Drag and Gender as a Performance

I have been intending to write this post since seeing La Cage aux Folles at a local theater, which sparked a thought about how much of what we think of as “gender” is really just a performance. 

 

The central idea of that musical is a cabaret with drag performers. The owners are a gay couple, one of which is the queen of all the drag queens. (Performed with aplomb by local theater veteran and co-owner of Ovation Theatre, Jason McClain.) 

 

Drag itself is a performance, of course, and differs from reality. It isn’t really about cross dressing, for example, and certainly isn’t an expression of being transgender. As a cishet guy, I am probably ill qualified to parse the difference between drag as a queer art and as a mainstream art form - and I have been informed there is a difference. But I do think that it can shed some light on gender as a performance, which affects all of us as humans. 

 

The bottom line is this:

 

Gender is a performance, just like drag, and has virtually nothing to do with biology.

 

In other words, we as humans do a lot of social signaling with gender performances. The specifics of the signals vary greatly from culture to culture, change over time, and take on meanings that have zero connection to the inherent meaning of the signals. 

 

Just one example: pink used to be a “male” color as recently as 150 years ago, and blue was a “female” color. Clearly that has changed. And there is nothing inherently “masculine” about a particular wavelength of light and the color that our eyes perceive from that wavelength. 

 

Everything about this is just cultural signaling. 

 

What drag does is switch the signals, with men adopting an exaggerated set of “female” social signals, and women doing the opposite. 

 

As art, this makes sense: art both reflects and critiques reality, and always has. By switching the signals, drag creates frisson, discomfort, and asks us to question our assumptions about what male and female actually are. 

 

The thing is, male and female humans are far more alike than they are different, and, with very few exceptions, these “differences” are at the statistical level, rather than the individual one. For example, males are statistically taller than females, but a great many females are taller than a great many males. (Me included: I’m 5’7”, so about 15% of US women are taller than me. That’s about 19 million women in this country who are taller than me.) 

 

While height is fairly strongly associated statistically with sex, other traits have virtually zero correlation. For example, intelligence, leadership ability, emotionality. Despite this, our social beliefs assign traits along gendered lines, leading to a general cultural belief that men are better than women in roles that come with higher wages and social status. (Including the fact that we still haven’t had a female president.) 

 

Back to drag. 

 

First, I want to mention an observation by Carson McCullers, who probably would identify as non-binary now. Humans before puberty, and in old age, look pretty much the same, whether male, female, or intersex. 

 

If you were to give a boy and a girl the same haircut, and dress them in the same clothes, they would look alike. And, if you raised them the same, they would largely act the same. (As the father of female children who could mix it up and get dirty with the best of the boys, I know this to be true.) The “differences” we see are at most at the statistical level, and, more likely, entirely due to socialization, not inherent differences. 

 

Likewise, shave beard and hair off an old woman and an old man and dress them in baggy clothes, and it would be harder than you think to tell them apart. 

 

What we are left with is a handful of secondary sex characteristics. Some of those are also merely statistical. Even as a teen, I had more hips than some girls. Some women have flatter chests than some men. (Breast reduction surgery is performed most on cisgender males, by the way.) Some men struggle to grow facial hair, while some women grow it. My wife’s voice is essentially in the same range as mine. The list goes on. 

 

Thus, it is actually fairly easy to swap the signals. Makeup is mostly associated with femininity in our culture, so put some on. Get a wig. Wear a dress. And, more than anything, adopt the mannerisms that are coded as “female” in our culture. Exaggerate them, and you have a drag queen. That’s really all there is to it. 

Shawn Rader as Georges Seurat in

Sundays in the Park With George

 

Shawn Rader (center top) - 

what a difference a little makeup makes

Because we humans are masters of picking up tiny differences, some people are better able to “pass” when performing. A tall man looks less like a woman to us, for example. (Something that causes problems for cisgender women who tend to be tall. Hate and bigotry toward transgender women often spills over into hostility toward any woman who doesn’t look “feminine” enough.) So the degree of “passing” will vary. 

 

Drag is about exaggeration, over-signalling, not passing, although some performers definitely are incredible at the illusion. And it is the illusion that is the source of discomfort for certain people. 

 

Because drag reveals that most of what we culturally experience as gender is mere artifice, mere signaling, it also invites us to consider what else in our culture is mere artifice, mere signaling. Or perhaps mere prejudice and a desire to keep people “in their lane.”

 

If femininity is a performance, then perhaps not all women prefer to be mothers, or love cooking and cleaning, or are okay with lower salaries. If masculinity is a performance, then perhaps men are not “naturally” unavailable emotionally, or naturally violent. 

 

I have been thinking about why it is that right wingers are currently losing their ever-loving shit over drag queens. 

 

Surely it isn’t an objection to acting performances generally. I mean, Jim Caviezel is not literally Jesus Christ, and people still went and saw that movie. And since right wingers at least claim to like Shakespeare, one has to assume that they are okay with all of his gender bending (to say nothing of the fact that males played all the female roles in Shakespeare’s day.) 

 

Although I am sure it is a reaction to the LGBTQ rights movement, and drag queens are seen as an easy target, I’m not even sure it is entirely that. Not all drag performers are gay, after all. (Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy were and are heterosexual, as far as I can tell, and their drag performances on the big screen are well known.) 

 

I think, rather, that it is because drag queens blur the distinction between genders, and invite that questioning of cultural gender roles and gender essentialism that is the issue. Right now, we are in an age of reactionism. The right wing wishes to undo the social progress of the past 100 years, and put women and minorities firmly back in their place, and LGBTQ people firmly back in the closet. 

 

Drag queens, by revealing that gender is a performance, open the possibility that “traditional” (aka Victorian middle class white) gender roles are not the only way to “be a man” or “be a woman.” They suggest that there are many ways to live our lives. 

 

And that is scaring the ever-loving shit out of right wingers. 

 

The story of my own family is illustrative of this. 

 

My wife is, by any reasonable definition, a cisgender woman. She has literally given birth to five children. She dresses in a way that our culture codes as feminine. She has longer hair than mine. She wears makeup most of the time. Within the framework of our mainstream culture here in 21st Century America, she socially signals her femininity just fine as far as appearances go. 

 

However, she doesn’t fit with the behavioral stereotypes of our culture. When we were preparing for marriage, we got some premarital counseling with an MFT, who gave us a series of personality tests. This was quite fun to do together, honestly, and also gave us important insights into each other that have been highly beneficial in our marriage. (I highly recommend getting secular premarital counseling before marriage or even cohabiting. It really does help with relationship skills.) 

 

One of those tests involved personality traits that code as masculine or feminine in our culture. 

 

I graded out fairly close to evenly balanced between masculine and feminine - I have traits that our society sees as one or the other. 

 

My wife graded out as 90% masculine. 

 

Yep, I’m very much the “girl” in our relationship. 

 

Understanding these traits helped us understand each other. And also understand that these were cultural interpretations, not inherent gendered traits. (In fact, many of my “feminine” traits would have been considered “masculine” at other times in history - for all their faults, the Victorians valued emotion in men.) 

 

What this does mean, however, is that my wife’s confidence, assertiveness, lack of manipulation and game-playing can get her labeled certain ways in our culture. Those traits are more valued in women than they used to be, but we have a long way to go still. They do, however, make her a good boss, which is why once the kids could handle her working day shift, she moved to management. (And she was definitely actively recruited.) 

 

Unfortunately, these same traits did not endear her to my mother, who has strong opinions about how women should perform “femininity.” These are also tied up with fundamentalist authoritarian religion for her, so failure to do things her way is also seen as defying God Almighty. 

 

My wife continued to work after the kids were born. We split breadwinning and childcare more equally. I took on a good bit of the cooking duties (at least until the kids were able to assist - now we each cook one day out of the week). Neither of us loves housework, so our house isn’t particularly spotless. My wife refused to see her body as a dirty source of (male) sin, and wore normal, flattering clothes. She didn’t spend her time as a mother freaking out about our kids experiencing pop culture of their generation. She didn’t act submissive, but like anyone’s equal. And, she advocated for herself openly, without resorting to manipulation and emotional blackmail (the way women of a certain generation were taught to do.) And, perhaps most unforgivable of all, she told my mom “no.” 

 

I really makes me sad that my mom chose to destroy a relationship over gender performance, but that’s exactly what happened. Unfortunately, when you believe you know the mind of God, your own cultural preferences become a divine mandate. And when you love your cultural preferences more than you love a child, you pick needless and senseless fights. 

 

We are also seeing this play out in our nation, with the right wing entirely sure that women are performing gender incorrectly, and need to get back to popping out [white] babies, staying in abusive marriages, and after they can no longer give birth, being unpaid child care workers. Certainly they shouldn’t be pursuing careers - women’s value is entirely tied up in their ability to make more humans. I have never before in my life seen this much vitriol directed at childless women. 

 

That same hatred toward women who won’t (or can’t) reproduce is behind the drag queen panic. Even by existing, both assert that femininity isn’t limited to one performance, or one system of one’s body. That there are many ways of living and of being a man or a woman (or neither.) And as a corollary, that women should be valued as humans, not as mere reproducers. 

 

So, get out and see a drag performance. Maybe go to one of those Drag Queen Story Hours if you have one in your area. Enjoy the artistry, the exaggeration. Relish those feelings of discomfort - that’s the social indoctrination you have had all your life experiencing cognitive dissonance. And ask yourself just how many of your beliefs about gender are really just cultural prejudice. If you are honest with yourself, you will see a lot when you open your eyes. 

Money in the Bank by P. G. Wodehouse

Source of book: I own this

 

I have made it my goal to read one P. G. Wodehouse book every year, even though I know that at that rate, I will never finish all his books - he lived a long life, and wrote an incredible number of books. 

 

I have written a lot about Wodehouse on this blog, starting with my introductory post. I will list all of the book reviews at the end of this post, should you wish to explore more. 

 

Money in the Bank dates to the 1940s, when Wodehouse was suffering from some unpopularity due to his boneheaded (although likely coerced) broadcasts from Nazi-occupied France during the war. I have discussed this a bit in my review of The Code of the Woosters. Wodehouse was not a fascist or a sympathizer - and none other than George Orwell - an OG of antifa to be sure - came to his defense. Indeed, in the runup to the war, The Code of the Woosters mocked British fascists such as Sir Oswald Mosley, parodying him in the character of Roderick Spode, one of the finest villains in Wodehouse’s work.

 

With Money in the Bank, Wodehouse avoids politics altogether, instead choosing to parody his usual bumbling aristocrats, but also private detectives and American con artists. And really, Wodehouse is hilarious when he takes on us Rebel Yanks and our unique shady elements. 

 

This book also does not contain any of the usual recurring characters - it is a stand alone story - but it does contain Shipley Hall and Lord Uffingham, who appear in a later book, Something Fishy. Shipley Hall was patterned after Fairlawne, a country house that Wodehouse’s daughter lived in after she married. 

 

As with any Wodehouse book, the characters and plot are complicated and filled with, um, complications. Let me see if I can set this up in a way that makes sense. 

 

Lord Uffingham is highly eccentric, and has just placed all of the family fortune (except for Shipley Hall) into diamonds, which he then hides in various places around the house. This goes wrong when he is in an accident which affects his memory. Now, he cannot find the diamonds, and has no way to pay his bills. 

 

Enter Clarissa Cork. Ms. Cork is a one-time adventuress, hunting game in Africa, who has now turned to the “health” industry as her profession. She rents Shipley Hall from Lord Uffingham to use as a vegetarian resort. 

 

Lord Uffingham’s niece, Anne, is Ms. Cork’s assistant, and negotiates the contract, which has the unusual term that the butler, Cakebread, must stay on. “Cakebread,” it turns out, is Lord Uffingham in disguise, and he stays on both to cosplay the butler and to search for the diamonds. 

 

But there is more! Anne is secretly engaged to Ms. Cork’s nephew, Lionel Green. Ms. Cork suspects the relationship, and does not approve. Lionel wants her to lend him money for the interior decorating firm he is trying to start, but she withholds the money until she is sure that he is not after Anne. Thus, Lionel insists Anne keep the engagement secret. 

 

As if this weren’t enough, there is a pair of shady con artists at the retreat, Soapy and Dolly Malloy. They are Americans from Chicago (of course!) who hope to get Ms. Cork to buy their fraudulent stock shares. But then, Soapy seems to be flirting with Ms. Cork, and Dolly suspects infidelity. (Although in reality, Ms. Cork is also being courted by Mr. Trumper, another guest.) 

 

Meanwhile, Ms. Cork catches Cakebread searching her room, and asks Anne to engage a private detective to watch him - she suspects he is trying to rob her. Dolly suggests her old buddy, J. Sherringham Adair, a private detective (and that isn’t his real name, either - it’s Chimp Twist…) 

 

When Anne goes to hire Adair, due to a series of humorous circumstances, Chimp is hiding in the cupboard, and Jeff Miller, a young attorney who has recently broken up with his fiance (to his great relief) and is coincidentally trying to apologize to Chimp, is mistaken for Chimp/Adair. Suddenly smitten with Anne, he impersonates Chimp/Adair in order to be near Anne. 

 

Oh, and it turns out, he is an old school enemy of Lionel Green. And Chimp shows up at Shipley Hall after he hears about the missing diamonds from Dolly, and….

 

Well….complications. 

 

And hilarity, of course. 

 

Will the diamonds ever be found? Who will win the hand of Anne, Lionel or Jeff? Will Chimp, Dolly, and Soapy get away with a heist? Can they even get along for long enough to pull anything off? 

 

I guess you will have to read the book. 

 

As usual, I have a bunch of witty lines to share. Some may be spoilers, so you can feel free to stop here and read the book first if you like. 

 

First, from Mr. Shoesmith, Jeff’s intended father-in-law (before the engagement is broken a couple chapters in.) 

 

Jeff had his little circles of admirers, but Mr. Shoesmith was not a member of it. About the nastiest jolt of the well-known solicitor’s experience had been the one he had received on the occasion, some weeks previously, when his only daughter had brought this young man home and laid him on the mat, announcing in her authoritative way that they were engaged to be married. 

He had said ‘Oh, my God!’ or something civil of that sort, but it was only with difficulty that he had been able to speak at all.

 

 For that matter, Jeff isn’t at all sure he wants to marry Myrtle Shoesmith. 

 

He was still quite at a loss to understand how the ghastly thing had happened. The facts seemed to suggest that he must have let fall some passing remark which had given the girl the impression he was proposing to her, but he nad no recollection of having done anything so cloth-headed. All he knew was that at a certain point of time in an evening party he had been a happy, buoyant young fellow, making light conversation to Myrtle Shoesmith behind a potted palm, and at another point in time, only a moment later, or so it seemed to him, he was listening appalled to Myrtle Shoesmith discussing cake and bridesmaids. The whole thing was absolutely sudden and unexpected, like an earthquake or a waterspout or any other Act of God.

 

This is, of course, a recurrent trope in Wodehouse - the accidentally trapped bachelor. But somehow, he manages to find a new and hilarious way of telling the story, with yet another witty and well turned sequence of words. 

 

The description by Dolly of the vegetarian retreat is also good. 

 

“It’s a sort of a crazy joint. You eat vegetables and breathe deep and dance around in circles. It’s supposed to be swell for the soul.”

 

Wodehouse usually finds at least one place in every book to sneak a ridiculously long and rare word, often in the most unexpected place. Here is the moment in this book. 

 

Anne Benedick had been waiting in the hall of Lord Uffingham’s club some ten minutes before his lordship finally appeared, descending the broad staircase with one hand glued to the arm of a worried-looking Bishop, with whom he was discussing Supralapsarianism. At the sight of Anne, he relaxed his grip, and the Bishop shot gratefully off in the direction of the Silence Room. 

 

If you are enough of a theology nerd to recognize the reference to Calvinist doctrine, congratulations. 

 

For Jeff, one of his biggest problems is that, since he is impersonating someone, he needs to find a way to keep those who know either him or Chimp from blowing his cover. For Lionel, even though they are enemies, he is able to use a carrot and a stick to keep him in line. (I won’t spoil it.) And he keeps his promise. 

 

He had never been fond of Lionel Green, and saw little prospect of being fond of him in the future, but there are moments when common humanity makes us sink our prejudices.

 

Not that he is entirely successful in his quest. Dolly, for one, would prefer he meet his demise. Jeff finds he respects her. 

 

And in addition to her psychic gifts, it now appeared, she had also this remarkable capacity for direct and rapid action. True, after swallowing most of his cigarette and looking up with a jerk that nearly dislocated his neck, he had not actually observed her leaning over the banisters, but an ormolu clock, last seen on an antique chest of drawers on a first floor landing, does not descend into the hall of its own volition, and he had no hesitation in assuming that Dolly’s was the hand which had started it on its downward course. He might be wronging her, but he did not think so. 

 

There is also this later passage, a musing by Soapy.

 

Dolly had always been the brains of the firm. He himself, he was aware, had his limitations. Give him a sympathetic listener, preferably one who in his formative years had been kicked on the head by a mule, a clear half-hour in which to talk Oil and plenty of room to wave his hands, and he could accomplish wonders. But apart from this one talent he was not a very gifted man, and he knew it.

 

Chimp Twist gets his own fun line later, when he decides to show up at Shipley Hall, not expecting what he will find. 

 

The hour of seven-fifteen found Chimp Twist at the main gates of Shipley Hall, humming a gay air beneath his breath and feeling that God was in His heaven and all right with the world. He surveyed the rolling parkland, and admired it enormously. He listened to the carolling of the birds, and thought how sweet their music was. Even an insect, which got entangled in his moustache, struck him as probably quite a decent insect, if one had only got to know it. His mood, in short, was one of saccharine benevolence. 

 

I appreciate the reference to Browning there. This moustache comes in for a bit of further action later, in this exchange between Chimp and Lord Uffingham - I quote just the highlights, because it goes on for a full page. 

 

‘That moustache. Had it long?’ he asked, like a doctor making the preliminary inquisition concerning some rare type of disease. ‘When did you first feel it coming on?’

…

‘Sometimes I use wax.’

‘Beeswax?’

‘Just ordinary wax.’

‘And that’s what makes it stick out?’

‘Yessir, that’s what makes it stick out.’

‘Well, it looks bloody awful. If it was mine, I’d have it off at the roots.’

 

Ironically, here it is Lord Uffingham who gets the subjunctive mood wrong. Later, he takes Anne to task for it, after she storms out of the room saying “I wouldn’t marry Mr. Miller if he was the last man on earth.” 

 

‘Not “was”. “I wouldn’t marry Mr. Miller if he were the last man on earth.” Dash it,’ said Lord Uffingham, driving home his point, ‘the thing’s a conditional clause.’

 

People hiding in various places are another recurring situation both in this book and in Wodehouse generally. Chimp takes refuge in a wardrobe, which, unfortunately, turns out to be in Mr. Trumper’s room. But before that, he sees Chimp dash up the stairs. 

 

Thoughts of burglars flashed into Mr. Trumper’s mind. Then he dismissed the idea. Burglars, he reflected, were creatures of the night and would not be likely to put on what amouinted to a matinee performance. Nor did they, it occurred to him, skim up stairs in this volatile fashion. They prowled and prowled around, like the hosts of Midian, but always, or so he had been given to understand, at a reasonable pace. 

 

Mr. Trumper’s character can be summed up in this line about what he did when he heard Chimp sneeze. 

 

Eustace Trumper had no objection to danger to the person, provided it was some other person.

 

Anne is, to put it mildly, slow to warm to the idea of loving Jeff rather than Lionel. Lord Uffingham is on Jeff’s side, at least. I loved this explanation of why Uffingham thinks Anne picked Lionel.

 

‘That,’ he concluded, becoming profound, ‘is the whole trouble with fellers like Lionel Green. If you see one without actually wanting to kick him, you think, “This must be love.”’

 

It is predictable what will happen, if you know your Wodehouse. 

 

In the relations of Lionel Green and Anne Benedick, there had always been on the part of the former something a little superior, a shade condescending. A charming girl, he had felt, but one who required moulding. He had looked on himself as the wise instructor with the promising pupil. And now, all of a sudden, she had changed into something formidable and intimidating. 

I myself just went ahead and married the formidable and intimidating woman. Which was a wise choice. 

 

And, speaking of weak, insecure men, here is another appearance by Soapy. 

 

At his least appearance in this chronicle, it may be remembered, Soapy Molloy was far from being in debonair mood. Introduced to the pistol which he was now bearing with such a flourish, like a carefree waiter carrying an order of chipped potatoes, he had quailed visibly, as if he had found himself fondling a scorpion. 

 

Finally, at the risk of spoilers, this hilarious exchange. 

 

‘You were kissing me? It was not just a lovely dream?’

‘No. I was kissing you. You see, I thought you were dead.’

Jeff paused. They were approaching the nub. From this point, he would have to follow her answers very carefully.

‘Do I have to be dead for you to kiss me?’

‘Not at all. I would prefer it otherwise.’

Jeff’s brain was still a little clouded. 

‘I don’t quite follow this.’

 

Good stuff. As always, I recommend Wodehouse for classic British humor. 

***

 

The Wodehouse books:

 

The Adventures of Sally

Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen

Biffen’s Millions

Cocktail Time

The Code of the Woosters     

Jeeves and the Mating Season

Love Among the Chickens

The Luck of the Bodkins

Summer Lightning

Thank You Jeeves

Uncle Dynamite

Uncle Fred in the Springtime

The Uncollected Wodehouse

Young Men in Spats

 

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Source of book: I own this.

 

This book was this month’s selection for The Literary Lush Book Club, our monthly gathering of friends to discuss books. It is difficult to believe, but I think I have been part of this club for seven years? It has been a wonderful experience because of the great people who are part of it. 

 

This book has an interesting back story within our club. Typically, we nominate books for a three-month period, then vote. Top three win, and we read those. The fourth most popular book gets renominated for December - our “second chance” month. 

 

This cycle, one of the books that won was nominated by a friend. It looked interesting to me, and apparently enough of us agreed. 

 

The problem was, nobody noticed that it wouldn’t actually be published until….December. So much for that. This meant kind of a last minute pivot. We picked The Bell Jar because it came in fourth and because it was easy to obtain quickly. I myself found a cheap paperback to add to my library. 

I wanted to find a less depressing picture of Plath - she was more than her illness and suicide.

I was surprised at this book, honestly. I expected it to be really dark and depressing. It isn’t. It is actually full of humor and positivity, and brilliant writing. Sure, it is about a descent into mental illness and attempted suicide, but it is about a lot of other things as well. 

 

The tragedy of Plath’s life is well known, of course. She committed suicide at age 30, during a time of incredible stress. Her life choices were, more than anything else, catastrophic for a person like herself - but they were made largely in response to societal pressures and expectations. One wonders if she had been born in the 1980s rather than the 1930s, if she would have felt free to eschew marriage and motherhood, as well as found better help for her mental health. If only…

 

The book does have its flaws. Most notably, the kind of casual racism that is unfortunately common in white writers of the 20th Century. And also, a lot of casual homophobia and gay stereotyping that has aged terribly. At least in the case of the latter, she has the excuse that the science hadn’t caught up with reality yet, and she died six years before Stonewall brought gay rights to the attention of the mainstream. 

 

I would also say that the book has some uneven writing, as one would expect for a first novel by a young writer. When the writing is good, it is really good, but there are some clunky spots too. 

 

As with any semi-autobiographical work, it is difficult to tell where Plath’s reality ends and fiction begins. She didn’t want the book published in the United States, because she knew people would recognize themselves in the book. Her mother was a bit traumatized, which is too bad, because I felt that it was a rather sympathetic portrayal. Anyone who thinks the mother is the villain in this book has missed the point. 

 

For many of us in the book club, we saw ourselves in Plath’s protagonist, Esther. For me, the feeling of being good at school, but not at life, reminds me SO MUCH of my early 20s. I have always had Imposter Syndrome, so Esther’s struggles really resonated for me. 

 

Another club member pointed out that he felt the core of the book was Esther’s metaphor of the fig tree. She sits on a branch, unable to decide which fig to eat, and while she fails to decide, they wither and rot and she starves. 

 

This too is real. Trying to choose a life path is tough, and sometimes all those choices can be paralyzing. 

 

Given the social pressures Esther is under: growing up poor due to her father’s untimely death, her constant pressure to excel so she can get scholarships, the competing pressure to marry money and stability, her difficulty in social situations that the rich girls thrive in - it actually feels perfectly natural that she goes crazy. From inside Esther’s head, a mental breakdown and suicide feel perfectly logical. That is the power of the book, bringing all that to life. 

 

But amidst this are so many humorous observations. Esther’s takedown of the fashion industry in New York City, the incident where the young women all get violently ill from food poisoning, the petty politics in mental institutions, and so many more, are laugh out loud funny. Again, I was not expecting that. 

 

I ended up writing down a bunch of lines that I loved in the book, for various reasons. 

 

I’ll start with a fun legal thing from the introduction. The book was first published in England, but Plath didn’t want it published in the United States. The problem wasn’t merely that copies could be - and indeed were - smuggled in. The law at the time (“Ad Interim”) was that any book by an American citizen and first published abroad had to be published in the US within 6 months, or it became public domain. 

 

Yikes! 

 

So, American publishers figured out really quick that they could simply publish it without paying royalties. This put Plath’s estate in a bind, and it had to agree to release the US rights and publish the book, so they could could get paid - it was going to be published either way. 

 

The book starts with Esther’s trip to New York, for an internship of sorts. She and the other young women were expected to enjoy the city, but Esther can’t seem to do so. 

 

I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react.

 

This really sets the stage for her eventual breakdown. It is a classic symptom of depression or a depressive episode. 

 

The one thing that does seem to break through for her is a hot bath. Her description is amazing. 

 

I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath. I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don’t believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

 

I also loved her bit about how to survive an upscale dinner. 

 

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty. 

 

She recalls an earlier incident, when she made a pretty hilarious mistake. 

 

That was where I saw my first fingerbowl. The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs. Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done. 

 

One line that got a lot of discussion at our club was the passage where Esther recounts all of the things she can’t do. 

 

I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it. The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. 

 

That’s where the fig tree story comes in.

 

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. 

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Contantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. 

 

That’s just brilliant. Looking back from nearly a half century old, I can certainly see how each decision has foreclosed many others. Some of these decisions I made myself, and I generally think I made the choices I would take again. Others were made for me, sometimes against my will, by my parents, and those are the ones I “regret” the most, although there is always the question of if I had been, for example, in a position to marry my wife if we hadn’t gone down the cult route. So it’s complicated. 

 

“Constantin,” by the way, is a vaguely foreign guy Esther goes out with. She ends up a bit disappointed that he isn’t interested in being her first sexual partner. But the food, though, that’s another matter. 

 

Constantin’s restaurant smelt of herbs and spices and sour cream. All the time I had been in New York I had never found such a restaurant. I only found those Heavenly Hamburger places, where they serve giant hamburgers and soup-of-the-day and four kinds of fancy cake at a very clean counter facing a long glarey mirror.

To reach this sort of restaurant we had to climb down seven dimly lit steps into a sort of cellar. 

 

My travel advice for everyone: wherever you go, no matter where you are, find this kind of restaurant. 

 

The book is also very much about sex, and coming-of-age, and especially about the double standard. When Esther finds out that Buddy, the local boy she thinks she is going to marry, has had a month’s long fling with a waitress, she decides that keeping herself “pure” is overrated, and seeks throughout the book to toss her virginity to….someone. Whoever she can get. 

 

There are multiple flashbacks in the book, often involving boys she knew. She mentions Eric, a southern boy at Yale, who she considers sleeping with, until he tells how he lost his virginity in a brothel. It wasn’t a thrilling experience. 

 

It was boring as going to the toilet. I said maybe if you loved a woman it wouldn’t seem so boring, but Eric said it would be spoiled by thinking this woman too was just an animal like the rest, so if he loved anybody he would never go to bed with her. 

 

Yeesh. That’s pretty sad too. I for one think that sex with a woman you love isn’t close to boring, but maybe your mileage might vary. 

 

This episode led to a recollection of one of those “purity culture” articles Esther read, that claimed that the best men were virgins on the wedding night, and even if they weren’t, they would want to be the ones to teach their virgin wives about sex. And how men lose all respect for a woman who will sleep with them (or others) and yada yada yada. (Been there, heard that a few thousand times…) Esther has a different perspective. 

 

Now the one thing this article didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl felt. 

It might be nice to be pure and then to marry a pure man, but what if he suddenly confessed he wasn’t pure after we were married, the way Buddy Willard had? I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a pure single life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not. 

 

Esther is right, of course. The whole point of the sexual double standard has always been to keep men from having to raise children that aren’t biologically theirs. It is solely from the male perspective, addresses male concerns, and really expects male ownership of women. 

 

Also, as an attorney who has done family law for a couple decades, I can attest that sexual experience is actually not related to success or failure of a marriage. (Unless someone chooses to make it an issue.) I have seen two-virgin marriages come apart viciously, and I have seen excellent and lasting marriages between two people who had prior spouses and partners. If you are going to focus on anything, find a spouse who matches you in their approach to financial matters - and who is willing to be an equal breadwinner. Trust me on this - egalitarian marriages with financial compatibility are the most lasting statistically. 

 

Whether or not Esther is justified in despising Buddy for his fling, what is clear is that she does not love him anyway, and he is a bit of a prick - a normal prick for the 1950s white culture - but still a prick. 

 

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn’t want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

 

Unfortunately, that was the reality for too many women in that era. And even our own. There is still definitely that expectation in some subcultures. My parents fully expected that after having children, my wife would “feel differently” about her career. When it turned out she didn’t feel differently, and went back to work after each birth, they felt obliged to despise and denigrate her (particularly my mother.) 

 

In Plath’s actual life, she married poet Ted Hughes, who was abusive, but even more than that, entitled. Sure, she wanted to write and all, but he still expected her to do all the child care, all the housework, all the cooking. 

 

I think she would have been far happier had she felt free to be childless. But at least he could have helped out equally. More on this later. 

 

There is another passage where she talks about a certain incompatibility with Buddy that sounded very familiar. To be clear here: no two people are completely “compatible” and if they could be, things would likely be boring. 

 

I found it hard to imagine Buddy lying quietly. His whole philosophy of life was to be up and doing every second. Even when we went to the beach in the summer he never lay down to drowse in the sun the way I did. He ran back and forth or played ball or did a little series of rapid pushups to use the time.

 

This is me and my wife at times. I am the one who likes to vacation hard, to be doing stuff. She likes to rest and relax. We compromise on this like we do on other things, and we actually do enjoy vacationing with each other. But we have different natural styles, which is why we also vacation separately from time to time. (I camp, she chills at the beach…) 

 

Esther’s first real shot at sex comes when a friend of her friend’s current flame takes her out to a party, and eventually tries to rape her. This is one incident where there is some unfortunate homophobia on display. 

 

I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Women-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one. 

 

While in its most obvious sense, she means he is a misogynist - and he is. But it is also implied that he swings the other way, so to speak. Again, this is a dated and inaccurate stereotype about gay men: that they are irresistible to women, and that they hate women, leading to rape. Ouch. 

 

Later in the book, after Buddy is sent to a sanitarium for tuberculosis, and falls in love with a nurse, that nurse has a mental break and ends up in the same mental hospital as Esther. It is strongly implied that Joan, is at least bisexual. She is caught in a compromising position with another woman, and she goes on and on about Buddy’s mother. 

 

I think there is also the implication that Joan has the hots for Esther, and, after Esther finally does have sex, relapses and commits suicide. Yeah, kind of some bad “lesbian dies at the end” vibes there. 

 

There is also this:

 

I wondered if all women did with other women was lie and hug.

 

Esther, for her part, can’t bond with anyone, so she pushes Joan away. This passage is fascinating for its depiction of how mental illness alienates. 

 

I looked at Joan. In spite of the creepy feelings, and in spite of my old, ingrained dislike, Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own. 

 

There is a fascinating scene after Joan’s death, when Buddy shows up to visit Esther, and notes that both women he has wanted to marry have attempted suicide. He wonders if it is him, or them. 

 

Many many years later, after Ted Hughes’ longtime partner committed suicide, he wondered the same thing. Was he seeing himself in The Bell Jar? 

 

I also liked the description of the psychiatrist’s office. She skewers psychiatrists throughout the book, and it hits home because there still is a lot of god-complex and condescension in the profession. 

 

Doctor Gordon’s waiting room was hushed and beige. The walls were beige, and the carpets were beige, and the upholstered chairs and sofas were beige. 

 

Here we are in the 21st Century and the era of beige has returned…

 

As the book comes to a close, there are a lot of further musings about marriage and sex and children. Some of these come when she is being fitted with a diaphragm. 

 

She also makes the mistake of looking through an issue of Baby Talk, and the babies all nauseate her. Nope, she should not have had children. 

 

“What I hate is the thought of being under a man’s thumb,” I had told Doctor Nolan. “A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.” 

 

And also:

 

I climbed up on the examination table, thinking: “I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway, regardless…” 

 

This really is the great freedom that contraception has brought: the freedom to not get stuck. I have long wondered about the risk women take when marrying, particularly without sexual experience. A man is pretty guaranteed to be able to orgasm, but if statistics are any indication, a hell of a lot of men can’t find a clitoris with a map. If nothing else, a little experience can determine if a man is willing to learn or not, if they make female pleasure a priority. 

 

Just one of many things that I have reconsidered over the last few decades. So many things have their roots in either racism or misogyny, and finding an ethical way forward often means reconsidering things that I was taught were right and wrong, whether female subservience, or human sexuality. 

 

Anyway, I enjoyed this book, found it better than expected, and can see why it is considered an essential classic of the mid-20th Century. 

 

A Quarter Century Together

 

Today is the 25th Anniversary of the first date my wife and I went on together. 

 

For those who wondered, we had coffee, then watched The Comedy of Errors at a local theater. This clearly set a precedent, because we have enjoyed attending live theater together ever since. And coffee is a given in our household. 

 

It has long been traditional to commemorate the anniversary of a marriage - that date when two persons pledge their undying love. But I decided to take note of our anniversary of being together, which, in a way, is every bit as important to me as our marriage. 

 

It isn’t that I think marriage is meaningless. Quite the contrary. But relationships are more of a continuum than a series of plateaux with clear and clean dividing lines. 

 

For my wife and I, once we started dating, we both pretty much knew we were getting married, even if her first proposal to me (four months later) or mine to her (four months after that) would be in the future for us. 

 

From then on, our relationship gradually became more intimate in every way all the way up until our marriage. And, for that matter, it has grown more intimate thereafter. Marriage mostly meant we now shared a household, and could wake up next to each other. 

 

We now have a quarter century of building a life together. That is more than half of our lifetimes with each other than without. 

 

Things have changed a lot over those years. She is no longer that 19 year old starting her second year of college. I am no longer that 23 year old in law school. 

 

We have five children (more than we expected, but all of them welcome), three of which are adults now, and the other two of which are teenagers. We had a lot of great years with infants, toddlers, kids, and teens, and are enjoying seeing them grow into the people they were meant to be. 

 

We have survived a pandemic, a real estate collapse, 20 years of working a day/night shift split, and significant ongoing political unrest. 

 

We have walked the streets of Paris and New York City together. 

 

There are too many memories and too many events in our quarter century to even begin to list. 

 

As in any long term close human relationship, we have had our share of stress, squabbles, crises, reconciliations, passion, exhaustion, and surprises. That’s the nature of being human and living with other humans. 

 

But the beauty of a truly companionate marriage is that you are good friends, equals, co-conspirators against whatever comes your way. 

 

Neither of us could have predicted how our lives would look now, but all of the unexpected is easier and better with a good partner. Everything is better when you have someone who has your back, who supports you when you are struggling, who brings you good and not evil all the days of your life. 

 

I also greatly appreciate having a partner who can be counted on to show excellent judgment in everything. This is something I did not have in my birth family, where profoundly poor judgment was all too common. A steady, thoughtful, informed, and open-minded partner is to be treasured. 

 

Where our lives will go from here is anyone’s guess. We live in Interesting Times, for better and for worse. But I cannot think of anyone I would rather face the future with than her. 

 

Here’s to the next quarter century!

 Still beautiful. This was at a Hollywood Bowl concert earlier this month.

***

 

If you want to read my other mushy posts:

20th Anniversary

Love in the Time of Covid-19

A Prime Marriage

Night Shift at the Hospital on Christmas Eve

Changing Together - 16th Anniversary

What I Learned About My Wife in Fifteen Years of Marriage

A Fortnight of Years

Thirteen

Love at First Sight

12th Anniversary

Valentine’s Day 2013

Valentine’s Day 2012

 

 

 

Like Most Revelations by Richard Howard

Source of book: I own this

 

I first discovered Richard Howard quite recently - earlier this year - when I read his translation of Spleen and Ideal, which is part of Baudelaire’s anthology, The Flowers of Evil. It seemed particularly to capture the music of the original, so I decided to see what I could find from Howard. I purchased a used hardback at low cost, and decided to read a bit of it this month. 

 

Richard Howard was known for a variety of writing: essays, translations, poetry, criticism. But it was his poetry that won him a Pulitzer in 1969. I chose to read a different collection, just because. 

 

Howard had an interesting childhood. He never knew his birth parents, or his original last name, only that they were poor and Jewish, and that he had a sister that he never was able to meet. When he was an infant, his adoptive parents divorced, and his mother changed both of their names to “Howard,” which was apparently an anglicized version of one of her other ex-husbands’ last name. 

 

Howard was openly gay, and LGBTQ themes often appear in his later works. There is a particularly amusing anecdote about a conversation he had with W. H. Auden, a friend (and also gay), where Howard complained about a colleague using homophobic and antisemitic slurs. Auden reportedly quipped, "My dear, I never knew you were Jewish!"

 

I also found it fascinating that Howard was renowned for his huge collection of books - the walls of his NewYork apartment were lined with them. I kind of aspire to that, and have a pretty good start. 

 

 

His poetry tends toward longer forms, particularly the “dramatic monologue,” a form that Robert Browning particularly used. I can see some definite parallels. Another throwback technique that Howard used extensively is the literary reference. He quotes and repurposes lines from Shakespeare, Henry James, and many others throughout his poems. 

 

I would say that his poems require a solid background in literature, art, philosophy, and ideas to fully appreciate. The Easter Eggs are hidden everywhere, ready to be discovered by anyone who knows what they are. 

 

Because many of the poems in this collection are on the longer side - several pages, typically - they aren’t quite as quotable in full as many of the poets I feature on this blog. Rather, I mostly noted excellent and memorable lines within the poems. This doesn’t mean the whole poems aren’t good - they are - but just that quoting them in full would take too much space and time to type out. 

 

There are a few, however, that I definitely want to use in full. First up is the title poem, which I think is amazing. 

 

Like Most Revelations

 

It is the movement that incites the form,

discovered as a downward rapture—yes,

it is the movement that delights the form,

sustained by its own velocity.  And yet

 

it is the movement that delays the form

while darkness slows and encumbers; in fact

it is the movement that betrays the form,

baffled in such toils of ease, until

 

it is the movement that deceives the form, 

beguiling our attention—we supposed

it is the movement that achieves the form.

Were we mistaken?  What does it matter if

 

it is the movement that negates the form?

Even though we give (give up) ourselves

to this mortal process of continuing,

it is the movement that creates the form.

 

Lovers of philosophy will of course see the argument between Plato and Aristotle. Is the nature of the universe the eternal unchanging form? Or is it change itself? Howard leans toward Aristotle, but it is more complicated than that, isn’t it? 

 

This is my favorite poem in the collection, and honestly, one of my new favorite poems of all time. The repetition, the use of form along with motion within that form, the way the form and the meaning and the movement all are connected and inseparable. That’s true genius and craftsmanship. 

 

The other poem I decided to quote in full is, unexpectedly, a tribute to Robert Phelps, an editor and writer who seems to have been well known in literary circles, and not so much out of them. I mean, you can find his NYT obituary, a book about his (possibly romantic) correspondence with James Salter, and a handful of articles in literary publications, but he doesn’t even have an entry on Wikipedia. (A mathematician of the same name does…)

 

I hadn’t heard of him either, but looked him up. In any case, he is immortalized in a particularly excellent poem. Contained within are nearly as many biographical details as the obituary, but told with true personal affection, good-natured humor, and insightful observations. 

 

For Robert Phelps, Dead at Sixty-six

 

The Times reports six years in Elyria,

            browbeaten suburb of your childhood

before my own had begun in Shaker Heights,

            the brighter side of Cleveland’s tracks…

 

years I never took into account, nonplussed

            by your habit of addressing me

- or any other man you regarded as 

            Worthy of the gaudy attention

 

to bookish leanings and upstanding looks

            you were gaily ready to bestow -

as “my dear boy,” “my son” and “my child,” although

            you were clearly the one to be raised

 

- or lowered - to the permanently askew

            level of our promiscuities;

it became entertainment, “telling Robert”

            last night’s scurrilous episode

 

and watching your vicarious blush appear,

            followed by the squeal of gratified

incredulity which greeted each disgrace…

            Oneself is always an abstraction -

 

le concret, ce sont les autres. To which end

            you listened more intently, waiting

like some credulous minotaur in his cave

            for Theseus to arrive, whereupon

 

you became Ariadne, eager to oblige.

            What can we relish if we recoil

from vulgarity? Not your problem, was it?

            Masterpieces you called “strenuous,”

 

and were satisfied - or so you asserted -

            with patching up Colette, endless

apprenticeships to other men’s disclosures,

            Jouhandeau, Wescott, Cocteau - not “works”

 

but the launching-pad that sends the rocket up;

            how gleefully you would disparage

or dismiss the monuments I so envied,

            standing emulously in their shade…

 

What you wanted - it amounted to addiction -

            was life recounted without design,

without that tyranny - just “the real thing strange”:

            letters, diaries, secrets written down,

 

and not having to dilute or deprave them -

            better one bold astronomer

than any number of big decorous stars!

            Even silence can be indiscreet,

 

and not everything we make up is a lie.

            About a thousand book reviews

made you too familiar to care much for Fame -

            what you liked was how others were moved,

 

strangers. Your own maneuvers you confined to

            the background - more room there than up front

where  the young struggle and sweat for their applause

Lovely, though, those intervals of flesh

 

under hot lights! Such was your gran rifiuto:

            I wonder if the delicacy

of your domesticities (that son unseen,

            that wife dedicated to her art)

 

made your love for men the mirror type

            of mine, you the critical voyeur

resisting “production,” I proliferating

            among nameless bodies, finding soon

 

how many were dying who never used to…

            Granted: you would not write. Then your hand

began to shake so, you could not write. It was

            Parkinson’s, as we would discover

 

but was it not at first a failure of your will?

            Those years you passed off as “successes,”

triumphant manipulations of decor;

            I recall seasons when you devised

 

“literaries” - a noun, voyons - for our latest

            Mme. Verdurin. Besides the fun,

she paid far better than mere authorship, since

            the rich, my dear, are always with us.

 

I sat at those tables with you, glib, grinning,

            ungainly, so greedy for limelight

on my terms and abashed by your forbearance,

            those evenings of unavailing skill.

 

Silence = Death, according to the slogan

            broadcast for AIDS. Yours was another

silence, as you said with an absurd chuckle;

            a guy can’t go on living all the time.

 

At least it was not the plague, not our plague, only

            Parkinson’s, only cancer. You smiled,

invoking plausible pretexts - embarrassed

            (such was your humility) to die

 

among the victims, to benefit even

            erroneously from emotion

reserved for the unwarrantable dead.

            Forty years out of Cleveland, we live

 

and die in the same Village now, Robert dear,

            and Shaker Heights seems quite as good

a place to have gone from as your Elyria.

            It was the wrong family member

 

you summoned up: you are the man I should be

            if I had not been the child I was;

not son, not father either, but - I know it now -

            the lost brother found, Vale frater.

 

There are quite a few things worth mentioning about that. First, Shaker Heights, where Howard grew up (his grandmother was wealthy), is quite a story in itself - and the setting for Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. I talked about the place a bit in that post. 

 

I also LOVE this line: 

 

better one bold astronomer

than any number of big decorous stars!

            Even silence can be indiscreet,

 

and not everything we make up is a lie.

 

I also noted the reference to “delicacy of your domesticity.” Phelps was married, with a kid, but, as the poem indicates, he was probably gay. Not that uncomment back in the day for a man to enter a marriage with a woman (and vice versa) with the understanding that there would be sex on the side with same sex partners. Preserve the appearance, gain the benefits of children and family. 

 

And, like so many of Howard’s later poems, the specter of AIDS haunting everything. Also that line, “a guy can’t go on living all the time.” Such great sardonic humor. 

 

The rest of the lines I want to highlight are just moments from longer poems. The first of these is from “Occupations,” which is essentially a dramatic monologue. “Essentially,” because it isn’t clear to me if the prose sections that are scattered throughout the poem are responses from another character, or memories of past conversations. 

 

The poetic parts are set in the form of a letter by an unnamed author to the painter, Matisse. The poem discusses (with a tremendous amount of wit) various impressionist and post-impressionist artists, art criticism, and a bunch of other related topics. It really is a lot of fun, particularly if you love art. 

 

(I recommend What Are You Looking At? by Will Gompertz for a better understanding of modern art - it really helped me understand the stuff in this poem as well as making my visits to modern art museums much deeper.)

 

The one line I wanted to feature is one in a discussion of Picasso and his unnatural colors, particularly as ripped by a critic who perhaps didn’t get the point. Quoting the critic:

 

If he looks long enough he’ll wind up

adding a little yellow, instead

of deciding what color

the sky really ought to be.

Is that painting? No,

that’s taking advice 

from Nature, asking

her to supply you

with information.

 

 The next line is from “Poem Beginning with a Line by Isadora Duncan.” I am not entirely sure I understand the poem, but what I can make out is that it is about a love affair with a man - and not a particularly great one. The details are the difficulty - one feels like inside information would be helpful. The sex is described very obliquely, as poems are wont to do, and with a wry humor. In or out of context, there are a pair of lines that are just great, no matter what. 

 

Laughter has no erectile tendencies

 

And:

 

My resistances, as I have called them, were

            no more than submissions

to Animal, Vegetable, Mineral Realms -

            flower, dog, druggery. 

 

I’ll end with a line from “For David Kalstone.” Kalstone was another gay writer and critic, who died of AIDS in 1986. It is another touching obituary, but one tinged as well with anger at the horrifically inhumane response of the Reagan administration and the government more generally to the health crisis. 

 

This passage really stood out to me: the opening of the poem. 

 

My own stake in his story had been pulled up

            years before such benignly recounted

elemental emptyings, comminglings; and

            wisdom asserts it is delusional 

folly to dwell on the past. Well past sixty,

            I know little more about wisdom now

than we did at thirty, but lots more about

            folly, and of course I tell what I know - 

 

This really resonates with me these days. As I approach 50, I don’t know how much more I know about wisdom than I did at 30, but I have seen such folly on display - indeed flaunted proudly as if it were an honor - in the Trump Era, that I can certainly say I know more about folly now than I did then. The amount of moral stupidity that is celebrated by my former religious tribe is astonishing and horrifying, but there you have it. 

 

Richard Howard’s poems are not much like other ones I have read; they have a unique style, a blending of old and new, a formality, and a unique focus and perspective. I look forward to reading the rest of his collections.