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?

Another Opening, Another Show

You would think that I had stopped this blog for good in disgust and despair if you had read my last entry.  But never think to count a confirmed narcissist out of the game.  I like writing out my thoughts, and what is more reading them over from time to time.  If I may sink more deeply into the squalor of self revelation, I will confess to keeping a file box next to my desk in which I have stored in the calendar order of their publication all my published papers, and looming somewhat adjacent and above this box is a shelf with that various books I have written plus copies of the translations into foreign tongue (one being Korean, of all things, with beautiful illustrations).  Vanity knows no limits.  And in this season where the leaf of inspiration lies sere on the brittle branch (my, that was rather elegant if I do say so!), one needs recourse to old papers and old thoughts, since new ones are not exactly popping up like spring flowers.  For several years now I have imagined trying yet again to compose a successful lecture course on Homer's Odyssey, and nothing develops.  I am, however, about to offer eight lectures (1 hr 20 min) every Thursday starting January.  This is for the senior citizens down here, learning lite, we might call it, no prerequisites, no assignments, no grades, no attendance takers, subjects from dense to frivolous, mostly discussions sometimes lectures from the more pompous or pretentious (guess where that puts me!)  So far I've done one on Greek tragedy, another on the Iliad.  The enrollees as you might have imagined are predominately women.  The American male (at least the heterosexuals, in my experience) have a hard time thinking about human relations which certainly is the foundation of tragic drama, and they don't necessarily like to return again and again to things that are unpleasant, which in the case of the Iliad means confronting his own death over and over.  That is why science fiction and other terrestrial action pieces are so popular; men can have the simulacrum of destruction and mayhem without the attendant human agony or implications of human mortality that, let's say, one finds in Shakespearean drama.  In any case, (you see my teaching style--nattering on and on farther and farther off subject until a brisk "in any case" gets us back on track), I am very much looking forward to the Odyssey lectures.  So many things that resonate through the ages and all began with this text: a boy sets out to find his absent father, his mother beset by sex mad males who want to despoil her of her house and home and take over and get rid of the son, glimpses of the lives of the rich and famous (Menelaos and Helen, Arete and Alkinoos), a fantastic voyage with giants and other scary scenes, a glamorous witch keeping the hero in sexual bondage until the gods release him, a witty scene where the hero meets up with a glamorous girl and, since he is naked, he tries to hide his erection as he kneels in supplication before her, and on and on and on and finally tears, homecoming, dad and mom reunited, the aging lovers having a night of love in their bed guaranteed to get a rise out of the students who are more or less coevals 

What's There To Say?

I cannot possibly top the inanity of Donald Trump being elected President of the United States, so I shall have to retire from the field.  As a parting note let me share with you a vision of the future I saw in downtown Sarasota this morning: a pickup truck driving along with a large TRUMP poster in the back and a Confederate flag tied to it and waving gaily in the breeze.

Electionn Day

Where can I hide from the onslaught of television, talk, newspaper reading.?  I voted weeks ago; there's nothing I can do, I don't want to know.  Now I am simply waiting for the fat lady to sing.  Timidly I glance at the Times, and leaf through the first section.  The editors have done a kindness by putting other news to the front.  A pleasing article about Obama on the election campaign circuit, more human interest than anything else.  The obituary of Janet Reno, the recounting of her quiet fight with Parkinson''s Disease, a little bit about dissidence in Hong Kong, and a murder here in America that the article claims shows the chinks in the welfare system. But inside we get soda tax in California--a damn good thing, the problems of doctors care across this broad land, no villain, really, but rather a problem that calls for fixing, a wonderful look back at the Arno flood fifty years ago and all the  wonderful people who rushed to Florence to help out immediately, the story of a man who donated a yacht which another fellow has outfitted to rescue migrants from the Mediterranean Sea.  Then a down about India's smog to keep the tone level, as a prelude to the International Pages and Australia backing down on gay marriage, a Palestinian getting 12 years for stabbing Israelis, corruption in the Ukrained, and the National section with  a lady thrown under the subway, news of a new kind of sandwich sold from a van by its creator rising to restaurant fame in Harlem, and the Pope--God Bless Him!--choosing a moderate for Archbishop of Newark, and the really good news is that the editors relegated all the nail biting election news to its special section, there to be set aside and maybe glanced at much much later after getting through Tuesday's special Science section.  I'm done reading about the election and await either business as usual or the Storm Troopers patrolling the streets.  Last night we went to a superb performance of Donizetti's "Don Pasquale" a comic work thus exhausting its humor early on, but which nineteenth century audiences, chatted and drank champagne as they listened to--odd but I believe grammatically correct--and I fell into a deep sleep.  So well rested I came hom, and now it's today.  I feel oddly sanguine this morning.

The Philistine

It is one of those moments in time when if I am objective enough to step back and look at myself objectively I find revealed the classic middle class philistine, whom you will always find at the concert hall, in the theater, on the list of donors printed in the program, sometimes baffled by what he hears, sometimes feeling his inner heart swell with the beauty he perceives in the notes he hears, sometimes puzzled and put off by the sounds.  This weekend on Saturday night I went with a friend to hear a very special performance of Anton Bruckner's Pierrot Lunaire played and sung lovingly by a group who has made this thirty odd minute piece their specialty.  It thoroughly repelled me, the screeching notes from the instrument, the screaming of the soprano voice.  I tried, I tried, I tried to assimilate it in some way of another, finally just surrendering and thinking to myself: well, this is happening.  Sunday at the matinee of the Sarasota Symphony we were treated to Beethoven's Egmont Overture as a Vorspeise, then Mendelsohn's famous Violin Concerto, which is lushly beautiful, and sweepingly romantic--what's not to love?  After the intermission Anu Talli, the conductor led a very crisp Sacré du Printemps, which Stravinksy had performed in a debut performance in 1913 just a year after that shrill piece by Bruckner.  It was from another world, although I know that as its first hearing it was shocking and outrageous in the extreme.  I listened to these pieces, just sounds to me, able to notice chords, and melodies, and progressions in the Mendelsohn piece, but mostly just thinking it's pretty, and the Beethoven Overture is pleasing because so familiar from eighty odd years of hearing it.  The Stravinsky is compelling because of the sharp and compelling rhythms, because of the associations with the ballet for which it was composed, for the anecdotes of scandal attached to it.  I was lost in it, sunk into a non intellectual animal appreciation of its rhythms and noises.  That's as far as I can go.  Tonight we go to the opera, Donizetti's "Don Pasquale," a treat if only because finally, thank god, the conductor has finished his decade long Verdi cycle.  Donizetti, isn't he "bel canto"? won't that make me swoon like bel canto usually does?  Well, there you have it folks, the inner workings of the mind and spirit of a typical senior citizen who used to listen to the Met every Saturday afternoon and the New York Symphony every Sunday, a member of America's cultured classes.  By chance Tomasssini, the Times premier music critic wrote a piece for the Sunday edition about how contemporary music is left out in the cold while modern art and the rest of the avant garde is let in the door.  Don't blame the persons who shut the door say I.  I vote with my ear. I try and try John Adams, Cage, Crumb, on and on.  "Eat your broccoli" is the inner command I hear.  The gorge rises in my throat.

A Night Of Classical Music

I can't read The New York Times  today.  I can't think about the election another moment.  Thank God, we do not watch television, and I am thanking God for that as well because news on television is on a new level of inanity.  But I cannot read another analysis of something which will become a reality on Tuesday.  I always remember the people at The Chicago Tribune set the headline for "Dewey Beats Truman," and were quite wrong.  I have never had so visceral a dislike of a candidate as I feel for Mr. Trump; in general I am suspicious of heterosexual males and when I sense the braggadocio, the I can get it for you wholesale, the says you, the outta my way, sweetheart, take on things I feel revulsion.  I am convinced as many more qualified to comment than I that there is so deep seated a misogyny in this country that a woman candidate is more hated than a black male candidate.  Read Elaine Showalter in the current Times Literary Supplement.  But enough of all this.  Last night I went with a friend up to New College, the elite, honors college of the Florida public university system to hear a performance of Arnold Schoenberg's legendary 1912 masterpiece Pierrot Lunaire.  Coincidentally the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra is playing Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps this weekend.  It was composed in 1913 so that is a easy point of comparison, and as we all know the first performance was a scandal, the audience was half disgusted and there were arguments and fisticuffs.  Somehow that has all settled down, and Stravinsky's piece is a "classic."  I have to say that the Schoenberg piece may be a classic in certain musical circles but its harshness remains for me an enormous barrier to easy listening.  But musical purists will scream " who the hell wants 'easy listening?'  I do, just as I have grown able to absorb the notes of other pieces of originally unfamiliar or difficult music.  I cannot get past the harsh shrieking.  I guess am a simpleton from Iowa and will remain one. But wait a minute" I have absorbed Picasso easily enough over the years, so maybe it's Schoenberg's problem. Still it was a wonderful evening, what I heard is still in my ears, and I was engaged in being one of an audience of serious listeners.  There was even one young man in the audience with the oh so fashionable only lightly shaved sort of blue beard chin wearing a dress to no one's distress (my companion, a local academic, said: "You see that all the time now.")

The Invalid

Another day and I failed to write a blog.  Another perfectly good excuse--sleeping in because of slow working through my body of a bad cold.  I am lucky to sense the onset of the common cold, and to act on the sensation by starting to drink lots of water and to take to my bed.  I get kind of nutty, totally drowsy, and yesterday, I think it was, that is to say, Thursday, I lay abed all day long, nodding off much of the time.  As an anxiety ridden person, taught to perform, be industrious, contribute--God, i can hear my mother over and over--, a day of idleness, deliberately "doing nothing," not even reading to improve my mind, is so unlike me that we have to imagine that I was deep in illness.  This morning, after having cancelled my session with the trainer at the gym, i emailed him to suggest that yes, I would come.  After that session, I had a pedi-mani as they call it over at the Spa in the mall, and then a quick drop by the supermarket for a few things and home for nap, by which time I had cancelled our expedition to an opening at downtown art gallery scheduled for six pm, a meeting with a friend, and a dinner out in Sarasota's supposedly finest restaurant. My husband had been badgering me about taking it easy.  Ah, well.  After the nap I turned myself to making cream of broccoli soup which I had promised my husband for day.  It was, if I may say, delicious.  From that to the television and two episodes of the new drama of the life of Queen Elizabeth II.  How boring can home life get?  That's okay, we are not much for going out in the evening.  I am so shaky, we don't see well, I guess I am okay with life just disintegrating this way.  I still have my wits about me; we both do.  Richard so far this year has read the Iliad in Greek, he's halfway through the Odyssey and just recently picked up Lucretius' De Rerum Natura to keep his Latin up to snuff.  Puts me to shame, the great college professor, whose early article was on Lucretius--wonder how much I could read now? who reads and rereads with unashamed pride the print version of a speech he gave a couple of years ago on the Odyssey (a text much praised by none other than Helen Vendler) who is scheduled in January to lecture on the poem in eight sessions and has yet to pick up the Greek text to refresh myself.  That's it.  I feel my cold lingering--a slight tickle in the back of my throat.  Back to bed.

Small Town

Last evening we went to a production of Lanford Wilson's "Book of Days," the first play of a cast made up of the second year students in the Asolo Conservatory or whatever it is called, a rather distinguished training ground for American actors, here in Sarasota.  There always has to be a certain suspension of disbelief since the characters are generally a variety of ages whereas the cast members are in their twenties, and this being "show biz," they are uniformly physically attractive, and buffed.  Wilson's play, one of his more indigestible creations, surveys the goings on in a small Midwestern town, peopled it seems by hypocrites, bigots, and all the other behaviors traditionally loaded onto such people.  It was all rather obvious, but there was one scene, however, that caught my attention immediately, and that is perhaps because of my predilection for attractive males.  The local minister and a visiting Hollywood director (improbably in town to put on Shaw's "St Joan" no less!) enter after having shot a few baskets, and the minister proceeds to change from sports clothes to his religious gear.  This was startling; evangelicals in my day did not disrobe so easily in front of strangers, so I imagined that it was to demonstrate his easy going small town camaraderie, just a nice guy underneath the gown, so to speak.  He stripped to his boxer briefs, a fashion item I was not expecting, (when did the clergy give up plain white Y fronts?) and what is more, they were black, which even though in keeping with his ecclesiastical calling, sort of, was a surprise.  The actor had perfectly turned thighs, in keeping with the reality of the actor, but interesting, I thought, for a man of the cloth.  Buffed, you would have to call him. Was I making too much of this?  A bit later, the minister, who is revealed as a total shit, whether he is personally aware of this or not--he is a counterpart to the clergy who are sentencing Joan to the stake in the play--reveals that an internet search on his part had uncovered that the Hollywood guy was mixed up with charges of inappropriate sexual advances to minor girls.  When that was revealed, the black boxer briefs fell into place in my imagination.  He was just too sexy when stripping and changing into his professional outfit and why? because those briefs were such a compelling statement in the context.  He was signalling something to the Hollywood guy, and he had read the internet revelations.  At first I thought the actor had thoughtlessly dressed in his normal fancy underwear, but no, now I see that it was a directorial decision, occasioned by the script, and it was a great note, and taking advantage of the unusual good looks and physique of the actor--you don't get small town evangelicals that attractive as a rule;  after all body loathing is one of the features of the religion.

The Day Of The Dead

As I opened Google this morning I was encouraged to "Discover The Day Of The Dead With Google." But. no thanks, I was thoroughly rehearsed in its possibilities from early childhood remembering all too well--and at this autumnal season, the dead leaves swirling around and mounding (all so appropriately), Daddy lying in his coffin at the foot of the stairs in the great front hall, his mourning friends and colleagues trooping in to, as they said, "pay their respects."  Mother sat and received them, banked with her six children, now so bereft, indeed, an occasion for another freshet of tears from those who beheld this mournful scene.  This was eighty years ago, an experience refreshed upon the occasion of her own death, a decade or so later, followed a year later by the solemn church procession as I proceeded my parents-in-law in the pitiful little procession in Ames Iowa following the gentleman holding the urn which contained the ashes of my young wife.  I could add the memory of the death of my best friend, Ted, who died at 43, overweight, too often drunk, but in my memory the most delightful and loving comrade, who taught me how to deal with the pomposities of academia with impudence and deceit, a friendship so much needed and gone so soon, and that thought prompts me to think of Phil, a young man at the university in New York who was one of the few strong deeply caring friends who gave me tenderness and commitment all the while keeping himself on the other heterosexual side of bromance.  Dead at forty somethng or other, oh, my so young, and I went on, and on, through the deaths of young men, often former casual lovers, gone with AIDS, until we arrived at the siblings Pinky galloping cancer as she called it who refused chemo, "ready to go," at 73, Holly, with internal bleeding, at 88, "I don't want to go back to the hospital, I'm ready," Cyrus, still mourning his dead wife beclouded with Alzheimer's whose tender care replaced the years of being doctor, who left this world when he fell down a flight of cellar stairs at 90.  Sisters Jane 92 and Barbara 89 are so aggressively alive that we will set them to the side, and there I am, tottering along with my stick, gym mornings three times a week, everywhere I turn the flimsy and oh, so cheesy bits of wispy ghosts purchased at Walmarts.  Mother established a home that had the aura of the train station where we seemed always to be waving goodbye to some departing train or other.  There have been many arrivals, her six children, then grandchildren, ten at least, maybe twelve, and the proliferation beyond that I cannot even count, save for my two great grandchildren, oh, how did I get on to this subject? No blog yesterday.  Could not sleep all night peacefully as I lay in terror of oversleeping and interrupting the arrival of the cleaning lady at 8:30 brisk, beautiful, a rebuke to sloppiness and laggard movements.  Well, now, two weeks free of that worry.