My Mind Is A Blank

I am approaching the second meeting of the course I am teaching for eight meetings.  It is an overview of the dramatic tragic productions put on at the Greater Dionysia in Athens during the course of the fifth century BCE.  These texts are commonly just labeled "ancient Greek tragedy," which is okay as far as it goes but not really specific enough.  Well, enough of that; the inner pedant is speaking.  Each meeting lasts one hour and twenty minutes, and I am trying to recover the technique I possessed in my heyday of talking for that length of time from a conception filled out with all the appropriate details without recourse to text or notes.  It derives from the years in which I played roles on the state requiring me to memorize long swatches of dialogue.  For forty years the technique served me well, and I could range back and forth across the front of a classroom talking eloquently on texts and adducing facts and theories relating to them without having to peer down and shuffle through notes.  The whole idea was in my head; indeed, when sometimes picking up the subject at any point  in a conversation outside of the classroom my mind quickly found the substance that was relevant to the moment.  I have spent the last weeks assembling the ideas, reading the texts, and Friday I will be talking about Sophocles' Oeidpus the King and to a lesser degree Oedipus at Colonus.  I woke today thinking I can't remember my lines.  Yes, I know the plays but the details, the specifics, the nuances that I had so carefully teased out two weeks ago from my reading of the Greek text are gone from my head.  Luckily I wrote them all down as a precaution.  But that special sense of readiness which made the years of my teaching such a wonderful experience just is not there.  After twenty years, it has all changed.  I am going to take a break from writing this blog to concentrate on thinking out my reactions to the text for the course.

Martin Luther King Day

I know it's MLK, Jr. but it has always irked me that such a great figure in our history has that little verbal tic at the end of his name, even if, of course, it is true that his father was a powerful figure and deserves whatever attention is rightfully his by having a son named after him.  Be that as it may, I cannot stand the "Jr."  Yesterday was the holiday, and in Sarasota I only really became conscious of it, when I wanted to get some books at the public library and found it closed.  This edifice is in what passes for the center of downtown Sarasota, and suddenly I realized that it was damn quiet around there.  And still my mind was blank as I wheeled away off toward the University to the north where I wanted to do some paperwork in connection with the course I teach.  Halfway there I remembered that the University was going to be closed that day, and so turned back and went, as I so often do, on a small side street to avoid the fast moving packed lanes of the main drag.  Too much quick reflex action for me!  The area through which I was about to drive was home to most of Sarasota's African-American population; if it were not for the fact that a number of white persons live around there as well I might be tempted to call it a ghetto.  When I first moved here, I was surprised that one never saw a black person in our neighborhood  super market, neither a customer nor an employee, check out clerk, bagger, whatever, although in fact these positions in supermarkets down here are taken by superannuated white people who probably all have pensions from something else and this is an add-on.  As I drove yesterday I came to a smallish park and it was jammed; across the street a parking lot was filled.  Everyone there was black.  There was a kind of platform erected and I could see speeches were being given.  Yes, so this was the Martin Luther King Day celebration, a species of the apartheid he tried so valiantly and eloquently to destroy.  When I was teaching back in the day, so many of my white students were so proud of how they were offending their parents with their so-called radicalism.  I bought into it, do doubt about it, if only in growing my hair down to between my shoulder blades.  But the real radicals back then were the African American students who sat at the counter in that lunchroom in Greensboro North Carolina on February 1st 1960, a historic date that started a revolution, a first step toward a major integration, still so sadly incomplete over a half century later.  It obviously hasn't gone all that far if America's most famous and distinguished black man has a holiday named after him which nobody is going to observe except his own people.  Students read "Letter from a Birmingham Jail, " or the "I Have a Dream Speech," and then go back to their lives.  I do the same.  On Martin Luther King day maybe things are different elsewhere in this country.  The south, after all, is the south.  But I was ashamed as I drove past this park.

My Bad

Damn! Forgot to post again yesterday morning.  Up at the crack of dawn, worried about the reaction of the student to whom I sent an angry email about his talking and phoning in class, about the pages I handed out without page numbers which I and the students collectively mixed up in as many different variations as six pages can get.  Anxious about getting ready for our cleaning lady, the former Marine, tall and blonde and clearly no nonsense.  Anxious about an expedition upon which I planned to embark as soon as the CL arrived: a walking expedition to visit a new acquaintance.  We met him at a brunch, he is a widower, his husband of thirty seven years died a few years ago.  Lo and behold, he lives nearby.  Mapquest said one mile of walking would put me at his front door.  I penned a note, he replied with an invitation to stop by.  I was a nervous wreck.  What if I got half way there and was not able to make it any farther?  What if I fell?  At nine sharp I set off.  I budgeted three quarters of an hour.  I remember walking from our apartment in Rome near the Villa Torlonia down the Via Venti Settembre across the Tiber through Trastevere and up the Janiculo Jill to the American Academy or from our house near the Bayshore Highway in Palo Alto into the heart of the Stanford campus.  Each of those must have been four miles at least.  A little tiny mile?  Nothing.  Well, it took me thirty two minutes, the visit was a pleasure, I stayed thirty minutes, I declined his offer of a ride home and set off in my sturdy shoes.  Two weird things. One was the sidewalks along the way, perfectly made, devoid of cracks, but set into the radically sloping sides of the roadbed, clearly never ever meant for anyone to walk on, so Sarasota, where the idea of a person on foot is as quaint as using a bow and arrow.  The other weird thing, which indeed I remembered from my other moment in the burbs, id est, life in Palo Alto CA, was the perfectly manicured lawns, the one storey houses, the perfect plantings, the quiet, the absence of cars, children, adults--it was a holiday and no one seemed to exist.  Except for the women out walking their dogs.  At the sight of me they froze.  Hey, ladies, I am not black, I am not young and husky, I am a retired professor with a big pension, relax!  A few more years and they will all be packing heat and walking could be fatal.  But, come to think of it, I will probably be dead by then.  Thank God, my husband and I chose to live in the squalor of the proximity to the mall, the traffic, the people, the noise.  To be in city noise is very heaven, isn't that what Wordsworth wrote?

Back In The Saddle Again

I was going to open with "hard to believe it," but upon reflection I guess no,  it was all too inevitable that sooner or later given the chance to stand before a classroom and speak I would do so.  This time as a volunteer professor in an academy for mostly elderly people wanting to get off the golf course for an hour or so a week.  My stint is only eight weeks long, so not really the most profound thing I have ever done. I kept joking that this would be my "Norma Desmond" moment, but pathetically enough, it sort of is.  Eight hour and twenty minute sessions.  The first threw me off my feed I must say.  First off, I forgot that I would have to go to the central office to pick up the stuff they had photocopied for me.  And there I met a woman rushing in to drop my course because she said, until she discovered that I was in fact that instructor, the instructor in the room was dreadful.  Who could this person be, I asked myself as the normal confusion of an opening day was turning into psychic pandemonium.  Well, of course, the registrar or whoever in his/her infinite wisdom had changed the room assignments only in the preceding hour, and there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing.  It was only because a dear friend, a local academic habitué of the university, was by my side and guided me to the correct place that I did not lose it completely.  But the result was that I failed to perform the opening day administrative rituals along with handing out my photocopied material without taking the time to number the first ten pages, and within a very few moments I was so flummoxed that I ended up with my personal pages in as much disarray as my students.  All very unnerving for a grand control queen in the classroom whose teen years in theater had always guaranteed that every first day of class would become opening night on Broadway.  And just to make it all perfect, two old men sat in the corner in the back, the one having called the other on his cell, to shout out, obviously deaf as a coot, the correct room number, and other directional items, and the late comer to enter in full voice thanking his friend for the information.  I lost it, sad to say, but they were both so deaf that my shrill faggy huffing and puffing and outrage was altogether lost on them.  The subsequent hour was really quite good I think it is fair to say, as I both amused, instructed, and at the same time soothed my inner self.  The psychic effort was immense and I was entirely tired and shocked to discover that what I had certainly assumed was a good hour and a half of tense making lecturing was actually something about fifty five minutes.  And I had twenty five yet to go!  Ah, well, I wrote the talkative old fart an angry email telling him and friend to withdraw or change their ways.  My husband insisted that I could not address him as "you deaf old bastard."  Although he did say from the experience of twenty years teaching troublesome teenagers "you've got to nip their misbehaviour in the bud."  I'm ready to quit.  Seven more meetings.

All Was Not Well In Denmark

It's eight o'clock at night, and I have forgotten to post the blog this morning and now I am sitting at my computer after leaving the last few moments of a Danish film about Queen Caroline and her mad husband in the eighteenth century.  Somehow I had read that it ended happily when the queen and her lover poisoned her stark raving mad husband the king, but, no, as the film unrolled she and her lover were in fact tricked and lied to and cornered and the end of the film was very, very unhappy, and so I left the room as my husband murmured "wimp!."  All too true.  And I am devastated.  And it is just a film even if true to history.  Where is my critical distance?  What does it matter this love affair?  I want tap dancing, disco, smiles and laughter.  Ah, poor Caroline, poor Dr. Struensee, and those sad children.

The Naked Self

I recently attended a talk on the subject of the various failures of the contemporary American medical system.  One signal feature the speaker offered was the patient's presumed loss of dignity in the consulting room, one example being being that healthcare workers address patients by their given names.  I find this illustration odd.  The consulting room is not the same as a social event where societal patterns are reinforced, one of them being the use of surnames.  The consulting room is all about efficient action to increase well being, and I do not think it is in anyone's best interests to have to labor over the extraordinary variety of pronunciations of surnames in the USA. My given name is Charles.  I was raised in a very rigid class structure, and would have been startled to hear my mother addressed as Ruth by other than her intimates.  I as any pompous young professors was intoxicated with being addressed as Professor Beye, but not so pompous as to imagine the title and I were inseparable.  I will never forget when I once had to welcome various administrative figures into a meeting and one woman introduced herself to me with "How do you do?  I am Dean Smith," to which I could not resist replying "What an unusual first name!" and she didn't get it.  So if the hospital personnel want to call me Charles, okay.  The other feature stressed in the talk was the loss of dignity and person hood when wearing a hospital gown, presumably because there was none of the security of undergarments,  too much flesh showing through the cracks, that troublesome gap with the ass showing through the back, who knows?  Yes, it's nudity with a little cotton/poly cover.  And yet the diagnostic and healing process is focused on my body not my personality, and I may as well bare the flesh to make it easier.  I guess perhaps a lifetime of nude sexual encounters with a wide range of people has left me if with nothing else at least a sense that me nude is able to talk to another person clothed without a sense of loss.  And anal penetration is hardly going to be a surprise.  There's nothing like a digital exploration of your prostate up your rectum to put things into perspective, especially if you are otherwise engaged in a lively friendly conversation with your oncologist/urologist.  Since I have sometimes been connected with doctors from teaching hospitals I have been asked if I would mind if some youngster sit in the examination and in fact on more the one occasion participate.  So I have had a second digital examination from some sweet young thing (female; I have to say that because I get even more gushy over the cute young guys) while my doctor stands by talking about what the sensations the tip of her finger is encountering possibly mean.  It's like suddenly finding yourself in a stall in the mens room in speeding train at three in the morning pulled in there by a handsome rugged pullman porter who thought a connection of bare flesh between us might help to while away the midnight hours.  It's really all the same, I figure, so just relax.

Cleaning Up

I have been lying in bed in the dark of the early morning thinking of my day, trying to muster the mental energy for the final organization of the papers I will be using in the brief lecture series of eight sessions that commence on Friday.  On the one hand, what could be more reflexive action than talking of ancient Greek tragedy to a group, something I have done possibly thirty or forty times in the past years, yet, on the other,,--oh, that Greek insistence upon symmetry in thinking--it has been twenty years before since I stood before a class.  So the tingles of excitement and dread are animating, what? to jump up? no, to burrow deeper into the sheets in the darkened room and fantasize doing things.  My desk top is where I shall work, and at first I must confront the various papers lying on it.  This is always a moment of ridicule, should my husband become privy to my plans.  He points out that i have no organizational skills, or rather in his words, am a mess.  There are perhaps twenty to thirty notes to myself, flyers needing to be looked to, bank notices I can't quite yet absorb, that sort of thing, and since I don't really use a folder system they remain out and about for me to spy when the impulse to think about them grabs me.  This, my husband notes, is what is called "poor organization." But as I lie here I cannot help but think of him, Mr. Neat Desk, Mr. Former Assistant Superintendent of Schools.  Let's turn to the dining room table or better yet to the kitchen, to the refrigerator.  In the cold closet we will find the remains of oyster stuffing from Christmas dinner, of a dip from the same meal, of a variety of cooked and discarded items from other moments, all sinking into decay, which he cannot, no cannot throw out.  What is more the counters have small portions of well wrapped Italian Christmas bread now rigid as a board, the table we eat at has a large BJs bought container of peanuts now going stale,  I could continue this survey but you get the drift.  Here we see another form of organization which I handle with the disposal in the middle of the sink and the trash barrel by the door.  For some reason he is free to remark in condescending tones upon my desk's disorder, but woe for me should I bring up the rotting masses that needing discarding.  Throwing away food, profligate behavior, waste, the dread spectre of waste, and all I have done is point out some mold on a tired old fruit dessert that really needs to get shoved.   Neither of us can let go, but for each very different items are at stake.