Confusion

I just noticed that the day before yesterday I published a blank blog, just the space with no words.  When I discovered that fact, right now as a matter of fact, my instinct to tidiness (non-existent, my husband would say) made me want to delete the page, but then I thought no, it is an expression of me at this moment in time.  That is to say, I am growing more noticeably forgetful and careless, the commonplace predicament of the over eighty five set.  Not to be confused with the onset of Alzheimers, I don't think.  I sometimes consider it early stage dementia.  No, no, friends insist: you are just distracted.  I guess it is that I can no longer carry two thoughts in my head at once.  It used to be that I would lodge Idea One in my brain and go on to thinking of something else, and then circle back to take Idea One to act on it.  But that is a perilous maneuver these days; often it has disappeared completely or grown sufficiently denatured by an overlay of impressions and emotions that it is scarcely recognizable.  At the moment I am making the initial motions to pack for a trip to New York City, while at the same time, organizing a bunch of medications and toiletries set on the counter of my bathroom so that they will be out of the way of the cleaning woman who comes on Tuesday.  And, I had also to keep ahead of the plumber who is hopefully coming on Monday to finish up work the requires him to go under the counter top and so I must empty the contents of that area.  This morning I have managed to assemble ready to be thrown into the trash a number of items, bottles of Vitamin E oil which someone foisted on me and now a year later I have not changed and will not.  Time to let go.  There was an article in the Sunday Times about a boy with exceptionally fine features who has taken to making his face up with cosmetics which he claims many teenaged boys would like to do.  It certainly makes him extraordinarily beautiful, and if he can live with the suspicion and occasional hostility of his peer group more power to him.  I thought back to a moment when I was at Vassar College as a visiting professor, aged fifty or so, and there was to be a celebratory birthday party to which I was invited, and I was sitting with the organizer with whom I had become special friends during my sojourn.  We were in her bedroom, and just for the fun of it, she began to make up my eyes.  I had never had such an experience except when I was in theater and getting ready for a performance.  When she finished with my face she held up a mirror so I could see the result.  That was over thirty years ago, the shock of the beauty of my eyes still registered with me today.  A woman friend once got me to buy very light pancake powder to smooth out the skin of my cheeks.  Loved the effect, but the inner boy from Iowa stayed my hand from using it on a regular basis.  It's there in the drawer of the bathroom counter, and it's not going anywhere.  Hey, they're going to need it for my corpse!

Mashers

My mother who was raised in the Edwardian era, always used to make us children laugh when she warned her daughters of "mashers" lurking everywhere in public spaces, particularly signifying the dangers of close proximity on public transportation.  But I have to say in the polite repressed world of my youth and then fatherhood I heard many stories from sisters, daughters, casual women friends, stories of smutty insinuations, gropings, hard cocks pressed against thighs, even exposures- this was in front of my teenaged daughters, for God's sake, on a respectable suburban street, by a man who stopped his car, jumped out and unzipped his flies as they were walking along to school.  When I finally learned of this it was more their amusing anecdote than a crisis story.  My mother constantly warned my sisters against entering a room alone with a male and not leaving the door open.  I was thus so conditioned that when colleges changed their rules for visitors of the opposite sex to dorm rooms, I as a professor always spoke out against it, people thought I was a fuddy duddy.  When I made two woman friends in Italy I, the brother of four sisters, was interested to see how they managed to be perfectly friendly to their masculine friends and acquaintance, accepting the ritual of constant masculine flirtation and invitation as a societal norm of Italian relationships but never allowing the pseudo stylized erotic to be in the slightest way erotic or invitational; it was all style, and meant nothing.  When I taught at Stanford I knew a brilliant aggressive woman professor who always no matter what replied to any male who made any remark that had even the minimal chance of being interpreted as a come-on "fuck off, you son of a bitch."  I have always despised the Muslim use of the veil but those women who champion it bring up the unwanted attentions of males all day every day, but sometimes I wonder when you hear the stories surfacing now about the veil's validity for those who want it.  As a gay male I am in an interesting position to study the obsession.  Heterosexual males are restrained from openly gazing at women sexually by their codes of proper behavior; construction workers on the job, as we all know, have license-- or used to- to stare, whistle.  A friend of mine has described the constant stream of males who pass her on a crowded Manhattan street who called out sottto voce "ya wanna fuck?" or something similar.  I have spent my life learning not to cast my erotic gaze on nearby handsome males wherever I am, not to make even verbal advances, since this natural form of male sexual aggression is absolutely or used to be dangerous in almost any circumstance.  Jokes are sometimes made describing a gay guy in a locker room of naked straight athletes.  It has its amusing salacious aspects, but essentially it is an exercise in painful repression.  But it is the obligation of males straight or gay to develop their defenses against arousal.  That is what being a gentleman is all about.  One must not become a masher.

Suits

We tried giving "Suits" another chance but gave up again in the first episode.  The script writers rely too much on formulae.  The young hero who comes into the law office, pretending to have gone to Harvard Law School, well, we gave him a chance to fake it convincingly.  But we could not stomach his willingness to surrender his integrity, his security, to a childhood friend who as we learn has betrayed him time after time, and, as we know him better, understand that this "friend" is a druggie without scruples as almost all of them are, who yet manages to maintain incredible good looks and perfect skin tone.  That seemed to us as unlikely as the protagonist's repeated inclination to trust and forgive his miscreant boyhood chum.  People who live by their wits trust no one.  His position in the law office is threatened by an ugly fellow--that's also a strange business since everyone in the series except for this one guy is super good looking.  The ugly bozo improbably enough--very very improbably enough--went to Harvard, back in the day when the Ivy League was for good looking Wasps, not somebody whom even liberals would want to put up a wall to exclude from these shores.  The script writers have fastened on the narrative line taken from fairy tale of the enchanted prince who is preyed upon by ugly monsters and we the spectators tremble for this innocent lad beset by powerful Ugly on the one side and seduced by sinister charm and childhood loyalties on the other.  It's all so obvious and he ends up seeming to be such a dope; in the fairy tale he would be the enchanted victim, in real life he is just a dope.  If we the spectators have seen this plot line a million times, we cannot willingly concede that this dimwit does not recognize it himself.  Perhaps it is also the case that we the spectators are a teeny bit bored by the fact that none of these highly educated (except the waif hero who has no college degrees) characters can manage to say anything that suggests even the most minimal attachment to a humanistic culture, or to anything else that suggests the web of human society. But then they are lawyers.   Do I harp on this because I am a retired professor who imagines that everyone slings the academic bullshit with extraordinary finesse?

Waiting For The Fat Lady To Sing

I am never good at speculating on outcomes, having been conditioned by my mother from childhood on to anticipate disastrous reversals, as we listened to the story of her first husband's sailing for France as a soldier in the First World War only to be felled by the Spanish Flu before he even entered battle. This inducement to foreboding was augmented in my early childhood when my father kissed us all goodbye  as he left with some colleagues to drive off to a conference only to return in a coffin after a head on collision four hours later which killed almost all of them.  So I have a hard time listening to my husband tell me the latest projections of Nate Silver and the other pundits on the fate of Trump and Clinton in the upcoming election.  My husband is jubilant, my trainer at the gym keeps telling me it is a "done deal."  And I smile and say to myself "not so fast."  As a professional classicist I tell myself the story of Oedipus who left what he thought was his hometown and in so doing proceeded to rationalize all the conceivable obstacles to avoiding disaster, only to discover in the end that his worst fears were realized.  In the times I have lived in Italy and Greece I took comfort in the sense of foreboding that informed casual conversational comments about future events; I consider it a habit of mind inherent in Mediterranean peoples, although I suppose one might put it down to the experience of living through the events of the twentieth century in that part of the world.  It is tortuous to live through expectation and foreboding for so many months.   The campaign season should be limited by law as it is in Europe.  I am sure that what prevents that here is the television advertisers who profit so from this circus of politics.  We now have degenerated into a public entertainment aided and abetted by those professional entertainers called newscasters.  The televised debates have been a scandal, the one candidate who comes from the world of entertainment would be more suited to debating with someone like Kim Kardashian.  The descent into so sordid a level of campaign oratory and behavior is the direct result of allowing Fox News to pretend to be anything other than entertainment, but I am beginning to froth at the mouth, so shall stop.  But I can't help thinking of that earnest, idealistic, ambitious, moral and thoughtful Wellesley college student giving her speech, thinking to herself, as sometimes she must, "has it come to this?"

Rome And The Hassler Hotel

My husband was determined that we stayed at the Hassler Hotel because it was what he knew to be a major luxury hotel and he wanted this trip to be completely memorable. Although I was raised in what they like to call very comfortable circumstances, I am often intimidated by luxury confidently presented; somehow I immediately think of ostentation.  But the Hassler has been around forever, dating from an era when the rich had much greater confidence in wealth, unlike the nouveaux riches of today who always seem to be looking enviously through the window at what in fact they have just paid good money to enjoy.  Since we were both of us not able to spend large amounts of time "doing the city," we took advantage of our confinement to stay in our splendid room, or better yet to sit for a long time over our breakfast and dinner, two meals we much enjoyed when taken in the splendor of an outdoor pavilion, formed by the open space created by four six or eight story walls.  One of these walls was made of brick, ancient, perhaps, or at least old enough and the right color to make an impression of Roman antiquity.  Another similar wall had bits of ancient statuary embedded into it, and a plant grew everywhere on it, of a delightful green which formed a color field as background.  The tables were set about under a tent like protection from the sun or open to the heavens.  At the far end away from the "ancient wall" was an art deco construction of a kind of large shell--in a delightfully lurid blue--the sort of thing from which Busby Berkeley would have chorus girls emerging in the stream of water that ended in a splashing torrent just behind the bartender mixing cocktails, which were then passed about by a team of splendidly handsome young Italian males impeccable in green jackets and black pants.  In the middle of our stay the hotel decreed that it had now become winter and the operations moved into a room of riotously overdone swag and brocade and gold trim and the beautiful boys passing the trays were now kitted out in maroon jackets to match the predominant color of the velvet which covered everything.  The space was so aggressively over decorated that it achieved a kind of greatness in its confidence.  It was the Hassler, for god's sake, an experience that those gathered there recognized to be sui generis, just the same sensation that overcomes those slack jawed viewers walking through St. Peter's

On The Streets Of Rome

Rome is one of the cities that I know quite well, street by street, partly because I have visited so often since I first was there in 1962, and of course from having lived there with my family in two stints of fifteen months or more, in the late sixties and mid seventies, but mostly because whenever there I walked the streets incessantly, thereby gaining a visual and visceral sense of the city.  This visit was dramatically different, for me because I have severe problems with my balance, and for my husband, whose joints as well as the nerves in his legs make extensive walking very painful. Walking Roman streets is a challenge since the brick construction of so much of the pavements makes everything uneven, especially in a city hardly known for its repair.  Even with my cane I was fearful, even with Richard ever ready, ever helpful.  So we took taxis everywhere, and went on only one excursion a day.  Since we knew the "tourist sites" so well we only revisited one, the Villa Julia, for some reason my husband's curiosity about the Etruscans was especially keen at the moment.  An odd choice I thought until when inside I realized that the objects on display were in some instance curiously unfamiliar to me and thus there was the pleasure of the shock of the new. and of course the tomb monument of the reclining husband and wife is also for the centuries a monument of connubial bliss.  As we sped through the streets in surprisingly inexpensive taxis, and for the most part more easily navigable than the Rome of my memory, I was terrified by the barrage of high speed motorcycles everywhere defying rule and rationale in their deathly passing on the left, on the right, cutting in front, always at top speed, zooming here and there, and I have to salute the taxi drivers who went through this mess with scarcely a complaint.  Moreover a majority of the taxi drivers left their seats to offer me a strong arm to use as support as I ascended into or alighted from their car, gentlemen one and all, and who did not expect tips.  We resolutely drove to locations for designated walks--in the Borghese Gardens, for instance, or the banks of the Tiber where a paved bike and running track has been built down below the Lungo Tevere street near the Ponte Sisto. a pedestrian bridge where on can stand to gaze down at the water or north or south at its passage. Every day we journeyed out for a two hour walk, laboriously achieved, always rewarding, with brilliant autumn weather, and the casual sights as thrilling in their own way as the so called "sites."  One reason for this is the incredible physical beauty of the average Roman, beautiful in youth beautiful in old age and very few disfigured by the commonplace obesity that marks the average sampling of population here in America.  And this must surely be tied in with the surprising dish of pasta which is the course served before a meat or fish course (the second plate so designated on the menu).  It always surprises me every time I am back in Rome.  Just enough for maybe ten bites, a taste, not a gluttonous major blob of food as in a so called Italian restaurant in the States, but don't get me started . . . . .

Bella Roma

My husband planned a trip to Rome for us as an extravagant gesture of gratitude to me for suggesting a  real estate venture to him twenty or so years ago which is now paying off well.  When he told me his motive--since he has often said that he did not really want to go back to places we know so well--he kind of teared up.  Yes, he wanted something that would truly thrill me, and this he did, and spent a lot of money in the process.  This latter feature, vulgar as it might be, turned out to be sadly enough an important and necessary part of the trip.  We both have traveled much in Europe over the past decades, both firmly convinced that walking about the streets of any city is the only, yes, the only way to acquaint yourself with the territory.  It helps that he speaks fluently all the major European languages and I at least can make myself understood even if I do not get more than the gist of what is being said to me.  He had to confront the increasing infirmity of us both, and chose to send us first class.  Seats that turn into a bed--that indeed is what separates the sheep from the goats.  We arrived at Fiumicino Airport as though newly risen from a night's sleep in our own bed.  Well, perhaps I exaggerate.  But we were rather well rested and our bodies free of the aches and pains that hunching up overnight in a coach seat always induces.  The Italian wheelchair people were as sympathetic and efficient as one could want, and of course those in wheelchairs get right through immigration.  And there we were ready to be handed over to a car and driver from the Hassler Hotel which he had also magnificently engaged.  It was the setting for our entire week: comfort, convenience, minimum stress, no exhaustion. Staying at the Hassler is--to use the hackneyed language of advertising--magical.  Perched atop the eastern edge of the declivity that was long ago formed by the erosion of the Tiber river next door to the landmark church called Trinita dei Monti which presides majestically over the famous Spanish Steps an elaborate stairway of many turns and platforms built of marble ascending from the piazza below, the Hassler is a throwback to an era of truly luxurious hotels.  Our Hassler driver presided over his car like an first class private chauffeur and once at the hotel, handed us over to one of the several uniformed and capped doormen whose attentions were as constant as they were entirely discreet. Our luggage was brought in and sent in its elevator to our room where we arrived after checking in.  The lobby and the other public rooms were done in wine colors and velvet fabrics accented everywhere by marble and mirrors.  I immediately felt that I was on the set of a major film about nineteenth century Europe.  We had anticipated this, packing suit jackets and long pants, rather than our customary jeans and Florida shorts.  This was the first surprise: to see so many persons in the breakfast room in shorts, young women in indiscrete short shorts, in this gilded setting, waited upon by an impeccable uniformed staff.  I was shocked, and with that knew that I  had turned into my mother