Is A Little Learning Really A Dangerous Thing? Or Does It Mattter?

One of my earliest and indelible memories of my mother is seeing her sitting in a wing backed chair in the living room reading The Des Moines Register and Tribune held out open with both hands.  She didn't just read it, she studied it, every page, every column, maybe not all the sports section, I could measure her progress through the paper by the comments she threw in my direction inspired page by page.  She was my model in this, and from an early age I too read a morning newspaper, first the Register, then moving East, The Boston Globe, and on to The New York Times, with side excursions into the San Francisco Chronicle, and a brief moment communing with Corriere della Sera and La Reppublica when I lived in Italy.  As a child with damaged back I was privileged to sit and read in the living room, alone among my siblings accorded this treat.  On a library table next to "my" chair were laid out Time Magazine, Fortune Magazine, The New Yorker Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post and today who remembers what else.  It set a lot of the style of my reading.  So now I sit in a wing backed chair not unlike my mother's, and as I have done all my  life, read and read and read.  From morning to night. In fact since my surgery my immobility is a problem, my balance has grown more unstable, and I struggle to do feeble laps back and forth the length of the gallery outside all the condos on the third floor.  Then back to my chair!  "You're old, for god's sake, you don't need to walk so much."  Once upon a time I read novels, some pretty ambitious, like War and Peace, Remembrance of Things Past, and then I was a college student and it was texts in ancient Greek and Latin, then later scholarly volumes in German and French on ancient texts as I worked up a dissertation topic, and after that bits and pieces of learning to prop up whatever thesis I was developing for an article.  Morning to night.  Now I still read but it is all addiction, I fear.  The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, The Guardian Weekly, The Economist, and still The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, and--oh, I can't think of them all, my head begins to swim.  But that is just the sad point of this listing.  Everything is of the moment, and so I read notices of the same books, the same films, and on and on, from one point of view after another, and the work that is the focus of these inquiring minds and taste makers is quickly lost and diluted in the swirling broth of critical opinion.  I no longer know what I am reading that is being criticized.  And what is so much worse is that at eighty five and more I tend to forget and thus to re read.  I sometimes think I could take one issue of one of these journals and read it over again for the rest of my life.  But you know, it really doesn't matter.  I am one of those oldsters sitting in the corner near the hearth for warmth who has been given a twisted skein for knitting and told to unravel it and then later it can be knitted up again.  Keeps the old timer busy, you know?

It Was Fun But All Good Things Come To An End

When I woke up to discover that Donald Trump was the president elect of the United States I felt betrayed by The New York Times.  I have been a faithful reader, nay a compulsive reader for more than four decades.  It's all the news that's fit to print, so surely their staff must have a handle on what's going on.  The betrayal struck deep; I decided I could no longer believe a word that they printed.  And so I went to my computer and cancelled my subscription for home delivery.  The operator with whom I spoke was gently insistent that I not do this, a little surprising I thought, since she could hardly have been personally affected by my decision.  Still and all, I have since learned that the Times was genuinely concerned to reach out to their readership to insist that this failure of reportage on their part would not happen again.  I changed my subscription to the Guardian and in the first issue sent out to me there was a revealing article by a reporter who had embedded himself with the Sanders and Trump campaigns, and thus had been very much aware that the great unwashed of the United State whom neither Secretary Clinton nor The New York Times seemed to bother to investigate were firmly committed to Mr. Trump.  Actually I had grown weary of the Times for some time as their other sections Style, Food, etc.  seemed to me to grow more and more irrelevant to my world, which is that of an aging retired academic on a pension from TIAA-CREF.  They were too much Vogue Magazine, it seemed to me.  The advertisements for real estate in the Sunday magazine, I mean stupendous condos that were beyond my imagining--think Russian or Chinese tycoons--began to offend me.  The clothes they profiled in Style were obviously not for an aging, eighty plus year old male with a sagging midline (what does that mean?), but more to the point whoever is normal pays hundreds of dollars for a sweater? Even thousands, for God's sake?  Well, some choice readers of the Times that's who.  So sayonara, Times.  And, you know, maybe it's just me, not you.  Really too far out of it, too slow of a pace, not up to the Times anymore.

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