Now That I Am Fully Awake

I can't really post such nonsense when our country is threatened as never before in my lifetime.  It is all so eerily reminiscent of the early days of Adolph Hitler's taking the reins of government in Germany in the early thirties, I think particularly of staffing it with extreme partisans and the singling out of a segment of the population to demonize.  Just as I am too old to lift the peanut butter jar, I feel shuttered and stifled with senile inactivity. My daughter emails with exhortations to telephone my senators with my views.  I have never been political.  Do they actually take account of the calls?  Well, I will do it.

Housekeeping

In our condo apartment everything has its appointed place.  Efficient, neat, orderly.  My husband who was the department head of foreign language programs in a series of top notch public schools is especially good at keeping order, if I were more honest, I might say frighteningly so.  He has the demeanor of the high school hall monitor who checks to see if you have the pass to leave the classroom to use the toilet.  Though I am more sloppy, let's call it "more creative," my years of department chair have also kept me on the side of compulsive, although hubby sneeringly reminds me that I always had a secretary to keep order.  I am reminded of the bright and negative sides of this personality quirk? disorder? almost every morning when  I cover two pieces of toast with peanut butter for my breakfast.  Above the counter opposite the sink is a cupboard on the first shelf of which are stored a variety of containers used in stove cooking or storing foods once cooked.  Above that on the second shelf are various food stuffs used as they are, one of them being the jar of peanut butter.  Because we get the healthiest the oil is separated and needs to be worked in.  I just keep it tightly sealed and upside down and set it in a saucer with a paper towel in it in case of leakage.  This has been our practice forever, well, for a decade.  This morning I got up late and thus everything was seen in a new perspective.  And I had to ask myself: why does an old man who has minimal strength in his feeble old arms reach up much too high above his shoulder level to take hold of a somewhat greasy jar which is relatively heavy (since his spouse cannot bring himself to buy the smaller container and thus most expensive) from its place on a shelf irrationally  and unstrategically (probably not even a word) positioned to begin with?  Well, I can no more answer that than I can think to rearrange the items of the kitchen.  It is at these moments that I have those flash visions of the police breaking into the place after having been called by the neighbors because of the smell and discovering the utter disarray of items littering  every surface and crammed into every cupboard.

A Day In The Life Of A Blogger

Compulsive readers of my blog will note that none appeared yesterday and today I am writing several hours later than usual.  It is the season here in Sarasota, by which I mean that visitors seeking warmth descend on us.  Not so grim as I make it sound.  Granddaughter, great grandson, daughter, all good, but only the last actually stayed with us. How odd it is that I had so looked forward to house guests when we moved down here, but that enthusiasm has sort of gone.  I remember living in Cambridge and Rome and Brooklne and Hull, in houses and apartments mostly big, but even when small, and always crazy fun when guests were on hand.  What has changed?  Well, first of all, everyone is much older.  The genial host of forty five waving a bottle of wine in his guests' faces has surrendered to a wizened up old gentleman of eighty seven who stumbles from room to room, anxious over the appointments of the guest room, and myriad other hospitality concerns.  However, without question, the greatest test of hospitality nowadays is the problem of diet: gluten free food, lactose intolerance, vegetarianism, vegan diets, aversion to alcohol-- the list is endless.  Oh, carefree graduate school days when one ate what was set before him or her, and loved it, and drank up a storm and laughed oneself silly, and maybe smoked oneself into a higher consciousness, when sexual games and satisfactions so outweighed dietary requirements.  Aging hosts such as ourselves are exhausted by the time the guests arrive, the effort at being cheerful so burdens someone in his eighties, and I am ready for bed as I show them to their guest apartment and hear them exclaim that they will be over in half an hour.  I do not want to talk to anyone.  I do not want to catch up, I discover.  I just want to go to bed.

Life Is Too Complicated

Today is Saturday and my daughter who has been visiting from Cambridge Massachusetts will be leaving for the airport mid morning.  She arrived on Tuesday, as did her niece, my granddaughter, down from Canada with her family to visit her brother's family who lives forty miles south of here.  We joined them all for a dinner at a seaside restaurant on Wednesday to which my husband drove since he was between cataract operations, and alone can see to drive in the dark.  Thursday at the crack of dawn he went for the second cataract operation, my daughter drove back south to spend the morning with her niece and the two toddlers, I went to teach my Odyssey course, completely tired and confused, the former condition bringing on the latter in the elderly I increasingly notice.  Despite my inner despair as I talked in class, for some improbable reason several applauded at the end, and more wanted to know what I planned to teach in a subsequent semester!  Home for a nap, then husband, daughter and I were joined by a friend who drove us in the sunset and gloaming down to Venice to see "Sister Act," exceptionally well done and preceded by a fabulous meal at Made In Italy, our favorite pre theater restaurant.  Home to bed, and up betimes on Friday, so as to get hubby to an appointment with the cataract guy to check the result,  and can't even remember what happened the rest of the day except a visit to the bank to rearrange money, and then off to down town Sarasota for dinner, wonderful Italian place, and then to the Urbanite Theatre for an opening, their latest production, "Ideation,," and marveled again at the brilliance of their productions, the energy and discipline of the acting, and home to bed and exhausted, and up this morning, thank God I never need an alarm clock, but the grim truth is that I run on anxiety.  And now I sit here, looking through my appointments calendar app and noting that the next set of arrivals will be driving in around four this afternoon, and that means drinks, dinner, charm, wit, and so to bed, as Pepys would have it in his diary.  Tomorrow Sunday and a little look around Sarasota with the guests, chamber music concert at five.  Oh, quite forgot that when being dropped off at home after the trip to Venice on Thursday night, I slipped while leaving the car and bruised my rib, don't think it is broken, but did not go to the doc.  The pain is not that bad and will last three to four weeks the internet says.  The woman behind me at the Venice theater laughing and joking and loving her evening told me during an intermission chit chat that she was ninety nine as though this were nothing special and okay with her.  I tried to get the same enthusiasm, well, at least I tried.

The Culture Of The Automobile

My daughter who lives in Cambridge Massachusetts is visiting us, and on Wednesday night we drove south of Sarasota to, Englewood, the town north of Boca Grande where we met my grandson's family and his sister visiting from Canada and her brood.  It was about fifty miles,  an hour drive through heavy traffic, not exactly bumper to bumper with a multi lane highway crowded enough to demand close attention.  As anyone who has ever driven in sprawl United States as opposed to urban areas, the highways are lined with strip malls, little businesses, god knows what, its entire length which means that cars are endlessly pulling in and out of the side of the road onto the immediately adjacent lane with the concomitant slowing down and speeding up that accompanies such maneuvers, no wonder Florida hold a record for collisions.  Add to the mix the abnormally high number of drivers over seventy five, a category which tends to hug the inner far left lane going slow and sure causing the speeding driver to weave in and out around them.  It is not a pleasurable nor relaxing ride, believe me.  After a lovely evening with the great grandchildren, and the grandchildren and spouses we headed back to Sarasota and the pleasures of relaxed dining and chatting had completely dissipated by the time we got home.  Last night we drove my daughter and a friend, who in fact did the driving for us in his car, down to Venice Florida to see a musical.  Venice, like Sarasota, has a wonderful theater with a far more adventurous program of drama sometimes.  The ride again was on the same nightmare trail that we had taken the night before although not quite so many miles distant.  Nonetheless, the positive experience of dinner and theater was much diluted by the horror of the drive.  I doubt that we will continue our theater subscription there.  The Republican government of Florida prides itself on not "wasting" tax payers' money on infrastructure nor services, so that in such a burgeoning metropolitan area as the essentially city cluster from Tampa and above all the way to Fort Myer and below, there is not a single bus nor trolley, only the insidious car.  My daughter who lives in the civilization of the North East and particularly Cambridge marveled at the fact that she can walk to many of the shops she needs, take a subway or bus to other destinations, and remarked that her husband's mechanic advised him to turn over the engine of the car and move it slightly so as to give the tires a chance to redistribute their weight because they use it so infrequently.  Well, we gave that up to be warm, and so far it seems a delicious bargain, and we do indeed like the warmth and absence of snow and ice, but the shutting down of activity which is concomitant with advancing age in a car culture is disquieting.

Grandpa

I know I must have written about this before, me being a grandfather, although it is always a surprise when I think of it.  Somehow I never thought of Charlie, the grandfather.  My own were dim shadows in the periphery of my childhood family history, two dying after lengthy illness in their beds in our home, where grandparents used to die, the other, much more robust, the "Boston grandmother," with the Beacon Hill accent and Edith Wharton manner, always exciting my mother's admiration and trepidation lived in Oak Park with one of her aunts and we saw her on our trips to Chicago, taken into her presence, being inspected through her lorgnette and dismissed.  Lots of fun, right?  That was a grandparent, those three, to my childish mind.  Remote, formidable, ugh!  When I became a teenager and such a silly, flaming fruitcake, Charlie as grandfather was the kind of laughable idea that my siblings might come up with in a round of merriment.  Ha, ha, ha.  Well, here I am folks, eighty six and counting, and father of four, grandfather of six, and great grandfather of two.  Whew! is all I have to say.  Last night we journeyed down to a beach front cafe to have dinner with the two children of my oldest child, and their two offspring,  the Canadian great grandchild who was visiting his uncle and wife and their daughter, his cousin, and my great granddaughter.  Dynasty.  I sat at the head of the table along with my husband and my daughter who was visiting, and surrounded by my grandchildren and their spouses, plus these two adorable baby children one under one the other under two, neither making the slightest fuss, betraying the incredible good natures of their parents, if not their grandfather.  I felt enclosed in love and respect.  As I made my progress from the restaurant tottering along with my cane, with all this retinue, I knew that somehow somewhere I had arrived.

Manchester By The Sea

I continue to think about Kenneth Lonergan's new film "Manchester By The Sea," trying to make sense of its morality.  The hero Lee Chandler is a person completely shut down after the disaster which befalls him, and for which he is entirely at fault even if the fire department lets him off the hook.  Stumbling drunkenly into town to buy some more beer and forgetting to put the fire screen in place is what the Church might call the Sin of Omission rather than the Sin of Commission.  Since Lee is a believing Catholic to the degree that he explains seriously to his nephew that the boy's father's corpse must be kept frozen until spring since as Catholics they cannot countenance cremation as a mode of burial, we must assume that other aspects of the Church also have power over him.  Lee encourages his nephew in his sexual pursuit of the girls in his high school, an interesting but common male dereliction of moral duty, although he himself is too shut down to pursue sex for his own satisfaction.  It seems to me, on the other hand, that his failure to seek absolution from the priest of his parish, despite the fire department's fellow working class Irish buddies' words, is unlikely, first because the priest would have come to him, to bring him to the confessional.  It is also a moral duty for Catholics to confess to sins and seek absolution.  It makes no difference what the fire department buddies think;  the entire film is about the effect of a drastic sense of guilt which grips Lee.  He wants to live with his guilt, he cannot seek absolution which is the bounden duty of every Catholic.  It is prideful to continue to carry his guilt with him, but doing so allows him to indulge his nephew in his pursuit of making out with the girls in his high school, the same pride that permits him to turn down the plea for a healing from his former wife who must carry some sense of guilt herself.  It is an interesting film for its depiction of a man who is guilty of the sin of pride and dying while still alive.

I'm In The Mood For Love

Beside being a well known song from the fifties, the phrase is the title of a film made in Hongkong by Wong-kar Wai starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung and premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival where it was nominated for the Palm D'Ore.  It is a favorite of mine although not of my husband. I have been wanting to watch it again for some time, and so last night he went to our other television screen to watch Jake Gyllenhaal in "Nightcrawlers" while I watched this.  It is the story of two young married people whose spouses travel a lot who by chance live next door to each other in the kind of impossibly tight, intimate living conditions familiar to Asians.  One thing leads to another obviously, and they become acquainted, romantically involved, but actually it is unclear whether they actually physically consummate their emotional involvement.  I suppose they must but it is never shown nor really implied.  The film is a visual study of two incredibly good looking people filled with sexual longing and excitement who pass each other in the corridor and occasionally go out to a meal together. The dialogue is so minimal as to be almost non existent. The film is unusually sensual for this reason, because you have to construct from what you see.  Seeing is everything, like an old fashioned silent film, because the director has a cinematographer who has brought out the incredible beauty of color and shape in every scene, while at the same time keeping things totally ordinary.  The one unusual feature is that Maggie Cheung who is physically superbly beautiful is dressed in the most ravishing street dresses slim and form fitting with mandarin collars the traditional Vietnamese style called Ao Dai, made of marvelous fabrics. Wong-kar Wai for this departs from the essential realism of the film to show her in a different and truly dazzling gown every time she appears which is a lot.  This is even acknowledged when another character remarks on her going out just for some noodle soup in a very fancy outfit.  The result is that the film is non-stop beautiful, with Cheung's beautiful body and the handsome yearning face of Tony Leung in nearly every frame.  Tony Leung was the star of another visual film triumph from 1992.  "The Lover," in which he plays a kind of rich Asian play boy who takes a teenage European girl as his lover and the film is essentially the most beautiful expression of sexual desire and ecstasy with no real dialogue but incredible visuals of two outstandingly beautiful naked bodies.  Despite the frequent shots of full frontal nudity of both actors the extraordinary thing about it is that it is not in the least lewd or salacious just incredibly beautiful sex; as in the previous film beauty quells the inherent physical desire. Both films are deeply moving for the feelings of longing and separateness that are invoked.  Dialogue is really unnecessary.  Yes, I would move on to watching "The Lover" tonight but I think my husband would revolt.  Evenings are supposed to be "our" time to watch film and we don't always really have the same taste in film at all, although we struggle to be accommodating.

The Experience Of Harvard

A post to a Harvard Magazine article about income disparities between students in which a student from a low income background describes how many of his fellow students could not understand that fifty dollars was a considerable sum of money to him took me back to when my wife and I were in Cambridge where I studied classics and she worked for something under a dollar an hour in a Harvard office.  Times were difficult, money not easily come by.  Harvard students had university supplied health insurance; spouses did not.  When I brought it up with an old Harvard alum, he exclaimed "but that would be socialism!"  We scrounged for food on Saturday nights at the Italian market in the North End;  produce which at the end of that evening was left over and to be discarded we could buy really cheaply, bruised and beginning to spoil, to be sure, but a judicious trim made it all worthwhile.  We had no friends who were in this economic fix, and we were known for our fun boozy (BYO) parties, so we socialized a lot and made a joke of our poverty so as to make it acceptable to the other classics students, because the study of Greek and Latin in those days was still strictly upper class activity we were surrounded by people listed in the Social Register.  They would always speak our names and roll their eyes and say "Charlie and Mary are soooo original and funny," as in poor house derelicts, I guess.  Well, sad to say, Mary never lived to see the happy days when I became a full professor with an endowed chair and a correspondingly pretentious salary.  And when I look back on the climb up the academic ladder and the jump into the gravy train I am reminded of black and white films of the kick, shove, and gouge narratives.  I can't say the experience filled me with joy, but it did not leave any lasting scars either, and one can never mention having a Harvard PhD often enough!

Inauguration Day

Well, I am trying to be positive about yesterday's inauguration.  I was particularly impressed with Mrs. Trump's blue suit by Ralph Lauren, her regal stance and walk which derived from years on the runway.  President Trump's call for heavy investment in America's infrastructure recalled the theme of FDR's Happy Days Are Here Again.  As a literary critic I reached out to themes and hints which set the tone, and I saw, as I said, FDR in that one moment, and JFK in the allusion to Mrs. Kennedy's inaugural Ralph Lauren blue outfit.  So like anyone in bleak situations and clutching at straws I was comforted by what I saw.

The American Dream

We watched "The Big Short" a few nights ago, and not for the first time, maybe the third in fact.  I think it is a remarkably clear exposition of the subject of Michael Lewis' book which has to do with the economic downturn brought on by the collapse of the mortgage securities industry and the subsequent large scale economic depression that ensued.  I am completely ignorant of economic theory, economic history, never took even an introductory course in economics in college, and so the book and the film and the economic collapse are very hard for me to understand.  But it is certainly clear that the banks were enormously culpable for the collapse, and also clear that the American economy had to be radically refunded so that the capitalistic system that provides the underlying stability of this country would not go under. But it is also clear the the government let the banking industry off the hook, never mind that they did not initiate suits against those in charge to make them liable for prison sentences since they were obviously operating in a crooked way, but they did not make these corrupt officials give back all the money they made in this period of time.  Drug dealers do not get to keep their money when they are apprehended, for instance.  The "little" people all lost their homes, these homes they had no business buying, but were seduced into buying, were victimized by the banking industry and the real estate industry, and because they were ignorant they are the fall guys.  At the gambling casino you see the guys down to their last chip, desperate because they stayed at the table too long. Why did these poor ignorant home buying suckers have to pay one hundred percent on the dollar while the banks got refunded for all their losses?   But a family's home is not the same as a gambling chip, and it is not the "housing industry" or "the real estate industry," it is sanctuary and place of family and it needs to be protected from the vultures of capitalism.  And now it's happening all over again, at least here in Florida, where a beautiful little town like Sarasota is being completely shadowed over by the condo towers going up everywhere, where on side streets little old forties and fifties bungalows are being torn down and monstrous vulgar palaces are going up in their stead.  I have an artist friend who had us to dinner a month or so ago where we met her husband,  a modest home builder who apologized for coming in late for dinner but blamed it on the volume of the workload.  I said it made me uneasy all this building.  "Yes," he laughed mordantly, "the banks and the developers, same thing all over again."

My Friend

It's winter in Sarasota, nights can go really low, dangerously low for the citrus industry to the thirties occasionally, otherwise uncomfortable forties and low fifties.  Most days it bounces back to seventy five unless the sky is overcast.  On those cold nights since I tend to sleep with open windows on both sides of my room thus allowing the Gulf air full passage. I put on top of my modest quilt a peculiar yet recognizable item: a limousine robe, I guess you'd call it, some grey fabric that mimics fur to cover the knees and feet of the passengers.  A friend sent it from California when she was making one of those housecleaning sweeps; her parents who always were driven in a limousine were dead, the chauffeur long since dismissed, she herself lived modesty and drove a Volvo. She knew my New England house leaked cold air in winter and saw me reading in my big chair with the robe draped over my knees.  Years later it has migrated to my dear little bed in Sarasota.  Every night when I snuggle under it I think of her.  What was she?  My surrogate mother?  wife?  I met her whee I came to teach at Stanford, she was at a meeting representing the administration where the discussion was promoting the newly launched fund raiser.  She had just arrived at Stanford, in her forties, formerly an assistant to the famous Mike Todd who had just died in a plane crash.  She was "Hollywood," though the mystique of her moneyed youth in a grand mansion on San Francisco's Pacific Heights clung to her; she was that snobbish.  Still she dressed like Carol Lombard or Greta Garbo, neat and tailored blouses, often in pants suits and always the prefect gold bracelet, trim simple loafers made from the most expensive leathers.  When she opened up as I got to know her she described Ceorge Cukor's Sunday brunches "actually a lot of fun" to which her art galley owner husband was always invited, weekends sailing off Catalina island, as guests of what were still real "movie stars."  None of this impressed.  The sweet young faculty wives asked her once at a reception why she had left LA to come north and I overheard her say in a direct matter of fact tone "Well, I had slept with all my friends' husbands and there was nobody left." and then in her tone and facial expression made clear that the subject was now dropped.  I loved her style.  She had a small house filled with marvelous bits and pieces from a life of picking and choosing at random, she had wonderful drawings on her walls.  I once complimented her on her taste and she furiously turned on me "don't ever use that word, disgusting!"  I talked to her every day, then when I moved back East by telephone, we traveled  to every major art museum in the United States, as well as England, France, Germany, and Italy.  i was besotted with her but not sexually.  She said that if she were an Inca Princess she could have been my mother with the sixteen year age gap.  I have photographs of her living room to remind myself of her on the wall near my desk.  She knew everything there was to know about style, aesthetics, color; she defended herself against other people with her irony.  It was Jewish irony although she dismissed being descended of the Jewish merchants who outfitted the miners who came to Sutter Creek.  In her own way she was so super Boston Wasp.  I can never stop talking of her, but now I will snuggle up into the chauffeur's robe and dream.  I think of her every day, something I can say of no other person who has ever crossed my path.

The Piano Lesson

We were planning to see August Wilson's "Piano Lesson" recently, and it started up a lot of memories of heirlooms and land, which is what the plot turns on, to wit, whether to sell off the old family piano redolent with memories and buy land to be able to farm as something better than a sharecropper farming a landlord's property.  My thoughts turned to my wife's family's land, first purchased in 1735 and added to later on, and to the furnishings of the main house which was burned down in 1923 and the much less grand original house which waa on the other side of the road and thus spared the flames.  It ended up being the retirement home of my former wif's parents and so we visited a lot, a place therefore where my children spent lots of time and which I sort of thought of as the"homestead."  It was filled with eighteenth century furniture far finer than the nineteenth century stuff that went up in flames because in the nineteenth century the family members who occupied the "big house" across the street disdained such old stuff and wanted up to date Victorian furniture.  Years went by and eventually the house, the extensive land and the furniture ended up as an inheritance from my wife to one of my daughters, and arrangement made a decade or so ago.  My ex-wife kind of forced her daughter to assume some of the cost of buying it all from the estate, and so there it was after her mother died, an unwanted inheritance, a kind of museum of antique furniture in a house with very small if indeed picturesque rooms.  For decades everyone had tiptoed around the fact that no one really wanted to live there, it was too remote, and too uncomfortable.  Trouble was it was historic, it was family, it was oh, all those compelling and impossible things people murmur while thinking at the same time "thank god, this is not mine."  My daughter tried it for a year or so, until her husband said "this is like living in a museum, i want to be able to put my feet up on things."  And she cut the Gordian knot, as it were.  She put most of the acreage into conservation thus ensuring the town that some hideous developer would not put up a cute little village; she took the furniture to an auction house and it was sold off; and she moved to the city.  What courage she displayed!  Her grandmother did not have it, her mother did not have it. You know the phrase slave to tradition?  Well, she would have none of it.  Brave woman!  I decided not to go to the theater; I had already seen the drama played out over a decade.

Martin Luther King Day

Today is MLK jr holiday, so designated by the federal government, and acknowledged by government entities across the land in varying degrees of enthusiasm and commitment.  Sarasota where I live is a southern town, and although there is no legal segregation black people live in one particular part of the community and you don't see them often in the other parts.  That there is some conscious segregation occurred to me last year on this date when I sensed that the town was not honoring the holiday in any special way, and then I happened to be driving for a few blocks on Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd and turned on the corner that borders park and saw that it was fillled with black people gathered around a band shell, and this was a celebration, but it was not centered in the downtown where the perky shops are.  In other words the city fathers were treating this holiday as a"black' event.That, of course, is partly because Sarasota is jammed with really rich white people for the most part; where they go I don't really go, either, like St Armand's Circle, for instance, a place filled with pretentious boutiques where the merchandise is way, way beyond my price. In fact we don't really go out to the boutiques which make up downtown Sarasota.  It always saddens me not to see middle class blacks in restaurants the way you do in New York City.  My brother who lived his life in Iowa and was entirely racist in an amiable sort of way marveled when I told him that in Manhattan it was possible to see black males all over the place with pin stripe suits and briefcases.  Yesterday I was in a yarn shop here in Sarasota with our house guest and it was a delight to see a tourist from Atlanta, a black woman, dressed to the nines but not aggressively over dressed, with a really good diamond on her finger.  And she and I, we talked about a booklet with patterns for men sweaters on a display table.  I yearn for more interaction which once I had in my youth when I gave sexual pleasure to a football player in my high school and we used the occasion to talk randomly, which I had again when my sister took a black male as her partner and he was part of my domestic life until he died ten years later.  And then there were random black hustlers.  I think it is easier for gays to walk across the color line.  One of my greatest teaching experiences was at Lehman College in the Bronx where my lecture classes were routinely filled with at least forty often fifty percent black persons.  But here I am at eighty six and I have no acquaintance, nor a friend of color, except for my wonderful trainer at the club who is of Puerto Rican ancestry and can't speak Spanish--I love it!--and claims he is black in the sense of being part African.  Well, yes, I see, and he is right, people forever label him as black, even an uncle an Italian-American married to his blood relative, and having lived in Italy I can see this: never met so many racist people, fearful of the dark skinned ever so handsome and beautiful Sicilians.  I love it that the Africans are arriving in numbers into Italy off the boats from the coast of Africa.  It will shake up the population.  Sadly the same mix up really does not work easily in the United States since the horror of slavery and the evil Reconstruction period has never been digested as the Holocaust years have been acknowledged in Germany.

Crime, Again?

My husband and our house guest exclaimed over another English crime series not unlike "Vera," which we had watched for all its available seasons and were urging on our visiting friend.  So instead of watching what I have been told is a "sweet" romantic comedy starring Chris Evans we sat down to this "Broadchurch" or something like that in which a dear lad of maybe ten or twelve is murdered and his body hurled off a cliff.  Crime solving is what it is all about.  But I don't want to watch another one of these.  Are my friends and family daft?  The families, the next of kin, the local greengrocer, the postman, the police officer, his assistant, all those make up the fabric of this wee village in Scotland, I think it is, are all reasonably nice people clear enough but if they had not been endowed by the scriptwriter with the fairy dust of a murder in the neighborhood to agitate over, they would clearly be the dullest people in creation.  None of them seems capable of carrying on a conversation with even a shred of clever repartee. I'm not asking for the acerbic one liners of the Dowager Countess of Grantham, but, hey, just something to spark the remarks.  Irony is unknown to them, literary references even of the simplest sort are beyond their ken, the outside world, politics, the facts of movie stars, none of this information seems to have entered their heads, been processed and come out as part of their conversation.  They are ordinary people, I get that, but blank, and dull, and really without affect (But, come to think of it, maybe that is what ordinary people mean.) There is a young handsome reporter on the make, or so it would seem, whose plastic features are as airbrushed as his emotional repertoire.  The rest of the cast which is hardly as toothsome are rivals to him in their ordinariness.  Well, we have only watched the first of this series, and indeed were aghast to learn that the little boy's murderer will not be found for several episodes.  I am not sure I can endure such a focus on something so unbearably uninteresting.  I kept asking my husband and our friend how they identified with the drama we were watching.  We are not plumbers in a small village in the north of Great Britain, we are not a drab housewife nor her equally boring sister who seems to be second in command in the police department, nor the dreary lady who runs the newspaper where the incredibly handsome but empty young reporter hangs out, not anyone else who wanders in and out of the set and says some lines that for the obviousness would not need memorizing.  What is it?  And then they get annoyed when I ask this question.

A Little Learning Is Really Basic

Last night our house guest who had flown in from NYC took us out to dinner and then suggested we watch a television standup comedy performance by a quite pregnant Asian-American at which I laughed and laughed heartily, as did my husband, while I at the same time registered shock at some of the language used and ideas explored by the performer.  I was equally shocked at how her very appreciative audience of men and women in their twenties I should say into maybe their forties--so hard to judge when you are more than fifty years older!--seemed to be relaxed and thoroughly enjoying her humor and the subjects she chose to bring up in her routine.  As a male who tried out homosexual experience from age fourteen on I deeply regret that I did not know what I was trying to do, had no experience, no role models, no teachers.  I realize now how tentative and inadequate were my moves to achieve sexual satisfaction from another man's body because we were both of us often frightened, sometimes one of the other repulsed, not sure this was "right."  There were no manuals, there was no internet to offer pornography which along with giving viewers a masturbatory stimulus is the great teacher of sexual practices to gays and straights alike.  If, just if, if all those brutalized ignorant women in this world had access to internet along with their husbands and learned that the marital bed did not have to be a clumsy rape scene.  One of the very first times I was penetrated anally the youngster doing it was a sixteen year old classmate who knew no more about it than I although we both understood the virtue and necessity of Vaseline.  He was a straight youth, horny as teenage males can be, who followed me up the ladder to the loft to the small barn at the back of our family property, and without hesitation disrobed alongside me, and took possession of me.  But he was gentle in proceeding,  and I was comfortable, although of course he knew nothing nor did I about the sweet spot of the prostate organ which can give a male so much pleasure in anal stimulation or intercourse.  The comedy performer dwelt on this at length in her show and as the camera again and again panned the audience of middle class educated ordinary men and women out on dates or perhaps husbands and wives who'd left the kids with the baby sitter that night all of them laughing and clearly accepting what they were seeing, I thought of all those years of being fucked in the ass, and sometimes it was good and sometimes not but we were too ignorant to make a satisfactory knowledgeable performance of it.  So, some things do get better!

Life Among The Troglodytes

Well, here we are at two little old people living alone and no one to "do" for them.  A few days ago my husband made the most delightful lasagna for two guests, our student at the Asolo Conservatory and his girlfriend.  As is so often the case these days, I suggested the recipe, insisted that I would take care of everything, but when the time came my wrist had begun to hurt big time, and he took over the whole operation, no doubt partly exasperated, but--well, I hate to say, but he is the biggest control queen in the world.  Sunday dinner was extraordinary in every detail, and having suggested the event, I did nothing.  He cooked the lasagna in a magnificent cast iron enameled pan, reminiscent of the grand days when my wife and I used to have twenty to dinner at the drop of a hat.  The effortlessness and fun of those impromptu events, I now realize, rode on the bottles and bottles of wine we consumed while turning out the whole affair.  Well, moving past the nostalgia, and arriving at Wednesday, he brought out the pan from the fridge with the rest of the lasagna, cut it into squares two of which we had for dinner and the rest suitably wrapped he put back into the cold.  Then yesterday he went for his cataract operation and I made my debut at this year's semester teaching the Odyssey.  All good.  Now here I am the next morning confronting the lasagna pan sitting washed and dried on the kitchen counter.  He, poor dear, could not put it away because his doctor severely enjoined him from bending over for the period of recuperation (all I can think of is a cartoon drawing of him bending over and his eye popping out of his head!), and I, alas, now have my damaged wrist under medication and in a brace.  So I guess it will just sit there on the counter.  Don't you suppose this is the way all those old, old codgers you see shuffling along who live alone?  When you read accounts of police breaking into some old person's house they always mention the smell, and, yes, the clutter.  It so happens that we are going to the airport later this morning to pick up a friend who has flown down for the weekend to escape the cold and get some sunshine. When we get back into the apartment first off while I make her a nice cup of coffee I can show her where in the kitchen cabinets various and sundry items need to be placed.  Come to think of it, my daughter will be here for a visit when the other eye goes under the knife, and she can . . . . ., but maybe, just maybe, my wrist will have healed.

Thinking Too Much Today

So today is Thursday, it's early in the morning.  My husband has long since left to walk over to the ophthalmologist- twelve minutes away--I am lining up the books for my introductory lecture on Homer's poem Odyssey, which I have lectured on for forty odd years, written books and articles about, and yet I really do forget the plot details.  Pathetic, but there you have it.  We've lived here in Sarasota six or seven years, and if you want to know what's really pathetic we've never made a friend close enough to share the detail that he is having a cataract operation and I am in such pain that I am dosed up on Prednesone or whatever it's called for my first day of class.  Our home is our castle and we have pulled up the drawbridge.  Actually we have a close friend but as luck would have it she just got out of hospital (I know that's the Brit way but I like it) and we haven't mentioned our situation but which we only got onto anyway.  A friend put us on to a British television light hearted crime series called Agatha Raisin.  The lead character is a good looking woman who moves from London to a small village in the Cotswolds and it's all about her trying to fit in whilst constantly solving murders by chance.  She fails again and again to establish a boyfriend relationship but my take on her is that she is utterly selfish, mindless, poorly educated, and maybe a nice figure and all that, but, no way is she going to get a man.  I find the programme (Brit again!) tedious because she is so aggressive and one note.  How can a woman watch this program and not weep for shame for the female sex?  And then I wonder are we like her?  Is Sarasota a Cotswold village in a demented ugly American way?  Okay, stop these self destructive ruminations.  Get into a hot shower and then shave clumsily of course with pain in your wrist doing mischief.  Today's pills haven't kicked in.  Ah, yes. you can recite in the shower, not sing: Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polytropon, hos mala planxthe and so on an so forth.  Everybody taking a course in the Odyssey should learn the first line in Greek, for God's sake!

Balance issues, sore wrist, worsening vision, you name it! Life goes on.

The day is half over and no blog.  Many reasons.  My wrist began acting up, the right wrist crucial for a right handed guy, and Monday as I tried to insert the coffee basket into our espresso machine the pain was so intense I  almost fainted.  A new complication that required a trip to the doc, and my regular could not squeeze me in so another diagnosed it as something that with time will go away, and for the nonce gave me a prescription for a regimen of six days and six pills.  And then we two went to my husband's eye doctor; we were by the way banned from the house because our oh too exhausting energetic cleaning lady was on site.  Eye doctor said unexpectedly "time for a cataract operation"!  New complication that tomorrow at six am husband goes under the knife.  Luckily he can walk to the doc, I can't see to drive in the dark.  My first class is tomorrow at 11:00 AM.  New complication: the books needed for a little classroom show and tell are too heavy and badly weighted for me and my famous "balance issues."  Angel of Mercy!  Student in the class shares a trainer with me, who told her of my predicament.  Trainer arrived this morning with a book bag on wheels so the balance issue is no more!  I will give her an A!  [NB: the institute does not give grades]  Friday a dear friend arrives from NYC for the weekend.  Complication: it is freezing cold and probably will remain so.  My wrist and his eye eliminate stove cooking.  Question: will friend endure barbecue chicken from store?  does she still prefer gin?  Typing this is a pain but would be more so if I were not prescribed this dubious medicine which a friend once told me can render the user psychotic.  Am I mad, even now, or is it true that they are saying that our President-elect was up to all sorts of sexual shenanigans in Russian hotels and the scene was video taped by Vladimir?  Am I to believe this?  Seems our darling out going Mr. Squeaky Clean gave a farewell to the nation president's address just as the incoming guy was talking to the press over the back ground reports of every kind of sexual game known to man. Well, well, well, some build up to the Inauguration.  How would George Washington have handled this?  As Bette Davis famously said in All About Eve, "Fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy ride."

The Job Search

I can sympathize with these American workers who agitate to keep jobs here in America and not lose them to foreign workers in far off lands.  When I started work, it was the reverse in my field, and probably quite laughable.  I trained to be a professional in ancient literature and history, the Greek stuff, especially.  I know it sounds laughable when the deserted industrial Middle West is talking about whole truck factories decamping to Mexico, whereas I am reminded of the British trickling in from Oxford and Cambridge or pretending to hold degrees from there, with their fairy upper class Brit accents, all of them named "Nigel" or "Spencer," and clutching testimonial proof that they were already fluent in both Latin and Greek when they got high marks on their "A level," whatever that might be, sort of high class high school diploma needed to get into university.  Enrollments were down in the fifties, jobs were tight--we were competing with returning veterans as well as these Brits--.  Who wants to hire some newbie when for a bit more you get get the genuine article, a terribly smooth,, elegant male who had sat at the feet of one of those luminaries we only knew because we saw their names on the back of important books.  They brought such authority to the classroom, when they spoke in departmental meetings, even if what they said was nonsense, it was like music to the senior faculty's ears, attuned always to their own memories of a year of study at Oxford or Cambridge.  Then there were the refugee Jews who brought not only great knowledge and skill along with impenetrable accents and a complete disdain and ignorance of American teaching methods and goals who had built-in stardom that made us pale in comparison.  That all of these gentlemen were beyond belief boring, entirely indifferent to a learning situation that they thought should have been done in high school (because, let's face it, the study of the classics in the USA usually begins at the college level and you have to squeeze together years of study and preparation in order to emerge with you BA degree and a tolerable knowledge of the subject so as to go on to graduate school.)  The irony of it all was that these Americans who achieved that were the brightest of the brightest whereas the imports were more often than not the ones who, having failed to find a slot at home, had to ship out to foreign ports to look for employment, or in the case of the refugee Jews, they were often men whose career had been in something quite otherwise who desperate in a new country dusted off something they vaguely remembered from their teen years at the gymnasium.  So it was a laughable scene those home grown scholars bending the knee in homage before the imports masquerading as know-it-alls.  It took about ten years for it to sink in, but it has made me fully sympathetic for the plight of a young person starting his job search and knowing that the jobs were going to some other ethnic group somewhere else.

Watch What You Show Me

With trepidation I set my toe into a murder mystery series called "Vera."  I don't like to see violence, blood, gore, suspenseful threats on the screen.  I am a wuss, however you spell it.  But "Vera" turned out to be alright, the murders were never in your face violence to the human body, scenes of the crime were for the genre decorous.  And the dialogue was quite witty; I loved it and never wanted it to end.  Plus it featured the most amazingly beautiful scenes of the north of England landscapes.  All good.  Now we have moved to New Zealand for the series "Brokenwood."  Again I marveled, here because of my pathetic ignorance of the world, at the beauty of the forests and open fields, if not quite the grand skyscapes to be found in "Vera." And my liberal heart could be at rest viewing the entirely gorgeous character played by a Maori male.  We are still in the first season I believe, but there is a quality of violence that has crept in to the material that means, I fear, that it is Bye Bye Brokenwood for Beye.  Two shows ago a man kills a woman who walks up to a hut in which she knows someone is hiding and he comes at her with a powerful insecticide spray machine which tears at her skin and eyes causing her to erupt in blood, and leaves her bleeding and then dead.  The next show featured a series of rifle shots by deer hunters needless to say killing one of them, plus scenes of a car wreck and a woman trapped in the ensuing flames, shown more than twice during the program, and a desperate killer found out who tapes two women's mouths shut, forces them to march with hunting rifles at the base of their skulls, then ties them to a deer hoist and hangs them up alive.  Eventually the bad guy gets his deserts and the women go home unscathed, but I . . . . .?  All night I dreamed of these scenes, they played again and again on an endless loop, the face burning in acid, the anguished screams of the woman trapped in the flaming car, the look of horror and desolation of the woman on the deer hoist as the camera pans the maniac staring at her.  Frankly I don't need this.  For whatever reason I am a manic and hysteric from the trauma of my youth. I am eighty seven.  I don't need bad things to happen on television.  I don't mind lying, cheating, deserting, double crossing, and the rest of the repertoire of wretched behaviors, but I don't need to see sadism, masochism and their bodily harm friends on the silver screen.

Existence

Yesterday I was sent by email a set of questions from TIAA asking me to critique a recent telephone exchange I had with one of their employees.  It was in reference to a recent decision on the part of the City University of New York to do something or other with the retirement accounts their employees hold.  I am about to be 87 and have been retired for over 20 years so I did not think it could possibly affect me, but who knows? and the CUNY administration had sent me a document fully twenty pages or more long announcing this in their customary impenetrable language so I felt I ought to pay some attention, not that I could understand a word of it.  I called TIAA and was pleasantly surprised to get into telephone contact almost immediately.  A woman with a nice telephone voice took my question put me on hold, and checked out what I was talking about, came back on to assure me the new policy, whatever it was, did not affect me.  End of exchange.  Somewhat later in the day or before the next I received an email from TIAA asking me to complete a survey on the telephone call.  These things are tedious but I wanted to support the person who had spoken with me, so I agreed.  Big Mistake.  I wish I could remember the questions now, but they were mostly so bland, so general that they did not describe nor not describe my experience.  Toward the middle of the session there came a question that threw the TIAA questioners into a tizzy which allowed for an answer saying that you were satisfied enough with the transaction, implying that you had been lukewarm about it.  Well, the truth was that I have the fortune perhaps to get on very well in these telephone exchanges, not that I have that many, and so I come away from the experience much as I do after having handed over my money for a package of gum at a CVS cash register checkout--neutral.  I marked the TIAA box for I don't know what it was, maybe "so-so," "okay" "normal," something like that.  Which prompted a set of questions wanting to identify what was "wrong" with the transaction.  God, I thought I am going to get this woman sacked!  But I couldn't go back.  Evidently even in answering innocuous performance questions you are supposed to be hyped up and smiling like the people hawking deodorant, toothpaste, or cooking oils on television.  Lay off, guys; life isn't like that, see.  It's just okay, and, hey, we lead drab existences and when you can say okay, it's an achievement!

The Perlman Music Program

In this the winter of our discontent  has come merriment and cheer for hearts heavy laden by the troubles of our fair American republic.  I speak of the wonderful Perlman Music Foundation's heartwarming winter musical program for young musicians, a two week course of training culminating in an evening where the students first sing as a chorus, boys and girls who are not training to be singers perform as a chorus followed by their assembling into the seats of their instrument divisions to play partly chamber music that has been brilliantly enlarged for a much larger ensemble of stringed instruments.  The novelty of their playing these longer more intricate instrumental pieces is that they change places at the end of each movement thereby assuring the chance to play first violin second viola or what variation the music arranger has done, for instance, for an original string trio or quartet.  I am not a musician so that aspect of the evening in its finer aspects passes right over me; however, the shining youth of the group is deeply inspiring.  They are in their late teens for the most part, from all parts of the world, persons who have been studying their instrument from childhood, digging deeper and deeper in to a repertoire that will lead them to our leading conservatories and on to chairs in our major orchestras.  They are brilliant and ebullient--hey, they're just kids!--but from an early age they have accepted the discipline of practicing their scales, and then their scores.  They are committed, and in an age of teenagers who are unmoored from any family or school or group ethos or discipline, they come across as startlingly mature in the way they move, look to each other, submit to the conductor, and yet all the time preserve the innocence of the young.  You have a feeling that they just don't know or cannot care what a sordid deal is being cut in Washington.  Partly of course that is true because many of them are not Americans and probably don't give a rat's ass what the administration is concocting (which also leads one to thinking of the immense sums that must be donated annually to get this thing going summer and winter--I mean the airfares alone!).  Their conductor is the famed Itzhak Perlman, a gifted concert violinist as well as being a conductor.  He and his wife, the violinst Toby Perlman, who have a raft children of their own, are psychologically constituted to be teachers and parents to this horde of kids, all summer in a camp in Long Island, and for the two week winter warm up here in Sarasota.  We in Sarasota are blessed with a great number of symphonic and chamber music concerts during the winter season, but nothing can stir the heart, especially if you yourself have raised children, more than their shining eyes, innocent faces, their sincerity, their great gift and dedication to playing.  Oh, God, I am so sentimental.  But just looking at their faces!  These string musicians are formed into a chorus and they sing.  Scanning the faces of all these nationalities and races eagerly and earnestly and expertly lifting their voices in song is thrilling, especially when you come across the sight of a young man coming into the last lines like "dona eis pacem," and wiping the tears from his eyes.  Just the evening performance of so many gifted, innocent young people, shining in their youth and enthusiasm brought tears to my eyes.

Pollock And DeKooning

Sebastian Smee's description of artists in their rivalry ends with that of Jackson Pollock and William DeKooning which is the beginning of abstract expressionism and the American dominance of Western art.  Tedious is all I have to say.  Both men were even more than usually for artists egomaniacs, Pollock a tragically compromised alcoholic whose behavior while drunk and he was seldom sober, exhibited a level of brutality that is breath taking, and I wonder why those around him tolerated it.  I know, I know, genius and all that.  But I cannot take unfettered and wanton brutality as a comrade's modus vivendi.  I find non objective painting fine enough for wall decoration.  Mark Rothko once accepted a commission for paintings that were to go on the walls of the Seagrams Building and then had a temper tantrum at the thought of his "deep, meaningful" stuff being considered "decor."  Fine, that's just what I think it is. Abstract art is anything you want to see in it Smee says DeKooning's mother was so brutal that it was only reasonable that he would grow up to paint one after another woman with ugly menacing faces.  Fine, but I do not have to look at them.  Nor am I taken with his endless black strokes. It is too much of an effort to ward off the brutal strokes as they descend upon me the viewer.  Nor can I take Pollock's drip paintings, yes, one in awhile but they are monotonous.  I do not have to suffer the stern injunctions of Clement Greenberg who told everyone in that period what they were to look at and think.  He is not the high priest of my aesthetics.  Nor Harold Rosenberg, both of them fascists of art criticism, determining what a painting should mean, sometimes telling artists what they were to paint.  What a bankrupt age!  Art fell into the hands of dealers and collectors far more intent on profit and prestige than anything before, and it has never recovered, although as long as there is a class of nouveaux riches there will be art, art criticism, and art auctions.  That is why one loves Agnes Martin for separating herself from the scene.  Everything about her oeuvre spells sanity.  One of the great days of my life was a visit to a show of her stuff at the Pace Gallery and upon leaving I dropped down to another gallery showing an artist I had never heard of-- Jean-Michel Basquiat.  The sight of his canvases on the gallery's walls after the serenity, control, and under statement made into over statement which was Agnes Martin, Basquiat's color, shapes, and violence were like a fabulous and much needed orgasm.  I will never forget that day.

Reflections On Monet's Views Of The Grand Canal

In my researches for the ideas in Sebastian Smee's book I have been consulting art exhibition catalogues, most recently some displaying Monet's Mediterranean scenes.  I lingered over his paintings of the Grand Canal in Venice painted at different hours of the day and thus showing various hues, the canal, the adjacent palazzi and churches, all manner of Venetian city scenes, and quite unconsciously I was able to place myself quite exactly into the locale.  The same was true at Antibes, and Juan des Pins, and all sorts of places he painted. And it came to me how lucky I was in this and in many other ways: that I knew intimately and instinctively my way around some of the most beautiful cities in the world.  True of Venice, true of Rome, of course, of Paris, and London, I could go on and on.  These are places that I have traced into my memory forever, or so I believe.  When I was young and Europe was being bombarded into oblivion, my mother, who carried on a daily breakfast conversation with us children about the progress of the war, was forever lamenting over the eventual disappearance of everything beautiful in this world (she did not include natural wonders like the Grand Tetons or the Grand Canyon, nor indeed any city in the Western Hemisphere).  Impressionable child that I was I grieved along with her.  When the war ended, and I became an adult, my obligations first as a student, then a husband, then a father kept me on these shores, but with clenched teeth I mimicked Scarlett's memorable scene of resolve when she cries out "As God is my witness, I shall never go hungry again!" Only I was resolving come what may I would get to Europe.  And I did and with an intensity and persistence that brought me back so many times, sometimes for the summer, sometimes on sabbatical for year or more.  I traveled and bore into my surroundings, made them mine, drank deeply, smelled the atmosphere.  Perhaps I have no idea of how to get from Point A to Point B in San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or Chicago or New York, or where really I should be going to find something attractive.  But the great European cities, ah, yes, they are mine, now in my memory, I doubt that I shall see them again otherwise.

My Friend The Artist

Readmg Sebaastian Smee's excellent book about artistic rivalries reminded me of the career of a friend.  He joined our high school jumior class as a newcomer  He was not at all the kind of person I was attracted to; neither his looks guaranteed my interest nor his intellect.  He was bright enough but not overly so.  A big tall blond guy with too large a nose, eyes that tended to stare at you rather than embracing you or flirting with you.  He was direct and obvious, not my kind of guy, but he was decent and friendly.  And he was tall, and reasonably athletic, and he was a very good tennis player.  Unllike other overly normal masculine teen males, he chose to be a friend of an overt gay boy, mainly because I was thrilled when he proclaimed he was meant to be an artist.He stays in my mind all these years because he did become an artist, and I acquired four of his paintings over the years.  Two of them have been with me for decades.  One I have had since we were maybe twenty or twenty one.  He painted it when he was nineteen in his parents' basement. I saw it and I bought it -- a stunnner--  oil on canvas depicting a collection of bottle shaped objects, each defined with space between, projected against a black horizontal bar.  It is very much a Morandi-like piece, these bottles, except that the one on the far left of the line is a bottle with another behind, and the two of them when viewed without too much effort of imagination show a well endowed penis with very large testicles.  I know my predilections make such identifications tediously obvious and I never mentioned them to the artist who as I can well imagine would have blushed, a dark red flush lingering on his face, his mouth quivering in confusion.  He was a sweet kid.  Years went by and we met again when both of us were teaching at Stanford University, me classics, he art.  By now he had a gallery in the area. My wife and I acquired a strange somewhat cubist hilltop scene done while he was traveling in Italy.  The hills in outline, the buildings in the town on the hill bathed in an orange glow suggesting sunset were all of them, like so many cubes.  It did not work really.  Never a favorite.  My wife claimed it in the divorce and I don't know what happened to it.  At much the same time I bought from him as a present for my wife a large graphite sketch of the three seated figures of  Giorgione's (now attributed to Titian) Fete Champetre which some see as an inspiration for Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe.  My friend drew superbly and this is a breathtaking example of his skill.  My wife, for whatever reason, declined it in the divorce settlement, and so I took it willingly and it has been something I look at every day, for the constant of the human male's need for clothing and the woman's nudity demanded by male artists.  The painting, perhaps it is a watercolor, that my wife took in exchange, demanded is rather the word, is another marvelous piece painted from a photo I believe of an elderly Italian couple standing before a table, and the tones and accents of their depiction are elided, the slippage of form and color is one of the delightful aspects of the piece.  My daughter now has it beautifully set out on the wall of her living room.  The artist had a wife, three daughters, played lots of tennis, and I thought of him as quite boring if a dear man over all.  My wife was more on his wave length, and I always hoped that they had an affair.  I can imagine him up in Heaven blushing at the idea.  He took up chevrons in paintings when that became all the rage; he became less original, and he lost out in the competition of the art world.  You can mention his name and sometimes people nod in recognition or fake it. But he will always be wonderful, his paintings that I have, at least to me

Life Begins

So it is Tuesday of the first month of the new year 2017.   I no longer marvel at this momentous movement of the calendar as I did when I was young; just too many years have gone by to get excited.  I have been reading in Sebastian Smee's book about the rivalry between Matisse and Picaso, and noting that it was most part entirely civil, never ill mannered.  Much is made of the patronage of the San Francisco Stein family, two branches, equipped with vast sums for buying art, and the Russian moguls who before the Revolution bought widely in Paris, and ironically enough because of state confiscations filled their countries' galleries with contemporary art, the very best.  I have never liked Cubism particularly; I don't respond to it, which is more or less how I judge art.  I am thrilled by Picasso's draftmanship, love those stolid prehistoric ladies, but I guess it is the colors of Matisse that win me.  At the time it seemed to be a popularity contest which is detestable, just as the Times describing contemporary art by what it brings at auction.  But enough of art, must think about my impending class, starting next Thursday week.  This Thursday we have an introductory meeting with all the faculty--coffee and cookies--and I will get to take a glimpse of my classroom.  I am too unstable to stand without support, so I hope there is a lecturn or something similar I can lean against.  One and one half hours.  I hate to sit to teach.  I have gone over the material, a text which I have lectured about certainly upwards of fifty times, not to mention which forms the subject of several books and articles I have written.  It's like all those script readings, rehearsals, blocking, tech, and then it is the day you perform.  More immediately I must go grocery shopping.  The cupboard is bare, so to speak.  If I were to go now--it's just a little after eight, the traffic would perhaps be minimal, my husband is not awake to put in his two cents.  We are planning to cook lasagna for our student and his girl friend on Sunday, actually I was, but my husband has decided he should cook it because I am old and burdened with teaching.  But then there is the recipe.  I found on on the web I really like.  He is however a fuddy duddy; he will have this recipe that he used thirty or forty years ago.  We are so much more sophisticated about Italian herbs, etc.  All this will have passed him by, or eluded him.  I see that I have made my bed, and so I can just up and leave.

Art And Life

My perusal of art exhibition catalogues continues apace.  Delacroix joins the scene but I must say that I do not like his stuff as much as Manet, Degas, and Ingres.  But I am a naif, and need the outline of the figure to feel secure whereas Delacroix, it seems, builds his images solidly from the color out.  I see that Monet does this to perfection and somehow I never noticed that his en plein air painting achieves solids by the juxtaposition of lights and shadow.  I have learned something in this journey through my art catalogues.  Manet's painting of the two clothed males sitting in the grass with a naked model whose clothes she has removed lie nearby while another female nude in the background bathes in a pool, the so-called Dejeuner sur l'herbe, is fascinating for being so modern in its disregard of the outdoors in which it is supposedly lodged, rather featuring a group of people entirely artificially grouped in a fake outdoors--it is entirely real in a completely unreal way.  It clearly looks ahead to our own times.  For some reason it struck me more forcibly this time around the fundamental incongruity of the juxtaposition of clothed men and naked women, sort of a muslim scene in reverse where women are wrapped up and not to be seen and men's corporal outline is available to the eye.  And I thought of the whole of western art, and the ancient Greek attitude toward male nudity, and frontal nudity at that, particularly in their statuary, and the emergence of female nudity in statuary later on, and Christianity's devaluing the male nude, and then the glory of Michelangelo's David, the assertive penis of that great statue, and in these catalogues I have been viewing how much more frequently a male nude is captured from the buttocks. The female breast is everywhere, the male's rear end is the complement.  Fast forward to our sojourns in the spa in Wiesbaden where males and females use the locker rooms and pools equally and nudity is unashamed.  It is great to see males proud of their apparatus of manhood.  One day a group of teenagers had arrived in the pool we were in and immersed themselves in a group laughing and chatting as they soaked boys and girls, and later they rose from the water to leave, the girls with their high tight breasts bobbing along, the boys with their penis and testicles forefront and waving.  Glorious sexual freedom!

Looking Back Over The Years

We watched "Philadelphia" last night, the film where the Tom Hanks character, a rising young lawyer, is infected with AIDS, fired by his prestigious law firm, sues, is defended in court by the Denzel Washington character, an obscure young lawyer willing to take the case with all its unpopular connotations who wins the case through making the jury work through their prejudice to the moral truth.  It took both me and my husband back to another era; he lived in New York then, a young gay male, watching his circle diminished by the disease while the government did nothing, and the public at large displayed their indifference along with their contempt; I, on the other hand, was a married man with four children whose sexual life in those days was pretty much confined to a series of males who would be considered very safe partners, because they were straight males trying something different in another kind of relationship.  Prior to the AIDS epidemic gays were more or  less hidden; the irony of the epidemic was that it opened up for inspection the gay world, when sons came back to Podunk City from New York or San Francisco to die in their childhood beds.  If they were lucky, that is, and their parents took them in.  So AIDS ironically made gay males acceptable, through the always sympathetic spectacle of young men dying.  "Philadelphia" is a real tear-jerker, a feel good movie that skirts the undying hatred of many families, the inherent suspicion of gays by straights, the unyielding hatred of so many Christian churches, all this is pretty much left to the side.  But in real life we two know so many gay males who were lucky or careful enough to survive who are now in their later years so damaged by a lifetime of repression, victims of the national hatred of gays, and the church.  We know so many men whose emotional lives are limited to furtive encounters that can never be revealed, of men shunned by their families, not invited to the family gatherings, men who cannot step out of the shadows and try for normal relationships because of the fear and instinctive repression that a life in the closet has given them, denatured, emotionally crippled, often successful professionals, but barren and empty old queens underneath it all.  Looming over it all are so many branches of the Christian Church not to mention the Jews and the Muslims (why my heart sinks at the thought of Muslim refugees!) who work their insidious damage before a youngster has even thought of sex, and as the Jesuits always say "get them young and you have them for life."  Since the most ardent of our religious public seem also to be devoted to the presidency of Donald Trump we will be interested to see how they reconcile narrow faith, strong prejudice, intolerance toward gays, with a First Lady who in her earlier modeling days walked the runways naked except for high heels.  I can't quite see Eleanor Roosevelt in that guise.