Karl Ove Knausgaard

Because the reviews of Knausgaard's My Struggle have been uniformly enthusiastic, in many cases, ecstatic, I was curious to sample it.  Although so far there are six volumes, each hundreds of pages long, I took the plunge.  The author is writing a detailed account sometimes in recollection otherwise contemporaneous with the events of the daily life of a man named Karl Ove Knausgaard, and the reader may presume, if he chooses, that the author and the protagonist are one and the same person.  Which may, indeed, be true.  I did not swoon nor surrender to the narrative in the course of the first volume; it is a strangely dispassionate description of everything he experiences, everything, every movement involved in spreading butter on bread, for instance. Still, I was sufficiently curious to finish it and pick up the second. Knausgaard is a Norwegian writer who lives in Stockholm with his wife and children, or at least that is what we read.  I cannot say I like him at all; he is self absorbed to an incredible degree.  His is the life of a new father who has undertaken to stay home with the baby so his wife can finish an advanced degree, at least that is the circumstance of the first and second volumes, although in the second we get the background of his meeting Linda, her pregnancy, and his decision to stay home with the baby.  He wants a life of disorder, claims that is what is the essence of Norway, condemns the excessive need for order and control he finds among the Swedes.  He and his male friends drink an extraordinary amount, sometimes what we would call binge drinking, and experiences again and again what we call blackouts, considered in our culture to be a symptom of alcoholism.  Nothing of that crosses the mind of Knausgaard, and while he sometimes feels guilty for his drunken binges, and his wife seems often disgusted, they never discuss drinking as a problem. But then perhaps that is the essence of marriage, that long suffering silence in the face of intolerable behaviors, the inevitability of enduring. Hh tells us that his father drunk himself to death, literally in the last couple of years of his life, while living with his aged mother, who seems to have accepted the situation passively.  His wife has suffered from extreme depression, suicidal impulses, the sort of disorder that one would imagine, I at any rate, would lead one to consider several times over whether marriage to such a woman, however charming and lovely she might  be, was a good idea.  On the whole, for an American the novel is intriguing, for presenting persons of artistic talent and intellect, who never summon psychology as a means of analyzing their situations, who often deliver abstract maxims, philosophical truths, as somehow relevant to the human condition, more especially their personal lives.  So far the best scene for me is in the second volume,  the long account of the birthing of their first child, an intimate scene of childbirth, which impressed me mightily because I was not allowed to be present at the birth of my children (not that I would have wanted to be!).  I very much read along with real empathy the many many accounts of this male who grits his teeth and undertakes parenting and childcare to the degree few males ever do, because of a pact he made with his wife so she could finish school.  Any male who has become a father will find this a redeeming struggle for the poor guy.

Aesthetic Chastity

From my long association with classical antiquity I have formed an ardent attachment to symmetry, restraint, order, tradition and its revision.  Thus I am thrilled to be able to go back to the source, the city of Athens, even if most of the monuments have vanished or remain as hardly recognizable fragments.  Nonetheless, the Parthenon temple is whole enough to force the viewer to surrender while at the same time sufficiently damaged and partial to excite the most extreme passion at the loss that time inevitably exacts, the Parthenon simply standing as part for the whole of that difficult life experience.  The archaic sculpture of the Acropolis is another aesthetic of restraint to which I immediately surrendered once I had seen it.  And at the time of my discovery of antiquity my wife in those years was teaching me about the aesthetic of the Bauhaus, and I read antiquity into the Seagrams Building and other testimonies to that style being thrown up at that time.  A few years after my Athenian adventure, I went to live in Rome, and discovered that, although I found so much of the painting in that city hard to take, I was intoxicated with the Baroque in architecture and in city planning, and of course I had to realize that despite my mother's constantly shouting out: "Charles, you're not Italian, you're not Jewish, stop waving your hands around like that when you speak," I was born to flamboyance as surely as I was born gay.  Walking through Rome demands that you stand up and act the part, you are definitely on stage, just as the sinuous curves, carved everywhere demand a sensual response.  I knew that I was not in Iowa anymore, not in Boston for that matter.   Still,  what I most of all love in our own time are the glass boxes, Philip Johnson's Glass House, or the Beinecke Library at Yale, not to mention a million perfectly decent houses, libraries, music halls, what have you, erected in stern understated while overstated--the essence of the Parthenon--style.  But of course the very, very funny thing about the marbles of ancient Athens, which delight us for their fragmentary nature just as their their cold stone whiteness chastens us and demands that we grow up, is the fact that the ancients painted the marble surfaces.  The Parthenon was a melange of maroon, gilt, and green. You even get a suggestion of this on the archaic sculpture of the Acropolis because it was buried early on and not brought into the destructive force of weather until very recently and immediately rushed into the protection of museums.  It's like learning that Plato invented rock-n'-roll. 

The Ruins Of Greece Seen From More Ways Than One

Planning a trip to an area where there is considerable poverty always exposes the traveler to the uncomfortable sensation of feeling uncomfortably comfortable in the midst of a sea of want.  In the last few years the economic collapse that has spread from the outrageous and criminal behavior of America's banks and major financial institutions has devastated the economies of southern Europe none more so perhaps than that of Greece which entered this period of extreme economic uncertainty with an economy in every way already frail by virtue of the outright lies with which their leaders managed their entrance into the European Union's economic framework and the commonplace tax evasion and other anti social economic behaviors which have been traditional in this country.  The unemployment among the young is staggeringly high; things don't get better and the people in Brussels are calling for ever greater austerity, not the best recipe to get the ball rolling again.  Add to this the large number of immigrants, refugees from countries of Africa where living conditions and brutalities make it imperative to escape; anything elsewhere seems better.  There is no love lost between the Greek nationals and these mostly unwanted guests who compete for social services or more to the point begging on the street or taking the bottom level job.  They say that parts of Athens look like the south Bronx of the eighties, that there has been minimal upkeep on buildings and storefronts in the area of Omonia Square and further out by the National Museum of Archeology.  As someone whose reverence for the contents of that Museum is passionate I do not look forward to seeing this disbasement.  I sometimes wonder at the new Niarchos Foundation project by Renzo Piano which is building a gleaming elegant new musical hall and national library south of the city  center on an abandoned race track.  Tarting up that tacky part of town is all to the good but it will shift the notion of "desirable" ever farther away from the Museum of Archeology which ought to be the very center of people's interest.  The Greeks of antiquity created a culture which, as we all know, is the fons and origo of western civilization (so alright, your Latin is a little slow this morning; just wanted to introduce a catch phrase for your pretentious ripostes at cocktails this evening [the wellspring and origin].  Following the adoption of the Christian faith the Greeks moved radically away from things heathen, and thereafter even more so when they became subjects of the Muslim Turks who conquered their territory.  The people of this area slumbered in ignorance of their noble past until a few bright lights aided by European romantics such as Lord Byron liberated them from Byzantine control emanating from Constantinople now Istanbul the capital of the Muslim country Turkey.  The Greeks' increasingly passionate embrace of antiquity in my view is more kindled by the profits envisioned from the tourist trade than any honest understanding of what this legacy is and or appreciation of what the culture was.  The sad state of the National Museum of Archeology is just a symbol of this neglect.

The Bidet

One of my four sisters has been exceptionally kind in the last sixty or seventy years in introducing me to everything that matters in life.  She was the first and for many many years the only member of my family to meet head-on my obvious desire for sexual relations with males; I was probably fifteen at the time and she nineteen.  A year later she taught me to jitterbug, for which I have been forever grateful since I so love to dance, and learning to do that made me the envy of all my high school classmates at a time when I could have easily been dismissed as a creep and a queer.  When I was eighteen we were both living in New York, and she took me in hand and down to MacDougal Street, in those days lined with what we would now call gay bars, took me in and sat there to the side for a while until I overcame my shyness.  A half decade went by until we reconnected; it was on the occasion of my marriage and she sent us a crate for a wedding present containing what she called a "bidet."  This was 1956, and I don't think either I or my wife knew what the word meant, just that my sister now married to a wealthy man in Palm Beach obviously would think up something extraordinary and glamorous for a wedding gift.  The object remained in its crate and in our attic, and went with us as we moved to New Haven and Palo Alto and back to Massachusetts, forever a mystery.  Still and all when we began traveling to Europe I did indeed discover what a bidet was and that it was for something other than washing out one's underthings in the hotel room, as so many Americans naively believed was its primary function.  When we were divorced, the bidet went with me to my new house in Cambridge and I hired a carpenter and plumber to build me a second bathroom on the top floor and install the bidet.  As I now knew from living in Rome a bidet is a very handy device far beyond the cleansing of a woman's private parts following intercourse.  Europeans all knew about the possibility of washing up one's bum in a bidet without having recourse to taking a daily shower.  Oh, the joy of it all, not to have to get one's hair wet, not to have to wet the entire body, just to be able to smell sweet again after the morning's dump.  Time passed and I moved away from this house and my beloved bidet to a place much more American and, alas, without a bidet.  Then it was, at age seventy or so, after I had had prostate cancer, and a treatment with radioactive pellets shot into that organ, I began to notice a definite new and not terribly pleasant aroma arising from the crotch.  On my follow up visit to the oncologist I complained of this, and he shook his head mystified, but it so happened that he had invited a medical student who was specializing to be a urologist to sit in on the appointment who immediately said: "Oh, that's 'old man's smell.'  We were just studying it yesterday."  I thought to myself that this kid would fail Bedside Manner 101 if I were handing out the grades.  But there it was: Old Man's Smell.  And I no longer had a bidet.  One of life's great inventions, I recommend it to my readers, one and all.

Guys And Girls

The Roosevelt documentary is compelling in every way; the three members of that famous family featured in this exposé that lasts for hours are all so vital, human, and in each in a different way vulnerable.  We have just been watching the part where Eleanor Roosevelt learns from a stash of love letters written to her husband that he has been having an affair with her former secretary.  It is noted that from all accounts Mrs. Roosevelt never got over the hurt and despair that this revelation caused her.  My immediate reaction, as someone who was grossly unfaithful long ago in heterosexual marriage, was why did Franklin keep those letters?  Who is so arrogant and cruel to imagine that they might might never be discovered?  Someone who just is not alive to the deep sensitivities of possession and fidelity in many spouses, or, as many psychologists suggest, someone who wanted the information somehow or another to be transmitted.  I was reading in the Globe this morning the quoted remarks of a young gay male married to another fellow who remarks that he and his husband have an "open" marriage and tend to use condoms if they are having sex with others.  As a male who has spent years of my life closeted while working with a variety of straight males in different situations involving different classes, I was always struck by the extraordinary amount of sexual energy these fellows evinced while encountering attractive women on the job, and I remember so well the numerous rumors about affairs as well as the late night boozy confessions of many guys of their extra marital exploits.  Before one suggests that "men are just like that," you have to think of Teddy Roosevelt in this same documentary, who I don't believe was unzipping his pants in the same way as his cousin.  So it isn't as though all men were lotharios.  But a lifetime of associating with men makes me believe that conjugal fidelity is not such a big deal as it is with women, and especially I think husbands are prone to stray when their wives are in their most sexually unattractive phase, late pregnancy, early motherhood, and breast feeding.  But the interesting thing that I take away from the gay husband's comments, which by the way I have heard many times over elsewhere, is that a sexual act by one's spouse outside of the relationship is not so threatening.  I think for a lot of males sex is sex, starting from their early teenaged mechanical masturbation to relieve genuine physical tensions and sometimes discomfort.  So sexual intercourse is just sexual intercourse.  Certainly the accounts of soldiers in various armies lining up to be "serviced" by prostitutes suggests that, and somehow from my experience of women, limited as it is, does not suggest to me that there would be the same line of women waiting for male prostitutes.  A corollary thought is my shared anguish of the fantasized male prostitute who has to face a line of hungry women with that very dubious instrument for constant gratification that nature has given him.

Dollar Signs

Watching the documentary about the Roosevelts is a salutary reminder of a class of people who lived in a world where money was not talked about.  The established old families did not mention money, partly because they had a lot of it and didn't need to worry, partly because their tendency was to play down display even if they also believed in the finest ingredients and stuffs for their dinners and their possessions.  That ethos pretty much dominated the better East Coast teaching institutions; when I was interviewed for my first job neither I nor the Dean who interviewed me nor my senior faculty colleague who brought me to the meeting thought to mention what salary was attached to the job, and i never learned my annual salary until I figured it out from my first pay stub.  I never heard my mother mention money, certainly nothing we ate or did ever had a price tag attached to it.  When she took me on our annual trip to Chicago to buy new clothes I don't remember cost as being remarked upon when we dealt with our man in Marshall Fields. Nowadays everything is monetized.  There is no picture that comes to the attention of the newspapers that does not have a recent auction price or estimated future one attached to it, as though this were a significant feature of its definition, as important as the artist's name.  Houses are always introduced with their presumed selling price rather than any serious attention to what makes that dwelling desirable or aesthetically pleasing.  A college education is defined by the thousands of dollars of debt a student will acquire, and there is always rumbles of concern that he or she should be directed toward fields of study that will "pay off."  All of this is perfectly understandable since money does indeed make the world go around, yet, on the other hand, there was a class of people in this country who managed by virtue of their personal wealth to manage to refrain from monetizing everything that crossed their path.  Now the country belongs to the nouveaux riches who are intent upon thinking entirely in dollars, and with them goes the mad giddy expenditure that is constantly featured in The New York Times.  The price of stock is considered far more important than the product made, the benefit to the country, or the welfare of those employed to do the work: a company is not thought of as a social, political, environmental asset to the country, but rather simply a source of wealth whose stock is party of a money game played by its owners.  Street after street in Manhattan and London are lined with luxury apartment buildings where units cost in the tens of millions and the inhabitants visit only a few months a year.  The major attraction as reported by the press is the outsize price.  I loved the woman from a posh New Jersey suburb whose husband had bought her a thirty million dollar weekend getaway in the city where as she exclaimed "I can see Central Park" and Bergdorf's is only a few blocks away." What more could one want in God's world, especially when the needy are tucked away out of sight?

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.