Them And Us

I have been reading my sister Holly's journal she kept in the late forties when she lived in Greenwich Village with her husband in a one room basement apartment.  They were the proverbial starving artists, she trying to write and sell her stuff, he painting and printmaking, not very successful at all.  A bitter, desperate existence a lot of the time, punctuated by jolly drinking parties at the White Horse Tavern nearby, not yet made famous by Dylan Thomas' drunken nights there.  Things were cheaper then by far, everyone pooled their funds also.  She writes endlessly of the Irish immigrant dockworkers, their drunken behaviors, the husbands beating their wives, the wives beating their children, how it shocked her coming from an supper middle class WASP family of the Midwest.  Coincidentally my husband and I just went to a local production of Arthur Miller's "A View From The Bridge" where the same desperation and cruelties are played out in a family of Italian immigrant dockworkers, almost contemporaneous also in time.  It made me think of my own grandfather, a teenage immigrant from northern Germany, who came alone with his cousin, got themselves across half the continent by walking and working for lodging and food, separated in Chicago, the cousin went on to Iowa started farming in a German community and when his family entered again in our narrative a century later they were prosperous farmers.  Meanwhile my grandfather at nineteen enlisted in the Union Army in the contingent from Illinois, learned fluent English, came back to Chicago, hitched his wagon to a local businessman, married the daughter's friend visiting from Boston, and fathered eight or so children, becoming a successful businessman in his own right.  The family took on the coloration of the mother's Boston manner--to hear my mother, her daughter in law tell it, something out of Edith Wharton's milieu.  I only remember her high falutin' Boston accent, and I have a photo of her at the silver tea urn, serving to a bunch of ladies--tres genteel!  No, longshoreman from the New York harbor in this image!  But don't forget the German immigrant whose father back in the old country was a farmer--just don't mention it.  There were plenty of people of Irish descent in Iowa, and I met them when I switched to the public high school, and at the same time discovered my mother's prejudice against them, when I mentioned the Celtic names of some of my new friends.  "Oh, she's Irish."  "Isn't that an Irish name?" People of Italian origin were not so common.  I was first introduced to the notion of "Italian' when as fourteen I started on a paper route not too far from my home, delivering the eighty-five papers from a bag slung over my shoulders on foot or by bicycle, depending on the weather, and when my mother scanning the list of my customers spotted what she claimed was an Italian name, she determined that on Friday when it came time for me to collect from house to house the thirty five cents price of the weekly delivery, she would come and stand down at the foot of their sidewalk near the street so that they could see "who you were."  Otherwise, she claimed, "those people don't always pay."  How awful to infect a child with a prejudice, but oddly enough my burgeoning erotic interest in males and the inclination of so many of these--in mother's eyes--questionable ethnics to satisfy their own emerging lusts with me meant that I never really developed any prejudice until I was in graduate school at Harvard which in those days sat like a castle with the moat drawn up as protection from "le peuple" of Boston.

Degas, Manet, and Homer

I am lost in the world of art right now what with reading Sebastian Smee's book about some celebrated rivalries between major artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most recently that between Manet and Degas.  It is extraordinary to see bourgeois males dressed in their city clothes, frock coats and top hats, in situations which I should find so uncomfortable, too hot, stuffy, liable to be mussed, spilled on.  Here in Sarasota it is a burden for me to put on long pants; I have gone completely native.  Thus the paintings of Degas and Manet depicting Parisians living their daily lives reflect a world as foreign as that of ancient Rome, and it is always a shock to reflect that these austere and elegant males so handsomely portrayed were forever pulling down or off some or all of these items of clothing for the incessant pursuit of their manly lusts with the many women of the demimonde who were available to them.  What a difference the zipper and y-front underwear have made for men of action!  This is really an aside, for, truth to tell, I am ennobled by the constant perusal of so much beauty as revealed and shaped by these two supreme painters.  I am so happy that I saved the catalogues of so many great exhibitions over the past forty years.  But now indeed I must set the nineteenth century aside and proceed with my lectures notes for my Odyssey course which begins in two weeks, install myself once more into ancient Homeric Greece which is as much or even more my fantasy as historical fact.

A Charmed Life As A Writer

A friend emailed me to ask if it were true that my novelist cousin used the famous and powerful Binky Urban as her literary agent, and I had to say yes, and what is more she once represented me on a book deal.  Wow! was the reply.  It made me think my career over, and I have to say, I've led a charmed life.  Nowadays writers outside of the academic market, i.e., university presses, struggle to find an agent to represent them, mailing their manuscripts  over and over again endlessly, facing a million rejections until they, if lucky, get a fit.  Way back when I thought to write a commercial book about the Homeric epics. I had taught the poems several times in humanities courses to college versions of the great unwashed, as I contemptuously like to refer to "le peuple," those who are not tuned into the literary and cultural currents of our day, and who look at me stupidly when I make what I think is a sparkling remark on what I have just noticed in the TLS, the LRB, the NYReview--the list is endless.  So I wrote up a specimen chapter based on my lecture notes and innocently mailed it off to Doubleday.  Innocently or mindlessly?  I knew that the publishing house had started a new series called Anchor Books, paperbacks for the literati and intelligentsia, and had the presumption to believe that someone in the office would open the package with my manuscript and read it.  Unsolicited.  Stupid of me perhaps, but this was 1964 and that's exactly what happened, and in time I received a reply from a young editor who took me.  I wrote the book, they published it; it stayed in print through several printings.  Then I wrote another book at their request on ancient Greek literature in general which was contracted to a friend of mine who died in a motorcycle accident.  It did well, eventually, even translated into Italian where I established some connections while there on sabbatical, and then it was  reprinted after some serious editing by a university press here.  Then John Gardener the novelist and critic wanted a book on Apollonius Rhodius for his literary series, and someone mentioned me, and he read my stuff or some of it, and I got the contract.  No sooner did I finish that than my student and friend who had become the publisher of a very large new commercial press asked me to write an ironic pseudo biography of Odysseus which was lots of fun.  For this high powered enterprise my friend insisted that I find an agent to negotiate the contract and I, thinking of my cousin, suggested Binky Urban. I was that naive; it was like a novitiate suggesting the Pope officiate at his ordination.  But she accepted, and I am sure got me much more money than the publishing anticipated for this item.  There were various other books along the way all of them at the suggestion of the press involved, all culminating in the publication of a memoir which was picked up by the supremely elegant Farrar, Straus, and  Giroux because its editor and publisher had it brought to his attention twice in a decade at a cocktail party and at a dinner party.  The decade interval at which he first rejected it and then had second thoughts gave me the chance to rethink it and add another chapter of later events.  Everything turned out just hunky dory.  Amazing.

The Monk In His Cell

My bedroom here on the third floor of our U-shaped complex is on the inner side facing the courtyard, and since we are on the north end out beyond through the trees to what is in fact a parking lot for a mall but comes through as an indiscriminate mass of open space broken by massing branches and leaves of live oak trees.  A nature scene, really, punctuated in the farther distance by the occasional palm standing very tall and solitary.  Down close, of course, it transforms itself in the squalor of mall parking lot and makes the residence less than desirable I should imagine.  We love it.  When we sold the big place in Cambridge I got a bookseller to take my library for a very good price.  Here I have only kept my art books and a few Greek and Latin texts.  Richard is now collecting DVDs as though he were going to open a store.  That's his compulsion; we do not discuss it.  Back to my subject, if it could be said that I have one.  Off my bedroom is a lanai reached through sliding glasss doors; this is a small screened in porch where I had two canvas chairs and lots of relatively ugly Florida flowering plants which look to be made of papier maché and rubber, take little water, and stay in full bloom for months.  It is a joy, however, to sit out there in the early morning and at sunset, and indeed later in the night when the moon shines down; the breezes off the Gulf are always splendid, the changing colors of the changing cloud formations are endlessly fascinating and beautiful.  I do not go out to walk, except for pacing back and forth on the galleria outside the front door.  Surprising how richer my monk's cell is what with the Sarasota public library, the New College Library, richer, I say, than I would have thought, but of course lacking the resources of Harvard's Widener Library in proximity to which I spent fifty or sixty years.  I have brought a considerable portion of the art I collected over a lifetime, spread on the walls of our two units, crowded together salon style from ceiling to the level of furniture.  I can sit for hours looking at a painting, with the same concentrated gaze i give the moon and the stars and the clouds.  I am at rest, I guess, although the anxiety and incipient terror which is the curse of my personality means that I shall never be satisfied or happy.  The Carthusian monks in their cells in the Grand Chartreuse high in the mountains in that documentary "Into The Grand Silence" or whatever it was,  my ambition to be like them.

Looking Through Art Books

My daughter gave me Sebastian Smee's fascinating book about rivalries between artists, Lucien Freud, for instance, and Francis Bacon, or Manet and Degas, for which Smee set the situation up by referencing the work of Ingres, perhaps the most celebrated and accomplished draftsman since the lead pencil was invented.  Luckily I have gathered over the years the catalogues of all the major exhibitions from the Hermitage to the Prado to the Louvre to the Met, oh, I could pretentiously go on for some time.  Shelf upon shelf groan in my living room with these great tomes which even hard bound I can scarcely lift, especially not now in my extreme dotage.  Luckily Richard is here to lift a great weight of them down at once.  I well remember an old bibulous dowager in Cambridge who fell on the stairs and broke her neck carrying, God bless her!, a case of good burgundy up from her cellar.  Way to go, dear!  I have been spending the last few days leafing through a gigantic catalogue of a Ingres portraits put on about twenty years ago at the Met.  There is a lot of Ingres in the States so that the Met was able to borrow freely, and the show of the drawings is unprecedentedly large.  Apart from the breathtaking skill and control exhibited in every drawing there is nothing more fun for someone who grew up gossiping in a small Iowa town than to read the capacious entries on each entry detailing in what can be considered a small town's gossiper every detail of their legitimate relationships, the illicit ones, the children, the maiden aunts, the friends, who was helping whom get ahead at court, all the background detail that then come to life so brilliantly in the eyes, the smiles, the creases around the mouth, the gesture of the hands.  It is soap opera of a very exalted kind avant la lettre

Going To The Pictures

My small hometown had three movie theaters, and because it was a university town with a large component of European refugee faculty one of the three showed foreign films almost exclusively.  Like every teenager I went to the movies a lot, all the new releases and lots of foreign films too because of my older sister's encouragement in that direction. There was no television on those days.  Every Sunday afternoon we gathered in my late father's study, kept just as he left it when he died in an accident in the mid thirties, and listened to the radio programs designed for children it seems to me.  I don't remember them now.  Today is Christmas and my husband and I decided to break the tedium of a holiday not observed by going to the "art" cinema here which offers a meagre menu of serious films.  Today we were going to see "Manchester By The Sea" I must admit with some trepidation as we had been warned again and again how depressing it was, what a downer it would be for us.  And in the end we did not go but instead stayed inside to watch more of our favorite television series.  The Lonergan film is coming on television in a couple of months and we shall wait for that.  I find it shocking to confess to this, but the fact of the matter is, we don't much like going to movie theaters anymore.  There's the talking, the rustling of papers, oh, all kinds o distraction.  Am I just growing dreadfully neurasthenic?  Are we, I should say, since my husband is far more disturbed by distraction.  I cannot bear to surrender to depression and sadness and to have the mood broken by whispering, or even worse outright talking from old people who have no notion they are doing so?  I remember when first I encountered this.  It was the chamber music concerts on Sunday afternoon, done by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and all these dear old people had toddled down from the Upper West Side, and as they sat and listened, they would loudly comment upon the instruments, the technique, completely oblivious to the fact that they were not at home on their sofa in front of the telly.  No, better to stay home, keep silence.  As it is I have some art books I have dragged down from the shelf, Ingres, Manet, Degas, to keep with reading Sebastian Smee's fascinating study of rivalry in the art world.  Right now it's the latter two I just mentioned who feature in his second chapter.  Then we can eat something, I'll have a little vodka and triple sec, and then a little of our favorite "Vera."  And so the day goes by.

Chosts of Christmas Past

The elementary school I attended was attached to the high school, the entire building housing this enterprise was built against the side of a hill overlooking the Iowa River.  The last day before the beginning of the Christmas school vacation.  We all stood attentively in our class home room, and at a given signal began to sing a Christmas carol for which we had rehearsed.  While singing we followed our teacher out the door and proceeded to climb the stairs toward the higher grades whom we could hear distantly singing out hymn as well.  Then we moved onto another hymn, ever climbing higher and joining more and more classrooms pouring out into the hall and the volume of singing swelled until we reached the high school level where the students because of their maturity provided extra volume and body to the singing.  It was a dramatic actualization of any number of ideas associated with the Christian story and I know that we little ones were mightily impressed by the powerful qualities being brought to bear on Christmas.  This ritual left me dazzled.  Next was the Night Before Christmas when we were allowed to stay up to hang our stockings along the mantelpiece in the living room plus enjoy a late night supper set at the dining room table before the older members of the family went off to celebrate Midnight Mass at the Episcopal Church.  Oyster stew was a centerpiece of this supper, and it is hard at this remove to imagine that this child eagerly slurped it up but such was the case.  In the morning we raced downstairs in our pajamas and tore at our stockings filled magically during the night with all kinds of goodies.  Then we paused, dressed, at a proper breakfast, and then lined up, marched up to the nursery where lo and behold was a large tree decorated with the most lavish decorations, intricately carved pieces from the famed workshops of Czechoslovakia and Germany, lights twinkling on and off, and the tree almost buried in the piles of gaily wrapped packages for a family of eight.  There were also included wrapped presents for the house servants who stood to the side smiling, who knows with what feelings?, and received theirs before returning to the kitchen and dining room to prepare for the midday Christmas dinner.  Which indeed began on time at one o'clock when we had all returned from church, and sat dutifully in the living room while the grown ups had cocktails before the maid summoned us all to the table.  There were guests, bachelor professors, the dean of nursing, the head professor of nutrition in the medical school, not meant to entertain children, but instead meant to endure sitting next to us, if that were their fate, and making conversation.  After the main course we children were excused and left to our own devices "to work off all the food," whilst the oldsters stayed at table and managed a civilized conversation over liqueurs and coffee.  And it came to pass that we were all happy and satisfied.

My Apple Calendar Is Notifying Me That Tomorrow Is Christmas Eve

There is something about technology's need to overkill that is both tiresome and frightening.  Something like the Night Before Christmas is so momentous and obvious that it is somehow suspicious this insistence of Apple Calendar to highlight it.  I am reminded of the character of the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers in the  film Rebecca gliding silently into the drawing room or boudoir to tell the second Mrs. DeWinter some direction.  My Iphone or computer is always giving me instruction, but of the slightly veiled sort, that is, direction in language that does not tell the whole story, and one has to piece it our from the language, the misuse of language or language used in ways that are foreign to the idiom, i.e., Silicon valley talk.  With the advent of new, improved--and I use the word loosely, borrowing their term--operating systems the world becomes evermore my oyster, or so the system proclaims, and I guess it is true, because my husband seems to manipulate all the nuts and bolts with ever greater proficiency and enthusiasm.  So I guess what I am seeing is me falling behind in the great race of proficiency and adaptability.  It's something actually I have been waiting for, every time I hear younger people exclaiming "Gee, Charlie, it's amazing that you know how to [supply some technological process] considering how old you are!"  When I scan the surface of my Iphone I recognize that I know what only a very few of the emblems displayed are meant to do for me; the same is true of those at the base of my computer screen.  And I know from past experience that whenever on both items I inadvertently "select"--to use their term--something I don't recognize by mistake, that I am led down into dark and dangerous passages where results are not what I expected at all.  And getting out of the mess is always problematic.  I used to try to turn on the television when my husband was out of town following carefully written instructions, and in every instance the screen turned to snow, and he would be exasperated upon his return.  Ah, well, I can read my book sitting in my chair.  God's in his heaven, all's right with the world.  Oh, look, even as I write this up in the right hand corner of the screen there slides surreptitiously on a banner with the legend "Christmas Day tomorrow."  As they say nowadays, "who woulda thunk?"

As I Lay In Bed Last Night

I am sure you thought I was going to say that I heard Santa's reindeer and their hoofbeats on the roof.  No, although I was indeed awakened at 2:30 AM.  Suddenly my computer screen which had been dark on the sleep command burst into shining light and I stumbled over to it, and then it was dark again.  I can't quite remember but in essence the Apple people had just decided to download the operating system.  I only learned this later, after the fact.  At that moment in the dark of the night I was in panic.  The screen went dark, and I thought the machine was broken, my computer had died.  Of course, I panicked, thinking of all the photos, frantically trying to reconceive the lectures notes for the Odyssey course I would be teaching in two weeks.  Well, everything is okay.  Now we have to celebrate Richard's thirty odd years of sobriety which we only do be smiling at each other all day.  I can hardly stay awake.  All this eating is adding the pounds.  Dinner out again tonight!  And tomorrow!  And the next time!  Then Christmas day and we can dig into the leftovers from the fantastic wedding anniversary dinner we treated ourselves to last night and only nibbled on.  And then Boxing Day and we can defrost the stuffed peppers I made for dinner two nights ago.  Those were some of thoughts and impressions that scattered through my hysterical brain as I looked on my Ipad for service centers for Macintosh products, all the while staring at the black screen which oddly enough had a little pointer still going.  If I had known anything that would be an indicator like pulse in the human body, but I know nothing.  Suddenly it was daylight and I guess I once more pressed the little unobtrusive button that turns the damn thing on, a futile gesture, but, lo, the computer came back to life.  Well, breathe deeply, finish your lecture notes, get you photographer guru over to help remove all the photos and make more albums over at Walgreens.  That is such a great service, and so short.  It is ridiculous to keep these photos on the computer when you can have albums and sit on the sofa with chums and leaf through them.  Now for a nap!

Once Upon A Time

I have been reading a novel in which one of the teenage characters recalls only very dimly the mother she lost in an accident when the child was a baby.  It inspired me to think back as  I often do to the memory of my father who died when I was six, and all I remember of him then was his body lying in a coffin.  But strangely enough I have a kind of memory of a physical being when I was four and had an appendicitis attack and he took me to the hospital, I remember being carried in his arms, for emergency surgery,  Not much of a memory but the man was in this recollection young and vigorous.  He was in fact 46.  And then in a flash I had a vivid memory of my first wife, who died when she was twenty six; her bright youthful skin tones, the smoothness of the skin, the flash of her eyes, the strength of her smile, everything about her said "young," which I was beholding in my eighty six year old self, and she was so present and yet in her youth so alien to me in my setting.  Mother, whom I next met walking down Memory Lane, was very hard for me to recall as the woman of 61 who fell asleep on her sofa watching the Army-McCarthy hearings and never woke up, much more vivid as the angry, frightening presence when she confronted me with "being homosexual;" she was a vigorous fifty two, anger making her an outstanding presence.  It was 1946.  My mother in law lived into her late nineties and I saw her often--she even came to visit for two weeks when I lived in Athens, when she was 80.  After years of a somewhat metallic relationship, not improved by her daughter's dislike of her or at least disappointment perhaps because her mother was not good at loving, she took to the divorced son-in-law and I to her, parentless as I was, and I can easily recall her looks, her strong features softening into a kind of blob of old person's flesh, the powder she wore turning her into a kind of doll.  Strange but rather sweet. Yet the interesting thing is that in all our late in life interactions she became more and more a personality to me; I grew to like her.   And my second wife?  Well, I can recall her vividly as a young woman in her twenties, nude or clothed, in or out of bed, and then of course we were divorced, and time seemed to make her fade, but I remember so well the two of us laughing and drinking and making love when were young.  We were so young, it was before the children arrived, that brief moment of time, when Mary had just recently died, and Penny and I had relatively empty lives, as though we were in an enchanted house of many rooms to walk through. Very heaven, those years!  The three boyfriends of my younger days, the two with whom I keep up, now both in their sixties when once they were early twenties to my forty five or so, are grand old men, well married, fulfilled, handsome, always clothed of course but I so well remember their young bodies of yesteryear underneath, and now young and old we meet on equal terms--a sixty five year old is not that much different from an eighty five year old!

Today Is Twenty One December Twenty Sixteen

We met on this date at a reception at the Graduate School of the City of New York's Classical Language Faculty.  He was 46, I 59, he, taking a breather in his career, mid-life crisis, me having become a member of the Graduate School faculty and director of the program.  We treasure it as a wedding anniversary date because back in the day there were laws against solemnizing same-sex relationships and we would not have a wedding until eighteen years and one hundred odd days had passed.  Funny to think that there are still segments of the population who fulminate against sanctifying same-sex with all the truly horrible events and actions on display 24/7 in this great big wonderful country of ours.  We were all so proper, going on a dance date and other "getting to know you" events for over a month before finally one night at his apartment stripping off our clothes and getting it on while the Good Lord looked down from the sky smiling.  He certainly did not send accidents, pestilence, the diminution of income, nor sickness upon either of us.  Tonight we will go out together to a very fancy steak restaurant right across the street and have our anniversary dinner.  They know us as having a wedding anniversary on this date; it's in their books.  Yesterday I made stuffed peppers, a favorite of both of us, not the least difficult, only time consuming, and for the elderly, a triumph of memory in organizing the preparation and cooking of each part of the process.  This I did, and thereafter cleaned up the kitchen and the stove.  My husband cannot abide kitchens that are messy and awash with the detritus of a meal just prepared. Neat, neat, neat is his motto.  Which is perhaps why he rarely prepares anything that requires several ingredients and steps in the preparation.  As a teenager he worked in the kitchen of his father's cousin's fish restaurant and the experience left its mark.  He, to say the least, compulsive, I, definitely, am a mess.  Raised in a house where servants pick up after you is not the best training for adult life lived on your own.  But I manage, and he tolerates.  In some things we are as alike as can be, in others the tension of our differences is telling. But we manage.  We both have great senses of humor not least about ourselves and the relationship we have created.  He can be such a pain in the ass, the same observation he could and would easily make about me; but we are in this for the long haul.

Lying In Bed

I made a discovery just now at eighty five, although I sort of feel I knew it years ago.  The expression "I am feeling peckish" means I am somewhat hungry, whereas I, although I never use it, somehow thought it mean feeling slightly ill.  I was about to write that since  I felt slightly peckish this morning I chose to stay in bed.  Okay, since I woke up feeling under the weather I chose to stay in bed. I awoke at five thirty and then remembered that the city was turning off the water from midnight until 6AM, so that definitely sent me back under the covers, although there was enough bottled water and toilets with full tanks to allay and anxiety over deprivation that I might feel.  At six twenty I heard water gurgling in pipes all over the condo, a kind of cheerful communal sound to which I responded by pondering getting up.  I am a compulsive early riser.  But today I lay back and pulled the covers over me again, as soon as I had got up, taken a piece of toast with peanut butter so as to have something in my stomach for all the pills that were sliding down my digestive tract. But I discovered now in the early morning light of a day swathed in cold fog that my room was a mess.  Lying in bed gave me the opportunity the sad moment of truth to face: there were things, books, clothes, new exercise machine, papers for my Odyssey lecture course lying in promiscuous piles every which way.  Today said the grim, grey,  cold day outside on the lanai beyond the sliding doors, today is a day to CLEAN UP, and I fell back onto my pillow, rose briefly to type this thought, and now . . . . well, we'll just have to see, won't we?

Vera

I guess I mentioned that I dropped my almost new Iphone onto the tile floor and fractured the glass face.  It didn't shatter, and as a matter of fact sort of created a spiders web, a rather beautiful spiders web of cracks through which I must look to see the various and sundry things one must push to operate the damn thing.  "Various and sundry things" will clue my reader into the fact that I am pathetic when it comes to technology.   I make no apology; I am a writer, a relatively well known classicist.  I don't have to know how to operate a super complicated telephone when all I want is to dial a number, send an email, and nowadays, Oh, Lordy, how I love it, to text.  I remember a few years back everyone was on about teenagers texting.  Now I see why.  Smart teenagers!  It's really the only way to communicate if you ask me.  This Iphone just got a new innards, system #something or other, and it had to be downloaded.  This is the second time in as many months I think.  And now the telephone every time I want to do anything find out the weather, look up a friend's address, and so on and so forth, a little box appears and says "you are doing this the [old, stupid] way, press such and such a button and you can learn the far more efficient way."  The manufacturers they are  daft if they think I am going to master some new way even more complicated.  It's enough I can handle the phone without dropping it all the time.  It is too big.  When you take hold of it the hand grips the beast and the fingers and thumb naturally and I do mean naturally fall to the spot where the buttons are that control loud and soft and the result is that I am always turning off the sound just by taking hold of the thing.  I was too embarrassed by doing this at first but have since learned that lots of people, their fingers fall there and they silence the volume.  And they laugh self consciously as though this were amusing when in fact it is an outrageous dysfunctionality created by a corporation that at the same time is pocketing untold billions.  But don't get me started.. . . .

People will note a tone that says Newcastle on Tyne.  That's because I have been watching "Vera," the detective story on the telly, and it's set there and they all talk like that.  Can't escape it, love.  Get's under your skin, most of all the extraordinarily beautiful landscapes and seascapes and old stone houses.  And what's more the actors are all--well, most-- so physically attractive, the most of them, yes, definitely, e.g., the new coroner, a brown skinned beauty with coal black eyes and impudent lips--they don't cast guys like him in the States .  Quite a collection, innit?

Christmas Cheer

For someone born in a temperate climate spending the Christmas season in a place like Florida is always weird. Wreaths and Christmas trees go with cold weather and more often than not snowfall or at least a walk outdoors with plumes of steam coming out of one's mouth.  Christmas decorations are geared to that back drop so that down here they just look tacky.  Which is of a piece with the constant stream of fake Christmas music, all done to a disco beat, from "I'll Be Home For Christmas," to "Oh, Little Town Of Bethlehem" and so on and so forth.  Makes you want to puke.  Having been through more than eighty Christmases I cannot imagine wanting possessions, and would never buy anything for anyone unless it truly struck my fancy as somehow related to the presumed recipient.  My mother in law, oddly enough, a woman whom I never ever would have accused of being imaginative, suddenly burst out into a new personality once her daughter and I were divorced, and year after year bestowed upon me Christmas gifts that were the most unusual, interesting, absolutely pleasing and perfectly fitted to my tastes.  This continued for twenty years until she died, God bless her!  Her daughter was bestirred to make a Christmas for our four children that was truly splendid, done up in lights and tinsel and all the trimmings.  The year we all spent Christmas in Rome inspired her to new heights.  Although there is no snow, Rome with its myriad churches, each out doing the other in lights and decoration, demanding that you know the The Birthday Is Imminent.The season is always magical, especially down around the Piazza Navona where the shepherds come down from the hills to play their music walking around among the splendid little huts set up for selling special Christmas treats.  She bought all kinds of colored papers, silver tassels, golden horns--her imagination ran riot, and we had the most flamboyant exciting Christmas of our lives.  Of course, as classicists know, it is not about Christmas at all but the long ago tradition of the Roman Saturnalia, which began on December 17th, and we can add to that the festival celebrating the birth of the new year which comes on the 21st of December, the shortest day of the year, heralding the return of longer days and more sunshine.  Happy Days Are Here Again.

Not One Of My Best Days

Yesterday was difficult.  I can scarcely even remember the course of events.  Oh, yes, up betimes (who even knows what it means?  i just used it but now I know, up especially early, I guess "before times," or something like that)  So there I was up betimes, and feeling wonderful.  And at ten my trainer arrived and put me through my paces, the whole point of his doing so, is to get my balance to work again, and I guess I am standing and walking better, still with a cane, yet I do not fall over, so that's good.  For some reason the various exercises completely demoralize me, especially walking heel to toe, or standing at rest heel to toe, although I am definitely getting better at the latter. I am always demoralized when we go to dinner across the street and watch one of the waiters who is possibly more than six feet tall, ramrod thin and straight, dressed all in black, walking swiftly between the tables without a trace of instability, as though he were but gliding.  Ah, yes, back to the trainer.  Now then when Mike left I had the chance to see myself in action, walking, only over to the mall, a scant block and a half away as these things go, but really through a parking lot.  There are no sidewalks; Sarasota, the city fathers, the developers, can't imagine that people can walk so there are no sidewalks except in the touristy "quaint" section of the town.  So I drove this pitiful distance to the mall to have a mani pedi and the bunch who work in the place I go are all the nicest Vietnamese women, every one of them a treasure.  I wore sandals so we would not have an issue with me getting socks and shoes off and the feet into the water and me sitting on the massage chair.  I managed it, but am always afraid of losing my balance--all the bending and shifting of balance--I can imagine the waiter doing it all so effortlessly.  Ugh. I am getting so rickety and frail.  The woman who took care of me was so thoughtful that she managed to do the manicure right there after the pedicure so I did not have to worry about putting the sandals on and going across the salon.  Then I was back out in the vast parking lot hobbling along with my cane to get to my car and suddenly a car started to pull out --not the slightest chance that the driver might consult the rear view mirror--and I stopped so that they would not back into me, and unbeknownst there was a car following behind me, and he let out a blast, and I nearly  jumped put of my skin and fainted.  How I hate parking lots, cars, malls, oh, the temper rises, but, hey, we moved here for the warmth, and I hear that it is going down below zero tonight up north so all is good.  But we are not done with the difficult day.  It ended with me dropping my quite new Iphone on the tiled floor and cracking the glass face.  Truth to tell, I hate this phone; it is too big for my hand, for one thing, and for another it has too many features.  I don't need anything but the basics.  I had just bought a new vest very lightweight for Sarasota weather, and with a zillion pockets, for the phone, for the sun glasses (driving), for the regular glasses, for the reading glasses, wallet comb, keys, many sets.  Joke is that I cannot remember which pocket has what, tragedy is that the pocket that I stupidly put the phone in was not deep enough and out it fell.

Homecoming

In am preparing my mni course on Homer's poem, Odyssey, to teach at the old folks institute down here in Sarasota.  In essence it is the story of Odysseus, one of the major Greek warriors who fought at Troy, specifically his exertions and tribulations in the ten years it took him to get home, partly reality, partly fairy tale.  The essence of the narrative is, however,, homecoming, the first in a long line of stories on that theme, and in our own time a major influence on James Joyce when he composed his, to me unreadable novel, Ulysses (the Latin name for Odysseus.)  In re-reading Homer's poem, as well as the books and articles of mine, occasioned by various readings over the years, has as it always does led me to ponder homecoming as a spiritual and physical fact in my life. In sum there was no home to come to: my father died when I was six, Mother when I was twenty two.  422 Brown Street, the home of my childhood has long since been "developed," if I may use that obscene contemporary term, into apartments.  I took the sense of "back home for keeps" from visiting my parents-law (along with their usually  reluctant and always pouting daughter) who dwelt in an eighteenth century farmhouse that had been in my mother-in-law's family since the mid eighteen hundreds.  Alongside this familial experience I often visited my aunt's extended family in Wisconsin where there was family compound like the Kennedys on a lake, once upon a time ringed with estates of all my nearest blood kin on Daddy's side of the family.  My Chicago cousins, and their progeny, still enjoy the ritual of going back to the old homestead, every summer.  I, too, came from a branch of this family, my own consisting of six siblings who, however, grew up and spread out, to California, Florida, Massachusetts, only one staying in the "hometown."  The war came along just as the older set were either going off to college or into the military.  We never met again as a group until 1954 arbitrarily summoned back "home" (by this time located in a small apartment) for my mother's funeral, and greeting one another warily, since we were all grown up and distant.  In 1973 when I was living with my second wife and our four children in a great house in Brookline Massachusetts  invited all five of them without their children--mine were off at camp--for a reunion.  It was a great five days, lots of laughter, lots of drinks, lots of great wit, every one of us with a good funny bone, but then we parted and it was back to silence.  So now I am an old man, and if you follow this blog, you will know that recently I was exercised by the subject of dying alone.  My husband is here in our wee condo in Sarasota.  Family live far away.  A favorite cousin of mine has been keeping me up to date on the various deaths and fatal illnesses of the extended family in the Chicago area.  None of that obtains for me.  We, my children, my grandchildren and now my great grandchildren, all have lives all over the  country.  That is why my thoughts turn often to the scene in the film where the dying man takes an overdose of morphine and goes to sit and then expire on a park bench next to a friend on a lovely sunlit day.  That would be homecoming of a sort I had initially entitled this essay "Heaven Is Just Around The Corner," but I decided on the other because of my Homeric studies.

Corrections To This Morning's Article (a few hours later)

Well, it wasn't a football team but a basketball team that featured in my blog of a few hours ago.  As the friend who corrected me, wrote "not that it matters."  But yes it does, it does.  It's all in the image.  The football players would be beefy, and that correlates to the overly busty cheer leading ladies.  The weight ratio falls apart with basketball players.  Plus the slim hipped slight young men who are the focus of this, the gays who are being celebrated.  What are they?  The same build as basketball players. Plus the one was proposing, get it?, proposing, they were not actually at that moment getting married.  Look carefully, there is no officiant tying the knot. The entire blog is dumb.  Old people not reading the small print.  Old people going off on their own, not paying attention.  Elderly gays bloviating on contemporary gay themed events that do not fit the concept of their place in the world formed half a century ago.  Tedious!

A Fancy Kind of Marriage

There seems to be a professional football team called the Bulls.  Recently a friend emailed me a video clip of a half time diversion where a couple is legitimately married in front of the roaring crowd.  This is evidently a custom of some standing, but in this instance the couple was two gay males, a first.  My friend who sent if on said she teared up it was so moving to her.  My reaction was so otherwise I have to ask myself, well, what?  Let me think.  So here we are in the middle of a football game.  I never played football, nor did I ever care for rough body contact sports, so I have no identification with the setting for this wedding.  Football players in my thoughts are overbearing, overweight males, a kind of guy who owns the world, the kind who sits on the machines in the gym reading emails and hogging the equipment (Granted I am such a pussy that I cannot bring myself to ask some one of these lunks to get up and move off)  The two gays coming together for this ceremony were slim waisted, thin chested, good looking in the direction of chiseled fine featured bordering on the feminine, in other words gay males, quite the opposite of the standard football player who would definitely make the bed creak if he were involved in the action (I speak from experience.)  Surrounding this ceremony were the cheerleaders who seemed to come out of something like Sporters.  I am no real judge of these things, but I understand why football players who must impact physically with one another want to be over built physically but the same necessity does not fall on those cheering them on, and I felt oppressed by so much cleavage, such extravagant mammary glands on the part of the costumed women who surrounded the happy couple , not to mention a large man decked out as a rooster.  It just seemed so, oh I don't know, so aggressively butch, that is, heterosexual.  For these two slim hipped males tying the knot, somehow so inappropriate.  Am I betraying my age?  A nancy boy from days, no, decades gone by?  I guess so.

Helpful Hints For Future Plans

A relative called to tell me that another, a distant cousin or something, a woman just my age, had contracted pneumonia and had decided to forego treatment and instead accepted the more than likely result of her death within a short time.  "Pneumonia is the old man's friend," I replied.  My only thought was how lucky this lady was to be taking a soft landing as it were into the realms of the dead, the inevitable destination for all of us terrestrials and for those of us about to end our ninth decade sooner than later.  Yesterday my husband and I were watching an English video in which an elderly man, but actually not all that old, who was suffering from leukemia which was turning out to be fatal, was interrogated into the death of a much younger male companion, who as it turns out the older gay guy had paid to be his companion, not for sex as the detectives suspected, but so that there would be someone at home with him when he died.   So deprived of the younger fellow, the leukemia victim made a date with another friend, a woman, and met her on a lovely sunny day, on a park bench, where they sat together, and the man grew feebler and feebler and eventually put his head on her shoulder and died.  Turns out he overdosed on morphine just before he came down to the bench.  Whether that was medically possible, I don't know, but I have been obsessed with his peaceful, friendly happy ending ever since.  Morphine?  Bring it on!  Dylan Thomas wrote "Do not go gentle into that dark night.  Rage, rage against the fading of the light."  or something to that effect, and I say nonsense, especially considering what a prickly and difficult person he was.  Imagine working in a nursing home where he was a patient, trying to get him up for a bath or putting him on the toilet.  No thanks!  Give me the sunshine, the park bench, the lady friend, and, oh, yes, the morphine, lots of morphine!

A Hard Rain, And A Lot Of Tears

Bob Dylan delegated Patti Smith to receive the Nobel Prize for him and she also sang one of his songs "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall" to a deeply moved audience.  I felt that the whole world was in mourning for the tragic results of the American election.  The site where I was able to hear Ms. Smith sing Dylan's song appends responses of those listening or viewing I guess I should say.  If I had not been crying as she sang, then the words of the listeners, the lost hopes and dreams of a generation that were my first students back in the day, would have set me off.  We all had such hopes once upon a time.  And then came Reagan and that mentality.  I live in Sarasota and enjoy the benefits of the many cultural activities here, but again and again I am overwhelmed by the vast wealth, the orgiastic style of overblown, so expensive architecture. I was raised in the years of the Great Depression in a household which was considered at the time upper class, and well, luxurious, I guess you might say, and yet there was always simplicity, shunning of ostentation, honoring the work done in the house by hired help by pitching in alongside when need be.  Here in what used to be dear little Sarasota every day another shingle house is ripped down to put up a condo building or a private home almost as large---private houses for no more than a couple.  The streets are becoming more like a New York City canyon every day.  And this is our America.  And soon we will have a new president in office who goes with that kind of spiritual decor.

What's In A Name Or A Spelling For That Matter?

I was just ordering some plays of Shakespeare on Amazon when my eyes was caught by their advertising the facsimile cover of the plays of Eurepedes.  Yes, this was not some sophomore's critical paper in a class from yesterday, but rather the outfit that seeks to monopolize and control the distribution of books in the USA, nay the world.  But should I react so violently to this misspelling?  Should I be wild enough to assume ever so crazily that the staff at Amazon gives a rat's ass or whatever that idiom for the contents of what is on their shelves?  I am old enough to remember book stores in every little town, maybe not with much of a stock, but still populated by those who read and loved books, was myself present for several  years in the Harvard Square area where there were twenty eight bookstores.  Think back to the cluster of bookstores in lower Manhattan above East 8th Street, at a fork in the streets, can't think of the name of this very distinctive place, bookstore after bookstore--oh, yes, Astor Place. (Thank God, for the survival of the Strand, ladies and gentlemen!) I still read from morning to night trying to remember to get up every hour to limp around enough to keep this aged frame in some way limber.  Eurepedes.  So depressing.  I remember my older brother brought a girl friend over at Mother's suggestion for Sunday's noontime formal dinner.  She was clearly "not our kind," to use one of Mother's phrases, a brassy, cheerful, quite good looking girl whom I have to think my brother was banging regularly.  She entered the house vigorously chewing gum, at the sight of which I became instantly nervous, knowing mother's aversion to gum chewing, in general, by  women in particular, in the living room and on into the dining room, most absolutely.  My heart skipped a beat when the soup course was served and she paused to remove the gum from her mouth and set it on the platter which held her soup bowl.  There it sat next to her, until the maids removed that course.  Nothing was said later.  I would have heard Mother's "little talk" with my brother taking place in the library.  I guess it was beyond awful.  Just like Eurepedes.

Diminished

Yesterday we were invited to a celebratory brunch by the founders of the Urbanite Theatre of which we have been ardent supporters since first we heard of it.  One of the two who created it is a former student at the Asolo Conservatory who was, as the expression goes, one of "our" students, that is, we shared in the annual tuition paid to the University for his training.  So we have always been his champion and he and a fellow student were lucky enough to gain the support of a local developer who built them a black box theater which it is their obligation to maintain by putting on plays and selling tickets.  They have been wildly successful and now in two years time have one thousand subscribers.  Yesterday's brunch was a very cheerful affair; the invitees were like proud parents  rejoicing in their kids' graduation from school.  I was surprised how little I interacted with those present, and it reflected, I decided, how much I have withdrawn from the world.  Years ago I was aggressively the center of attention, or at least a social force to be reckoned with deploying my wit and intelligence in rapid fire delivery thither and yon.  Of course, I have such severe balance issues that getting around is a challenge, and that makes for seriously diminished star turns in a social gathering.  I noticed it the night before when we, as the expression goes, "hosted" our current conservatory student and his girlfriend to a dinner celebrating their end of term.  Granted, our student who is well over six feet, exceptionally genial, ravishingly good looking, and his equally tall companion, also an actor, and well trained to hold her own on any center stage she chooses to create, were both serious competition for my trying for the limelight, but actually I really did not try.  Physically I felt like a pygmy among giants, and as the genial host I had encouraged everyone to order lots of food--it was a Chinese restaurant-- and somehow I could not see my guests over the mountains of food which those two ate up heartily, helped by my husband always a lover of such cuisine.  The conversation between the other three at the table was lively, I registered the laughter, but only intermittently managed the sense; the room itself, cavernous echoed with the laughter and talk of what seemed huge amounts of people.  I picked at the food, sampled the conversation, and was not unhappy, rather better described as not really with it.  That mode of table manners carried over into this morning.  The others are our table were certainly genial and outgoing, and we all confessed our absolute love of the Urbanite Theatre and its founders, but suddenly I realized I was too tired to make conversation, and I  could not really hear, although the ambient noise was minimal.  I felt myself withdrawing, and decided that this was what old age is all about. And then I looked across the room to behold one of the mainstays of any gathering involving the arts in Sarasota.  When yesterday I had been sitting next to her waiting to go into the student presentation I overheard her describing the day's events, her having to cut one event after another short so as to fit everything into what seemed a schedule that began well before noon and was projected into the nighttime.  She has a faded glamor that recalls days gone by; she is exactly my age.  Whew!

Oldtimers Amongt The Young

For the past two days those of us who give financial sponsorship of the students studying drama at the Asolo Conservatory are invited to watch members of the first and second year class demonstrating some of the skills they are working on at school: movement, voice, acting.  The audience surrounding them in the practice rooms where the demonstrations take place is largely persons in their sixties and seventies with a few such as myself extending up into the mid eighties.  It is a thrilling experience for persons such as myself to see young men and women jumping, turning somersaults, landing on their feet in straight upright position, not even swaying.  Bodies in their strength and sureness are so beautiful; the skin of young people is a glistening shimmering thing once faded, never to return.  The instructors patiently explain what they are getting at with the exercises. I particularly like hearing the voice teacher talking about how the voice is made by the whole body; it seems like something we can all do to improve our projection.  One of the acting classes is devoted to Shakespeare, some recite the sonnets, others perform scenes.  There are the teacher's favorites.  Yesterday for the third time I watched and listened as Richard III menaced and cajoled the widowed Queen Ann across the dead body of her husband as she struggled with weakness and resolve in the face of this monster.  Young people seem to get younger and younger and Richard and Ann are no exception: such as the contemporary cultural demand of the exercise room that one gets Shakespearean royals buffed and trim, and of course so very very young, but then in real life the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge look a helluva lot better than their forebears did.  In the intensity of all the acting gives these youngsters a gravitas that their youth denies them.  Some very convincing moments were enacted.  The other acting class required improvising with some lines furnished the performers on the spot.  Their various inventions were amazing, especially since there were always two persons and each had to improvise to an impromptu response of their partner.  It has been a thrilling week, and we capped it by taking the student we sponsor and his fabulous lady friend, another student, out to dinner and listened to them talk of what they had been doing and we had been witnessing.  Sponsoring a student is the highlight of our Sarasota life.

Just Down The Block

When I was growing up in small town Iowa I lived in a house painted white with a wide porch that spanned the front, and down two flights of concrete stairs was the brick lined street with sidewalks shaded by giant elm trees.  I and my five siblings walked every day to the private school on the banks of the Iowa River, a distance of over ten or twelve blocks which required crossing the main road from the north heading toward Cedar Rapids, what we would call a major highway nowadays, but since it was within the town's border what traffic there was had slowed considerably. Plus this was the depression.  Who owned a car?  There were still horses being used for transportation.  When I was sixteen we moved to the "new" part of town and since it was just my mother and little sister now, we lived in a modern bungalow type place with one and one half baths, three bedrooms, on a cul de sac, oh, how boring, not that I quite realized that in those days, and I rode the city bus to the extreme edge of the other side of town where there was a new high school building.  I shall jump forward to the years of the domesticity I created with my second wife with whom I first lived in a kind of horses stall and hay loft converted into a very "cute" house built against the side of a hill, once upon  a time hay came in above, horses below, I suppose. This place had very small rooms with uneven tilting floors, but across the upper portion was a porch running its length that looked out over a state forest reservation, all very beautiful and extremely quiet.  The only down was I had to drive into New Haven to teach which left my wife stuck with the new born and desperate in her loneliness.  Then we lived in a cul de sac in Palo Alto which was encircled by modern glass boxes each with two adults and three to four children who played together in safety in the middle of the cul de sac and all walked the six blocks to the local public grade school. My wife kept the car and I walked the several miles to Stanford, the beginnings of my liberation from the automobile.  The area was a serene, only occasionally reacting to traffic noise from the freeway not visible at all beyond a wooden fence.  Apart from a stint in Rome in which we lived on the second floor of a palazzo with gardens to look upon from every window or from two terrazzi where one could catch the sun, the next several years were in a suburb of Boston where we lived in a large Edwardian house, again where I would walk the several miles to work,  with plenty of room for the four children to spread out, entertain their friends, and for my wife and me to grow apart in our separate spaces.  Then the kids went their way, my wife and I went our own ways, and we were all virtual grown ups.  "I'll be home for Christmas" goes the song, only there was no home that one could go home to.  And nowadays when we live in the Midwest, Canada, Florida, New Hampshire, and my ex-wife is dead, there really is no more coming home.  The children are all married and go to their spouses' parents or some of the grandchildren are beginning to go out on their own.  Whatever happened to Iowa?

Imagination

When we moved to Sarasota we bought a condo in a relatively old building housing forty five units or so in a most unlikely spot, smack dab in the middle between a major (now less so as another even more giant one has been built over to the east) mall and a brand new middle school.  The school building is about the same height as out condo building where we live on the third and top floor and thus can see over the surrounding impediments to the open sky and watch the ever fascinating cloud formations of Florida pass by.  The roof of the school building forms a line, irregular and thus constantly intriguing which provides the bottom to an imaginary view.  This morning as I was getting my coffee ready I looked out the kitchen window and saw the merest tint of pink/orange in the cloud formation framed against the roof of the school building which in the darkness and shadow resembled  the morning sun peeping over Mt. Hymettus which I had watched so very often from the kitchen window of our house in Athens.  This impression was comforting as it was beautiful, and was matched by the evening sun which turned the clouds rosy, and from the small balcony facing the west there I felt myself to be on the terrace of our place in Rome, conjuring up yet other happy memories of years of promise and achievement not the least tinctured by the regret of inadequacy which was certainly there at the time.  No, I in this moment of dawn or dusk of winter in Sarasota Florida near a shopping mall and a middle school was in some way standing in the hints of sunrise and sunset, a-tingle with the sensual life that was mine in those years, as well as the satisfaction and provocation of being a protective father of four children. It was a fantasy fed for some time by the slowly emerging sun in the morning and its shifting sunset rays in the evening.  Satisfied that god was in his heaven and all was right with the world, I could limp away well into my dotage, but also into a not unpleasing reality of a small apartment just right for two.  Just as Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris I will always have Via Bartolomeo Eustachio and Odos Souidias right outside this little place on the  top floor.

Life Is Not So Easy

I am preparing for the eight lectures I am giving in January and February in a mini course for senior citizens, in something called the Institute for Life Long Learning.  This will be my third course, the first one I taught in 2014, maybe, can't quite work it out.  I do distinctly remember, however, that the subject was ancient Greek tragedy.  I assigned a lot of tragedies, and really it did not matter if the students read them all carefully, or just consulted a synopsis.  I just wanted people who did not know anything about what is called "Greek Tragedy"  to get a little sense of it.  The subject is vast, the evidence very fragmentary, the facts can be obscure.  There are so few plays that survive from antiquity and almost everything is from the hand of the same three men, so as you can see, making any kind of generalization is extremely hazardous.  So we mostly talked about individual plays, or rather I did, and made very few assumptions about the art form itself.  I think for people raised in the Judaeo-Christian tradition it comes as a shock that the god figure, or in this case, figures, since their heaven was populated with quite a crowd, or possibly I should say that there was quite a crowd on Mt Olympos oh, this sentence is incomplete, so drawing myself up sharply and beginning in medias res, the ancient gods do not demonstrate any real love or even affection for mankind in general, and some individual gods sometimes have a real love or a real hate relationship with some particular human. So gods or fate could be extremely cruel to someone or ones for no particular reason at all.  Human existence is cruel in tragic drama, and what makes the audience accept it, I think, is that the humans who respond to impossible situations often with savagery or other reactions not exactly approved in our culture demonstrate incredible strength and moral courage.  I think of Medea who was ready to kill her children so as to exact revenge on Jason, her husband, who abandons her for a younger more important woman.  And since the only thing a male looks for in a woman is her power to breed his dynasty, Medea made herself have meaning and stature by destroying the children born of that union.  Likewise Clytemnestra had to accept that her husband's determination to sail the fleet to Troy meant that he was willing to sacrifice their daughter on the altar to propitiate the gods of the expedition, and so after he left she started sleeping with his cousin and when he came back she murdered him.  Moderns say she was punished for adultery but, no that's such a Judeao-Christian interpretation.  She was being strong by sleeping with his cousin and dirtying his bed, and in effect emasculating him, and then strong again when she murdered this same husband upon his return.  All for the daughter, which by sacrificing he had declared negligible and thus her mother's birth agony negligible.  So Clytemnestra was honoring her own womb and vagina even if it meant that she became a murderer in the eyes of her son who turned around and killed her.  I was surprised at how a class of eighty something year old women were more accepting of this than a teenager girl audience.  It is what makes teaching these courses such an interesting surprise......every time.

Once Upon A Time And All So Strange

Once upon a time I was sixteen and very, very good looking.  I was also becoming aware of my sexual attraction to other males and what this might mean.  In essence I was becoming "a gay."  A slow process for some, really years of agony, indecision, and growing determination.  It is difficult to say why that was not my story.  In short order I was comfortably promiscuous, in my small home town, relatively notorious as a "cocksucker."  I credit it to my family's prestige, our money, my good looks and my instinct for making nice in every social situation. I had a strange experience in the midst of this which I have generally repressed, and only occasionally does it surface.  Today was one of those days.  In those days on the main street there was a cafe presided over by a tubby middle aged cook and his helper the dishwasher, who also set and cleared the tables.  They were utterly nondescript, the patterning on the ugly, tired wallpaper of life.  The cafe was popular with the kids of the town; I spent a lot of time in there, pseudo flirting with all my girl friends, trying ever so subtly to put the make on the good looking dudes of the town, totally horny and utterly stupid who more times than you can imagine were willingly led into assignations with me in my car on a country lane.  Our transactions were all witnessed by the chef who presided over his hot plates and handed the dishes across the counter top to us all.  One Sunday when the cafe was of course closed (this was god's country) I got a telephone call at my home which surprisingly enough, as I came to realize through the coughing stumbling and mumbling, was the cafe chef inviting me to his room over the cafe.  I was apprehensive, not that I feared violence or anything like that, but I grew up as a social snob and I knew that his guy was not someone one "knew."  Why did he want to talk to me?  Could not imagine and with my generous arrogance told him I would stop by.  It was a strange experience.  He was naked when I arrived; I don't remember seeing such an old person without clothes.  He wanted us to get into his bed and make out.  Suddenly this self assured center of attention in the cafe downstairs was a tubby loser, and so lost as to be desperate.  How did he ever get the nerve to telephone me?  Make the assignation?  The funny thing was that the matter turned upon my mother's social graces which had led me to spend so much time with her chatting up entirely improbable people as a gesture of grace and kindness.  I stripped down, lay beside this guy who by then was sniffling and verging on crying, and took his body into my embrace.  It was, as kids say nowadays, "weird," and I have never had an experience similar to that in my entire life.  But I think that it is important for arrogant, proud, self assured persons, somewhere along the line, to experience the ordinary, the ugly, the desperate, the deserving undeserved.  Hey, it's only a roll in the hay; it's not a night at the opera.

Sunday

It was a full day yesterday.  The brunch at ten in honor of the new students in the drama program, and since we are partially supporting one of the guys we were there at a table with his other sponsors, and him, and a few people sniffing around at the idea of shelling out four thousand and up per annum.  It's our big philanthropy; many donors take on two or three, other sponsors pony up a hundred thou or more for a production.  A few years ago at the same kind of brunch the director happened to mention in his speech that he was only four thousand short of his goal to raise money for audition tours at which some gentleman at my table jumped up and shouted: "Oh, Good Lord, we ought to be able to get that easily enough right in this room.  I'll pledge a thousand!"  Amid good-natured shouts and pledges twelve thousand was raised in minutes.  That's life in high end Sarasota where we paupers just watch from the edges with our mouth open in wonder.  So we were at the brunch at a big round table trying to make conversation, always a torture and a triumph since the over seventy set are all hard of hearing and the room is devoid of acoustical proofing.  But very few of the people can count on hearing much anyway there is really no attempt at serious communication.  After two hours of making nice, and actually everyone shutting up to hear each of the new students make a brief and oh so self assured presentation, we left, went home took a brief nap, and wheeled off to the symphony hall where we heard another sublime program from our Sarasota Symphony.  The hall itself is one of those multi purpose places with however very good acoustics.  It was obviously built for young people going to rock concerts although its mission is more to house programs for eighty five year olds remembering Edie Gorme and that ilk. It's ossified Las Vegas, I guess.  The arena is steep climbing, the passage ways wide and very poorly secured with railings.  The rows were squeezed as tightly as possible to increase revenues.  The ideal customer is a rake thin kid.  Watching elderly over weight people with canes, find their way to their seats is painful and then to know that when intermission comes their bladders are going to be calling out.  You go through hell to get to listen to great symphonic music.  It is not Boston's Symphony Hall, that's for sure.  But, hey, we parked our car easily under the shade of a tree, walked (stumbled) to the building under beautiful sun, fluffy clouds, breezes off the Gulf.  All is good, in it's own way.

Married Life

Today is one of those days that tests long term marriages by revealing the strengths of two people hanging in there through thick and thin.  My husband is suffering through political troubles with the people on our condo board of which he is the unwilling president.  A very large and complicated strategy which he worked through with what he thought was the assent and encouragement of the other board members now when push comes to shove, they have rejected acting on it.  At the very same time the second applicant for buying his New York studio has been rejected by his coop board there, and since coop boards by law do not have to divulge their reasons, he who is a very cooperative take charge guy is as a complete loss.  There is some suggestion that the board there wishes to hold everything off the market to wait for the rise in prices in studios, but there is no way of knowing.  He is going mad with the anxiety of the impotent.  And none of these things improves his mood.  We had company last night and I opted to cook some veal scallopini, but he jumped in angrily determined to cook it his way which involved breading--much too heavy in my opinion.  He was angry that  I even thought to take over the kitchen, although as he often describes for twenty years I cooked his dinner every night.  But he had to have control.  That's one of those things in long term relationships, it's like therapy, and you have to play act situations and not surrender to emotions.  Tedious, made more so by the fact that he does not drink nor drug and has no way to relieve his tensions. God, thank god I am only a heavy drinker and not an alcoholic!  The pre dinner cocktail which Mommy introduced me to when I was sixteen has been a life saver.  Last night was One of those Moments--when one would prefer to be out at a restaurant rather suffering through someone proving his manhood.  We have been a couple for over twenty five years; our "anniversary" is coming up, the date commemorating the day we met since legal relationships were not allowed back then.  We met at a party---it was, indeed, a set-up--and this was so different from so many of the gays of that era who met their significant other cruising in the park or wherever gay persons could effectively hook up in a time of police control and prison sentences.  The new movie "Loving" tells the story of a white man and a black woman who ran afoul of the miscegenation laws in this country.  It's the same story but far crueler. 

Plans For Teaching

I was just notified that the advance enrollment in my prospective course in Homer's Odyssey is sufficient to make definite plans to offer it in the winter season which begins in early January.  It's an offering in the so-called life long learning institute or something like that, an educational program devised for the large number of elderly people in the Sarasota area who have the time and enthusiasm for instruction but perhaps not the educational background nor as they say in German the Sttzfleisch (the flesh on the ass to endure sitting for hours on end) to take a full term academic course. The course meets eight times.  Learning lite, you might say.  I taught one in ancient Greek tragedy two years ago, Homer's Iliad last winter and this will be my last since the only other subject that would interest me would be the invention of democracy in Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries for which I would have to prepare strenuously since I do not know the subject that well.  I realize that I am turning eighty seven in March, and have balance problems that make standing for any length of time problematic, so I am sure that this will be my last. Since I started some students have complained about the length of the reading assignments, but I always say the course is a general survey, you certainly don't need to feel obliged to read every line of every text, I am handing out outlines and paraphrases of everything, and since you are not receiving academic credit nor paying much beyond administration fees, you should only do what you want. I anticipate that the course will be an antidote to the general woe in which our country, if not the world, is mired.  Last year the soldier males of the Iliad were engaged in killing every day, or watching their comrades die, and the expectation of every one was about the possibility of a short and rather unhappy if glorious life.  The Odyssey is the great happy contrast: a soldier overcomes a variety of obstacles to get home to his wife, a teenage son searches for his father with whom he is reunited for the first time since infancy, a variety of louts and despoilers are either tricked or overcome with tests of strength, and in addition to his beautiful wife (albeit by the time he gets home perhaps a little long in the teeth) the hero has had long term affairs with two ravishingly beautiful bewitching--in every sense since this story is partly out fairy tale--women, and politely declined marriage with an extremely nubile princess whom he first meets when as a shipwreck he emerges naked from the bushes on a beach where she and her playmates are playing catch themselves only scantily clad.  The Odyssey  is a totally fun story, and I anticipate sharing my enthusiasm for it with a group of interested people my age, which has the benefit of not having to play the mule driver, whipping a group of youngsters through something that is definitely work, a labor, however much of love.

Osso Bucco

Today we must go shopping for the ingredients for Osso Bucco a la Milanese.  It is one of my favorite dishes to serve guests first because my recipe makes way too much for the two of us, and second because it is so wonderful, so impressive, and really almost no work.  It's all in the assembling.  I have a marvelous Belvue I think it is called cooking machine which can cook slow, steam, pressure, just about everything.  Osso Bucco is cooked slow for six hours.  So get the ingredients at the store, sautee them on the sautee setting, add the requisite liquid,  lock the lid into place, and that's that.  One other thing I often make in this machine is Risotto a la Milanese, which as we all know, used to require constant attention and judicious stirring for over an hour to achieve that perfect creamy texture and taste.  Now put the rice in the cooker, press the sautee button, get the rice slightly brown, add the chopped onions, broth, butter and whatever, put the lid on, set it for ten minutes of pressure, come back open the lid and there is perfect risotto every time..  Sounds like a commercial, doesn't it?  Love it, love my cooker, but almost never use it. We just don't cook like that any more, nor entertain.  If I break down and cook risotto we have a jar left over in the refrigerator for weeks.  The curse of growing old is the left overs.  No one eats his portion. Oh, the food we have brought home from restaurants!  I remember visiting my mother in law who would exclaim over the moldy old titbits in her fridge she had "saved" for me.  Could not bear to throw away food.  Neither can my husband wnich shows it is psychological and not conditioned, she rich as Croesus he poor as a church mouse.

Billy Elliot

Last night I went with a friend to a local production of the original musical, performed in a town nearby famous for its high end amateur stage productions.  It is always an extraordinary experience visiting Venice Florida, first because the main streets have so many very, very good restaurants, then for all the interesting shops that are interspersed between the places to eat, and then again because the layout of the town has not yet surrendered to gaunt towers of residential condos which is the tragic fate of down town Sarasota making one wonder it he has wandered perhaps into the industrial parts of Gary, Indiana.  No, Venice is very dear, if a little bit too twee for my taste.  The musical was also to my taste well done, my companion was far less impressed with the talent on display, although we both warmed--perhaps too much--to the cute young man/boy playing the lead role.  What surprised me, however, was my companion's wanting to leave at the intermission because he was having too serious a negative reaction to the dismal household affairs of little Billy, the grotesque, ill educated and loudmouthed grandmother, the ignorant, ill-educated brute of a father, a coal miner, and brother similarly limited and engaged.  This was England at the height of Mrs Thatcher's war on the unions which is harsh and cruel and which the film soft pedals.  My companion who grew up in an American equivalent low income, uneducated, uncultured home only himself to escape it through persistent education plus the analgesic of being gay, found it too sad, too terrifying, too much close to home.  It was one of those moments when I realized once again of the incredibly easy time I have had in life despite my vaunted lower back troubles.  It was also a reminder to me of what I guess Donald Trump seems to represent to low income voters somehow a way out, although will that turn out to be  chimerical as so many believe?  Here in Sarasota, famed for it "culture," where every fundraiser for theater, art, music, etc. is immediately oversubscribed, and I have actually met people who have a condo over looking the bay in downtown and a "country" place out on Longboat Key, an investment in real estate running into the millions, there evidence of poverty every where you turn, not to mention the homeless who line the streets.  I don't see it, until my companion remarks on one or another resemblance to the world of his childhood, and it comes into my house, so to speak, close up.  The musical ends with the miners having lost their strike lining up to descend into the bowels of the earth again and then being swallowed up, while little Billy, an acclaimed genius of dance, goes on into another life.  That was true in my companion's life, the glory mingling with the guilt, which is offering us all yet another life, which is those of us who are "successful," by virtue of special brains, talents, skills, owe a debt that comes from God to those who are so much less fortunate.

Pride . . .Fall

A defining event of my younger years was the moment I fell from one floor to another in the stairwell. I was four; the fall damaged the bones of my lower back to the extent that I wore a corset until I was ten or so, then, when more active, graduated to a steel and leather truss, a kind of brace, designed to hold my skeleton in place as it grew rapidly through the teen years.  At eighteen I threw it away gladly, surrendered to intermittent joint pain, sometimes shockingly lacerating, but registered the freedom of movement for my sex life and jitterbugging.  As one can see, it is right to designate it as defining, not only for the continual pain, but for my withdrawal from an active life to a sedentary scholarly existence.  Abruptly in my mid thirties all pain ended.  Who knows why?  The fall, however, has been a leit motif in my family ever since.  My brother, aged ninety, visiting his daughter in Texas, fell down a flight of stairs and died from complications two weeks later.  My sister, aged 80 or so, was alone in her house, walking through her kitchen when her femur suddenly shattered, and she fell to the ground, and with effort dragged herself to the telephone and hospital services.  After five years in a wheel chair and sometimes with a walker, and after some years of slight improvement, she fell again one day, while overbearingly standing and offering someone a chair in the nursing home dining room; she died of internal bleeding which she chose not to have staunched.  My ex-wife, a feminist before her time, alone in a large barn in New Hampshire, decided to move a large antique chest of drawers from the upper store room to the lower floor, and in devising a system of weights and pulleys to achieve this feat alone, she instead managed to fall over the edge and plummet to the floor below where she lay from maybe mid morning until evening in more or less freezing temperatures when her daughter came home from work.  After extensive surgery which many claimed was botched, she never stood erect again, and walked only with the aid of a wheel chair or cane for the rest of her life.  She never complained, always insisting that it was entirely her fault.  At eighty six I have developed severe balance problems which have been variously diagnosed but one of my favorites is the inherent sense of acting out the primal fall so to speak of my very youth, and thus I will always be tottering on a precipice imagined or real, psychically.  When I fell initially I was crouching over the staircase a floor below in order to throw a blanket down on the head of my unsuspecting two year old sister whom I knew was coming to join me in the nursery.  So the event was a kind of primal sin as well. I remember every moment vividly.  Pride goeth before fall, and, boy, don't I know it!  As an absurd coda to it all, I was reminded last week when describing this nexus of falling to a long ago lover, and he recounted the time we were vigorously making love in a great old Victorian double bed when suddenly the slats which supported the mattress gave way and we crashed to the floor.

Is A Little Learning Really A Dangerous Thing? Or Does It Mattter?

One of my earliest and indelible memories of my mother is seeing her sitting in a wing backed chair in the living room reading The Des Moines Register and Tribune held out open with both hands.  She didn't just read it, she studied it, every page, every column, maybe not all the sports section, I could measure her progress through the paper by the comments she threw in my direction inspired page by page.  She was my model in this, and from an early age I too read a morning newspaper, first the Register, then moving East, The Boston Globe, and on to The New York Times, with side excursions into the San Francisco Chronicle, and a brief moment communing with Corriere della Sera and La Reppublica when I lived in Italy.  As a child with damaged back I was privileged to sit and read in the living room, alone among my siblings accorded this treat.  On a library table next to "my" chair were laid out Time Magazine, Fortune Magazine, The New Yorker Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post and today who remembers what else.  It set a lot of the style of my reading.  So now I sit in a wing backed chair not unlike my mother's, and as I have done all my  life, read and read and read.  From morning to night. In fact since my surgery my immobility is a problem, my balance has grown more unstable, and I struggle to do feeble laps back and forth the length of the gallery outside all the condos on the third floor.  Then back to my chair!  "You're old, for god's sake, you don't need to walk so much."  Once upon a time I read novels, some pretty ambitious, like War and Peace, Remembrance of Things Past, and then I was a college student and it was texts in ancient Greek and Latin, then later scholarly volumes in German and French on ancient texts as I worked up a dissertation topic, and after that bits and pieces of learning to prop up whatever thesis I was developing for an article.  Morning to night.  Now I still read but it is all addiction, I fear.  The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, The Guardian Weekly, The Economist, and still The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, and--oh, I can't think of them all, my head begins to swim.  But that is just the sad point of this listing.  Everything is of the moment, and so I read notices of the same books, the same films, and on and on, from one point of view after another, and the work that is the focus of these inquiring minds and taste makers is quickly lost and diluted in the swirling broth of critical opinion.  I no longer know what I am reading that is being criticized.  And what is so much worse is that at eighty five and more I tend to forget and thus to re read.  I sometimes think I could take one issue of one of these journals and read it over again for the rest of my life.  But you know, it really doesn't matter.  I am one of those oldsters sitting in the corner near the hearth for warmth who has been given a twisted skein for knitting and told to unravel it and then later it can be knitted up again.  Keeps the old timer busy, you know?

It Was Fun But All Good Things Come To An End

When I woke up to discover that Donald Trump was the president elect of the United States I felt betrayed by The New York Times.  I have been a faithful reader, nay a compulsive reader for more than four decades.  It's all the news that's fit to print, so surely their staff must have a handle on what's going on.  The betrayal struck deep; I decided I could no longer believe a word that they printed.  And so I went to my computer and cancelled my subscription for home delivery.  The operator with whom I spoke was gently insistent that I not do this, a little surprising I thought, since she could hardly have been personally affected by my decision.  Still and all, I have since learned that the Times was genuinely concerned to reach out to their readership to insist that this failure of reportage on their part would not happen again.  I changed my subscription to the Guardian and in the first issue sent out to me there was a revealing article by a reporter who had embedded himself with the Sanders and Trump campaigns, and thus had been very much aware that the great unwashed of the United State whom neither Secretary Clinton nor The New York Times seemed to bother to investigate were firmly committed to Mr. Trump.  Actually I had grown weary of the Times for some time as their other sections Style, Food, etc.  seemed to me to grow more and more irrelevant to my world, which is that of an aging retired academic on a pension from TIAA-CREF.  They were too much Vogue Magazine, it seemed to me.  The advertisements for real estate in the Sunday magazine, I mean stupendous condos that were beyond my imagining--think Russian or Chinese tycoons--began to offend me.  The clothes they profiled in Style were obviously not for an aging, eighty plus year old male with a sagging midline (what does that mean?), but more to the point whoever is normal pays hundreds of dollars for a sweater? Even thousands, for God's sake?  Well, some choice readers of the Times that's who.  So sayonara, Times.  And, you know, maybe it's just me, not you.  Really too far out of it, too slow of a pace, not up to the Times anymore.

The Onset Of Winter Midst The Palm Trees

I just finished reading The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain which I seriously enjoyed, although I am not sure that the word records my emotion.  I was quite depressed when I began to read the book and seriously depressed when I finished it.  Of course, the depression which is the most profound I have experienced in some time was set off by the political events in our country for which I see no improvement in my foreseeable lifetime.  So, as the expression goes, "get used to it."  In the midst of my reading of the Tremain novel I stopped to read Alan Bennett's charming Uncommon Reader, a day's read, and something that for a moment lifted my spirits.  We also watched the film "Genius," about a once successful novelist named Tom Wolf and his relationship with his editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, who is always referred to as legendary since among his authors were both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and a host of others, also well known, if not quite such star power.  Wolf's novels were immense, he was wordy wordy wordy, and I remember thinking at the time, boring, boring, boring, and could never understand how he attracted such a following.  The acting in the film was extraordinary, and although throughout I wanted to throttle the Wolf character I was dazzled at Jude Law's undertaking a Southern accent, indeed, the American accents of most of the principals who were Brits, except for the Australian Nicole Kidman.  It did not lift my depression, however, because Wolf's logorrhea was so insistent and threatening, stifling from beginning to end.  I wonder how to get out of this mood.  Creative work, I always say.  I wish I could write a novel, and I have tried yet again to do so in the last year.  The plot just does not work out, however.  I am preparing lecture notes for my Odyssey lecture course, all of eight sessions for the old folks academy, and this for some reason does not enchant me in the doing.  I have never really made any friends down here so I cannot go out to lunch and dinner as I would do in other cities in which I have lived.  How much physical exercise can one perform?  At least the severe balance problems seem to have diminished slightly thanks to my persistent trainer.  Well, back to Odysseus who is now sitting down with King Alcinous and Queen Arete and telling them of his wandering since he was blown off course on his way home from Troy, the Cyclops and all that, quite a lengthy narrative and reminds one somewhat of the Gilgamesh story, which is interesting, and I am going to work that into my lecture, and from the depths of my despair I am wondering if it is worth the bother.  But hope springs eternal.  Of course, I don't believe that, but it is a consolation to write.

I'll Have To Ask My Husband

The newspapers have mentioned the rise in incidence of verbal and visual anti-gay attacks in the USA since the election.  It does not make me fearful since the sight of two very elderly males who might or might not be a couple is not likely to stimulate whatever chemicals in the brain that react in rage? disgust? repressed lust perhaps?  I don't buy into that argument that lower class white males are all on the prowl and ready to attack gays.  From my experience of many decades I know, have often sensed it myself, there are young clearly sexually active males who are unthinkingly and positively heterosexual but who are easily roused to anger which has a real element of fear in it when confronted by the sight of gay males.  The problem is, to my mind, they get aroused by the idea of gay sex, fear it, act out on that fear.  I remember this so well from my teen years.  And more often than not if they could be isolated from the protection of their group of buddies, you could flirt them down to polite behavior, sometimes go further and have sex with them, which is what they didn't understand they wanted all along.  The main thing to remember in the face of menace: these males want a kind of intimacy they can only vaguely imagine, but they want it. It a relief to turn to males who have fully resolved their sexual needs and identities.  When we lived in Hull Massachusetts and now again here in Sarasota we deal with working men every few days.  If it is I who come to the door, I always answer their inquiry about the task they have come to work on with "I'll have to ask my husband," and very few are the times where the guys do a double-take, give a quizzical look, suppress a reaction. It's what all my elderly lady friends report.  They don't react to me as a male with gay potential, but rather to a sexless wrinkled old lump of flesh.

"So Thanksgiving Was Yesterday And I'm Still Recovering" Heard At The Gym

The woman who cuts my hair told me the other day how grateful she was that her kids were otherwise engaged for Thansksgiving, and she was let off the hook of any hostessing duties.  She and her husband were lying back in their loungers back home from work absorbing this fact when it came to them that the perfect Thanksgiving dinner was to wrap up two home made Turkey sandwiches, grab a bottle of wine, two glasses, a couple pieces of pumpkin pie,take up a blanket and go down to the beach, and lie back and gaze at the scudding clouds and feel the gentle breeze off the Coast.  Heaven!  I am in the process of reading through the text of the Odyssey this week and next and into the New Year until it is time to teach, and nothing is more engaging than rehearsing a text much beloved and congenial.  I almost always used to say "one of the foundations of western civilization," but after reading Kenneth Appiah''s demolishing of the notion of western civilization in this week's Guardian I shall have to think of it in less majestic terms, less pretentious, and concentrate on what a great story it is, and how often tongue in cheek.  Odysseus!  what a guy! I guess my new approach to the poem is going to be more like my barber and her plans for Thanksgiving day.  Ah, well, and so it goes.

Jews and Blacks

A couple of nights ago we went to friends for a preThanksgiving dinner, just the four of us together and thus a chance to sit and talk seriously after we had had the delicious food our hostess  prepared.  The assembled foursome all retired ranged in age from 76 to 95, and brought interesting points and experience to the talk. The subject was the ethnic and class animosities that the president elect was fanning among his supporters.  We in the room were two upper class WASPS, another born into a low income laboring class from an immigrant mix of predominantly Irish, but some German, and the last a multimillionaire self succeeded Jewish man whose childhood ghetto home was where Yiddish and Polish were spoken.  The subject was the demonstrable underchievement in school of children from the inner city, and how these academies which recruit them try furiously to leap them over the hurdle of apathy so as to get them into the nervous making track of compulsive success struggle which will plunge them into the direction of Harvard and the other accepted goals.  I thought how I had internalized that struggle as a small white upper class boy (failure or even low grades were unthinkable for me and my friends; I never missed a day of school even the day after my father's death in a car accident when I was six).  Two others described teaching elite suburban schools where failure was not an option for the children.  The three of us were describing anxiety and tension as the norm both at school and at home.  Success was not an option but a demand, a given.  The Jew complained of the rift between Jew and black and wondered why it was so since they were both needing to succeed through the antagonism of their Gentile/white classmates. We ta;led about the natural or inbuilt instinct to over succeed drove jewish children, whereas black children were conditioned to know that black skin in the United States signals failure. We all agreed that the American culture has never been honest about the brutality of slavery nor the horrors and cruelties of the Reconstruction period. Where do we have museums that expose the torture and brutality that the enslaved Africans endured?  Where are our Auschwitz, or Bergen-Belsen?  where are the bronze plaques showing where a black man was lynched?  It was all agreed that Germany had come  to find rest with the horror the Germans had created but centuries on the Americans are hiding to their hurt an ugly ugly truth which lies beneath the hearts of all of us.  Part of the American horror is that this discussion takes place again and again with no blacks present because the social divide is enormous.
Who has a black friend with whom one can really talk honestly?