Struggling And Striving

One of life's amusing incongruities is that in the very same downtown area of a city one may find facilities such as Starbucks where people sit for hours gazing at their opened lap tops, or out the window in contemplation of who knows what, all very respectable activity upon which passersby glance approvingly if some times with amusement whereas over in a nearby park sit a body of persons, their dogs and backpacks at their feet, talking with one another or staring vacantly into space.  These are the homeless whose presence excite the most extreme reactions from almost everyone who comes that way.  I know that I myself am fearful, somehow frightened of their seeming lack of purpose and thus of control, their indifference to life's struggle as it is structured in the bourgeois world.  That many of them are addicts and thus struggling what we now know to be a disease does not increase my compassion; all I can see is "waste."  Walking into San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and stepping over the persons lounging with their pets on the sidewalks and verges of the entrance area is almost too terrifying for me.  I was interested to read in the Times yesterday about the chain fence forming an impassable border between an area of New Haven which offers public housing and the affluent suburb of Hamden.  The housing is largely filled with black persons and the fence is presented as an element of a racial divide, but interviews with middle class black residents of Hamden showed that they, too, want the fence kept intact.  They spoke in terms of handouts, public housing, the usual, but behind it lies the very real fear of being tainted by persons who haven't the get up and go, gave up the race.  I remember living in the historically Jewish suburb Brookline Massachusetts to which community we moved our family when I came back east to teach on the theory that living among so many Jews would naturally improve their chances for doing well in school.  And yes, the pressure upon the young in that community to do well, succeed enough to make it into one of the Ivy League universities was overwhelming.  I think one can see the same sort of thing at play in the charter schools of Harlem run by the very energetic and enterprising Eva Moskowitz who has an army camp like atmosphere and an energetic discipline for a school full of low income black Harlem youngsters.  To my mind Ms. Moskowitz is trying to impose middle class Jewish anxiety and discipline upon a group who had traditionally been unaware of that kind of non stop desperate struggle.  She is wildly succeeding, the parents love her--who knows if the kids do?-- but in four years when it is time to be accepted to college we shall know how it all pays out.  I quite forgot to mention the genteel indolent, those folks living on trust funds, whose glide through life is quiet, unchallenged and serene, if sometimes tinged with a mysterious wonder at the meaninglessness of it all.

Lessons From Italy

Recent photographs of Pope Benedict chatting with Pope Francis have left me stupefied.  I never could understand how a pope who under the right circumstances is deemed infallible could resign and live in the back lot somewhere while a new infallible pope took the throne.  It grappled with that for  awhile but I made my peace with the idea since Pope Francis seemed at least on the surface of things  to have moved resolutely away from the issues that exercised Benedict toward the concerns traditionally associated with the man of whom he is always called the vicar of here on earth, that is, Jesus, and I mean poverty, need, want, love, and so on.  I don't like seeing Benedict coming out of his retirement apartment and talking with the new pope; it is dissonant.  I fear his authority.  Oddly enough it is the same reason that I dropped my initial allegiance to Hillary Clinton in the presidential primaries way back when Obama first ran.  I was altogether enthusiastic until I saw President Clinton out on the campaign trail and I suddenly realized that if Mrs. Clinton made it to the White House her husband would still have all the security clearance and other perquisites of a retired president, plus a live-in situation at the White House, and no doubt a casual drop in basis in the Oval Office.  That thought did it for me, and now I feel the same way about the Popes, not to mention the thought of Mrs. Clinton once again in the running for the presidency, and this time no other candidate likely.  Italy has been on my mind recently for another reason and this was the announcement that Mayor DeBlasio was off to Rome to learn from the city's mayor as well as some other Italian urban officials how they do things over there.  I realize he is gung ho about his Italian ancestry and god knows I love Italy, lived there a couple of times years ago, but I don't think anyone thinks to go to Italy to learn how to administer anything, maybe putting truffles into risotto, something like that.  It was said once upon a time that Mussolini made the trains run on time.  But he did a lot of other evil repressive things, so that accomplishment is probably not worth reviving, since the  price is too high.  Mr. DeBlasio should visit his ancestral home and stay away from any city hall while he is over there, that's my thinking.

Why Is The Professor Lecturing

Centuries ago when knowledge was transcribed by hand, and written documents were rare treasures, in the centers of learning the chance to hear a lecture was central, because as the word lecture means, a reading, it was the chance to have read to you what otherwise you would not know nor to which you could not gain access.  It was more than anything a dictation, although in most instances presumably the hearers contented themselves with making a precis of what was being read.  The advent of the printing press meant that more and more students could gain access to the written knowledge on their own and indeed share it.  Although reasons to lecture grew less urgent, the form was retained, principally because the academy does not alter the way it does things over the centuries.  Conserve, preserve, the past is the present.  More able and more original lecturers began to embellish their reading with ideas and observations of their own.  This is the ideal of the modern university lecture class, but it is interesting how technology has radically changed the game.  To begin with, there is really no reason for a lecture, since almost invariably the speaker is offering something that can be found in the library already printed in books.  It is a convenience to the hearer who does not want to make the effort to read through a book on the subject, or who wants the several points of view that might be contained in a variety of books which the speaker has read and synthesized.  But as the world is made up principally of dull and unimaginative people, time servers, and they are legion in the academy, one cannot count on getting more than just what the book says in a lecture.  A very brilliant professor of my acquaintance in talking about poetry in her lecture class forbids the students taking notes, speaks to the poem which she has put on an illuminated screen in front of the group, and expects them to make the intellectual effort of synthesis and retention with nothing more than the brain to form and contain.  Nowadays it is the custom for the students to arrive with their laptops.  I am so thankful I retired before this invention became common.  Once the lap top is opened students are free when their attention wanders to bring up other screens, play computer games, for instance, a little chess or crossword puzzle work, while only so often switching back to the screen on which they are typing in notes.  I think that is called "multi-tasking," and is supposed to be the mark of the bright new generation.  It is amusing or depressing to sit in the back of a large lecture hall and see the enormous range of programs on display as all the while the professor intones from the lecture platform some subject which we must imagine is dear to his heart.  A professor friend of mine who had generously acceded to the request of a graduate student to sit in for credit on her major lecture course, noticed one day when her assistant was doing the lecturing and my friend had taken a seat at the back of the lecture hall that this graduate student was seriously engaged in watching a dance contest on her screen.  When a break came, my friend went over and quietly closed the younger person's laptop, to which the response was sullen resignation rather than even the teeniest bit of embarrassment and remorse.  Why don't they just all go home?

Women

MoMA had an exhibition by women artists and craftspersons which is part of an ongoing series demonstrating the increasing participation of women in the creation and performance of arts.  Having been married to a woman who was ardent in wanting a career as an architect for the very good reason that she had a recognized talent at envisioning problems and possibilities in the design of buildings, I know at first hand the problems a woman faces.  It is all about domesticity, about a woman's surrender to demands of the home, more often than not crudely imposed. Because my wife married when knowing almost nothing about cooking or any other domestic skill, she was better prepared to resist the demands of the culture that she become chief cook and bottle washer, but nothing alters the playing field faster than a new baby not to mention a young man's necessary overly eager engagement with the first phase of a career.  A mother's surrender to a baby is a natural and happy circumstance but difficult to get out from under, particularly when another baby appears on the scene.  The simple physical facts of early motherhood place her very much at the mercy of her already by nature far more physically powerful spouse.  I don't mean this to be sinister, but weak and strong are a fact of the household, and with that inevitably go power and powerless, already in evidence in the inequality of him who goes forth to earn money and her who stays home to suckle the baby at the breast.  i turn now to another exhibition I encountered which was the display at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of the work of couture of Charles James, a celebrated British born American dress designer from the twenties into the fifties whose evening wear achieve a standard of design and workmanship which have won him the highest praise from the fashion industry as well as cultural critics and even art historians.  The gowns on display are very much works of art, but what impressed me the more is the way in which fashionable clothing is a form of aggression and control for the women who wear such clothes.  One can extend this beyond such opulent and contrived items on display at the Met to the larger phenomenon of women dressing themselves as an act of self presentation.  Of course, a girl learns early on the intense sexual excitement she generates in any male passerby, and therefore girds herself up for each such encounter if only unconsciously.  She must take her inherent victimhood as the object of the male gaze and make it her mode of attack.  Looking at high fashion is always so satisfying from this aspect, since it demonstrates the female willingness to go on the attack, impose their bodies, rather than offer their bodies to the surrounding throng.  High fashion is not for everyone, but the act of adornment however simple renders the same result: control.

The Problem With Aesthetics

I was just in New York where I visited as I always do the Museum of Modern Art, a temple, or so it has always seemed from my earliest youth, of cold and haughty beauty, certainly alien to everything that I knew from the simple middle class culture of my Middle Western upbringing.  It was my second wife, an architecture student when I met her, besotted with the Bauhaus style of her school's director, Walter Gropius, who showed me the way to modernism, although I must admit that I only purchased a membership to MoMA years later so that we as a family with young children would have easy access to clean bathrooms in Midtown Manhattan.  In our home my wife insisted upon a stripped down version of things, clean, simple lines, spare detail, intoning over again "form follows function," to which I, heir to Victorian bric a brac, and Edwardian ornamentation, thrilled as to illegal drugs.  On this visit to MoMA, however, I was once again confronted with how these things do not always work out.  In a gallery on the second floor there was a temporary exhibit for which the show's curators had assembled a collection of drawings displayed in a vitrine that was a long continuous glass topped box cantilevered out from the wall. It was easily the most elegant thing in the room, its spare ninety degree angle moment of contact with the wall was such a minimal statement of gravity's demands and wight's pressures.  I was startled to see that next to this a guard had constantly to stand at attention admonishing viewers not to surrender to their natural instinct to put the slightest pressure on the vitrine with their hands and arms to study the art.  It could not support the slightest weight.  On the ground floor I was once again struck by the fact that there is a rise of maybe five stairs leading from the initial reception area to the entrance to the garden, as well as the landing that takes one upstairs to the second floor.  These five stairs stretch maybe thirty feet across and only at the very ends are there narrow elegant tubes scarcely standing away from the wall that constitute railings to assist those who finds stairs a trial.  At eighty four I am one of them, and I take great exception to this cavalier dismissal of a commonplace need in the interests of the elegance and cool of the visual drama of the vase expanse of bare stone steps.  It was a great shock a couple of years ago to discover that the re-ordering of the plaza at Lincoln Center included a grand stair of maybe twenty very shallow risers (sort of a ramp, one might say, with a step up every few feet) which must measure seventy or more feet across without a single railing in all that space.  An enthusiast dismissed my complaint pointing out that there were two ramps at either end for "people with problems," as she put it.  I resent, however, having to be shuttled off that way when it would give me great pleasure to engage with this giant space of the grand stair, and I don't think--now we're moving into the old timer's indignation almost a whine-- any architect with talent would not be able to find an aesthetically pleasing solution for a few railings every so often.  I also nastily find it amusing that even the young in winter's snow, slush, and ice find those barren windswept Lincoln Center stairs a trial and search vainly for railings.

Prejudices

I have been reading a novel centered on a Nigerian woman's experiences immigrating to America and there is a long scene in which African-Americans teaching at Yale and various African friends assess Barack Obama's chances of winning the election because he is black.  Since the election one reads political commentary explaining Republican opposition to the president as being largely driven by white hatred of a black man.  It always mystifies me because I never think of him as black. He is so Harvard, so upper middle class intellectual, well, really, so Waspy.  Michelle, maybe, but the president? My prejudice is bizarre, that's clear.  Anyone out of that milieu constitutes a category for me that transcends all others.  Another of my irrational prejudices came out as I read in today's Times an article on rethinking the boxes on the census form because "white," for one example is too inclusive.  I could not agree more.  It was evidently Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants who felt they were lost in the category "white."  I feel exactly the same way.  I don't like thinking I as a Wasp am just lumped together with the Irish and the Italians and the  Jews as a white person when African-Americans can be specifically black and if you speak Spanish and immigrated,say, from Mexico even though your grandfather immigrated into Mexico from Ireland and your name is Murphy you get to put Hispanic.  I want to put Wasp where it says other and not check the "white" box.  This tiresome rant will have to do for today, Wednesday and the eight days.  I have just typed this on my IPad and my chubby arthritic fingers made a mess of the screen keyboard plus I can hardly see the Lilliputian print.

O, Death Where Is Thy Sting, etc.?

I was stopped in the novel I have been reading when the protagonist, a thirty something year old male of French Canadian descent living in New Hampshire, is urged by his wife and various friends to screw up his courage to look at the corpse of his brother lying in an open coffin at the wake.  It is clearly a Roman Catholic event, but I do not know if it is a religious obligation or simply part of the culture of this group to look into the face of the departed.  It started me remembering all the dead in my memory, starting with the body of my father whom we six children were brought to view in the grand entrance to our house where he lay in his casket.  I was six, still perplexed that days before he had kissed me goodbye in the morning and in the late afternoon was reported dead in an automobile accident.  Dead really did not mean anything to me; I thought he was asleep, although the tears and lamentation throughout the house signified something else. When I was twenty four they called me in Cambridge to say my mother had died, quite suddenly and surprisingly, my younger sister having just been married in the presence of our mother, who seemed to be glowing, only the previous week.  We six children converged, and the sobbing began.  Without a debate we stopped our grief long enough to upset the undertaker when we settled on the cheapest coffin obtainable, and firmly declined to view her remains.  I would say that having been raised by our widowed mother in a cult of her dead husband we instinctively chose to have nothing to do with it.  The following year my wife of four years died one Sunday afternoon quite by surprise.  She had asked me to call a doctor who was with her shortly thereafter when she gave a little groan and, well, just died.  What gave it reality for me was that our cat let out the most extraordinary cries just at that moment from the kitchen where she had been sequestered.  I stared at her body, thinking that like my father, she looked to be asleep on her bed, except that I was repulsed, as though a taboo had been broken.  She was a dead thing, and I did not want to touch her.  I have thought of this so often when watching the cinematic behavior of bereaved husbands who throw themselves upon the still warm corpse of their spouse.  I even refused the undertaker's offer to  see her laid out in the beautiful white suit she had worn as a bride.  Strange that refusal.  Since we had only just moved to the town where she died, it must have been myself at the request of the undertaker who chose the dress and brought it to him.  A few years later out in California where we were all living (I by then with my second wife, and many children), fate or some deity evened things out (paid me back?) when her mother died, after a grotesque struggle with stomach cancer where I had enough instinct for pietas to visit her nightly, although I had always found her a tiresome woman.  I, of course, wanted nothing to do with the woman dead, but still did indeed accompany her aged and incipiently quite senile husband, my once upon a time father-in-law, as he took the body by train back to the Mid West.  We were met in Des Moines by the very undertaker who had dealt with the ashes of my late wife when they arrived from the East Coast. This time there was a body and a coffin which he proposed to set out open for viewing.  "This is Iowa, Charlie, everybody expects an open coffin." he said in response to my anguished objections remembering how ravaged she had seemed at the end.  With that he threw open the lid, and there she was, dressed in her very best silk party dress, her face somehow covered in enough foundation cream to look quite credible.  And yet it was grotesque.  I stood transfixed with horror at the spectacle.  She was so dead.  "Here, Charlie, give me a hand," he  shouted out briskly, "she's slipped down in this box from all the movement of the train."  And then I had my hands under her shoulders giving the body a giant tug, pulling it just so, as the other guy pushed, and she was established in a more "life-like" sleeping position.  "Good job," he said smiling approvingly.