The Philistine

It is one of those moments in time when if I am objective enough to step back and look at myself objectively I find revealed the classic middle class philistine, whom you will always find at the concert hall, in the theater, on the list of donors printed in the program, sometimes baffled by what he hears, sometimes feeling his inner heart swell with the beauty he perceives in the notes he hears, sometimes puzzled and put off by the sounds.  This weekend on Saturday night I went with a friend to hear a very special performance of Anton Bruckner's Pierrot Lunaire played and sung lovingly by a group who has made this thirty odd minute piece their specialty.  It thoroughly repelled me, the screeching notes from the instrument, the screaming of the soprano voice.  I tried, I tried, I tried to assimilate it in some way of another, finally just surrendering and thinking to myself: well, this is happening.  Sunday at the matinee of the Sarasota Symphony we were treated to Beethoven's Egmont Overture as a Vorspeise, then Mendelsohn's famous Violin Concerto, which is lushly beautiful, and sweepingly romantic--what's not to love?  After the intermission Anu Talli, the conductor led a very crisp Sacré du Printemps, which Stravinksy had performed in a debut performance in 1913 just a year after that shrill piece by Bruckner.  It was from another world, although I know that as its first hearing it was shocking and outrageous in the extreme.  I listened to these pieces, just sounds to me, able to notice chords, and melodies, and progressions in the Mendelsohn piece, but mostly just thinking it's pretty, and the Beethoven Overture is pleasing because so familiar from eighty odd years of hearing it.  The Stravinsky is compelling because of the sharp and compelling rhythms, because of the associations with the ballet for which it was composed, for the anecdotes of scandal attached to it.  I was lost in it, sunk into a non intellectual animal appreciation of its rhythms and noises.  That's as far as I can go.  Tonight we go to the opera, Donizetti's "Don Pasquale," a treat if only because finally, thank god, the conductor has finished his decade long Verdi cycle.  Donizetti, isn't he "bel canto"? won't that make me swoon like bel canto usually does?  Well, there you have it folks, the inner workings of the mind and spirit of a typical senior citizen who used to listen to the Met every Saturday afternoon and the New York Symphony every Sunday, a member of America's cultured classes.  By chance Tomasssini, the Times premier music critic wrote a piece for the Sunday edition about how contemporary music is left out in the cold while modern art and the rest of the avant garde is let in the door.  Don't blame the persons who shut the door say I.  I vote with my ear. I try and try John Adams, Cage, Crumb, on and on.  "Eat your broccoli" is the inner command I hear.  The gorge rises in my throat.

A Night Of Classical Music

I can't read The New York Times  today.  I can't think about the election another moment.  Thank God, we do not watch television, and I am thanking God for that as well because news on television is on a new level of inanity.  But I cannot read another analysis of something which will become a reality on Tuesday.  I always remember the people at The Chicago Tribune set the headline for "Dewey Beats Truman," and were quite wrong.  I have never had so visceral a dislike of a candidate as I feel for Mr. Trump; in general I am suspicious of heterosexual males and when I sense the braggadocio, the I can get it for you wholesale, the says you, the outta my way, sweetheart, take on things I feel revulsion.  I am convinced as many more qualified to comment than I that there is so deep seated a misogyny in this country that a woman candidate is more hated than a black male candidate.  Read Elaine Showalter in the current Times Literary Supplement.  But enough of all this.  Last night I went with a friend up to New College, the elite, honors college of the Florida public university system to hear a performance of Arnold Schoenberg's legendary 1912 masterpiece Pierrot Lunaire.  Coincidentally the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra is playing Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps this weekend.  It was composed in 1913 so that is a easy point of comparison, and as we all know the first performance was a scandal, the audience was half disgusted and there were arguments and fisticuffs.  Somehow that has all settled down, and Stravinsky's piece is a "classic."  I have to say that the Schoenberg piece may be a classic in certain musical circles but its harshness remains for me an enormous barrier to easy listening.  But musical purists will scream " who the hell wants 'easy listening?'  I do, just as I have grown able to absorb the notes of other pieces of originally unfamiliar or difficult music.  I cannot get past the harsh shrieking.  I guess am a simpleton from Iowa and will remain one. But wait a minute" I have absorbed Picasso easily enough over the years, so maybe it's Schoenberg's problem. Still it was a wonderful evening, what I heard is still in my ears, and I was engaged in being one of an audience of serious listeners.  There was even one young man in the audience with the oh so fashionable only lightly shaved sort of blue beard chin wearing a dress to no one's distress (my companion, a local academic, said: "You see that all the time now.")

The Invalid

Another day and I failed to write a blog.  Another perfectly good excuse--sleeping in because of slow working through my body of a bad cold.  I am lucky to sense the onset of the common cold, and to act on the sensation by starting to drink lots of water and to take to my bed.  I get kind of nutty, totally drowsy, and yesterday, I think it was, that is to say, Thursday, I lay abed all day long, nodding off much of the time.  As an anxiety ridden person, taught to perform, be industrious, contribute--God, i can hear my mother over and over--, a day of idleness, deliberately "doing nothing," not even reading to improve my mind, is so unlike me that we have to imagine that I was deep in illness.  This morning, after having cancelled my session with the trainer at the gym, i emailed him to suggest that yes, I would come.  After that session, I had a pedi-mani as they call it over at the Spa in the mall, and then a quick drop by the supermarket for a few things and home for nap, by which time I had cancelled our expedition to an opening at downtown art gallery scheduled for six pm, a meeting with a friend, and a dinner out in Sarasota's supposedly finest restaurant. My husband had been badgering me about taking it easy.  Ah, well.  After the nap I turned myself to making cream of broccoli soup which I had promised my husband for day.  It was, if I may say, delicious.  From that to the television and two episodes of the new drama of the life of Queen Elizabeth II.  How boring can home life get?  That's okay, we are not much for going out in the evening.  I am so shaky, we don't see well, I guess I am okay with life just disintegrating this way.  I still have my wits about me; we both do.  Richard so far this year has read the Iliad in Greek, he's halfway through the Odyssey and just recently picked up Lucretius' De Rerum Natura to keep his Latin up to snuff.  Puts me to shame, the great college professor, whose early article was on Lucretius--wonder how much I could read now? who reads and rereads with unashamed pride the print version of a speech he gave a couple of years ago on the Odyssey (a text much praised by none other than Helen Vendler) who is scheduled in January to lecture on the poem in eight sessions and has yet to pick up the Greek text to refresh myself.  That's it.  I feel my cold lingering--a slight tickle in the back of my throat.  Back to bed.

Small Town

Last evening we went to a production of Lanford Wilson's "Book of Days," the first play of a cast made up of the second year students in the Asolo Conservatory or whatever it is called, a rather distinguished training ground for American actors, here in Sarasota.  There always has to be a certain suspension of disbelief since the characters are generally a variety of ages whereas the cast members are in their twenties, and this being "show biz," they are uniformly physically attractive, and buffed.  Wilson's play, one of his more indigestible creations, surveys the goings on in a small Midwestern town, peopled it seems by hypocrites, bigots, and all the other behaviors traditionally loaded onto such people.  It was all rather obvious, but there was one scene, however, that caught my attention immediately, and that is perhaps because of my predilection for attractive males.  The local minister and a visiting Hollywood director (improbably in town to put on Shaw's "St Joan" no less!) enter after having shot a few baskets, and the minister proceeds to change from sports clothes to his religious gear.  This was startling; evangelicals in my day did not disrobe so easily in front of strangers, so I imagined that it was to demonstrate his easy going small town camaraderie, just a nice guy underneath the gown, so to speak.  He stripped to his boxer briefs, a fashion item I was not expecting, (when did the clergy give up plain white Y fronts?) and what is more, they were black, which even though in keeping with his ecclesiastical calling, sort of, was a surprise.  The actor had perfectly turned thighs, in keeping with the reality of the actor, but interesting, I thought, for a man of the cloth.  Buffed, you would have to call him. Was I making too much of this?  A bit later, the minister, who is revealed as a total shit, whether he is personally aware of this or not--he is a counterpart to the clergy who are sentencing Joan to the stake in the play--reveals that an internet search on his part had uncovered that the Hollywood guy was mixed up with charges of inappropriate sexual advances to minor girls.  When that was revealed, the black boxer briefs fell into place in my imagination.  He was just too sexy when stripping and changing into his professional outfit and why? because those briefs were such a compelling statement in the context.  He was signalling something to the Hollywood guy, and he had read the internet revelations.  At first I thought the actor had thoughtlessly dressed in his normal fancy underwear, but no, now I see that it was a directorial decision, occasioned by the script, and it was a great note, and taking advantage of the unusual good looks and physique of the actor--you don't get small town evangelicals that attractive as a rule;  after all body loathing is one of the features of the religion.

The Day Of The Dead

As I opened Google this morning I was encouraged to "Discover The Day Of The Dead With Google." But. no thanks, I was thoroughly rehearsed in its possibilities from early childhood remembering all too well--and at this autumnal season, the dead leaves swirling around and mounding (all so appropriately), Daddy lying in his coffin at the foot of the stairs in the great front hall, his mourning friends and colleagues trooping in to, as they said, "pay their respects."  Mother sat and received them, banked with her six children, now so bereft, indeed, an occasion for another freshet of tears from those who beheld this mournful scene.  This was eighty years ago, an experience refreshed upon the occasion of her own death, a decade or so later, followed a year later by the solemn church procession as I proceeded my parents-in-law in the pitiful little procession in Ames Iowa following the gentleman holding the urn which contained the ashes of my young wife.  I could add the memory of the death of my best friend, Ted, who died at 43, overweight, too often drunk, but in my memory the most delightful and loving comrade, who taught me how to deal with the pomposities of academia with impudence and deceit, a friendship so much needed and gone so soon, and that thought prompts me to think of Phil, a young man at the university in New York who was one of the few strong deeply caring friends who gave me tenderness and commitment all the while keeping himself on the other heterosexual side of bromance.  Dead at forty somethng or other, oh, my so young, and I went on, and on, through the deaths of young men, often former casual lovers, gone with AIDS, until we arrived at the siblings Pinky galloping cancer as she called it who refused chemo, "ready to go," at 73, Holly, with internal bleeding, at 88, "I don't want to go back to the hospital, I'm ready," Cyrus, still mourning his dead wife beclouded with Alzheimer's whose tender care replaced the years of being doctor, who left this world when he fell down a flight of cellar stairs at 90.  Sisters Jane 92 and Barbara 89 are so aggressively alive that we will set them to the side, and there I am, tottering along with my stick, gym mornings three times a week, everywhere I turn the flimsy and oh, so cheesy bits of wispy ghosts purchased at Walmarts.  Mother established a home that had the aura of the train station where we seemed always to be waving goodbye to some departing train or other.  There have been many arrivals, her six children, then grandchildren, ten at least, maybe twelve, and the proliferation beyond that I cannot even count, save for my two great grandchildren, oh, how did I get on to this subject? No blog yesterday.  Could not sleep all night peacefully as I lay in terror of oversleeping and interrupting the arrival of the cleaning lady at 8:30 brisk, beautiful, a rebuke to sloppiness and laggard movements.  Well, now, two weeks free of that worry.

The Black Penis

In the Sunday Iimes magazine Wesley Morris, the former drama critic of the Boston Globe, and now a cultural critic at large, in his usual beautiful and thoughtful prose wrote an interesting piece on the penis, specifically the general expectation upon seeing a black penis, the fear in the public at large that the black penis will be so large, much more commanding than its white counterparts.  I know of this expectation lodged in the hearts and brains of white males, have heard it referenced often when the occasion for talking about naked black males among white males arises.  I was once indeed amused when in a hotel room with an enormously tall majestic black professional athlete who had disrobed down to his underpants in preparation for our having sex, he paused, looked over and said, as a way of warning : "I only have an ordinary sized prick." I would not have imagined otherwise.  Starting when I was fifteen years old I had had a twice a week encounter with a kid my age, the only black in our small town high school, who lived with the cruel experience of being a star athlete and very popular with the boys in the locker room, but because of his skin color never invited to the parties nor asked out on dates.  He and I encountered each other one night in the shadows near the stadium trying to sneak into a basket ball tournament, and when we failed in that endeavor, I discovered myself wildly aroused, and he a sexual outlet for his otherwise untapped libido.  Larry and I became great friends of a special kind.  He was a young male with normal sexual appetites who took advantage of the only game in town available to him, I was a bright gay young middle class kid who wanted into his pants.  We spent the next eight years two evenings a week in the shadows of the city park in my car, and both talkers, followed the coitus with a half hour of banter.  He never acknowledged me especially if we came across each other down town or at school.  So it never occurred to me that black males are supposed to be especially endowed.  And further experience of them in bed over the years gave me no reason to change my expectations.  They were just guys, like any other male on the planet.  I always told my children and my students that they should have sexual experience of persons of other races so as to dispel the mystique.  How I secretly envied my daughter's year in Kenya and her Masai boyfriend!  But straight males are always worrying about their own equipment, how it measures up.  That's one of the virtues of teenaged gay promiscuity: you learn that although they come in all sizes and shapes, they are pretty much the same.  The ancient Greek sculpture shows them small, seems they found larger penises aesthetically unpleasing.  Ancient athletes exercised and competed in the nude with their dick strapped to their leg, to avoid its flopping around.  The myth of the large black penis is certainly a subconscious reaction to the guilt of the white slave owner.  Revenge rape is a natural concomitant.  Look at the army of invading Soviet soldiers who methodically raped every woman they could manage when they entered Berlin.

Halloween

Back in my youth in Iowa, seventy five years ago, Halloween was a moment of great excitement that always began ritualistically with a drive out of town to the farms so we could buy a pumpkin, looking for the perfect one, among the piles lining the roadway as we passed farm after farm.  There were six children in my family, but the older two had graduated from carving pumpkins.  Every one of us had strongly held aesthetic notions of what constituted a good pumpkin face--the size and shape of the mouth, the teeth (requiring some very special carving and not for sissies).  We sat in the kitchen to work on our pumpkins, overseen by the kitchen help, who were constantly and verbally vigilant as we wielded knives that were too big for our hands.  After the candles had been installed the four were set on the front porch and the entire family went out to inspect.  Then I grew up and moved East for graduate school, having long since abdicated my role as a participant in Halloween.  In Cambridge we lived among students; the only carved pumpkins we saw were in store windows.  I took to loathing Halloween as a cheap commercial trick.  Time went by, and my memories of Halloween with my own small children blurred into a vast swirl of costumes, carved pumpkins, walking the streets with my costumed charges, and the many, many responsibilities, their nervousness at the competition from neighbors pumpkins, costumes, etc. somehow blotted out any positive memories.  Flash forward to Hull Massachusetts and out house on E Street.  My husband positively loved Halloween, had all kinds of false teeth fangs, capes, masks, and as it turns out so did my older daughter.  The two of them carved pumpkins, got bowls of candy, worked on costumes, and then came the night.  It was an extravaganza.  This little down was bursting with children, it was safe to walk down our street, no sidewalks, no cars, children marched along, with their parents trailing discreetly behind like the Secret Service for the presidential family.  It turned me into a lovable old coot when I beheld these very young children in their pride of costume climbing our porch stairs to meet up with my husband and my daughter acting their parts, the parents staying behind down on the street in the wings so to speak.  All ages, scarcely speaking to early teens (one boy stepping into the living room said unexpectedly: "you have some nice art here").  Now we are in a condo in Sarasota Florida where no one under fifty five can live and no child comes near the building.  But it was great fun while it lasted.