How Do We Do What We Do?

Yesterday a friend sent me an email complimenting me on my blog, noting as well that he had wanted to make a comment where it seems provided for one at the base of the text, but did not seem to have the technology to do so.  I told him that others over the years had had the same experience, and that to my memory there was only one person, a gentleman who wrote code for a living, who had ever managed to make a comment on the blog.  I got in touch with this person, and he wrote back that one simply had to go to the lower portion of the page and follow the procedure there.  With sinking heart I tried that, and of course there was no way that I could manage anything.  There were no instructions; you had to intuit it all.  I remember when I first got an what ? an Apple Two perhaps in 1984 at the suggestion of a forward looking younger friend who thought perhaps it was time for me who was an established writer to move on from ball point pen and pads of yellow lined paper. which then had to be transcribed onto my electric typewriter.  There were no significant instructions with this Apple, no booklet, as I remember.  I do remember spending two of the most soul-wrenching weeks of my life, up in my study,  crying in frustration and desperation.  And so it has been over the years as I progressed to the big Mac computer, the lap top, the ipad, the iphone.  I remember struggling for months to figure out how to add pagination to one of those Apple writing programs.  And I discovered chat rooms where people with Macs shared with each other arcane bits of technology about the writing programs.  I went to the Apple Store signed up for seminars heard bright young things talking about all the fabulous apps you could add to your machine but never getting into the basics of the process.  I thought to myself what if car dealerships were this indifferent to the driving knowledge of their customers?  Even greater mayhem on American roads!  My husband who is far more interested in process and detail and know-how (I just want to write the damned book, I don't care how it is achieved!) is always pointing out nuggets of technical information when we are having what passes for marital conversation in this the twilight of our lives, nuggets that I cannot digest and intellectually spit out like baby with its first green peas.  People are always telling me brightly all the fabulous things they can do on their computers, phones, pads.  I walk through life like the deaf, dumb, and blind, and having seen the film of the life of Steve Jobs, nay having read the bio, I know what fundamental arrogance eminates from Cupertino or wherever it is the company lurks.  I have written probably five or six books on a computer, but I always expect when I open it up in the morning that the pages will have vanished.  That has actually happened to me. I do not know what I am doing, and at last at this late date I don't really care.

Saving

Every other Tuesday the cleaning woman arrives, a young energetic blonde who feels she must "organize" as she cleans, an irritating tendency that I try to defeat by making a stab at arranging the books and clothes, pens and papers in my study/bedroom so that she will see "organization" when it is not actually there.  She is not fooled, but we have made a truce and she will at least not lay a hand nor a dust rag for that matter on my desk and the items strewn across its surface.  The truth of the matter is that I have too many things.  The closet contains eight suit jackets most of which are really too heavy to wear in Florida, although I thought that I had done a great job sorting out my unsuitable outfits when we moved away from New England.  But perhaps the larger question is: why would I need eight at an age, in a climate, and social setting where polo shirts and tee shirts are about all I ever wear?  There is also a rack of cotton pants, kakhi, black, brown--you's think it was a clothing store.  And I thought I had sorted through everything five years when we downsized. Trouble was I was always afraid that I would need some one of these things that I was about to throw away.  Is this what they call "anal retentive"?  I remember learning the phrase at roughly the same time that I married my second wife, whose family was what they call "old money," people who had held on to their assets for more than a century, and, interestingly enough, she herself suffered slightly from constipation, something I always found mildly ironic.  Don't I understand that the contents of my closets and shelves are easily replaced?  I can even walk from here to Macy's in the mall. I remember when I was a boy an anecdote my mother told me which involved being with my father on some trip when weather turned suddenly cold.  "What did you do?" I asked anxiously.  She laughingly replied "Went out and bought some warmer things."  My astonishment, nay, horror, lasted perhaps for the next fifty or so years until I was with my younger daughter in Victoria British Columbia and a spell  of icy winds came upon us, and we were both shivering.  I marched her into a fancy tourist shop which was right there and we bought some marvelously warm, grotesquely ugly, and embarrassingly expensive sweat shirts and gloves, something for the day and already meant for Goodwill.

Reality

Edgar Degas, the artist, always spoke out against artists painting outdoors in the landscape, "en plein air," as they used to say.  He insisted that the artist's vision was compromised by the in your face sensation produced by the so called "real thing" right there.  In the studio before the easel the artist was free "to see" what in fact was the vision of his psyche, the true reality of the artist. I have a friend who is a gifted artist, but I think limited by wanting to paint the reality she sees before her rather than in her heart and soul.  I remember once looking at a sketch she had made of a little boy standing on what seemed to be a dinner plate, and saying: "Why don't you add a dead bird lying there on the plate?"  She was not scandalized by my suggestion, bizarre as it was,  respond simply: "But there was no dead bird." I have always treasured Degas' advice because I think it frees a critic in other areas as well.  In the study of antiquity the evidence available is scanty, and unevenly distributed.  Only a very few plays, for instance, of the oeuvre of Aeschylus and Sophocles survive, and when you add in the larger number of extant Euripidean pieces you still have statistically a miniscule sample of the output of the Athenian fifth and fourth centuries.  This means that to speak of Aeschylus' or Sophocles' style and dramatic tendency is nonsense, and further still to speak of Greek tragedy in general is ridiculous.  So much of my studies were devoted to fending off the seductions of those who would insist on the historical truth, the realities of the ancient world, when what we have is surmise filtered through a variety of intelligences devoted to a variety of different things.  I remember when I wrote about Thucydides in my ancient Greek literature book I was most of all impressed by how his account of the rise of Athenian imperialism and the war with Sparta was shaped, or so it seemed to me, by the commonplace sense of development in tragic drama, and I was happy to see this opinion voiced by Francis Cornford in his wonderful Thucydides Mythistoricus devoted to the idea that Thucydides did not simply lay out "the facts," but made a narrative obedient to the tragic development from pride to ignorance to error to awareness to fall.  Ancient historians consider Herodotos to be the myth maker, the man who was more interested in a good story than historical fact.  But perhaps it was just that he knew what was available, and how fact and theory were available in story, and Thucydides was doing the same, but talking in a more "scientific" way.  I loved this chapter in my book, and remember showing it to a distinguished scholar of ancient Greek history, a close friend and someone with whom I had gone to graduate school years before.  I couldn't wait til he laid the book down after reading the chapter.  "Pure bullshit," was what he said

Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?

I have been reading the life of Sergeiy Diaghilev, the man who created the Ballets Russes and otherwise was enormously instrumental in advancing the cause of modern art in the early twentieth century.  One of the features of his tempestuous life was the constant need for money.  Diaghilev was not a government functionary but an entrepreneur who found his funding where he could.  He started with his contacts in the Russian Imperial Court, but as time went on he was at first estranged from this source and then of course with the Bolshevik revolution the source disappeared.  In the west he relied on millionaires, such as in Paris the American Singer Sewing Machine heiress, the Princess Polignac, or as in London Thomas Beecham who got his millions from the family's pharmaceutical enterprises.  Everywhere Diaghilev turned he was dependent upon rich people since he was determined to maintain a standard of novelty and aesthetics for which he could never be certain of audience enthusiasm.  He was that thrilling kind of genius who will insist upon standards to which he will bring his audiences over time, but never hesitant at the moment of introducing them.  This takes money and more money and importuning, and seducing, and never slacking.  Having taught at private universities for most of my career I am well aware of the incessant search for financial security.  I was part of the faculty team that went out to speak to alumni groups when Stanford set out to raise one hundred million in 1960, starting Friday evenings, continuing on Saturday, luncheon speeches, cocktail speeches, after dinner speeches; strange as it may seem, a young woman working in the alumni office had a small airplane in which she flew me from speech to speech.  The sum we were trying to get seems paltry now when Harvard University trumpets the billions they seem to raise effortlessly almost every two or three years.  When the downturn came in 2008 Harvard abandoned its plans for a new campus across the river as though the university were about to go on the dole.  Nowadays we read in the Times that the Metropolitan Museum announces that it is running short, although at the same time the papers are full of admiring accounts of their new success, The Met Breuer building over on 75th.  What do all these institutions do with the endowment?  It is never to be spent, just built upon?  Harvard, especially, for what are they growing and growing their endowment?  We all know the old Boston joke of the down and out debutante who was seen in Scollay Square selling herself, and shocked amazement was met with "but she never dipped into capital."  I studied at the State University of Iowa and got graduate degrees at Harvard.  The classics department's sherry parties were my first experience of luxury in higher education.  I have spent my life in an enterprise that is never going to be a draw for the common man; even with all the hoopla and advertising the arts, the humanities are not going to become popular, and classical literature least of all. I can sympathize completely with Diaghilev.  As Blanche Dubois said about depending upon the kindness of strangers with all the attendant ironies and sadness in that observation,  I can, as they say, relate.

Instability

The first day I felt free to take the car after my open heart surgery I went to a very nearby cafe to have brunch with a friend.  I was early so I looked into the back seat to get a book I had with me to read.  But instead of going into the cafe I stood there stupidly next to the car in the parking lot reading.  (I somehow feel I have told this story before; that is one of my greatest fears of aging, repeating oneself, and if you knew the number of close friends who will tell you the same thing six or ten times in the hour--oh, Lord, deliver me!)  Well, the people in the next car returned and wanted to leave but were afraid of bumping me.  They delivered some ever-so-discreet tiny beeps on their horn, I looked up, saw their dilemma and turned to get out of their way.  Of course, I did not gauge the pivot and fell to the ground, injuring my wrist. Despite the intense pain in my wrist I could only think of the fall.  Only the second time, I swear, in twenty five years!  Well, before my surgery I had been dutifully surrendering to my former trainer who was now embarking on a series of exercises to train me to walk more securely.  I had also enrolled in a balance clinic where three days a week I trained myself to stand on a cushiony pillow sinking into the foam and try to maintain my balance.  Or walk along putting my feet into discrete squares and at the same time looking at the ceiling or at the floor or to the right or to the left.  The trainer at the clinic was an exceptionally handsome young man with the most perfect balance, erect carriage, coupled with a gentle manner and shoulder length hair--he could not have been nicer in dealing with me, the clumsy oaf. You are going to improve, do not surrender to a cane, he sweetly said, since then the walker is just around the corner. So, now here I am, the surgery is behind me, I am ever so gently taking up my workout of old, with my trainer checking to be sure I keep the weights low on the machines and avoid those that would pull even a tiny bit on my still sore and very slowly healing severed sternum.  I am encouraged to walk, and I spend a tolerable amount of time on the treadmill which I like because I can hold onto the railing. But two days ago I ventured forth to a lovely park which had a half mile walk through it, curving and winding in ever such gentle gradations, a macadamized path that is laid down onto the landscape and seems of a piece with it.  I parked my car and set off, crushing the sensations of vertigo that panicked me and almost sent me reeling.  But as soon as I was too far to go back, whatever that means, I realized that I was completely off balance.  With some inner steel that I mustered from who knows where I made this nightmare journey around the park, sure that I would fall at any moment, summoning again and again a precarious balance that I did not know I had.  Nightmare!  Pure nightmare!  Today I went to see the orthopedic guy about my wrist.  The x-rays as we both discussed showed a split in some bone which normally they might pin.  But because of the heart surgery another round of anesthesia is out of the question.  He was marvelous.  Let's see what will happen over time (you actually might die in the interval and resolve the problem.)  The pain has diminished, right?  Good sign.  The pain that remains is your arthritis; nothing to do about that.  Yes, the fall was a terrible thing.  And, I quite agree, you want to avoid falling again.  Use a cane--or a walker; it's even better.  Don't consider more falls;  that is definitely not the way to go.

La bella Sicilia

The British Museum has an exhibition on right now devoted to Sicily.  The website has the peculiar advertisement: "The largest island in the Mediterranean.  The home of Mount Etna." Two items of absolutely or very little relevance to what finally they get around to mentioning in the third sentence, to wit: "A cultural centre of the ancient and medieval world." And what a centre, as the Brits spell it, that island is!  Of course, the museum will show pieces that relate to the Arab presence on the island, the Norman invasion, and before all that the Greeks who immigrated in the sixth century BCE and the Romans who followed in their traces several centuries later.  The most significant piece in the show to my mind is the so-called Motya Charioteer, found in 1979 on a small island right off the coast where it is normally exhibited, and thus in such an out of the way location generally ignored.  It is a larger than life size marble sculpture of a young man sculpted in a languid pose, hip thrust out slightly, all odd enough, but the truly peculiar feature is the chiton covering his body, in the so called "wet drapery" mode so that the sheer fabric clings to the body, highlighting his testicles, his buttocks in a way that an ancient nude sculpture never does (butch ancient male statuary is always in the nude).  It is astounding as will be immediately apparent to the museum visitors who may compare it with the Elgin Marbles, carved about twenty five or so years later, which are so much more severe, conventionally masculine, restrained.  Alas, that is the only truly exciting piece that can be on offer since otherwise the great remnants of Sicilian cultural history are firmly in place, situated in the ground.  One thinks of the extraordinary procession of archaic Doric temples on the high hill in Agrigento, or the Norman Cathedral in Monreale the interior of which is aflame with wall mosaics, or the Norman rebuilding of an Arab castle in down town Palermo with its Palatine Chapel, again a scene of vibrant mosaics. Or--I can't control myself!--the Roman villa uncovered in Piazza Armerina whose splendid mosaics, room after room, vie in my memory with the extraordinary imperial communal toilet with, I can't remember now, four or five holes.  So gregarious at all times the imperial family!  These are only a few of the architectural treasures that dot the landscape.  I urge everyone to visit the island, and yes, you can walk right up to Aetna, but a decade ago I remember six tourists destroyed in a sudden eruption, minor to be sure, not headline making, but if you are at the rim, a little more serious.  Go in April for the green of the fields, for the red poppies making their splash, for the lonely splendor of the temple at Segesta out in the open away from any other visual distraction.  But go easy on the ancient theaters.  They are everywhere, and, frankly, take it from someone who has led tours on the island, you've seen one of them, you've seen them all.

Summertime and the Living Is Easy

Summer approaches; in Sarasota that means a cessation of well over half the cultural activities that characterize the cooler months when the so called Snow Birds arrive to clog the streets with their cars and the beaches, restaurants, and stores with themselves--and fill the concert halls and theaters.  Into this vast emptiness which is summer, the two or three workouts at the gym gives some vague shape to our hot, humid, listless days.  We used to plan a trip to London for the theater, then on to Paris or Wiesbaden for the sheer pleasure of being in Europe, but somehow the allure has gone off it, too many complications to an easy trip.  So what to do?  Today's New York Times has provided my inspiration, two superb articles, one by Wesley Morris on the music of Prince, and the other, a mock obituary, on this the anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare.  I have never consciously heard a piece of music composed or played by Prince.  Only a few months ago I had a revelation when our local bank manager a woman from Poland introduced me to the music and singing of Freddie Mercury, now I shall take up Prince.  Louis Bayard's mock obituary of the Bard of Avon was just the reasoned, thoughtful array of the facts known to us of Shakespeare's life and production to inspire me to take up my volume of the collected plays and make the reading of them a summer's project.  It will be hard going through the comedies and the speeches of the fools in the tragedies.  I have never taken to Shakespeare's witty verbal games, just as I cannot abide my husband's turns at wit (ugh!).  Here in Sarasota as patrons of the Asolo Student Conservatory and a supporter of one of the students we are privileged to attend the student recitals at end of their Shakespeare class, and thus over the years hear some rather high powered performances of pieces of a wide range of plays.  Now is the time to build on that.  I am nervous, I must admit, afraid that Shakespeare's language has become too remote from me because I see so few of the plays entire on the stage, that I will lose my resolve.  Can the man who stays by Elena Ferrante, even reading the tetralogy twice, who is into the fifth book of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle falter at the Collected Works of William Shakespeare?

Acting and Suffering

I saw a performance of "Ah, Wilderness" which left me disappointed with O'Neill as I always am.  In this play, a sentimental view of a family, there is a single older uncle in the family and a spinster lady, his counterpart, and would be love interest if he were able to make himself presentable to her by giving up drinking.  Uncle Sid is your classic Irish drunk in America from a hundred years ago, and as such meant to be an amusing feature of the household. It reminds me of our family chauffeur/gardener who luckily only had to drive my surgeon father to the hospital in the morning. We smiled when he used to come to the side door wth a bouquet for mother.  "He obviously was on a bender last night," she would declare, tolerant as ever for an Irish person whom she never considered the mental or moral equivalent of her Yankee stock. It takes an effort of leprechaun fairy dust, however, to make an old drunk over into pleasing, at least from the perspective of twenty first century America where  alcoholism is a medical issue rather than a quaint personal idiosyncracy.  In O'Neill's play the "relationship" or "courtship" of the older couple is counterpart to the adolescent boy who is in the throes of first love and trying out relationships.  Uncle Sid is such a failed person that the contrast does not work very well in a light comedy, suggesting as he does that this is the way of personal relationships as one grows old.  Another O'Neill character with whom I am always at odds is Mary Tyrone.  In this play's reach for "tragedy" we can add to the debilitating effects of tuberculosis and alcohol, Mary's morphine addiction, which indeed is not her fault but which makes her a major victim rather than an actor in the drama.  I am too much of a fan of ancient Greek tragedy to find a victim compelling;  the play is always tedious even the celebrated performance of Katherine Hepburn in the film.  It seems to me more noble to act decisively in the full knowledge of potential retribution in order to set things right, or right in the minds of some.  I think of Clytemnestra murdering Agamemnon because he sanctioned the ritual sacrifice of their daughter, or Oedipus killing the man who manhandled and threatened him on the road even though he knew he was fated to kill his father.  One thinks of Lady MacBeth--the list is long.  It is why I am never sure about Othello as really tragic figure since Iago so manipulates the man that he sometimes seems not his own person, like Mary Tyrone, more a victim.  It doesn't help if one knows the Plautine antecedents to the dramatic action, I mean the wily slave who craftily works to seduce his master to a course of action.  What is a laugh riot in Plautus is utterly sinister in "Othello" but I am not sure it is tragic.

Walking Along

At the end of February I underwent open heart surgery from which now in late April I am finally almost altogether recovered.  My index to this is monitoring in an informal way the decline in dull pain that emanates from the place where they cut my sternum in two and afterwards stapled it (I guess) back together.  Bone takes a long time to grow together and hurts while its doing it.  In all other respects I take the testimony of my friends who marvel at how active, sparkling, alert and lively I am compared to the dull Charlie of months ago whose blood evidently was moving very sluggishly through clogged arteries and valves. Friends marvel; one of my daughters had a more dubious expression of enthusiasm:  "Dad, you look great!  You look eighty!"  My goal is to walk into downtown Sarasota, some three miles away.  First, however, Arlington Park beckons, with its one half mile path, something I am sure to do well since even in pre-surgery days I could make it, albeit with many stops along the way.  Twice around the path at Arlington Park for starters is my immediate objective.  The walk to down town Sarasota is mostly along side streets with manicured sidewalks of the rich whose giant mansions line the way.  So it will be a pleasant walk in every way.  Otherwise I can once again take up walking to our health club, although here I must confront the squalor of Tamiami Trail, as Route 41 i called.  Like Los Angeles Sarasota is utterly a car city, and as befits a populace which is proud to carry fire arms openly, there are--I guess I must somehow call them city streets--such as the Trail, where traffic moves six abreast and highway speeds, past drive in diners, car washing establishments, mini malls,  and all the other grotesque manifestations of a car culture.  The sidewalk is not exactly designed for the pedestrian but rather slants toward the street since it is the entrance to one after another parking lot along the way for these mini malls and drive in shops.  I didn't used to mind walking this route, but as I have aged and grown frailer, albeit with a heart pumping far more efficiently, I am more sensitive to the trucks, cars, and motorcycles thundering past me on the Trail, sometimes even feeling the air pressure from an especially large and fast vehicle moving along.  Soon I will be taking my new tentativeness to Manhattan where I notice already that as I step down from the front door of our apartment building I must look to join the stream of human traffic marching along in both directions, finding the moment to break into their ranks, not unlike making that turn off a street with no traffic light, onto a main thoroughfare.  Someone suggested carrying a cane, if not for support, then to beat them off, if I cannot make a path through the crowds.

Those Were the Days of Our Lives

Yesterday my husband and I went to a workshop so called, presented by the graduating students at the Asolo Conservatory for Acting.  They appear in small dramatic pieces which demonstrate their acting skills and this workshop they will take to New York City and show themselves off to directors, agents, and producers.  As usual we were dazzled and intrigued by their acting skills but generally put off by the nasty tone of the boy-girl relationships on display in the small segments of contemporary drama.  I thought back to my own introduction into a sexual life, albeit with other males, but I don't remember all the sharp, negative, narcissistic tones of the encounters, nor a few years later when at twenty one I met and married a woman.  But this morning's Times had an interesting piece by Wesley Morris locating the present day ill will on display in television romances claiming it was Lena Dunham in "Girls" who first presented mean spirited women and in the end men as well.  Yes, thought I, we started watching that and were amazed at how selfish and cruel the characters were, and thus we stopped.  Well, according to Morris it got worse season after season, and as I guess is the case, this is the nature of modern day relationships. The woman sitting next to me at the workshop presentation, an oldster such as myself, kept saying that in her youth people were not like that, and I quite agreed.  It was different for me, of course, because I kept propositioning the boys in my school, and they were not about to enter into romantic relationships with me; they just wanted to get their rocks off.  It would be easy to say that there was no relationship at all in these encounters, but the funny thing about it was for the most part these guys were part of the social fabric of my life and familiars; they knew me well, tolerated me as an eccentric and there was a kind of comradeship, strange to say, that persisted over many years.  I think of that often in connection with a recent article in The New Yorker Magazine in which the author takes up the interesting fact that juveniles in the United States of America who engage in sexual relations are liable to be prosecuted as sex offenders for which they are held accountable throughout their lives.  I was appalled to read this, and thought back to the encounters as a fourteen and fifteen year old, the frenetic and strenuous urge to relieve the pressure of a teen aged hormonal surge.  Sex offender!  No way!  It was all fun; my cohort of boys never had enough sense of Christian sin to cast what we were doing into that Stygian gloom.  When I think back on that long ago time I hear Freddie Mercury's voice soothing me and sending me back into nostalgia with that song "Those Were the Days of Our Lives."

The Cleaning Lady

It is 8:12 and I am furiously making the last minute sweep of my bedroom and bathroom, tidying up the unruly mess that is my natural way of life.  The cleaning lady arrives at 8:45.  She is not the stereotype of New Yorker cartoons of yore, but a tall, brisk, striking blonde with an upsweep, securely and perfectly in place, with a can do attitude and no holds barred when  it comes to organization.  I am terrified.  Yes, I love having the kitchen made spotless and gleaming.  Yes, the carpets are vaccuumed thoroughly, the tile floors polished.  All good.  But it is the hours of frenzied tidying, clearing the bathroom counters, the kitchen counters, putting away clothes, shoes.  I am exhausted, and what's worse so out of sorts that I shall not have the proper response to her hearty hug and loud loud good cheer.  I have to stop now.  I've got catch a quick shower, and, oh, god, so many other little details to attend to.  Wish me luck!

Richard at Seventy Three

Today is my husband's birthday.  We went yesterday evening for a steak dinner, and this morning I invented a birthday card to set by his plate at the breakfast table, something "cute" from my computer since as usual I had failed to buy a card at the store.  Richard and I have been together for more than twenty five years and he has never failed to set a card out at my place on my birthday.  Says a lot, but I shall not hazard the guess what that is.  When we met Richard was 46 and I was 59; he was so handsome, with an eyebrow that could bend up in such a sexy quizzical fashion, made to match his wit.  A friend of mine observing the two of us after a year into our relationship said "oh, my god, you two laugh so much," and yes, we are both funny and use language for wit as well as communication.  The only down side are his terrible puns from time to time.  We are truly different types. He was a high school teacher, I was a college professor (he would say that thus he cared about the growth and development of the youngsters before him, whereas I was more concerned with how my performance was coming across). He is, as I am forever saying to friends, the high school hall monitor demanding to see that you have your bathroom pass when he meets you coming along.  I am the kid in the back row throwing spit balls or sneaking out at recess to go home.  He is very patient when it comes to re-arranging the house, which we have done on many occasions.  And of course there is the incredible fact that he is a handyman who knows how to repair most everything, not to mention build from scratch a deck on the side of the house in Cambridge, the exquisite brick terrazzo and pergola in Hull, and all the repairs that all our dwellings cry out for over the years.  Add to this, his annoying propensity for correcting all my grammatical errors in Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.  Fundamentally, I don't care, I am sloppy and a lazy learner, born into old money, and indifferent to precision--and as I often remind him, I am the one who has the Harvard PhD.  Richard grew up in poverty on Staten Island and went on to college degrees and graduate degrees and a superb teaching career.  That's quite a difference.  It manifests itself as well in his obsessive precision with money.  Nothing annoys him more than when asked by him after some purchase of mine "What did you pay for that?" I reply "I don't know." Money is a strange thing; my mother in law, my second wife, just like Richard balanced their check books down to the penny.  I  never have, just  like my mother, taking for granted that what the bank tells me is okay.  He shudders when I say that.  When first we met I innocently asked "Where did you spend your summers when you were a kid?"  He was polite and didn't get angry, and answered: 'in our four room house on Staten Island," but he never lets me forget my naiveté.  Recently I had open heart surgery, and for three weeks Richard was a constant support, never complaining, never cringing, never wanting out for a break.  "Oh, my god," I said finally, "you are so nice and kind."  "I love you," he replied.

Paul Rudolph

The Ringling Museum is currently exhibiting a facsimile of a beach house by the architect Paul Rudolph done many decades ago.  The real beach house exists somewhere on a key in a rich man's grounds south of Sarasota.  I have now been three times to the exhibition; it is so beautiful a structure that I could go, nay, shall go many more times before it is taken down in the autumn.  Paul Rudolph who was a distinguished architect, pretty much started his career in the Sarasota area, although he is famous for buildings he designed later throughout the country and abroad.  There is a great sentimental draw as well.  I knew Paul but that is not so memorable as the encounter I had with his aesthetic when I first went to the apartment of the woman who was to become my second wife.  She was a student at the Harvard School of Design and steeped in the design theories of Bauhaus which the school's director Walter Gropius had made to flourish in America.  I had never seen anything like the decor she had imposed on the small basement room in which she was living.  It was so spare, the few areas for sitting were all built into the walls, the small room was distinct in its divisions without any physical prompts .  The space beyond the door where I stood upon entering was created by stringing raw leather thongs from floor to ceiling.  It was, I recognized, a sort of vestibule, but there was no wall, only the intellectual and aesthetic sense of one.  I had grown up in the Middle Western affluence of a surgeon's home, rooms full of tables, chairs, Persian rugs, embroidered cushions, things and more things and more.  And here in this Cambridge basement I was confronted with spare, empty, stripped down spaces.  Paul was one of the critics the last year of her studies, he had been a judge on her qualifying project; he was also a friend.  It so happened when we moved to New Haven for my appointment a few years later he was arriving as the Dean of the School of Architecture, and our friendship flourished.  We were on hand to witness Paul's transformation of the Elks clubhouse building into his residence, inspiring us again and again to eliminate, minimize, go for the bones of the design, geometry and coordination over careless sensuality and comfort.  It was so exhilarating.  The beach house at the Ringling has glass walls, and panels that can be lowered or raised over the glass to create darkness or light, rooms that mimic the measurements of the exterior glass panels, so that the occupants will feel themselves in a Mondrian painting.  When we moved to California for my Stanford appointment we lived in an Eichler house made by a mass market housing developer whose allegiance was to Bauhaus.  Every piece of furniture we installed in the living room was in some geometric relationship with every other, nothing was random.  And then suddenly we had four children approaching their teens, and Bauhaus was over.  We moved back East to a large rambling house filled with too much furniture, too many casual messes strewn all over the place, too many dogs, people, residents and visitors, hullabaloo.  So the facsimile of the beach house draws me back again and again to a memory of the early years of our marriage, and a kind of special sanity.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

We made it through the first act of the play by that name based on the 1967 film with Hepburn, Tracy, and Poitier.  We thought it embarrassingly outdated, and a plot so contrived--anyone not meant to be in the ensuing conversation left the scene conveniently enough if only to fetch another handkerchief.  Perhaps there are still  large parts of the country where ordinary polite middle class white people might be outraged that their daughter was thinking of marrying an African-American.  It was 1947 or 48 when my sister brought a black man to Sunday dinner, our black cook who served the meal had a hizzy fit and left the room, and mother had a melt down--this was in the American middle west.  I had taken up having sex with a black football star at our high school a needy guy who was prevented from dating white girls and was willing to settle for relief in the back seat of my car, and over the years we struck up a friendship of sorts.  When a daughter went on a semester study trip to Kenya I encouraged her to get a Maasai boyfriend for her stay.  They were so gorgeous and it would all be so unsensational an experience unlike in the States.  My oldest sister lived with a black male for the last ten years of his life, and I got to know him quite well since they came to visit at my seashore place often.  He was someone who has used the GI Bill to make it into the executive class at IBM, quite a social distance from his mother who was a domestic, as I discovered at his funeral.  His silence on his family was indicative of the artificial comity of our relationship.  There was the same wall between the footballer and myself during our many teenaged conversations.  We never brought up the fact that his fellow students who were so friendly and admiring of him never ever invited him to parties.  Once when we were in college, still sexual partners oddly enough ("can't break the habit,"said with a laugh) when there were black girls everywhere on campus, he took me and a white friend to a --to me strange-- encampment so to speak out in the woods near Cedar Rapids where there was food and drink for sale and a jazz band playing.  I never thought of it at the time, but I suppose that Negroes could not go into jazz clubs in those days.  He and I never talked about the social and political facts of our two races just as we never talked about the fact that I was a queer going down on him whenever he wanted it.  Once a black student came to my house in Brookline and afterward while cutting through on a path to the Roman Catholic Church was apprehended and arrested by a typical Irish cop who saw black and saw crime.  It was dreadfully embarrassing; I got a liberal lawyer who got him off, of course, although the arrest stuck at municipal court level to protect the cop, so the acquittal was at superior court.  The student and I could say nothing; he forbade it.  His anger at me for living in a fancy white suburb came out clear, but what was I to do?  I have not talked, I mean really talked, to a black person for years now.  My trainer at the gym who is Puerto Rican and volunteers at a center for children where the clientele is largely black urges me to take up reading there to the smaller youngsters whose home life is pretty bleak.  But a white friend of mine cautions me that the mothers are all suspicious of the motives of older white males and I am not ready to put my gayness out there and reel it back in with false charges of sexual molestation

Charm

Did my mother teach me to be charming or did I pick it up from studying her in action all the years of my childhood?  I am said to be charming, and, indeed, I recognize it in myself.  Independent testimony, in this case, from classmates from ten to fifteen years of observation, is unanimous in underscoring my mother's charming manner.  Charm and deploying my sense of humor got me through the teen age years when other boys were disarmed from being hostile toward me, the colossal freak queer in their midst; they never quite got it that charm is just as aggressive and often hostile as their instinct to toughness and bullying.  When I entered upon a professional life, first in graduate school studying for the PhD degree, and then when I started teaching it was difficult for me to adjust to the males who dominated this new world who for the most part were entirely impervious to my charm, were really ignorant of how charm worked, not expecting clearly enough to find or respond to charm in a male. The charm was tied into my sense of humor; that they sometimes got, although the chair of the Stanford department, himself an old line WASP and as such utterly alien to a sense of humor, used to ask colleagues if in fact perhaps I were a Jew.  The chair at Yale, Frank Brown, appreciated me for my bizarre points of view, in fact, invited me to come to Yale after a dinner party where we sat side by side and traded nonsense with each for several hours.  Yes, Stanford was a tough nut to crack; the department was small enough that I was at the table for all departmental meetings and never impressed but only mystified the literal minded, matter of fact elderly persons that it had pleased Fate to give me as colleagues. I was saved by another junior colleague, a man from the Boston working class Irish, and as such, mischievous and subversive of authority and tolerant of my manner if not always appreciative of it.  I traded all that for a stint as chair at Boston University charged with building up the department, where at first charm and a sense of humor were all I needed with the group of youngsters I assembled as colleagues.  I generally puzzled faculty from other departments who were often New York  liberal Jews who considered me irrelevant politically and socially naive.  Charm did not work on them, and a few years later it certainly did not work on the new president, John Silber, a man of ferocious aggression and bluntness.  Charm, perhaps, was going out of style.  Still, my husband who came into my life about the time I was wondering if I needed to rethink my social manner, was much taken with my charming ways, remarking often that this had not been on offer in his family home on Staten Island.  He was not only amused by it, but mystified at how much benefit it accrued to me, and sometimes annoyed that his open and honest ways were no match for charming Charlie, as for instance, as I think I have recounted elsewhere in this blog, the time a representative on a United Airlines desk setting up a flight to London from Dulles arbitrarily gave us two first class cabin seats after she had been subject to what Richard pointed out was a barrage of charm--and I thought I was just chatting with the lady to pass time!  Recently I had a fabulous, funny, and ridiculous conversation with the nurses making up the surgical team for my open heart surgery.  Clearly this was before they put me out.  It was a delight that these same ladies came to my room to bid me farewell four days later when I was released from the hospital.  Ah. fun and games!  Let the party continue.

Female Architects

In the April 13th edition of the New York Times there was an article about a number of women now gaining purchase as architects in a field hitherto solidly dominated by males and pretty much closed to the ladies.  I am interested more than a little because for two decades I was married to an architect graduated from the Harvard School of Design in 1956, a student of Walter Gropius and Jose Luis Sert, as he called himself then.  Her career had the inevitable set back in becoming a mother four times over in rapid succession when day care was an unusual remedy and stay at home moms were thought psychologically necessary (we both thought so, and in retrospect so do our grown children,  I might add), but once back at work she met resistance frequently when she was the only woman, for instance, on a design team.  This long winded prelude gets me to the Times article which was front page of the Arts section and featuring photographs of six rising stars in the business.  I use the word business because that is really what the news article is all about--women getting secure positions in a business, architecture, hitherto controlled and dominated by males.  I would have called this piece of news a fit for the Business section of the newspaper.  Furthermore, I am quite sure if they were profiling six rising males there would never been the photographs.  Overall the piece seemed completely sexist in its implications.  Female business achievement is not straight forward in some way, it has to be gussied up as a form of artistic endeavor, the area assigned to women and gays, by and large. The photographs were perhaps even a more egregious slap at women, since the decision to run them seemed to operate on the age old notion that males need to have the gaze when dealing with women.  "Lovely to look at, lovely to hold," sang Fred Astaire all those years ago, and women are still tortured by the imperative to look at them.  I remember my wife and feel guilty at how I tried to manipulate her. When I met her she generally wore an old grey flannel skirt, sneakers, a dull grey sweater with the collar of a man's shirt sticking out; it was her uniform.  After we were married I got her into thigh length skirts and dresses and black boots; you can't keep a gay man down when there is a chance to buy women's clothing!  Of course, at home she wore mu-mus covered with juice and cereal stains, but when she returned to work after ten years and I took over the household tasks because my teaching permitted the time at home, she took to wearing pants suits, elegant fabrics, minimal decoration, straight lines, and I don't think I ever saw her in a dress again.  I think of my sisters and my mother's constant admonitions on their clothing, on "how you look", something she never said to me or my brother.  We were all of us short people except one sister who loomed tall and big; if she had been a male, she would have been a football star.  As it was, her teenaged years were a torture of being an outcast, an ugly, clumsy, insecure, immediate object of fun, whose mother. fastidious and delicate, gave her no support.  There is a somewhat happy ending to this story when this sister moved to New York City, shed the pounds, became miraculously a tall, elegant, ravishingly beautiful woman, who now at ninety, at her birthday party showed herself to be the same majestic beauty.  But this story is ugly.  What about the person?  Who cares?  She is beautiful, worth looking at, that's all that matters in our male controlled culture.  Today's news is that one of Harvard's exclusive all male clubs declines to take female members because of the potential for sexual abuse.  As my wife used to say "if they can't control their dicks, they should cut them off."

Things Do Do in Sarasota (this is yesterday's blog, somehow not downloaded)

Yesterday evening we were listening to a performance of Brahms' Sonata in F minor for Viola and Piano presented by a group called La Musica, a group of musicians who  offer four concerts of chamber music in the opera house and then this one at another auditorium, always in the month of April, this being their the thirtieth year of performance.  Later in June there will be a series of chamber music concerts of faculty and students of a group studying in Sarasota.  During the winter Izaak Perlman runs a winter version of his Long summer camp for aspiring instrumentalists culminating in a charming orchestra group playing his orchestrations of chamber pieces.  Yesterday we could have stayed to hear Samuel Barber's Sonata for Cello and Piano in C minor, but both of us so awash in the ravishment of Brahms chose to leave while we were ahead.  Plus we were hungry and there was a great fish restaurant in the vicinity.  During the "season" we go to six performances of the Sarasota Symphony which does not have the most exciting programming but marvelous playing and sound, and to chamber music concerts put on by the chairs of the various instruments which are always much more interesting.  There are four or five operas on offer during the season where excellent principals as a rule mingle with relatively indifferent and poorly directed choruses.  The ballet in Sarasota is world famous right now garnering reviews in the New York Times for their performances of Ashton.  The Asolo Repertory Theater is sort of the Broadway of Sarasota catering to an audience of very old people who last saw a play, one senses in the Eisenhower era out in Ohio--it's a bridge and tunnel crowd you might say, that comes from all over the Midwest and Canada to escape the cold.  The Asolo's  student conservatory theater balances this by unpredictable and sometimes difficult pieces---I saw my first play by Annie Baker there;  then there is a black theater that puts on mostly musicals but this year also did three serious dramas ("Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," for example) not their strongest efforts, and a conglomerate theater company with many auditoriums which puts on a melange of musicals, comedy shows, in our estimation mostly shlock, and now the quite new and small intense Urbanite Theatre which devotes itself to edgy and difficult plays for which it has already developed a passionate following.  The jazz music is well represented in clubs and halls throughout the city, like the Friday afternoon two hour sessions at the Unitarian Church.  All of which is to say that there is usually something going on during the season.  (I did not even mention the summer season of the Banyan Theater.)  The curious feature is that for any given moment there is very little choice, and there are no sudden commercial shifts.  The art scene is far more institutional here, the result rarely random and unpredictable.  So as opposed to Manhattan the great feature about it all, I recognize and appreciate, is that it is predictable.  There is no desperate struggle for the almost sold out event of the must see artist.  Everything is plotted long in advance, the drive to the theater is easy, parking is plentiful, quality restaurants are waiting  in the near vicinity.  True enough, there is very little that makes you really tingle, throws you for a loop, leaves you shaken for days.  The audience is mostly beyond seventy and maybe those moments of strong emotion are just as well over.  And yet, and yet down twenty miles south the theater in Venice last November put on a production of "Hair" that was as strong as the one that opened on Broadway in 1968.

Viewing the Helmers Marriage

Last night my husband and I went to a performance of a modern version of Ibsen's "Doll's House," stripped down for twenty first century taste (eliminating the complications of the children, for one thing, which as any veteran of marriage will tell you, so radically changes the chemistry of husband and wife that this is basically no longer Ibsen's play).  As is always the case when the tensions of the power struggle between husband and wife are played out, and there is ample evidence of the acculturation which keeps women enslaved to the family, and obedient to her husband's outside power struggles, I grow guilty in recollecting my own twenty year marriage to the mother of our four children.  She was a trained architect, just out of school, and ready for her first job, when we married, I was in my second year as an instructor of ancient languages in a four year college commuting an hour three days a week from Cambridge where we lived. In the second year of our marriage she bore a baby boy, quite unplanned, as those things could be back in the days before The Pill.  Three more were to follow.  We both assumed that she would stay home and mother the child, and then again with the later arrivals.  I was frantic at the disruption of my routines; I had to prepare classes, read papers, write some damn book or another to ensure my future.  She was stunned at the loss of her personal life as the babies dominated her ever waking moment.  I didn't know what to do.  Yes, I could cook and did so, could diaper a baby, did that far less so; babies were breast fed, so that let me off that hook.  But me cooking and shopping made us both tense.  It was "time away from my career."  We both felt it, both uneasy, but she also angry because of the underlying perception unspoken that hers didn't matter.  For ten years she felt bitter and I felt guilty.  The children were the most adorable, beautiful, sweet human beings, we were so proud of them, so pleased to laugh and play with them, for me true to this day when they are all in their late fifties and visiting me in Florida (their mother alas having died in 2005).  But as youngsters they were always that burden and responsibility, that "other" thing, not what we were trained to do, supposed to do, which was working on our careers.  After ten years the children were all in school and the responsibility of other adults for long stretches of weekday time. I was successful enough to arrange my teaching and research duties so that generally I could operate from my office at home in their off school hours, and she went back to work full-time.  She had lost ten years as her classmates were gaining a foothold in the  profession.  She was a woman in a man's world.  I was reminded of that by the article in this morning's New York Times about women architects and the formidable challenges they face in a man's profession. My wife and I understood that when she returned to work nothing must stand in her way. And nothing did; she worked her way up to associate, the co- designer of major buildings around Boston, even from time to time out in the field as the site architect with her hard hat and boots.   I took over the cooking, a cleaning woman came for the cleaning, the children made their beds and oversaw the laundry.  It was an interesting role reversal as my children remarked on how in their friends' families it was the father who often had to work late at the office and the mother cooked dinner.  I became to all intents and purposes the main homemaker.  I suppose that anyone viewing this arrangement would say it all evolved naturally and comfortably from my being more gay than straight, even if this were an item unknown to not many more than my wife and myself.  We grew apart, my wife and I, for a variety of reasons, not the least because she liked being out in the world, giving architecture all her attention, hanging out with the boys, and I wanted to take sabbatical years in Europe with the family, and finally did so without her.  It was a divergence of interests, the sexual one becoming more pronounced as we developed in different directions. Nobody slammed the door, like Nora Helmer, the marriage ended not with a bang but a kind of yawn.

Monday Morning

From time to time people have asked me for more of my blog.  I stopped once and then again because I grew tired of the tyranny of having to compose a new one each day.  I was often asked "why do you feel compelled to do this every day?"  Well, that is my nature, is the obvious answer.  For someone who was required from early boyhood to be standing behind his chair at the breakfast table to await the moment of his mother's arrival at the table, and who cannot recall one single time that he or any one of his five siblings failed in that obligation, I guess writing the blog is just another hoop through which to jump.  I have been inching forward to resuming the writing, but my compulsion to frame things is so strong that I had to find the appropriate day.  It would have to be a Sunday.  Why?  Well, the week begins on Sunday.  Says who?  Some little voice in my brain still alive to serving as altar boy at the early morning service at our Episcopal Church.  Oddly enough in the years of retirement the days of the week have lost any significance except Sunday which is now marked only by the greater size and variety of sections of the New York Times delivered to my doorstep daily.  Like the Dowager Countess of Grantham I really have no sense of "weekend" anymore, although unlike Her Ladyship I once did indeed look forward to the weekend like a shipwreck sighting an arriving naval patrol boat.  Sunday April 10th was to be my debut in a third incarnation of blog writer.  Another opening, another show.  This Sunday, as I sat with my Times in my big comfy chair, there came out of the sky blue morning a strange crack of what I could imagine was lightening, and the lamp by my chair went out.  And thus my computer was stalled, and thus the blog was not about to be started, and thus the rhythms were off, and . . . . .Well, here it is Monday.  I shall start the blog, and pretend that Monday, the start of the work week for millions of people, is a good moment to begin another installment of what in my idleness I shall call a simulacrum of my life's work.  After all, in addition to teaching, I did write a lot.  In any case, this lovely Monday is a new beginning for someone whom I shall style a New Person, having just come through open heart surgery a few weeks ago.  As a raconteur I know that the phrase ought to guarantee the immediate attention of your audience except here in Sarasota open heart surgery is rather much a ho-hum procedure.  What else could one expect in a community which supposedly has the highest percentage of over eighties in the nation.  Eighty, now that's a word to conjure with!  A daughter just visiting remarked enthusiastically that it was like a miracle to look at me.  "You look eighty again!" she exclaimed.  Hmmmm . . . .