The Straight And Narrow Path

It is fascinating to discover how many males who are vigorous opponents of gays turn out to have a hidden homosexual portion of their sexual repertoire.  It does indeed seem what so many claim that men who are nervous about their sexual orientation or deeply ashamed by it will act out their fears by vigorous public opposition.  I think the same could be said about the militant jihadists intent on blowing up the world, their murderous assaults everywhere covering a deep insecurity at the prospect of the modernity of the western world and its implications for their own personal life.  It is strange to me that the majority of Muslims who are entirely  secure in their beliefs and their interaction with the evolving global culture of modernity to not stand up and object, reject, seriously lash out against these terrorists.  I treasure the present Pope for saying in some discussion about issues with which the Catholic has doctrinal arguments "Who am I to judge?" giving the lie to all those puritan orthodox rigid narrow minded knee jerk religious zealots who insist that their road is the only road and no other path shall be trod.  He spoke as a human being where judgement of others can be set aside, where love and acceptance must be the norm.  In the same vein I will always treasure the response of Pontius Pilate reported in one of the Gospels who replied to Jesus when he said "I come with the truth"  "But what is truth?"

No Accounting For Tastes

My husband and I have a running battle over the film we will choose to watch through out television monitor after dinner most evenings.  He wants action film, science fiction film, I want dramas involving human reactions to each other.  Last night we watched "Hotel Rawanda" which depicted a truly horrendous human event, I kept running scenes from the Holocaust through my head, and deploring how the world yet again turned a blind eye to the massacre.  But I could not become engaged in the film, I did not find the development of the Don Cheadle character rich enough neither as he evolved into the savior of the refugees nor in his relationship with his wife; in the first instance his tendency to make nice as befits a luxury hotel manager motivates his humanitarian tendencies--let's keep things neat, quiet, and nice; and as a husband he was so strikingly like a modernized European or American as was the wife that that oddity was a character treat needing exploiting for me.  In sum the mass murder was horrendous, the failure of the UN and the west ghastly, the hotel manager and those who assisted him were heroic.  I didn't need the exposition in a two hour movie.  The night before we watched the Ivory-Merchant "Heat and Dust" in which a contemporary English woman's search for her ancestor's life in India is interwoven with the drama of that woman's entering as a bride into the life of the British colonials, her gradual rejection of it, and her surrender to the local Nawab, a shocking event in the rigid structured society of that time.  The film which drove my husband mad features, first of all, incredibly beautiful interiors and gorgeous clothing, then a very slow development of the heroine's revolt against her life in India, her gradual enchantment the Nawab, all of it couched in terms of personal beauty as both these actors are seductive and glorious.  The psychological reaction to everyone party to this growing attraction is well developed as is the parallel experience of the granddaughter in her Indian exploration of a historical fact and her own inner growth and development.  For me the story was interesting, although none of these people "mattered" in any way on either the world's stage or the smaller place of a little kingdom in India.  My husband claims I always like to look at movies featuring upper class people. I have to admit I like the refinements, details, and subtleties of conventional repressive manners among the so called upper classes, I like to watch the way they play out.  On the other hand, proof that I am not the star fucker he insists I am, I can scarcely endure that soap opera "Downton Abbey," so many gauche, vulgar, obvious behaviors coupled with such lack of imagination, and downright stupidity.  And for all his man of the people stance, he is glued to "Downton Abbey."  Curious

Girls

Someone told me that the Hannah Horvath character in "Girls," was informed at the end of the last season that she had been accepted into the Iowa Writers Workshop at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City.  Since that is my hometown, although now mostly a faded memory of the thirties and the forties, and SUI as it used to be styled, my alma mater, and faculty of the Workshop, such as Paul Engle and other legends were family friends, I felt obliged to take a wee interest. My husband and I had been much intrigued at the start of the first season, having only the most minimal contact with the type of persons depicted, but fascinated that such people were objects of interest, and also, of course, startled and charmed by Ms. Dunham's fearless display of her tiny tits. But we grew bored and disgusted with the young ladies, and stopped watching. Some of my projected fun collapsed when I learned that the administration at Iowa banned filming on the campus; still I was curious to see how the character would behave herself even in a faux Iowa and an imagined Workshop atmosphere.  To get ready for the Iowa experience we overcame our distaste  to try a few of the final episodes, .  The four girls have grown even more tedious than they were in years gone by, having become--hard to believe this possible--even more shallow and self-obsessed than before.  One named Marnie, the pretty one of the bunch, has kept her nice girl personality that goes well with her stunning looks, and is evidently so desperate for approval that she takes up with the former boyfriend of one of the other girls, not for a relationship but to get some sex with complicated motives.  Nothing like fucking a friend's boyfriend, someone you have known well from a different perspective, and better yet barging into his apartment and telling him to put up or shut up while marching into his bedroom and removing her clothing.  I know men do this all the time, and therefore to object or to criticize this woman is male chauvinist piggery.  And it really is not that big a deal, it's just that she is so "nice."  Actually sort of that brittle, good looking hard nice that I associate with sorority girls that I knew in the forties.  Much more fascinating was the Hannah character who got into the Writers Workshop.  For instance, it is evening, she is at the theater for the opening of a production of "Major Barbara" in which her boyfriend Adam has a big role, and of course his big chance. This is his big break and he has been avoiding her for weeks living at a friend's so he could work on his lines without distraction.  She has been enraged and stalks him constantly during this period.  Now opening night as he sits at his dressing table in a last minute moment of calming and centering, she marches in, and breaks his mood to tell him of her new triumph, she will be off to Iowa, and an entire new future will develop for them.  Moments before opening!  Oblivious!  At least thank god the Adam character has been given by Lena Dunham the lines he needs to deliver, telling the Hannah Horvath character how disruptive, manipulative, and subversive she is being.  And she does not understand!  I have to ask myself: Who are the people out there watching this series?  Do young women identify with these four dreadful girls? I say girls, because they all behave like five year olds.  Am I in some parallel universe?   The bigger mystery to me is how Lena Dunham could create this nasty, self-serving vacuous girl which the public thinks and she sometimes rather implies is based on herself, when as her artistic work proclaims she is not this girl.  Well, of course that is the parallel universe, Hannah Horvath, Lena Dunham, but why does the author do this?

Another Day, Another Lecture

I was lucky to find the intellectual love of my life at nineteen when I enrolled in Ancient Greek in college which led me into a career of teaching the Classics.  I had lost my faith in the Christian religion at sixteen, so my studies not only refreshed my intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities, it brought me into a new understanding of my universe.  After a rocky start teaching students who for the most part were uninterested in the ancient world, mostly because they were simply intellectually not awake, I began teaching at Stanford some of the brightest, most intellectually alert and inquiring that one could imagine.  It was the beginning of the sixties and American youth seemed to be waking up in many ways.  My love affair with my students continued for years until I was fifty, as I recall, by which time I was back east teaching the new phenomenon, suburban kids, raised between a 7 Eleven and a mall, far from the cultural, social, intellectual stimulation of cities and towns which the earlier generation had fed on.  These students for the most part were indifferent to what charm my teaching had once upon a time commanded, and I was no longer desperate for the spiritual nourishment which rejecting Redemption and taking up The Tragic Sense of Life has brought to me.  But at fifty I was too young to quit, so I soldiered on.  Luckily a very different kind of teaching position suddenly became available, rendered my life vibrant with possibilities, but I knew by the time I was in my early sixties that I was getting too old, too out of date, and those men and women before me, needed another point of view. (One could argue that the various critical theories emanating from Paris during these latter years and now mostly repudiated suggested that I was not out of date in any real sense of the word). I taught my last class shortly after I turned sixty five, and the central administration could scarcely conceal their joy at the thought that the enormous salary I commanded could be quartered to provide four new entry level teaching positions.  I wish that more of my colleagues would do this, if only for the benefit of the next generation of scholars.  It saddens me that there is a federal law prohibiting mandatory retirement, at least for college professors.  We are a strange breed, solo performers with next to no supervision, mostly prima donnas of one sort or another, and unlike the theater audience which can respond with boos, jeers, and catcalls, our student audiences know that we hand out their very much needed grades, so they sit through any kind of shit in silence.  Luckily for them nowadays they may bring their laptops to class, and as has been documented, a great number are busily entertaining themselves in a variety of ways as they sit before the teacher.  I have a friend who at nearly eighty no longer recognized one student from another, and was finally with infinite patience removed from teaching, but several years later still thinks he is on sabbatical.  A former colleague of mine, again eighty, used to stink of urine so strongly you could smell him coming into the library stacks.  Imagine what he must have been like in a small class!  These two, and a host of others, had once made notable contributions to the scholarship of the profession, and they were still teaching what they had thought up fifty years earlier.  Pathetic.  In a way for these old timers it is like the marathon dancer in "They Shoot Horses Don't They?" only it's not dancing for the money, but teaching for that fragile sense of self, desperate for that audience every day of their lives.  On an ironic note: I am volunteer teaching in a senior learning program for eight meetings on the subject of Greek Tragedy starting next week.

Surroundings Are So Important

We came down to Sarasota in 2008 after the economic collapse when expansion of the campus of the senior retirement home outside New York City into which we had planned to spend our remaining years fell through. In a fit of exasperation I took, as they say, a chunk of money out of the bank determined to get something in this warm climate, to assuage the disappointment of losing out on the proximity to my notion of the Center of the World.  We went with a real estate agent recommended by friends and she showed us three or four items in our modest price range.  We rejected stand alone smallish houses, one, because it made me think of raising four children, neighbors with children and dogs, the paraphernalia of another life, two, because my husband was done with doing home repair.  We looked at a condo building sandwiched between a parking lot for a mall and the faculty parking lot of a middle school, an unpromising location that was immediately attractive to us, and a mystery to everyone we know who visit us here.  Well, we liked being isolated away from anything else, floating on a sea of macadam and surrounded more immediately by trees, we liked being on the top floor and looking off over rooftops, we liked the nearby bus system and the noise of a city, both of us remembering times in our lives when we were lost in the immense silence of suburbia.  We liked being able to walk thither and yon to destinations like stores rather than staring at yet another clump of bushes.  Most of all I have grown to love the aesthetics that this location provides me.  I am a great fan of easel painting, in fact, our walls here are covered with paintings, and watercolors, and photographs, all in their rectangular frames.  Reality cut out and boundaries established, that gives me an enormous thrill.  I love Mondrian in another way or the early Kandinksy's oh, all sorts of things with thrilling interventions of line, edging, and shaping.  Here on our third floor I look in the morning from the balcony and there is the line of the roof of the middle school, impeccable in its neatness and precision, a dark shadow below and the sky every minute turning another shade of pink above, and the variant of the small clouds adding punctuation of softness into the hard edge aesthetic otherwise created.  In the evening I sit on my little balcony gazing off to the west and first I encounter the long horizontal of a roof top, above it another pink sky shading from faint to bold, more clouds, sometimes functioning as markers, and then there is here and there and one place or another a large palm tree whose fronds punctuate the whole in an entirely different way.  Closer to hand if I sit in another spot I can gaze into this through the medium of half opened blinds, and another criss-cross of definition is added to my visual pleasure.  But what about the beach and the open sea, friends gently ask, and I say skin cancer and the boredom of too much undefined open space.

The Real Thing

Once upon a time I lived in the provinces, a boyhood spent in Iowa.  And I learned from the serious attention we paid to the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, not to mention the Sunday New York Philharmonic coming over the airwaves at dinner after church, that Manhattan was where one was meant to be.  My oldest sister went there after college and never came home; a second sister went back and forth, and I spent half a year there when I was eighteen.  It has always saddened me that I did not stay on, that I did not get into the gay culture forming and growing stronger at that time, that I was too timid essentially to take up the challenge of a New York existence.  Later on I was based in Cambridge Massachusetts, definitely the timid man's place to try out culture, and  I was in New York a lot, trying to make up for the fact that years before when I was teaching in New Haven, only an hour and a half away, so immersed in young parenthood and my career was I, that I never once made it to the city to hear Maria Callas sing.  When I was in my mid-fifties and I moved down from Cambridge to teach in New York, I developed an obsession to see and hear everything, already formed and exercised in the previous decades of sporadic visits.  I think it was some kind of Iowa complex.  For several years I did manage to get to what everyone was talking about, out every night, afternoon museum visits, no stone left unturned.  Friends always remarked on this, strangers marveled that whatever they brought up, I already "knew" about it.  One day, and I remember it well--I was riding down an escalator in a department store--, it suddenly occurred to me that sooner or later I would die and then I would not "know" anything of the cultural scene.  What a relief!  I was free to ignore, forget, or dismiss anything and everything, just so that I remembered that what was important and first-rate was only to be found in Manhattan.  And then I grew old, and getting around was more of a chore than I had anticipated;  luckily I was now retired and had more time.  I still walked through the Park to the Metropolitan from my apartment, but it took longer and longer, and I grew less inclined, once I had gained the Upper East Side, to expend the extra effort in going to the other museums located nearby.  And then I grew older, and fearful of the ice and snow.  I remember one particularly vicious winter week when I was afraid to walk out onto Fifty Seventh Street for Carnegie Hall or down Broadway to the theater district,  just as I would not walk up Ninth Avenue to get to Lincoln Center.  I was a prisoner of the winter, so I moved to Sarasota, which I knew to be a place for the arts, theater, dance, symphony, opera, chamber music.  Still it is an interesting change.  Quite a lot to see and hear, but never or rarely, contemporary, certainly not avant garde nor even much to shake one up.  The Asolo Repertory Theater for instance is about to put on "The Matchmaker" and then some saucy W.S. Maugham comedy from the twenties; it's the culture of the fifties redux (well, look at the audience one might rejoin).  But then, I think to myself, just as existence when one is eighty five is more or less going through the motions of living, so Sarasota's cultural surround preserves the form if not the content of what we want to call culture.

The New Facism

Upon reflection most serious students of the contemporary American scene will have to admit that Mohammed Attta won his battle by virtue of the devastating effects upon the quality of American life created by the hysteria which was the aftermath of 9/11.  We live in a world where we are constantly directed by security to do this, do that, move here, move there, and we acquiesce.  Likewise the Silicon valley technologists have been complicit in eroding the independence and spontaneity and freewheeling behaviors that have always been true to the American character.  I speak because I am still exercised by my recent encounters with the world of Apple, beginning I guess yesterday when I went with my husband to buy a new computer.  The Apple store is housed in a gleaming new mall which is situated alongside an interstate and next to an exit, two of the most formidable forms of control in our contemporary world.  The interior of the mall, an endless succession of flat, aesthetically integrated facades that deny idiosyncracy, led us to the Apple store where a young man at the door with his Ipad at the ready entered my husband's name and directed where we were to stand and how many minutes we would have to wait.  Mission completed, today, while my husband wrestled with setting up his new computer,  I contacted Apple online because my Iphone refused to sync contact data and calendar data with my Imac.  First I went to Google to ask if there were some way to achieve this synchronicity without the hassle of contacting Apple.  Nichts.  So I went online and contacted Apple, which first asked me to check which was the problem.  Their language did not admit of an answer, so they next asked if I wanted to "chat."  To my affirmative answer there suddenly appeared on my screen a little box, a chat box, I guess, and there appeared a question about my concerns, and since there was no direction, I did what seemed obvious and typed in my reply in a box at the bottom.  Nothing happened except that every so often another message appeared from my Apple handler asking me why I did not reply to his/her chat.  Then the connection was broken.  I tried direct telephone and it rang and a man answered with so heavy a southern accent I could not understand a word he was saying.  I did finally make out that the failure to sync could be due to many things.  I did not feel I was up to going through the various solutions (push this, check that, new screen, download, etc. I was definitely feeling ill), told this man that I needed to talk to somebody face en face, and he finally understood.  We hung up.  I went to Google, checked out the website for the local Apple store, went to their menu, asked for an appointment at the Genius bar, and was told that they were not taking reservations.  Apple then sent me an email with the sadistic and degrading legend "Thanks for contacting us."  End of story.  Why does the fabled magic of capitalism not created an alternative to this controlling monster?  I read the biography of Steve Jobs and he lives on in these machines.