La bella Sicilia

The British Museum has an exhibition on right now devoted to Sicily.  The website has the peculiar advertisement: "The largest island in the Mediterranean.  The home of Mount Etna." Two items of absolutely or very little relevance to what finally they get around to mentioning in the third sentence, to wit: "A cultural centre of the ancient and medieval world." And what a centre, as the Brits spell it, that island is!  Of course, the museum will show pieces that relate to the Arab presence on the island, the Norman invasion, and before all that the Greeks who immigrated in the sixth century BCE and the Romans who followed in their traces several centuries later.  The most significant piece in the show to my mind is the so-called Motya Charioteer, found in 1979 on a small island right off the coast where it is normally exhibited, and thus in such an out of the way location generally ignored.  It is a larger than life size marble sculpture of a young man sculpted in a languid pose, hip thrust out slightly, all odd enough, but the truly peculiar feature is the chiton covering his body, in the so called "wet drapery" mode so that the sheer fabric clings to the body, highlighting his testicles, his buttocks in a way that an ancient nude sculpture never does (butch ancient male statuary is always in the nude).  It is astounding as will be immediately apparent to the museum visitors who may compare it with the Elgin Marbles, carved about twenty five or so years later, which are so much more severe, conventionally masculine, restrained.  Alas, that is the only truly exciting piece that can be on offer since otherwise the great remnants of Sicilian cultural history are firmly in place, situated in the ground.  One thinks of the extraordinary procession of archaic Doric temples on the high hill in Agrigento, or the Norman Cathedral in Monreale the interior of which is aflame with wall mosaics, or the Norman rebuilding of an Arab castle in down town Palermo with its Palatine Chapel, again a scene of vibrant mosaics. Or--I can't control myself!--the Roman villa uncovered in Piazza Armerina whose splendid mosaics, room after room, vie in my memory with the extraordinary imperial communal toilet with, I can't remember now, four or five holes.  So gregarious at all times the imperial family!  These are only a few of the architectural treasures that dot the landscape.  I urge everyone to visit the island, and yes, you can walk right up to Aetna, but a decade ago I remember six tourists destroyed in a sudden eruption, minor to be sure, not headline making, but if you are at the rim, a little more serious.  Go in April for the green of the fields, for the red poppies making their splash, for the lonely splendor of the temple at Segesta out in the open away from any other visual distraction.  But go easy on the ancient theaters.  They are everywhere, and, frankly, take it from someone who has led tours on the island, you've seen one of them, you've seen them all.

Summertime and the Living Is Easy

Summer approaches; in Sarasota that means a cessation of well over half the cultural activities that characterize the cooler months when the so called Snow Birds arrive to clog the streets with their cars and the beaches, restaurants, and stores with themselves--and fill the concert halls and theaters.  Into this vast emptiness which is summer, the two or three workouts at the gym gives some vague shape to our hot, humid, listless days.  We used to plan a trip to London for the theater, then on to Paris or Wiesbaden for the sheer pleasure of being in Europe, but somehow the allure has gone off it, too many complications to an easy trip.  So what to do?  Today's New York Times has provided my inspiration, two superb articles, one by Wesley Morris on the music of Prince, and the other, a mock obituary, on this the anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare.  I have never consciously heard a piece of music composed or played by Prince.  Only a few months ago I had a revelation when our local bank manager a woman from Poland introduced me to the music and singing of Freddie Mercury, now I shall take up Prince.  Louis Bayard's mock obituary of the Bard of Avon was just the reasoned, thoughtful array of the facts known to us of Shakespeare's life and production to inspire me to take up my volume of the collected plays and make the reading of them a summer's project.  It will be hard going through the comedies and the speeches of the fools in the tragedies.  I have never taken to Shakespeare's witty verbal games, just as I cannot abide my husband's turns at wit (ugh!).  Here in Sarasota as patrons of the Asolo Student Conservatory and a supporter of one of the students we are privileged to attend the student recitals at end of their Shakespeare class, and thus over the years hear some rather high powered performances of pieces of a wide range of plays.  Now is the time to build on that.  I am nervous, I must admit, afraid that Shakespeare's language has become too remote from me because I see so few of the plays entire on the stage, that I will lose my resolve.  Can the man who stays by Elena Ferrante, even reading the tetralogy twice, who is into the fifth book of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle falter at the Collected Works of William Shakespeare?

Acting and Suffering

I saw a performance of "Ah, Wilderness" which left me disappointed with O'Neill as I always am.  In this play, a sentimental view of a family, there is a single older uncle in the family and a spinster lady, his counterpart, and would be love interest if he were able to make himself presentable to her by giving up drinking.  Uncle Sid is your classic Irish drunk in America from a hundred years ago, and as such meant to be an amusing feature of the household. It reminds me of our family chauffeur/gardener who luckily only had to drive my surgeon father to the hospital in the morning. We smiled when he used to come to the side door wth a bouquet for mother.  "He obviously was on a bender last night," she would declare, tolerant as ever for an Irish person whom she never considered the mental or moral equivalent of her Yankee stock. It takes an effort of leprechaun fairy dust, however, to make an old drunk over into pleasing, at least from the perspective of twenty first century America where  alcoholism is a medical issue rather than a quaint personal idiosyncracy.  In O'Neill's play the "relationship" or "courtship" of the older couple is counterpart to the adolescent boy who is in the throes of first love and trying out relationships.  Uncle Sid is such a failed person that the contrast does not work very well in a light comedy, suggesting as he does that this is the way of personal relationships as one grows old.  Another O'Neill character with whom I am always at odds is Mary Tyrone.  In this play's reach for "tragedy" we can add to the debilitating effects of tuberculosis and alcohol, Mary's morphine addiction, which indeed is not her fault but which makes her a major victim rather than an actor in the drama.  I am too much of a fan of ancient Greek tragedy to find a victim compelling;  the play is always tedious even the celebrated performance of Katherine Hepburn in the film.  It seems to me more noble to act decisively in the full knowledge of potential retribution in order to set things right, or right in the minds of some.  I think of Clytemnestra murdering Agamemnon because he sanctioned the ritual sacrifice of their daughter, or Oedipus killing the man who manhandled and threatened him on the road even though he knew he was fated to kill his father.  One thinks of Lady MacBeth--the list is long.  It is why I am never sure about Othello as really tragic figure since Iago so manipulates the man that he sometimes seems not his own person, like Mary Tyrone, more a victim.  It doesn't help if one knows the Plautine antecedents to the dramatic action, I mean the wily slave who craftily works to seduce his master to a course of action.  What is a laugh riot in Plautus is utterly sinister in "Othello" but I am not sure it is tragic.

Walking Along

At the end of February I underwent open heart surgery from which now in late April I am finally almost altogether recovered.  My index to this is monitoring in an informal way the decline in dull pain that emanates from the place where they cut my sternum in two and afterwards stapled it (I guess) back together.  Bone takes a long time to grow together and hurts while its doing it.  In all other respects I take the testimony of my friends who marvel at how active, sparkling, alert and lively I am compared to the dull Charlie of months ago whose blood evidently was moving very sluggishly through clogged arteries and valves. Friends marvel; one of my daughters had a more dubious expression of enthusiasm:  "Dad, you look great!  You look eighty!"  My goal is to walk into downtown Sarasota, some three miles away.  First, however, Arlington Park beckons, with its one half mile path, something I am sure to do well since even in pre-surgery days I could make it, albeit with many stops along the way.  Twice around the path at Arlington Park for starters is my immediate objective.  The walk to down town Sarasota is mostly along side streets with manicured sidewalks of the rich whose giant mansions line the way.  So it will be a pleasant walk in every way.  Otherwise I can once again take up walking to our health club, although here I must confront the squalor of Tamiami Trail, as Route 41 i called.  Like Los Angeles Sarasota is utterly a car city, and as befits a populace which is proud to carry fire arms openly, there are--I guess I must somehow call them city streets--such as the Trail, where traffic moves six abreast and highway speeds, past drive in diners, car washing establishments, mini malls,  and all the other grotesque manifestations of a car culture.  The sidewalk is not exactly designed for the pedestrian but rather slants toward the street since it is the entrance to one after another parking lot along the way for these mini malls and drive in shops.  I didn't used to mind walking this route, but as I have aged and grown frailer, albeit with a heart pumping far more efficiently, I am more sensitive to the trucks, cars, and motorcycles thundering past me on the Trail, sometimes even feeling the air pressure from an especially large and fast vehicle moving along.  Soon I will be taking my new tentativeness to Manhattan where I notice already that as I step down from the front door of our apartment building I must look to join the stream of human traffic marching along in both directions, finding the moment to break into their ranks, not unlike making that turn off a street with no traffic light, onto a main thoroughfare.  Someone suggested carrying a cane, if not for support, then to beat them off, if I cannot make a path through the crowds.

Those Were the Days of Our Lives

Yesterday my husband and I went to a workshop so called, presented by the graduating students at the Asolo Conservatory for Acting.  They appear in small dramatic pieces which demonstrate their acting skills and this workshop they will take to New York City and show themselves off to directors, agents, and producers.  As usual we were dazzled and intrigued by their acting skills but generally put off by the nasty tone of the boy-girl relationships on display in the small segments of contemporary drama.  I thought back to my own introduction into a sexual life, albeit with other males, but I don't remember all the sharp, negative, narcissistic tones of the encounters, nor a few years later when at twenty one I met and married a woman.  But this morning's Times had an interesting piece by Wesley Morris locating the present day ill will on display in television romances claiming it was Lena Dunham in "Girls" who first presented mean spirited women and in the end men as well.  Yes, thought I, we started watching that and were amazed at how selfish and cruel the characters were, and thus we stopped.  Well, according to Morris it got worse season after season, and as I guess is the case, this is the nature of modern day relationships. The woman sitting next to me at the workshop presentation, an oldster such as myself, kept saying that in her youth people were not like that, and I quite agreed.  It was different for me, of course, because I kept propositioning the boys in my school, and they were not about to enter into romantic relationships with me; they just wanted to get their rocks off.  It would be easy to say that there was no relationship at all in these encounters, but the funny thing about it was for the most part these guys were part of the social fabric of my life and familiars; they knew me well, tolerated me as an eccentric and there was a kind of comradeship, strange to say, that persisted over many years.  I think of that often in connection with a recent article in The New Yorker Magazine in which the author takes up the interesting fact that juveniles in the United States of America who engage in sexual relations are liable to be prosecuted as sex offenders for which they are held accountable throughout their lives.  I was appalled to read this, and thought back to the encounters as a fourteen and fifteen year old, the frenetic and strenuous urge to relieve the pressure of a teen aged hormonal surge.  Sex offender!  No way!  It was all fun; my cohort of boys never had enough sense of Christian sin to cast what we were doing into that Stygian gloom.  When I think back on that long ago time I hear Freddie Mercury's voice soothing me and sending me back into nostalgia with that song "Those Were the Days of Our Lives."

The Cleaning Lady

It is 8:12 and I am furiously making the last minute sweep of my bedroom and bathroom, tidying up the unruly mess that is my natural way of life.  The cleaning lady arrives at 8:45.  She is not the stereotype of New Yorker cartoons of yore, but a tall, brisk, striking blonde with an upsweep, securely and perfectly in place, with a can do attitude and no holds barred when  it comes to organization.  I am terrified.  Yes, I love having the kitchen made spotless and gleaming.  Yes, the carpets are vaccuumed thoroughly, the tile floors polished.  All good.  But it is the hours of frenzied tidying, clearing the bathroom counters, the kitchen counters, putting away clothes, shoes.  I am exhausted, and what's worse so out of sorts that I shall not have the proper response to her hearty hug and loud loud good cheer.  I have to stop now.  I've got catch a quick shower, and, oh, god, so many other little details to attend to.  Wish me luck!

Richard at Seventy Three

Today is my husband's birthday.  We went yesterday evening for a steak dinner, and this morning I invented a birthday card to set by his plate at the breakfast table, something "cute" from my computer since as usual I had failed to buy a card at the store.  Richard and I have been together for more than twenty five years and he has never failed to set a card out at my place on my birthday.  Says a lot, but I shall not hazard the guess what that is.  When we met Richard was 46 and I was 59; he was so handsome, with an eyebrow that could bend up in such a sexy quizzical fashion, made to match his wit.  A friend of mine observing the two of us after a year into our relationship said "oh, my god, you two laugh so much," and yes, we are both funny and use language for wit as well as communication.  The only down side are his terrible puns from time to time.  We are truly different types. He was a high school teacher, I was a college professor (he would say that thus he cared about the growth and development of the youngsters before him, whereas I was more concerned with how my performance was coming across). He is, as I am forever saying to friends, the high school hall monitor demanding to see that you have your bathroom pass when he meets you coming along.  I am the kid in the back row throwing spit balls or sneaking out at recess to go home.  He is very patient when it comes to re-arranging the house, which we have done on many occasions.  And of course there is the incredible fact that he is a handyman who knows how to repair most everything, not to mention build from scratch a deck on the side of the house in Cambridge, the exquisite brick terrazzo and pergola in Hull, and all the repairs that all our dwellings cry out for over the years.  Add to this, his annoying propensity for correcting all my grammatical errors in Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.  Fundamentally, I don't care, I am sloppy and a lazy learner, born into old money, and indifferent to precision--and as I often remind him, I am the one who has the Harvard PhD.  Richard grew up in poverty on Staten Island and went on to college degrees and graduate degrees and a superb teaching career.  That's quite a difference.  It manifests itself as well in his obsessive precision with money.  Nothing annoys him more than when asked by him after some purchase of mine "What did you pay for that?" I reply "I don't know." Money is a strange thing; my mother in law, my second wife, just like Richard balanced their check books down to the penny.  I  never have, just  like my mother, taking for granted that what the bank tells me is okay.  He shudders when I say that.  When first we met I innocently asked "Where did you spend your summers when you were a kid?"  He was polite and didn't get angry, and answered: 'in our four room house on Staten Island," but he never lets me forget my naiveté.  Recently I had open heart surgery, and for three weeks Richard was a constant support, never complaining, never cringing, never wanting out for a break.  "Oh, my god," I said finally, "you are so nice and kind."  "I love you," he replied.