up while marching into his bedroom and removing her clothing.  I know men do this all the time, and therefore to object or to criticize this woman is male chauvinist piggery.  And it really is not that big a deal, it's just that she is so "nice."  Actually sort of that brittle, good looking hard nice that I associate with sorority girls that I knew in the forties.  Much more fascinating was the Hannah character who got into the Writers Workshop.  For instance, it is evening, she is at the theater for the opening of a production of "Major Barbara" in which her boyfriend Adam has a big role, and of course his big chance. This is his big break and he has been avoiding her for weeks living at a friend's so he could work on his lines without distraction.  She has been enraged and stalks him constantly during this period.  Now opening night as he sits at his dressing table in a last minute moment of calming and centering, she marches in, and breaks his mood to tell him of her new triumph, she will be off to Iowa, and an entire new future will develop for them.  Moments before opening!  Oblivious!  At least thank god the Adam character has been given by Lena Dunham the lines he needs to deliver, telling the Hannah Horvath character how disruptive, manipulative, and subversive she is being.  And she does not understand!  I have to ask myself: Who are the people out there watching this series?  Do young women identify with these four dreadful girls? I say girls, because they all behave like five year olds.  Am I in some parallel universe?   The bigger mystery to me is how Lena Dunham could create this nasty, self-serving vacuous girl which the public thinks and she sometimes rather implies is based on herself, when as her artistic work proclaims she is not this girl.  Well, of course that is the parallel universe, Hannah Horvath, Lena Dunham, but why does the author do this?

Another Day, Another Lecture

I was lucky to find the intellectual love of my life at nineteen when I enrolled in Ancient Greek in college which led me into a career of teaching the Classics.  I had lost my faith in the Christian religion at sixteen, so my studies not only refreshed my intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities, it brought me into a new understanding of my universe.  After a rocky start teaching students who for the most part were uninterested in the ancient world, mostly because they were simply intellectually not awake, I began teaching at Stanford some of the brightest, most intellectually alert and inquiring that one could imagine.  It was the beginning of the sixties and American youth seemed to be waking up in many ways.  My love affair with my students continued for years until I was fifty, as I recall, by which time I was back east teaching the new phenomenon, suburban kids, raised between a 7 Eleven and a mall, far from the cultural, social, intellectual stimulation of cities and towns which the earlier generation had fed on.  These students for the most part were indifferent to what charm my teaching had once upon a time commanded, and I was no longer desperate for the spiritual nourishment which rejecting Redemption and taking up The Tragic Sense of Life has brought to me.  But at fifty I was too young to quit, so I soldiered on.  Luckily a very different kind of teaching position suddenly became available, rendered my life vibrant with possibilities, but I knew by the time I was in my early sixties that I was getting too old, too out of date, and those men and women before me, needed another point of view. (One could argue that the various critical theories emanating from Paris during these latter years and now mostly repudiated suggested that I was not out of date in any real sense of the word). I taught my last class shortly after I turned sixty five, and the central administration could scarcely conceal their joy at the thought that the enormous salary I commanded could be quartered to provide four new entry level teaching positions.  I wish that more of my colleagues would do this, if only for the benefit of the next generation of scholars.  It saddens me that there is a federal law prohibiting mandatory retirement, at least for college professors.  We are a strange breed, solo performers with next to no supervision, mostly prima donnas of one sort or another, and unlike the theater audience which can respond with boos, jeers, and catcalls, our student audiences know that we hand out their very much needed grades, so they sit through any kind of shit in silence.  Luckily for them nowadays they may bring their laptops to class, and as has been documented, a great number are busily entertaining themselves in a variety of ways as they sit before the teacher.  I have a friend who at nearly eighty no longer recognized one student from another, and was finally with infinite patience removed from teaching, but several years later still thinks he is on sabbatical.  A former colleague of mine, again eighty, used to stink of urine so strongly you could smell him coming into the library stacks.  Imagine what he must have been like in a small class!  These two, and a host of others, had once made notable contributions to the scholarship of the profession, and they were still teaching what they had thought up fifty years earlier.  Pathetic.  In a way for these old timers it is like the marathon dancer in "They Shoot Horses Don't They?" only it's not dancing for the money, but teaching for that fragile sense of self, desperate for that audience every day of their lives.  On an ironic note: I am volunteer teaching in a senior learning program for eight meetings on the subject of Greek Tragedy starting next week.

Surroundings Are So Important

We came down to Sarasota in 2008 after the economic collapse when expansion of the campus of the senior retirement home outside New York City into which we had planned to spend our remaining years fell through. In a fit of exasperation I took, as they say, a chunk of money out of the bank determined to get something in this warm climate, to assuage the disappointment of losing out on the proximity to my notion of the Center of the World.  We went with a real estate agent recommended by friends and she showed us three or four items in our modest price range.  We rejected stand alone smallish houses, one, because it made me think of raising four children, neighbors with children and dogs, the paraphernalia of another life, two, because my husband was done with doing home repair.  We looked at a condo building sandwiched between a parking lot for a mall and the faculty parking lot of a middle school, an unpromising location that was immediately attractive to us, and a mystery to everyone we know who visit us here.  Well, we liked being isolated away from anything else, floating on a sea of macadam and surrounded more immediately by trees, we liked being on the top floor and looking off over rooftops, we liked the nearby bus system and the noise of a city, both of us remembering times in our lives when we were lost in the immense silence of suburbia.  We liked being able to walk thither and yon to destinations like stores rather than staring at yet another clump of bushes.  Most of all I have grown to love the aesthetics that this location provides me.  I am a great fan of easel painting, in fact, our walls here are covered with paintings, and watercolors, and photographs, all in their rectangular frames.  Reality cut out and boundaries established, that gives me an enormous thrill.  I love Mondrian in another way or the early Kandinksy's oh, all sorts of things with thrilling interventions of line, edging, and shaping.  Here on our third floor I look in the morning from the balcony and there is the line of the roof of the middle school, impeccable in its neatness and precision, a dark shadow below and the sky every minute turning another shade of pink above, and the variant of the small clouds adding punctuation of softness into the hard edge aesthetic otherwise created.  In the evening I sit on my little balcony gazing off to the west and first I encounter the long horizontal of a roof top, above it another pink sky shading from faint to bold, more clouds, sometimes functioning as markers, and then there is here and there and one place or another a large palm tree whose fronds punctuate the whole in an entirely different way.  Closer to hand if I sit in another spot I can gaze into this through the medium of half opened blinds, and another criss-cross of definition is added to my visual pleasure.  But what about the beach and the open sea, friends gently ask, and I say skin cancer and the boredom of too much undefined open space.

The Real Thing

Once upon a time I lived in the provinces, a boyhood spent in Iowa.  And I learned from the serious attention we paid to the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, not to mention the Sunday New York Philharmonic coming over the airwaves at dinner after church, that Manhattan was where one was meant to be.  My oldest sister went there after college and never came home; a second sister went back and forth, and I spent half a year there when I was eighteen.  It has always saddened me that I did not stay on, that I did not get into the gay culture forming and growing stronger at that time, that I was too timid essentially to take up the challenge of a New York existence.  Later on I was based in Cambridge Massachusetts, definitely the timid man's place to try out culture, and  I was in New York a lot, trying to make up for the fact that years before when I was teaching in New Haven, only an hour and a half away, so immersed in young parenthood and my career was I, that I never once made it to the city to hear Maria Callas sing.  When I was in my mid-fifties and I moved down from Cambridge to teach in New York, I developed an obsession to see and hear everything, already formed and exercised in the previous decades of sporadic visits.  I think it was some kind of Iowa complex.  For several years I did manage to get to what everyone was talking about, out every night, afternoon museum visits, no stone left unturned.  Friends always remarked on this, strangers marveled that whatever they brought up, I already "knew" about it.  One day, and I remember it well--I was riding down an escalator in a department store--, it suddenly occurred to me that sooner or later I would die and then I would not "know" anything of the cultural scene.  What a relief!  I was free to ignore, forget, or dismiss anything and everything, just so that I remembered that what was important and first-rate was only to be found in Manhattan.  And then I grew old, and getting around was more of a chore than I had anticipated;  luckily I was now retired and had more time.  I still walked through the Park to the Metropolitan from my apartment, but it took longer and longer, and I grew less inclined, once I had gained the Upper East Side, to expend the extra effort in going to the other museums located nearby.  And then I grew older, and fearful of the ice and snow.  I remember one particularly vicious winter week when I was afraid to walk out onto Fifty Seventh Street for Carnegie Hall or down Broadway to the theater district,  just as I would not walk up Ninth Avenue to get to Lincoln Center.  I was a prisoner of the winter, so I moved to Sarasota, which I knew to be a place for the arts, theater, dance, symphony, opera, chamber music.  Still it is an interesting change.  Quite a lot to see and hear, but never or rarely, contemporary, certainly not avant garde nor even much to shake one up.  The Asolo Repertory Theater for instance is about to put on "The Matchmaker" and then some saucy W.S. Maugham comedy from the twenties; it's the culture of the fifties redux (well, look at the audience one might rejoin).  But then, I think to myself, just as existence when one is eighty five is more or less going through the motions of living, so Sarasota's cultural surround preserves the form if not the content of what we want to call culture.

The New Facism

Upon reflection most serious students of the contemporary American scene will have to admit that Mohammed Attta won his battle by virtue of the devastating effects upon the quality of American life created by the hysteria which was the aftermath of 9/11.  We live in a world where we are constantly directed by security to do this, do that, move here, move there, and we acquiesce.  Likewise the Silicon valley technologists have been complicit in eroding the independence and spontaneity and freewheeling behaviors that have always been true to the American character.  I speak because I am still exercised by my recent encounters with the world of Apple, beginning I guess yesterday when I went with my husband to buy a new computer.  The Apple store is housed in a gleaming new mall which is situated alongside an interstate and next to an exit, two of the most formidable forms of control in our contemporary world.  The interior of the mall, an endless succession of flat, aesthetically integrated facades that deny idiosyncracy, led us to the Apple store where a young man at the door with his Ipad at the ready entered my husband's name and directed where we were to stand and how many minutes we would have to wait.  Mission completed, today, while my husband wrestled with setting up his new computer,  I contacted Apple online because my Iphone refused to sync contact data and calendar data with my Imac.  First I went to Google to ask if there were some way to achieve this synchronicity without the hassle of contacting Apple.  Nichts.  So I went online and contacted Apple, which first asked me to check which was the problem.  Their language did not admit of an answer, so they next asked if I wanted to "chat."  To my affirmative answer there suddenly appeared on my screen a little box, a chat box, I guess, and there appeared a question about my concerns, and since there was no direction, I did what seemed obvious and typed in my reply in a box at the bottom.  Nothing happened except that every so often another message appeared from my Apple handler asking me why I did not reply to his/her chat.  Then the connection was broken.  I tried direct telephone and it rang and a man answered with so heavy a southern accent I could not understand a word he was saying.  I did finally make out that the failure to sync could be due to many things.  I did not feel I was up to going through the various solutions (push this, check that, new screen, download, etc. I was definitely feeling ill), told this man that I needed to talk to somebody face en face, and he finally understood.  We hung up.  I went to Google, checked out the website for the local Apple store, went to their menu, asked for an appointment at the Genius bar, and was told that they were not taking reservations.  Apple then sent me an email with the sadistic and degrading legend "Thanks for contacting us."  End of story.  Why does the fabled magic of capitalism not created an alternative to this controlling monster?  I read the biography of Steve Jobs and he lives on in these machines. 

Winter Paradise In The Sunshine

Sarasota must have been the charming center of a delightful landscape back when John Ringling built his house and mansion, Mrs. Potter Palmer came down from Chicago and built her mansion, and a man named Burns put up a number of cottages in charming little streets, all of which survive to this day.  As readers of the newspapers must know Florida has now surpassed New York State in the number of inhabitants.  The prevailing philosophy of the state is loathing of government control; everyone wants to have a gun on his or her person whether in the woods, in a restaurant, a church, a school or on the front seat of the pickup truck.  And this vehicle, thanks to another stand off with government, is not inspected, and is free to belch its fumes, as indeed most cars do.  Motorcycles are everywhere; you don't need to read bumper stickers to know this, the incredible noise proclaims it.  Motorcycle noise is to straight men what tights pants are to gays: it shows off their virility, or at least perceived.  To make the motorcycle all the more butch, some one of the governors awhile ago cancelled the law requiring cyclists to wear helmets.  Just another cross for the overburdened emergency rooms to bear, stretched as they are with a population underpaid and without health insurance.  But hey, there's always Siesta Key and Longboat Key, and various other ghettos, with populations so rich, in houses so large, that it is truly another universe.  The charm of old downtown Sarasota is being eroded by the mindless city permission to developers to build towers for the rich, here there and everywhere, springing up, grotesquely, incongruously looming over the charming real estate of yesteryear.  Pretty soon it will be like 72nd and Broadway where the monstrously large populations of all the towers Donald Trump was given permission to build along the West Side Highway flow into the miniscule IRT subway stop.  One wonders where the increased population will dine out; lines, reservation tension, frenzy to turn the tables over fast, ah, well, larger profits.  The somewhat quaint down town area is fenced in by a number of multi-lane--I would call them highways--avenues upon which ceaseless heavy traffic bumper to bumper flows at a ceaseless forty five miles per hour, the worst of them all being historic Tamiami Trail.  Woe to them that would cross these roads on foot, which I do daily to walk to my gym.  Turn right on red is the law down here, more freedom from government control, and no one looks up from their texting to consider objects in the pedestrian cross walks.  Knowing the statistics for pedestrian deaths in Florida, I have devised a maneuver of extreme caution, which I hope will see me through my remaining days.  I press the pedestrian walk light.  Do not move from the curb until it is clearly illuminated, then look to my left, wait until I have established eye contact with the driver waiting--and I use the word loosely--to turn right, then signaling with my arms by waving vigorously, I then step off the curb, and as I go along I keep close tabs on cars coming from the other direction and turning right into where I am walking and I keep an eye for maverick turns from any direction.  But if you come, don't miss the glistening white high rise condos facing the marina along Tamiami Trail studded with giant palm trees.  The bay glitters, the white gleams, the sky is blue, and in some funny way it looks exactly like the Boulevard des Anglais or whatever it is called in Nice.  Quelle beauté!

Paris In The Spring

Well, it was really only mid-March, twenty five years ago, and my husband--then a very, very new friend--and I were ensconced in the Hotel St. Germaine, on the Rue de Bac.  Breakfast time, and there was a knock at our hotel room door, which I jumping out of bed, rushed to open.  There stood a stout lady in uniform bearing our breakfast tray who, as she entered, trumpeted, "Bonjour, Madame et Monsieur", then looking more closely at the other figure in the bed, drew a breath and came out with "Bonjour, Messieurs."  The next morning, the knock again, I opened, and she was in the middle of "Bonjour, Madame et Mo---" stopped, and managed her "Messieurs."  The third morning, as I opened the door she smiled triumphantly as she proudly proclaimed, "Bonjour Messieurs." Later on one of those days we were in a very elegant patisserie; my husband always laughs and says he will never forget the shock that ran through the assembled ladies, staff and customers, everyone dressed with the elegant and compulsory neck scarf, when as the woman who waited on us began to wrap up a scone which I had bought to munch on I called out in my impeccable French.  "Ça n'est pas necessaire, Madame.  Je l'achetée pour manger dans la rue."  In those days eating on the street was an unpardonable vulgarism, certainly never encountered the Rue de Rivoli.  The ladies drew back fascinated to be in the presence of a monster so naive that he did not even scruple to admit this horrid truth.  Mais, il est americain. vous savez, pour cette chose rien n'est impossible."  As I recounted in the memoir, at one point we sat on a bench by the Seine and gazed into each other's eyes and kissed.  The crowd aboard a passing one of those Batteaux Mouches applauded.  We are remembering out trip this week having congratulated ourselves at surviving twenty five years.  At a party last week amid a crowd of heterosexual couples, none of them  could claim such connubial longevity.  Extraordinaire!

The Cleaning Lady

Yes, it always a question whether the rigorous straightening up and organizing of everything in our house before the arrival of the powerful, smart young lady--a former military officer-- who cleans for us is worth all the effort.  We have always been intimidated by our cleaning ladies, only once relaxed when we had instead a cleaning man, a slightly rotund blonde youth who wore a black spandex suit and called me "Doll."  This morning we were busy with the cleaning and then hustling ourselves out of the place and to the gym so as "not to be in the way."  I, as they say in Iowa, clean forgot my blog.
Better luck tomorrow.

You're Bleeding

A few hours ago I stopped at a nearby copy shop to get an estimate and as I lounged against the counter waiting for a clerk I heard a voice saying softly:  "You're bleeding."  It was a young man nearby using the copying machine.  I knew right away what he meant, and looked down over my exposed body parts, and sure enough there was blood trickling out of a small gash on my right arm below the elbow.  In my general unsteadiness I often bump against the frame of doors as I walk into places; it must have happened here.  The rich flow of red blood was moving down my arm in a dramatic way.  "The bathroom's over there," said a clerk who had just arrived at the  counter to help me.  "It's either blood thinners or a stroke," I said as I went in to get some tissue, but realized that that kind of gallows humor does not work so well with the young who firm of mind, body, and soul cannot imagine the disintegration the lies ahead of them.  I have eighty five year old tissue thin skin which rips at the slightest provocation and the blood conduits beneath are only too happy to release their liquids.  A year ago whilst boarding a subway at Columbus Circle enroute to Grand Central Station, I was severely jostled by a wheelchair and knocked against a metal pillar while waiting to board.  Only when I was seated on the train did feel the unaccustomed warmth on my arm, looked down and perceived the blood flowing, indeed more copiously than usual--it must have been a large tear--, and I had no tissue.  My respectability drained from me along with the blood.  What could he be, I could imagine my fellow passengers asking themselves, some old wino, homeless, derelict, pathetic!  Desperate to staunch the flow, plus eliminate the evidence, I, like any dog or cat, began to lick my arm, grotesque I know, but a normal human reaction, no?  As I discovered later some of the blood adhered to the skin around my mouth, ugh!  After a ride to 42nd street, a transfer to the Shuttle Train, I arrived at Grand Central, by now, with bits of evidence of blood here there and everywhere, still licking away, and shunned by one and all.  I raced downstairs to where I knew the mens room was located, pushed the waiting occupants aside, barged into a stall, grabbed at the toilet paper, oblivious to the seated astonished figure trying to take a crap in peace.  Outside at the mirrors over the sink I applied copious amounts of tissue, wadded up more to put into my pockets, regained my composure, met my friend at Track #46, and went off with her to a delightful meal with her family in the burbs.  Another day in the life of an old timer.

Flowers

The White Flower Farm Spring 2015 Garden Book has arrived in my mailbox, conjuring up the years, decades, really,  in which I opened it to seek inspiration for the coming growing season, to identify through the photographs flowers I had seen in other gardens but failed to remember the names.  More than that, it is a catalogue that one can spend the day with, large, detailed, entirely helpful, and with any number of photographs of beds of flowers grown on their extensive estate in Litchfield Connecticut.  These more than anything else are the true porn for a gardener; I have pondered those photos year in year out and sick with desire imagined the plants, the flowers, the patches of sun and the tender shade as being possible for me in my humble plot of land.  My real strength, however, came from a nursery in Hingham to which in the first year of our ownership of our new house at the seashore I trekked again and again to get advice, and buy and buy and buy flats of flowers, shrubs, everything that was blooming so dramatically and seemed destined for my space.  It was disconcerting after spending upwards of a thousand dollars, or so I imagined, to read an interview with one of the nursery's owners who insisted that anyone who would start a garden in such a severe drought year needed his head to be examined.  So said the heroin dealer about the addict he had created.  Still and all, despite it all, we watered and watered with brackish water from an eight foot deep well we had dug, close enough to the ocean to have an eternal supply.  Ten years later we had covered almost all the space of what had been sparse grass with stone pavements, raised beds, geometric arrangements with a fountain at its center.  Forsythia succeeded to lilac and in turn came wisteria followed by peonies, then roses, fifteen bushes of them, then the great buddleia plants with their myriad purple blossoms, standing tall over the beds of phlox, oh, every conceivable plant designed to bring color and variety straight through to the end of October.  It is odd to live now with my third floor terrace enhanced by an etagere holding terra cotta pots of geraniums, by a large terra cotta pot containing a variety of succulents and a large opulent and vulgar and thus "fun" urn on a pedestal containing a rather large species of fern.  I turn the pages of the White Flower Catalogue as though viewing a distant exotic land which I only dimly remember.  I wonder if the new owners, an innocent young couple, have been able to hold their own with the pergola covered with the most aggressive wisteria I have ever known, demanding cutting back at least once a week or seeing the tendrils reach the gutters on the side of the roof, with the de-buding of all those roses, the phlox, oh, I cannot even imagine it all now, it was an all day every day job from May through September, for two people who were not working.  I sit on my little third floor terrace in the morning coffee in hand gazing at the geranium blossoms and the weird shapes of the succulents in the pot.  Not quite the same as sitting on a bench amid blossoms staring at the water making its plash (as Henry James would say) into the fountain basins.  But I look at the clouds scudding overhead and it is good.

Power And Violence

My husband wants us to watch "The Godfather " Part Two this evening and I am resisting.  A few days ago I brought out a rather weak Ivory-Merchant film of a Jean Rhys novel called "Quartette" about a sadistic rapist (only in the twenties they called it a rich man having his way with one of his young friends), his constantly tortured compliant wife, and the young girl who at least as the film depicts her is both repelled and fascinated by what they used to call the cad until she finally kills herself as did his previous victim.  The film is static, I agree with its critics, but of course beautifully made and beautifully acted.  But we were both bored by it, and I was intimidated by hubby's disdain and we turned the monitor off.  Next night he got me to watch the first part of the Godfather trilogy.  I really did not want to.  I am tired of brutality, don't want to watch "The Sopranos" ever again, I think.  I cannot get out of my mind, Tony strangling the informer when he and Meadow are visiting a college in Maine, will never forget Drea being dragged across the ground to her death, the strangling of Christopher, and these images are there along with a lot I have manufactured from reading The Kindly Ones, naked Jewish women being forced to run as the SS soldiers shot at them, or maybe I have seen that in a movie--naked women running uphill in a cattle run. Of course, I saw all those black and white news reels when the camps were first liberated.  I  know I saw the video clip of the American Army helicopter with the boys shooting down at a family in Iraq out on the street, killing the kids among others, on the very vague suspicion that they were all harboring weapons, and saying when told that they had just blasted a couple of kids along with the adults "Well, hell, they shouldn't a brought their kids along."  I have that in my head.  Now my husband wants me to see the film "Sniper" but I saw the clip in Coming Attractions yesterday, blowing away the Muslim woman and her child .  I've read descriptions of torture at Guantanamo and I've heard Cheney say he'd do it all over again, watched the bombs falling on the people in the Gaza strip, and I'm one of those people it doesn't go out of my head.  I think of a student who'd been in some invasion we had in the Dominican Republic a long time ago and when I oh, so stupidly asked if he had ever killed anyone described picking guys off a distant ridge running along in silhouette and say it was like a shooting gallery, in his memory forever.  And I can never forget the women who have described to me being gang raped, friends, brave ladies, nor the student prisoner I had when I volunteered in teaching in prison who quietly told me quite unbidden in detail how he had surprised a woman at a bus stop dragged her somewhere nearby and raped her.  I was classified 4F so I have never served in the army, led a very cushy life, protected in every way, really.  My husband can't get enough of violence and brutality on the silver screen, well, he's at one with everyone else in America.  Maybe if I just drank more when those films come on.  Last night I stared in disbelief at Diane Keaton playing Michael Corleone's wife; she was in "Annie Hall" and is still here such a strong, well-mannered principled WASP lady; never would she have married him, certainly never would she have submitted to the demands of his world, never would she have sat around with his vulgar relatives, never would her parents or her brother allow such an environment for her or her issue.  Puzo, Coppola, clearly have never emerged from their own ghetto long enough to see how the other half lives.

The Women And The Men A Very Long Blog For The New Year

I grew up in a home with four sisters, two live-in women servants, two or more who came to work daily, and a widowed mother who directed all the house activities.  Because she grew lonely eating alone, she had us six siblings join her for meals.  Thus it was from the age of six on I was immersed utterly in a woman's world (my brother, seven years older, avoided the family life as much as he could with his persistent pursuit of athletic success at school).  Being crippled kept from the masculine playing field, and home reading books.  In my home I saw a powerful woman running a complicated show, who, however, only when necessary actually involved herself in the day to day details.  Apart from shopping. I often accompanied her to the various small shops which preceded the invention of the supermarket where we bought the different ingredients that made up our daily meals.  She alone knew the right cut of standing rib roast, the perfect ripeness of the pears and peaches; it poured down from her as a mystical aura.  Choosing food was sacred, something I took over when I lived with my four children in Rome years later, and shopped daily with my string bag.  Mother was my model of an adult human being--in command, respected (she was the president of the school board, a much socially invited faculty widow), although I knew that she thought males like my father and my uncles were what made the world go around, and that my brother would be a surgeon like his father, and I would be, well . . .the decision was out on that considering what a poufta I was clearly turning into (concern registered through brows knitted together in consternation, nothing said).  My first wife was truly brilliant, an unusual thinker, taken to makeup and glamor, and dropping out of college once she got a husband who would support her.  She had never thought of career, she'd thought of everything else, in what she read, looked at, walked through.  She was an original, a provocation, only like my mother in the sense you couldn't mistake her in the room.  She was happy to leave the idea of working for a living to men, thought it their problem, not hers. I was going to become the professor; she would sit home reading novels once I was settled into a job with my PhD.  Her death left an immediate and huge vacuum in my spiritual life, and indeed, economically, since she ironically had been supporting me through graduate school.  My second wife was a determined student architect when I met her, and I gloried in everything she told me about the field, and the efforts and career projections to which she introduced me.  Our ignorance of birth control and our constant sexual intercourse found us with four of the most adorable boys and girls one could want who have never  been less than wonderful and perfect even as they approach the grand age of sixty.  But they were not expected--there were no pills back then, condoms disdained, and diaphragms ineptly applied.  Four babies and one miscarriage in five years.  Changed abruptly our thoughts on life.  The first ten years we struggled with changing diapers, feeding babies, lugging home groceries, cleaning the house, washing the clothes, preparing classes, teaching classes, researching and writing a PhD dissertation.  Nothing in our parental homes prepared us for this dramatic change and inversion, indeed perversion of our lives, but we stuck it out.  Luckily our children were robust little darlings and always precious and fun even when tiresome burdens.  And when you are still in your twenties despite the constant pressures and distractions you can usually find some moment in the day for a quick shag, even if, when finally horizontal and the lights turned off in nightime's quiet, the tired brain says sleep often before the orgasms came to release the woes of the day.  But things righted themselves.  I took over a lot of housekeeping after the first ten years, the live in student helper was replaced by a mature cleaning lady who came by afternoons, my bride got out her pencils, and the professional clothes and went back to work.  It was pretty much my house now, with an assist from the mom.  It's a trajectory that is possible for any male/female couple, just first finding the right job situations.  The point of this long winded blog is that if a male will start out with a firm understanding that it takes two people to run a household then as circumstances change, he is prepared to take over more and more of the housekeeping and subtly managing his outside employment to fit these home needs.  I grant you that a machinist on the assembly line does not have the luxury of home working conditions that I had.  But I think for more men than can be imagined adjustments can be made; some might opt for the cleaning and dusting rather than my forte, the shopping and cooking.  The dialogue with the employer must be started day one, the idea must be planted in graduate school even before. It must be seen as normal that any male is fully capable of being a homemaker.  And the great thing is, and I felt  it at my granddaughter's wedding this summer as I looked at my middle aged kids, how close we were daddy and kiddies, the bonds of the experiences we had together, the hours we spent in the kitchen together, traveling in europe together, crying on each other's shoulder.  I am very very lucky.