The Onset Of Winter Midst The Palm Trees

I just finished reading The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain which I seriously enjoyed, although I am not sure that the word records my emotion.  I was quite depressed when I began to read the book and seriously depressed when I finished it.  Of course, the depression which is the most profound I have experienced in some time was set off by the political events in our country for which I see no improvement in my foreseeable lifetime.  So, as the expression goes, "get used to it."  In the midst of my reading of the Tremain novel I stopped to read Alan Bennett's charming Uncommon Reader, a day's read, and something that for a moment lifted my spirits.  We also watched the film "Genius," about a once successful novelist named Tom Wolf and his relationship with his editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, who is always referred to as legendary since among his authors were both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and a host of others, also well known, if not quite such star power.  Wolf's novels were immense, he was wordy wordy wordy, and I remember thinking at the time, boring, boring, boring, and could never understand how he attracted such a following.  The acting in the film was extraordinary, and although throughout I wanted to throttle the Wolf character I was dazzled at Jude Law's undertaking a Southern accent, indeed, the American accents of most of the principals who were Brits, except for the Australian Nicole Kidman.  It did not lift my depression, however, because Wolf's logorrhea was so insistent and threatening, stifling from beginning to end.  I wonder how to get out of this mood.  Creative work, I always say.  I wish I could write a novel, and I have tried yet again to do so in the last year.  The plot just does not work out, however.  I am preparing lecture notes for my Odyssey lecture course, all of eight sessions for the old folks academy, and this for some reason does not enchant me in the doing.  I have never really made any friends down here so I cannot go out to lunch and dinner as I would do in other cities in which I have lived.  How much physical exercise can one perform?  At least the severe balance problems seem to have diminished slightly thanks to my persistent trainer.  Well, back to Odysseus who is now sitting down with King Alcinous and Queen Arete and telling them of his wandering since he was blown off course on his way home from Troy, the Cyclops and all that, quite a lengthy narrative and reminds one somewhat of the Gilgamesh story, which is interesting, and I am going to work that into my lecture, and from the depths of my despair I am wondering if it is worth the bother.  But hope springs eternal.  Of course, I don't believe that, but it is a consolation to write.

I'll Have To Ask My Husband

The newspapers have mentioned the rise in incidence of verbal and visual anti-gay attacks in the USA since the election.  It does not make me fearful since the sight of two very elderly males who might or might not be a couple is not likely to stimulate whatever chemicals in the brain that react in rage? disgust? repressed lust perhaps?  I don't buy into that argument that lower class white males are all on the prowl and ready to attack gays.  From my experience of many decades I know, have often sensed it myself, there are young clearly sexually active males who are unthinkingly and positively heterosexual but who are easily roused to anger which has a real element of fear in it when confronted by the sight of gay males.  The problem is, to my mind, they get aroused by the idea of gay sex, fear it, act out on that fear.  I remember this so well from my teen years.  And more often than not if they could be isolated from the protection of their group of buddies, you could flirt them down to polite behavior, sometimes go further and have sex with them, which is what they didn't understand they wanted all along.  The main thing to remember in the face of menace: these males want a kind of intimacy they can only vaguely imagine, but they want it. It a relief to turn to males who have fully resolved their sexual needs and identities.  When we lived in Hull Massachusetts and now again here in Sarasota we deal with working men every few days.  If it is I who come to the door, I always answer their inquiry about the task they have come to work on with "I'll have to ask my husband," and very few are the times where the guys do a double-take, give a quizzical look, suppress a reaction. It's what all my elderly lady friends report.  They don't react to me as a male with gay potential, but rather to a sexless wrinkled old lump of flesh.

"So Thanksgiving Was Yesterday And I'm Still Recovering" Heard At The Gym

The woman who cuts my hair told me the other day how grateful she was that her kids were otherwise engaged for Thansksgiving, and she was let off the hook of any hostessing duties.  She and her husband were lying back in their loungers back home from work absorbing this fact when it came to them that the perfect Thanksgiving dinner was to wrap up two home made Turkey sandwiches, grab a bottle of wine, two glasses, a couple pieces of pumpkin pie,take up a blanket and go down to the beach, and lie back and gaze at the scudding clouds and feel the gentle breeze off the Coast.  Heaven!  I am in the process of reading through the text of the Odyssey this week and next and into the New Year until it is time to teach, and nothing is more engaging than rehearsing a text much beloved and congenial.  I almost always used to say "one of the foundations of western civilization," but after reading Kenneth Appiah''s demolishing of the notion of western civilization in this week's Guardian I shall have to think of it in less majestic terms, less pretentious, and concentrate on what a great story it is, and how often tongue in cheek.  Odysseus!  what a guy! I guess my new approach to the poem is going to be more like my barber and her plans for Thanksgiving day.  Ah, well, and so it goes.

Jews and Blacks

A couple of nights ago we went to friends for a preThanksgiving dinner, just the four of us together and thus a chance to sit and talk seriously after we had had the delicious food our hostess  prepared.  The assembled foursome all retired ranged in age from 76 to 95, and brought interesting points and experience to the talk. The subject was the ethnic and class animosities that the president elect was fanning among his supporters.  We in the room were two upper class WASPS, another born into a low income laboring class from an immigrant mix of predominantly Irish, but some German, and the last a multimillionaire self succeeded Jewish man whose childhood ghetto home was where Yiddish and Polish were spoken.  The subject was the demonstrable underchievement in school of children from the inner city, and how these academies which recruit them try furiously to leap them over the hurdle of apathy so as to get them into the nervous making track of compulsive success struggle which will plunge them into the direction of Harvard and the other accepted goals.  I thought how I had internalized that struggle as a small white upper class boy (failure or even low grades were unthinkable for me and my friends; I never missed a day of school even the day after my father's death in a car accident when I was six).  Two others described teaching elite suburban schools where failure was not an option for the children.  The three of us were describing anxiety and tension as the norm both at school and at home.  Success was not an option but a demand, a given.  The Jew complained of the rift between Jew and black and wondered why it was so since they were both needing to succeed through the antagonism of their Gentile/white classmates. We ta;led about the natural or inbuilt instinct to over succeed drove jewish children, whereas black children were conditioned to know that black skin in the United States signals failure. We all agreed that the American culture has never been honest about the brutality of slavery nor the horrors and cruelties of the Reconstruction period. Where do we have museums that expose the torture and brutality that the enslaved Africans endured?  Where are our Auschwitz, or Bergen-Belsen?  where are the bronze plaques showing where a black man was lynched?  It was all agreed that Germany had come  to find rest with the horror the Germans had created but centuries on the Americans are hiding to their hurt an ugly ugly truth which lies beneath the hearts of all of us.  Part of the American horror is that this discussion takes place again and again with no blacks present because the social divide is enormous.
Who has a black friend with whom one can really talk honestly?

Another Opening, Another Show

You would think that I had stopped this blog for good in disgust and despair if you had read my last entry.  But never think to count a confirmed narcissist out of the game.  I like writing out my thoughts, and what is more reading them over from time to time.  If I may sink more deeply into the squalor of self revelation, I will confess to keeping a file box next to my desk in which I have stored in the calendar order of their publication all my published papers, and looming somewhat adjacent and above this box is a shelf with that various books I have written plus copies of the translations into foreign tongue (one being Korean, of all things, with beautiful illustrations).  Vanity knows no limits.  And in this season where the leaf of inspiration lies sere on the brittle branch (my, that was rather elegant if I do say so!), one needs recourse to old papers and old thoughts, since new ones are not exactly popping up like spring flowers.  For several years now I have imagined trying yet again to compose a successful lecture course on Homer's Odyssey, and nothing develops.  I am, however, about to offer eight lectures (1 hr 20 min) every Thursday starting January.  This is for the senior citizens down here, learning lite, we might call it, no prerequisites, no assignments, no grades, no attendance takers, subjects from dense to frivolous, mostly discussions sometimes lectures from the more pompous or pretentious (guess where that puts me!)  So far I've done one on Greek tragedy, another on the Iliad.  The enrollees as you might have imagined are predominately women.  The American male (at least the heterosexuals, in my experience) have a hard time thinking about human relations which certainly is the foundation of tragic drama, and they don't necessarily like to return again and again to things that are unpleasant, which in the case of the Iliad means confronting his own death over and over.  That is why science fiction and other terrestrial action pieces are so popular; men can have the simulacrum of destruction and mayhem without the attendant human agony or implications of human mortality that, let's say, one finds in Shakespearean drama.  In any case, (you see my teaching style--nattering on and on farther and farther off subject until a brisk "in any case" gets us back on track), I am very much looking forward to the Odyssey lectures.  So many things that resonate through the ages and all began with this text: a boy sets out to find his absent father, his mother beset by sex mad males who want to despoil her of her house and home and take over and get rid of the son, glimpses of the lives of the rich and famous (Menelaos and Helen, Arete and Alkinoos), a fantastic voyage with giants and other scary scenes, a glamorous witch keeping the hero in sexual bondage until the gods release him, a witty scene where the hero meets up with a glamorous girl and, since he is naked, he tries to hide his erection as he kneels in supplication before her, and on and on and on and finally tears, homecoming, dad and mom reunited, the aging lovers having a night of love in their bed guaranteed to get a rise out of the students who are more or less coevals 

What's There To Say?

I cannot possibly top the inanity of Donald Trump being elected President of the United States, so I shall have to retire from the field.  As a parting note let me share with you a vision of the future I saw in downtown Sarasota this morning: a pickup truck driving along with a large TRUMP poster in the back and a Confederate flag tied to it and waving gaily in the breeze.

Electionn Day

Where can I hide from the onslaught of television, talk, newspaper reading.?  I voted weeks ago; there's nothing I can do, I don't want to know.  Now I am simply waiting for the fat lady to sing.  Timidly I glance at the Times, and leaf through the first section.  The editors have done a kindness by putting other news to the front.  A pleasing article about Obama on the election campaign circuit, more human interest than anything else.  The obituary of Janet Reno, the recounting of her quiet fight with Parkinson''s Disease, a little bit about dissidence in Hong Kong, and a murder here in America that the article claims shows the chinks in the welfare system. But inside we get soda tax in California--a damn good thing, the problems of doctors care across this broad land, no villain, really, but rather a problem that calls for fixing, a wonderful look back at the Arno flood fifty years ago and all the  wonderful people who rushed to Florence to help out immediately, the story of a man who donated a yacht which another fellow has outfitted to rescue migrants from the Mediterranean Sea.  Then a down about India's smog to keep the tone level, as a prelude to the International Pages and Australia backing down on gay marriage, a Palestinian getting 12 years for stabbing Israelis, corruption in the Ukrained, and the National section with  a lady thrown under the subway, news of a new kind of sandwich sold from a van by its creator rising to restaurant fame in Harlem, and the Pope--God Bless Him!--choosing a moderate for Archbishop of Newark, and the really good news is that the editors relegated all the nail biting election news to its special section, there to be set aside and maybe glanced at much much later after getting through Tuesday's special Science section.  I'm done reading about the election and await either business as usual or the Storm Troopers patrolling the streets.  Last night we went to a superb performance of Donizetti's "Don Pasquale" a comic work thus exhausting its humor early on, but which nineteenth century audiences, chatted and drank champagne as they listened to--odd but I believe grammatically correct--and I fell into a deep sleep.  So well rested I came hom, and now it's today.  I feel oddly sanguine this morning.