The Body

I was captivated by the photos in the Huffington Post of the celebrities gathered for George Clooney's wedding in Venice, he so handsome, his bride so beautiful, Venice so glamorous, and his celebrity friends, what a strange collection.  Anna Wintour I would not have thought as one of them, but there she was photographed in two different outfits during the various festivities.  I was struck to see her in a simple sleeveless dress, although it is indeed a line of which she is fond, because for the first time I realized that she was perhaps a little old for this.  She was photographed in the awkward exertion of getting on or off a water taxi, not the most graceful moment in a person's life, and where her arm extended from her body, it was clear to see that her skin was loose against the bone structure, a common problem as we age, but not one that is usually made available by the clothes we wear.  I find it amusing to watch my arm when being pulled up through one of those power dryers in public restrooms because the skin is so loose that it ripples and billows in the powerful air currents.  I first noticed this once weeding in the garden bending over and looking back between my legs, noticing the skin of my thighs hanging ever so slightly loose as though I had on panty hose which were much too  big for me.  It is really rather grotesque this flailing of the person without actually removing the skin completely from the body, but I have to admire the athletic ladies of the bath and racquet club where I work out weekly.  There are dozens of tennis courts there, and a corresponding large group of regulars playing tennis from dawn to dusk.  As a group the women are well dressed well coiffed ladies in their high seventies and low eighties whose game is ferocious and steady, and none of them in their crisp white tennis shorts and shirts is the least bit bothered by the loose skin on their arms and legs which has a kind of life of its own as their owner's limbs move vigorously through the tennis game.  As an ever larger group of prosperous, healthy, active persons live into serious old age they present ever newer forms of physical well being.  Faces wrinkled with healthy skin, featuring clear, attentive eyes set deep in a mass of crows feet are as beautiful as an athletic arm with its loose skin.  Surrendering to botox and surgery turns a living person into a corpse, and it seems so strange that persons in the class for whom having "work" done is de rigeur don't recognize that fact.  Well, a smooth face, surgically altered so as to be devoid of expression or personality has the advantage I suppose of hiding life's tragedies and disappointments, and maybe that's easier for those confronting a long life in the mirror. 

Writing Lessons

Vicky Madden's New York Times essay "Why Poor Students Struggle" reminded me of my experience teaching at Lehman College in the Bronx.  It was one of the most thrilling episodes in a forty two year teaching career including stints at Yale, Stanford, and Boston University, thrilling because of the interesting observations I got to read on many of the interpretative essays I assigned my students to write.  But the other side of the coin was the hard work I put in reading and correcting these essays.  Most of my students were either foreign born or they were from disadvantaged New York City backgrounds where reading and writing were not part of their home life nor was the speaking of standard American English.  It was obvious that the New York City school system had not been much help in overcoming these obstacles.  So I devised a system in correcting the essays.  First, I was careful to read the work sympathetically, to meet the writer on his or her terms, and to append a critique of the ideas in the piece.  But then I systematically line proofed the piece, having asked that the student submit the paper typed with every fifth line numbered.  This way I could make easy reference as I typed out a response to the grammatical problems, the stylistic problems, vocabulary confusions, all the things that needed to be flagged in the writing of someone whose work was highly uneven and ill informed. Of course, I was also concerned to help each of them to identify and legitimate their idiosyncracies in writing that would make the writing their own. I generally struggled to hand back my corrective essays to the entire class at our next meeting, usually three or four pages to each of them.  Some grumbled, but others glowed with the understanding that they were being taken entirely seriously.  These were students who had not the first notion of how to write an essay, and if the reader put that fact aside, some of the texts were in their inchoate and stumbling way, filled with fabulous observations on the subjects assigned.  The three years I taught this course were constantly thrilling, if exasperating and headache making in the demands upon my time.  Sometimes there was a real laugh for me, as when a newcomer from Africa handed in something I immediately recognized as too polished to be other than entirely copied, and when I challenged him at the next meeting he cheerfully acknowledged this, saying he felt bad handing in something that would be crude and hard for me to read.  I remember those classes as thrilling for me as I participated in the awakening and discovery of the power of the English language and a self conscious writing style in people who did not know of these possibilities.  It remains one of the most treasured memories of my teaching career.

What If . . . .?

As I prepare for my trip to Greece in October I am reminded of the first time I was in the country in August of 1962, arriving in fact the day after or the day Marilyn Monroe died, a fact I learned because to my intense satisfaction I, a professor of ancient Greek, could construe the modern Greek in the headlines of the newspaper.  I was going to be traveling with a student of mine, a fellow ten years my junior, and our plan was to meet at the airport, where he would come to meet my plane.  Stupidly enough, we had no back-up plan, and since he absent mindedly stayed on the observation deck roof of the airport too long, and I and my fellow passengers had long since disembarked, and when he came downstairs finally we did not find ourselves in the throng, and of course there were no cell phones in 1962, he went on back to the downtown thinking to find me somehow.  I was alone in Athens airport and did not know what to do, but a young man with whom I had struck up a conversation suggested I come with him to a hotel suite, his father, a wealthy French businessman, maintained.  It was a strange evening since the young man, maybe all of twenty, was a European playboy, aimlessly traveling, this time to Turkey, as I remember it.  He invited me to come along, mentioning yachts in the southern Mediterranean and other fun things.  It was entirely disconcerting, especially since he was the kind of guy I only saw in French movies, not exactly an airhead, and certainly very intelligent, but very unfocused.  I remember that we had sex sometime in the course of the evening, more, I think, because he sensed my proclivities and thought it was only right and proper to indulge them rather than from an ardent desire for same sex activity.  In the morning I remembered to call a colleague of mine who was spending the summer studying at the American School of Classical Studies for his advice only to be told by the operator there that my friend was not at the school that week, and then suddenly wanting to know if I were the same person who called yesterday, mentioning the name of my prospective summer companion.  He gave me the name and telephone number of the hotel that had been left in the message, and I quickly called, and with great relief made contact.  Within the hour, I was greeting my missing companion who had rushed over to get me at the hotel where I had spent the night, and I had said goodbye and thanked my new friend who regarded me and my friend with amused curiosity.  And so life went on as planned, whereas I might have been swept up in an Alain Delon type bikini clad beach intrigue played out across the Levant.  Ah, those fantasies!

The Good Old Days

Donald Kagan has an interesting piece in the Saturday September 27 issue of The Wall Street Journal which by chance landed on my doorstep instead of The New York Times .  It is always good to read Professor Kagan who is an ancient historian underneath the layers of positions he takes on current events. The point of view he expresses here is well known:  The United States in these perilous times must defend against its enemies; the invasion of Iraq was simple justice; those who try to analyze any possible reason for the hostility exposed on 9/11 are traitors to their country (he singles out the academics).  He argues that the founding fathers believed in an education that taught patriotism, love of country, as well as reading, writing, and arithmetic.  Contemporary universities are filled with professional nay sayers, professors who are quick to find fault with the system.  He talks of the philosophers Plato and Aristotle and their support for city-state democracy as opposed to the philosophers of the Enlightenment who privileged the rights of the individual as their reaction to the repressions of crown and church.  It's just not so simple as Kagan imagines.  Plato and Aristotle were scarcely household names, the general citizenry would have been unlikely to know their ideas; Pericles, who Kagan, advances as the great leader of the Athenian democracy, nonetheless presided over a society in which slavery was commonplace, and women were chattel, and foreigners were excluded.  A multi-ethnic society like ours would have been unthinkable.  But I hear a nostalgia in Kagan's words which I share.  I grew up in a small town in Iowa, of which we were all so proud.  We shopped at small stores on Main Street and were friends with all the owners, the bank president knew the people whom he passed on the street, my father, the surgeon, was not above going out to a farm and operating in an emergency on a body lying anesthetized on the kitchen table, afterwards saying to the family assembled "Pay me what you can."  Now we go out to shop at the mall, we have impersonal box stores (try to find a helpful clerk among the wage slaves listlessly moving product around) with rickety products made in China on their shelves, nothing repaired everything thrown away, it is so cheap.  Our automobile manufacture lies about their faulty products, our priests molest the choir boys, our banks are enormous remote entities, protected by the federal government in crisis who help them reap profits from people who have been foreclosed mercilessly without any protection from a government.  State and federal legislatures are entirely purchased for the profit motives of special interests.  Ah, the contemporary American profit motive! Plato and Pericles would not have understood the reckless pursuit of the bottom line, no, not for a moment!  We have just read in the newspapers of a doctor brought in unbeknownst to an anesthetized patient who was then sent a special bill of over $100,000. Kagan talks of the need for an education that will explore the themes of American democracy, but how can the average young person consider anything other than the barest bones "practical" education at the prices higher education is charging for their services?  I grew up loving this country in a very different time, but I can well understand the present day alienation.  Our media from left and right are mercilessly critical of our federal government, our daily news channels wallow in stories of babies left to die in closed cars or lunatics setting off guns or chopping off heads.  Seems like every figure in the legislature is for sale.  But, hey, guys, compare us with Athens.  There is no legal slavery here (even if Walmart tells its employees to get food stamps to supplement their meagre pay check), women have the vote and can own property and manage their affairs, and who knows how many of our fellow citizens were born elsewhere?.  At least Professor Kagan would have to agree that we have finally come to our senses and recognized as the ancient Athenians did that males lying on a couch in loving embrace is a fine expression of a truly democratic society.  Male love was considered the cornerstone of a strong military presence. Take that, Tea Party!

Difficult Thoughts

I have a gay friend in his late thirties whose southern Baptist family continues to deride and scorn him for his sexual orientation, trusting in their religious faith as ironclad inspiration for their contempt and derision.  I shudder reading the accounts of militants in the Middle East who want to bomb the region into submission to the laws of Shariah.  I am revolted reading in the so-called black books of Martin Heidigger of his virulent hatred of Jews--this in the thirties and forties!--whilst professing a system of philosophy that seems far distant from it.  I cannot tolerate the idea that people will allow themselves to become captive to a system of belief that forces them to act destructively to their fellow human beings.  And yet, I have to examine my own conscience.  I do not find it in my heart to love or even recognize or accept as fellow humans so many of the drugged or alcoholic homeless persons I see lurking about in our cities today.  I live in a city with a warm climate that is a natural shelter for persons who are driven to live out of doors.  They are visible, sometimes in large groups, and I am angered at seeing them, because I fear for the comfort of law and order to which I cling perhaps too desperately.  Control, organization, rules, regulations, it is all too obvious that I truly fear anomie.  But in the end that is neither here nor there.  I cannot find it in my heart to love, --forget that, understand, --or that,--tolerate,--there, that is a better word, and yet I have had to fight all my life for acceptance as a gay male.  I find the homeless unclean and hopeless and failing in the important rules of life.  That is what so many many people in this world would say about me.  Hitler wanted to segregate and destroy gay people and he had a lot of his countrymen willing to go along with him on that project.  I want to move the homeless out of the downtown of my pretty city.  Where to?  Is a kind of Dachau lurking in the misty trembling regions of my mind?  Not really able to say it, think it, but know that there must be some "place" for these people.  The remnants of Christianity that I learned in my youth remind me that the Christ loved the poor and the desperate, mingled with the equivalent homeless of his day, but all I have is fear.  Once upon a time when I was much younger I  volunteered to teach in prisons, volunteered in soup kitchens to make food for persons with AIDS who were not ambulatory, maybe it is time to get up off this aged butt and find a soup kitchen down here where there might be something I could do if only to improve my mental and moral health.

Flying In The Friendly Skies

Shanah Tovah!

 I have been doing a lot of flying lately and observing the extraordinary maneuvers contrived by the passengers to ensure that their luggage goes on the plane with them.  I can understand boarding with a small overnight case and maybe a large purse or briefcase; I do this myself when I go from our condo in Sarasota to our studio in Manhattan.  But it is amazing to see the numbers of people simply flouting the rules for the dimensions of luggage to be taken aboard or bringing on two or three pieces in direct contravention of the two pieces maximum rule.  I find it interesting that none of the airline personnel at the gate make any effort to stop this, and indeed I have for many long years been amazed at the widespread indifference to passengers breaking the rules, in this or in boarding in the wrong sequence, oh, any number of behaviors which always seem to me to be of a piece with the robust capitalism exuded by so many of those boarding--like the bankers, the real estate developers and the like--who seem to think rules are made to be broken!  Since I take advantage of being so obviously old I go on when they announce that privilege for the elderly, the infirm, and those traveling with children, and thus I often hear the staff aboard the plane complaining about the horrific amount of heavy luggage they are asked to fling up into those bins.  And one wonders at the people who cheerfully bring on pieces they themselves cannot conceivably manage to place in the overhead racks when they might have checked them.  And the people who quite cynically bring on over sized pieces which then have to be "checked" at the front of the plane which they can retrieve the minute the flight is over.  My daughter observed that in this manner they avoid paying the charge of checked luggage.  Or perhaps, I thought, they feared lost luggage.  I am happy to check mine through.  My husband and I once went to Venice and the luggage arrived the day we were leaving Venice and followed two days later back to our home in the States.  Another time my children and I got to Rome and our luggage never made the connection in Paris which was heavenly since Air France later brought it to our front door in Rome without any effort on our part.  The idyllic time for flying was the months after 9/11 when it was forbidden to bring anything aboard into the cabin.  One simply boarded fluidly and easily without aggression or agony. Everything was checked.  What peace would reign again if the airlines were to forbid luggage in the cabin of the plane!  We would all be equal, there would be no competition, no deceit, no pretense.  The present system will not work in the long run; it gets worse every day, and suddenly the airlines will discover that for some very good reasons that they will discover it is in the interests of maximum safety that passengers board without holding on to their luggage.

Happy Days In Canada

I have just returned from Cape Breton Island and my granddaughter's wedding.  With my penchant for generalizing I was quick to determine what seemed basic differences between the people I met there and what I find in the United States.  I was reminded of Norway, actually, not because of the frequent views of ocean, steep rises of land, forests, but rather an extraordinary sense of enjoyment that the locals displayed.  Of course, the area was rural, isolated, there was none of the pressure of urbanity; still and all it seemed like the young men and women I encountered at all the festivities were not preoccupied non stop with their incomes, their chances of getting ahead, the general tension that occupies the space between people here in the States.  It was as though we were all at a very congenial laid back relatively quiet jazz bar without the drinking.  Maybe it had to do with the fact that the groom belonged to a blue grass group, and there were numbers of musicians at the various social events surrounding the wedding, most of them coming from that musical tradition.  The men particularly seemed to me so attractively masculine without demonstrating an overload of testosterone.  They were well built in a chunky way, so refreshing after the excessively slim variety of male one sees here balanced against the definitely over expanded bellies of the middle aged.  And pleasant! And gentle! I don't know when I have talked to so many gracious, polite, just downright nice males.  The women were good looking and laid back as well, but that did not strike me so strongly since I encounter women like that the world over.  It is beautiful land, constantly sliced with views of lakes and inlets of the ocean, water everywhere.  The natives all talked about the long winters, and snow and rain and sleet and ice with gallows humor, so I suppose that the sunny balmy wedding days were sufficiently rare that everyone was in a really good mood.  I can imagine a different tone in the dead of winter.  Whatever, as we all say nowadays.  I was entirely refreshed emotionally and spiritually from my visit there, just as I was a few years ago from a stay among Norwegians.  Maybe it's partly the welfare state; people are not so desperate in these places.