Helen Gurley Brown

Somehow In browsing through the copious reading material that lay on my reading table I uncovered more than the usual fare of atrocities.  There was the New Yorker story of tribes in the Amazon basin who are being decimated from their contact with Europeans, the LRB account of the Chilicot report summarized by Chilicot himself in an uncompromising speech in London in which he laid out Blair's extraordinary culpability for leading the UK into the Iraq war, and in the New York Times a special section devoted to a sampling of the new novel by Colson Whitehead detailing the sufferings of enslaved Africans trying to escape the antebellum South.  I can just barely get through Holocaust stories, and am completely paralyzed by the complicity of my ancestors, in general rather than particularly so, in the racial brutalities of this country that I started it and set it down for another day.  Then the Book Review described an account of the murderous rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi, and I had had it, since of course the news sections of the paper had been filled with news reports of the ongoing trauma of the Middle East.  I set this down to turn to a biography of Helen Gurley Brown of which I had read a review.  Aggressive women, monstres sacrées. the Diana Vreelands of this world, have always fascinated me perhaps because I grew up in a household of a mother whose widowhood in prosperous circumstances made her more active than average in a middle western setting of the thirties, plus I had four sisters who were determined to strike out for independent lives, and then, of course, as any one would be quick to point out I am gay, and hence by definition in the opinion of the world attracted to powerful or seemingly powerful women.  The bio was rather tedious, being overwritten with too much detail, but by judicious skimming I managed to make my way through a great story.  Helen Gurley Brown came from hardscrabble poverty in the rural south to the Beresford on Central Park West. She stayed single into her late thirties, then married David Brown, producer of Jaws among other things, and most important edited for decades Cosmopolitan which she devoted to the protofeminist project of educating women into being aggressive in their pursuit of good sex. Before this women were supposed to stand like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, waiting for the gaze of an erotically transfixed male to take hold of them, and of course lead them to the altar after which lay bed, kitchen, and baby bottle.  Brown taught women to go out and find good sex and forget about marriage, and , very important, also to maintain good friendships with other women.  If marriage arrived, good, if not, then living as a single woman was just fine, so long as the woman in question got laid.  Dress up, have good hair, do your face over, be sexy, and most of all have a good time in bed, think orgasm.  I remember the polite middle class middle western society of the Eisenhower years, and then along came Helen Gurley Brown.  There was Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, others, but no one had the bead on personal feminine freedom which Brown endorsed.  She lived a long time, she was not beautiful, nor particularly glamorous, but she had incredible style, and a powerful message; in one of her books she even described detail by detail how to give the perfect blow job.  Reading the bio made my day.

Dreams

For the first time in my life at age eighty  six I have sometimes waked in the morning from a dream which is so compelling that it take me time so situate myself into the reality of the darkened bedroom I sleep in here in Florida.  Previously I almost never dreamed except very occasionally in a cold fear of some imaginary pursuers in my desperate flight from -- what?  Now--must have been the heart surgery-- at least once a week I arise in a fantasy that seems to cling to me as a kind of cloud--like a movie set as I walk through the door to the espresso machine, the touch of which establishes my reality.  The dreams are all of a piece, portraying me as a boy of ten or eleven, sometimes when they are a little edgy I wake in flight from some unidentifiable menace but since the scene is a classroom of the sort one remembers from schools sixty or so years ago, I suppose I am dramatizing schoolhouse fears of my youth.  But I am quite clear on that; having already spilled the beans that I was attracted to other boys (I can't quite describe that with the dignified "I had identified myself" mainly because it was by groping that I committed to self advertisement.) the source of fear was something else.  More frequently I awake running, or moving fast, and then I am standing by my bed, trying to slow down.  This morning I was a newsboy, clearly of the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, I felt the cap on my head, and the lace up shoes on my feet.  Happy go lucky newsboy, but rushed.  No time for breakfast I was late, had to get to the corner where the news company dropped the piles of papers, and as I opened the front door, the dream evaporated into eighty six year old me bending over to pick up The New York Times neatly rolled up and enclosed in blue plastic.  I like being this carefree boy, albeit today with pressing concerns.  Some days he and I are running--me experiencing it from within the body, he looking ahead at the road--and it is a street without traffic, not necessarily early in the morning, but a normal day at the height of the Great Depression when there were long stretches of time when no car passed on the streets.  The boy, the quiet, the serenity.  I shall not look at the paper this morning, cannot bear another word about the wars, the killings, the insecurities, the projections of the possibility of insanity in the White House before too many more months.  But I was never this newsboy, I rose at the ring of a bell and descended to breakfast with my siblings presided over by my mother and served by ah, to use the phrase "an elderly retainer."  From this vantage in time equally dream-like, since I am one of the very actors still above ground who performed in that real life drama .

Have A Nice Weekend

"Have a nice weekend!"  Today, Friday, I had my two sessions with balance trainers, and each of the two young men asked in the course of the exercises "What are your plans for the weekend?" and I had to reply that I had not even noticed that today was Friday and that we were as they say embarking on a weekend.  I could tell from their facial expression that they were sympathizing with an old geezer who had nothing but emptiness and loneliness in the two days looming ahead.  I began to feel sorry for myself, but then I recalled that my husband mentioned how happy he was that Friday had arrived and he could do absolutely nothing on Saturday, the day upon which he liked to sleep in, and rest.  And I began to recall the week.  Monday night we had a young couple to dinner, several time consuming courses designed for their exacting palates, and which wore me out.  Tuesday I spent recovering from Monday night.  Wednesday I had two balance training sessions which left me scarcely able to walk, but satisfied with some kind of progress, and then we ordered in pizza and a professor friend of ours came to dinner and we talked about his coming trip thither and yon.  Thursday I was so crippled from the training sessions on Wednesday that I was happy to lie about and then hobble over to the nearby mall for a pedi-mani, as they call it.  Friday back to the torture of the balance sessions and having to endure the two  young studs asking me my plans for the weekend. Then of course we were scheduled to go to an art opening and meet a friend and then the three of us went out to dinner.  Everyone relishes in the televisiion show "Downton Abbey" when the Dowager Countess of Grantham asked the question "What is a weekend?" when the idea had not been invented. I remember when I first had a job as an office boy in 1948 in New York City at an office of West Coast film directors they were pleased to tell me that the work week ended at twelve noon on Saturday.  I have been retired for twenty years and quite forgotten how it was in those days when I went out Friday evening and got drunk and with any luck scored with some guy.  I grew up in a home where the breadwinner my surgeon father died when I was six and left enough money that my mother neither had to take a job outside the home nor dismiss the servants who waited on her, and thus breakfast for seven days of the week were of the same texture.  The only mark to the seven days was that Sundays a large formal dinner with invited guests was served at one o'clock in the broad light of day.  This was after the communion service in the Episcopal Church downtown and before the staff filed out for an afternoon of freedom after they had served us. We by the way made our own popcorn which served as Sunday evening repast, eaten before the large radio broadcasting our favorites.  Well, I guess we had what passed for a "nice weekend."

Tomorrow

Who is it that is always coming but never here?  That old riddle was posed to me two days ago and I have spent all too many minutes wrestling with the answer until finally I cut to the chase and went on to Google.  Tomorrow, of course.  Tomorrow is when I go to bed, and I think that before too long I will wake up after a good night's sleep, turn on the espresso machine and pick The New York Times off the doormat.  And then I am immersed in today;  The Times does its duty to bring "all the news that's fit to print," but I am getting so I can't take the political news.  It's a "Punch and Judy" show that is going on too long, grown stale, and I yearn for a change in election laws where candidates can electioneer for one month tops.  So many authorities, so many back stories, and not only the American presidential election, but the implications of Brexit, and then there is the maneuvers in the MidEast.  Too much to think about, all of it grim, scarcely even room in the Times for a pleasing human interest story.  I know that I need a project.  It used to puzzle me when a friend of mine when she got to her late eighties and into her nineties used to say "I need a project."  But now I see it clearly.  My husband is on the last pages of a year old project to read Homer's Iliad through in the original Greek.  He intends to go on to the Odyssey or the Latin poet Ovid's Metamorphoses when he's done.  As I have said or whined--take your pick--before, I truly want to write a novel, but although two decades ago I churned out four, none of them very good, I cannot seem to manage it now.  Painting?  Music?  There is always going to the gym, my husband's other great project, and indeed I do that with some regularity if not the least enthusiasm.  Right now I have trainers, at two places working on my balance, and I now see them the same day for a few weeks because of scheduling conflicts, one in the morning one in the afternoon.  I came home Wednesday, the first of this new exercise regime, and I could hardly walk I was so stiff, and we had a guest for dinner.  The next thing I knew it was eleven o'clock at night and I awoke in my big chair in front of the television, the room was dark, silent, no one was about.  That was the evening that never came and I limped to bed, tomorrow was almost already here.

Life In The Fast Lane

I used to walk with a neighbor in Cambridge every morning for an hour or more and we covered several miles in our perambulations.  That was a twenty or thirty year sojourn in my life in which earlier I had taken up swimming daily for one hour in whatever university Olympic-sized pool I had access to by virtue of my professorship.  In the last six months I have lost the ability to walk seriously because of what they call "balance issues."  I can do it on a treadmill at the gym although here I am compromised by my poorly healing broken wrist which makes holding on to the side rails painful after ten or fifteen minutes.  I can take the car and go over to the nearby mall and walk around endlessly looking at the display windows of Talbots, Abercrombie & Fitch, etc. and wonder if I should slit my wrists from boredom.  I was just in New York City where I walked through countless museums with my cane, and my friend and hostess said I had certainly done the equivalent of serious treadmill exercise.  A couple of days ago I woke up after a very poor night of sleeping and did not go to the gym with my husband.  I suffered agonies of guilt and stress because I did not get exercise.  I sat in a chair this morning reading The Times and later a history of the Mitford family.  What is to become of me?  I am not exercising enough.  How is it that I am supposed to walk my butt off when my mother-in-law who lived to 98 never did more than walk from the back door to the garage door?  And what about Queen Victoria who never budged from her chair in all her umpteen years of widowhood?  (Don't you love the image of her on a treadmill, widows weeds and cape and all?)  I am beside myself with anxiety over a failure to exercise properly, and, of course, always conscious of the fact that the treadmill was invented to require prisoners to suffer from walking on it many hours of the day.  Think of Oscar Wilde in the play "Gross Indecency," and I have to say to my shame that when I saw the piece in the theater, my ever compulsively ameliorating mind, could only concentrate on the health benefits accruing to tubby Oscar as he suffered through the induced walking.  Now it is time for a nap.  Shall I starve myself to compensate for lack of physical exercise?  But then there are the glasses of wine with lunch.  Certainly does not help.  Maybe I will just fade away and die.  Isn't that what's supposed to happen?  Slowly giving up on exercise and then just expiring?

Oh, Happy News!

I have scarcely been able to open the morning's Times, so horrifying are the accounts of the antics and remarks made by the Republican candidate for president.  Just the things he says are mind blowing, ranging from absurdities to out right frightening contraventions of everything this nation has traditionally stood for.  And dodging back and forth suggestive of an inconstancy of mind that leaves me paralyzed with fear when I realize that he is soon to be given daily briefing along with the other candidate, information he should never be privy to.  And then this morning, for a brief moment of pure joy I could turn away from the projections of one grim scenario after another to revel in the news that flossing one's teeth has probably been an exercise in futility all along.  "Studies show . . ." those happy words.  Free at last, free of the guilt.  Because I must tell you, gentle reader, I have almost never flossed.  No, my chubby, awkward, arthritic fingers tried and tried to get the string between the teeth, yes, I even went the route of torture and got a little implement that set some floss on a tension like a high wire.  Never could master it, no way, clumsy, awkward.  Gave it up years ago, straightened my shoulders, and faced another future.  I took up dental stimulators, remembering so well those early days staring moodily out of the plate glass picture window of the third floor bathroom working my gums by the hours staring down at my neighbors hustling off to work.  "You retired?" people would ask.  "What are you doing now?" Stimulating my gums most of the time," was my reply.  Those were my retirement plans.  Then I took up plastic toothpicks with feathers, and by this time my husband was retired and we sat in our lounge chairs and watched a movie both of us vigorously working those toothpick.  And then we moved to Florida and a new dentist, and although he did not detect any serious plaque he clearly was disappointed that I did not floss.  Oh, the guilt!  I took up a water pick, and he was mildly pleased with that alternative.  But today, yes, today I throw off my shackles!  No more guilt!  Gums, home free!

Politics

I must have pressed something somewhere on my computer since I now receive a couple of weekly briefings from the Brookings Institute alongside something every couple of days it seems from a online magazine called The Week and constant notices of short essays from something called the Kos.  I must have assented to these, just don't know how or where or . . . .I have never been all that much interested in politics having cut my teeth on the subject reading Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" in the original Greek and the Roman historian Tacitus' account of the reigns of various of the emperors, especially the hilarious--in a mordant sort of way--story of Nero and his mother.  With that as a background I tend to take a dim view of the possibility of truth being reached in any account.  I guess that is why I tend to favor Herodotos whose story telling technique is first rate, and who, it seems to me, understands that the minute you starting shaping your facts in obedience to abstract ideas you are straying from what might be called "reality."  Professional ancient historians always favor Thucydides but I think he really does just that.  In any case, these latter day commentators make no bones about partiality, although of course the Republican candidate does, it seems to me, lay himself open to almost parody at every turn.  I was told to watch an interview with Roger Stone, the Republican strategist speaking to Charlie Rose, and his straight faced endorsement of all the tics of Mr. Trump's personality and style made me wonder if we were operating in the same universe. But this is just to say that there are days when I suffer from an overload of political analysis, too many pundits, too many theories tossed at facts, too many statistics quoted, and I really do believe that I am growing suffocated.  Was it ever thus?  I have never paid attention to the details of an election before, or that is how I remember it.  Of course, we have never had in my memory two candidates so starkly opposed in personality or ideology.  I cannot imagine how my brain would be fried if I had to add television into the mix.  I see it enough three morning a week when I am on the treadmill at the gym, lucky if someone has not already set the channel to Fox News and we are watching one of the more neutral channels.  Why are the men in suits? and the women in long, long hair dos.  Thank God for Rachel Madoff who looks like she is operating with brains.  As I may have mentioned before, an old friend who has spent time on the White House staff says "Veep" is the most realistic representation of what goes on in there.  It is satisfying to think that this might be the case, because then one is relieved of the obligation of trying to make sense.