Charlie

I hated to have it end. It was one of the best, most memorable, most informative books I have ever read.

My spouse loved The Wright Brothers, so it's on my list for the near future.

I read only Swann's Way, many years ago, and I don't remember a word of it.

I think you and I may be the only persons on this site (maybe on the Internet) who have ever read Wieland. When I wanted to teach it in an AmLit course a couple of decades ago, I found it had been out of print for years. (Any other Brockden Brown fans out there?)

I knew we must have something in common: I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on Jane Austen, tried to write a novel once about a lost manuscript by her sister Cassandra, and still re-read her novels occasionally (I recently finished Sense and Sensibility again). I visited her home at Chawton several times, and did some research in the Austen papers at St. John's College, Cambridge. But I never joined the Jane Austen Society, because zealots make me uncomfortable. At the moment, I am working my way through Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, which I was given as a gift when it was first published, but somehow sat unread on my bookshelf for the last half century. However, I don't read much fiction anymore. I prefer history and biography instead. Concurrent with the Styron, I am reading Augustus to Constantine: The Thrust of the Christian Movement into the Roman World, which is dry and academic, but informative. I am learning more about the theological positions of Eusebius and Tertullian than I ever knew before (and I am sure I will have forgotten it by next week). As WilliamM noted, Lucky used to prod us to talk about books we were reading--he is a voracious reader, but our tastes and interests are totally different--but I have seen little about books since he left. He hoped that the Comedy&Tragedy forum would provide a home for book discussion, because it tends to get lost in the Lounge.

The mere contemplation of the subject makes me weak in the knees, and not from pleasurable anticipation.

My first serious sexual experience was with someone who picked me up in the Port Authority Terminal in 1960, so I think of it fondly.

I was assigned "The Power Broker" in a graduate political science class, and it was the most enlightening text I read in any course that whole year.

I was in the new one in Liege, Belgium, a few months ago. It was designed by Santiago Calatrava, and is spectacular.

I used to commute daily in and out of Penn Station in the 1960s, while the new one was being built aboveground. It was a mess, but I figured that once they were finished with the rebuilding, it would be OK. It wasn't.

No, but I have been to Durham at that time of year, though I have never seen it from that angle.

It looks like Durham Cathedral to me.

This thread caused me to rummage through my drawers, where I found a dozen copies of other magazines I bought on 42nd Street in the mid to late 1950s, like "Body Beautiful," "Adonis," "Vim," "Tomorrow's Man," and "Popular Man." They are very small format, mostly 4x6 inches or 5x8 inches, and most cost 25 cents. A few have color photos on the covers, but everything else is black and white. Some of them had names and addresses of the photographers in the back, and one night while I was sharing the mags with my best friend (we were both teenagers), he noticed that one of the photographers lived near us in the New York suburbs. He suggested we go to the house, knock on the door, and say we were interested in buying posing straps (the mags often carried ads for posing straps). We parked on the street near the house, and I stayed in the car while he rang the doorbell, and then disappeared inside the house. I sat there nervously in the dark for 10 minutes, until a man emerged from the door, came over to the car, and said "You better come inside." I followed him into the house, and....well, I suppose what happened next should remain private between me, my friend and the four men in the living room.

These photos brought a sentimental tear to my eye, because I used to buy these magazines when they were new, at the newsstands and magazine stores on 42nd Street west of Times Square, before it became "family-friendly." A few years later I even got to meet Bob Mizer, through a friend of mine who was an aspiring pornographer.

In my public high school, students took Latin, German, French or Spanish. Then at the beginning of WWII, they stopped German, and never reinstated it. When the urban community college I taught at first opened, liberal arts majors were required to take German, French or Spanish, and one could also major in one of those languages. So few students chose German that all courses were dropped after a few years. After ten years, we were down to a single professor of French, who had to teach an occasional Italian elective to fill her teaching schedule; when she retired, she was replaced by a part-time adjunct. The school now offers courses in Arabic, Chinese, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese and Swahili, but Spanish has become the only foreign language with full-time professors and possibility as a major, in a college with over 40,000 students.

+1 Recently, at an AT&T store, I was helped by a young salesman who had the barest hint of an accent. I asked if he were Canadian, and he said he was from Uzbekistan. He had come to the US in his 20s, speaking no English, and had spent a few months at a relation's apartment in San Francisco, watching American television all day long, to learn English. When I probed a bit deeper, it turned out that he already knew three other languages before he came to the US. Most language learning research shows that the earlier one learns another language, and the more languages one knows, the easier it is to master another one. When Serena Williams won the French Open in 2002, she tried to give an acceptance speech in high school French, and it was such a garbled mess that the audience could hardly keep a straight face. When she won again eleven years later, she accepted in fluent, idiomatic French that left them cheering. In the meantime, she had bought an apartment in Paris and lived there for long periods, and had a French tennis coach (and rumored lover). There is no substitute for being immersed in the culture when trying to learn a language as an adult.

My spouse worked for awhile in a professional office in Singapore. Most of the local staff were Chinese Singaporeans. He said that when the staff were conversing among themselves about personal matters, they always spoke Mandarin, but the minute they started to talk with one another about their work, they switched to English.

I wonder what Dante's spoken Italian would sound like to a modern Italian.

I studied Spanish, German, French and Italian in school, but never learned to actually speak any of them. Then I became good friends with someone who spoke all those languages fluently, before he learned English. He is a published writer in English, Spanish and French. How I envied him! So for several years I worked on my German, and became fluent enough to study at the University of Vienna. When I lived in eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, I was surrounded by people who spoke no English, but I was pleased to find that the older ones often spoke enough German for me to converse with them. Like whippedguy, I love to exclaim in 19th century operatic Italian, and I can muddle through enough to get by as a tourist in French and Spanish-speaking countries. But I rarely find anyone in Palm Springs with whom to speak anything but English, except for the occasional foreign tourist or immigrant.

I had no idea how two men had sex--I thought they probably rubbed against one another while kissing--until my first experience when I was 17, when the guy explained that we were supposed to insert our cocks into each other's assholes. I thought it was a bizarre concept, until I tried it.

Ri-i-i-i-ght! (snicker) Even today, when people have much more information about sex, and more incentive to know themselves, teenagers can be confused about their orientation, so it is not unusual to look back to high school or college days many years ago and see classmates whose orientation wasn't obvious, even to themselves, at that time. I still dated girls until I was 21, just in case my gay feelings were a phase that I might grow out of. My best friend was engaged to be married at 24, until he was outed by a witch-hunt in the military. It was a traumatic experience, but it may have saved him much more grief later in life if he had gone through with the wedding.

Nowadays, Gman, everyone over the age of 10 seems to know all about sexual diversity, but back in olden times, it was assumed that everyone was heterosexual except the rare screaming queen. I was aware of only one other person in my high school, and that was because everyone said he was queer; in retrospect, I'm not sure that he was more than sensitive and "artistic." Amazingly, I never suspected my best friend, although as soon as he came out to me in response to me coming out to him, I realized we both had missed a lot of clues. Shortly thereafter, we discovered through someone else in a neighboring town that two of the most popular and attractive guys in the class ahead of ours were boyfriends who were well known in the larger gay community (which we also didn't know existed). So, in a school the size of yours, there were undoubtedly others whom, unfortunately, you just never recognized. Obviously, there are drawbacks to everyone now knowing or suspecting everyone else's sexual orientation from the onset of puberty (like having it bandied about on social media), but it does make it easier to find a like-minded circle of friends much sooner in life. I was fairly quiet and shy in high school, and if I hadn't had the amazing luck to have bonded with the one classmate who could draw me out, I might have stayed in the closet for much longer than I did.

My best friend from high school told me about his earliest realization that he was gay. When he was 12, Richard had a local paper delivery route, and once per month he collected his payment from the customers. One of them was a Polish woman with an 18 year old son, Philip, a big, blond athlete. One day when he went to collect his money, the woman wasn't home, and Philip invited him to come in and play around, which turned out to be masturbating one another. From then on, Philip often managed to be home alone when Richard came to collect, and over the next six years the playing around escalated into more homoerotic activity, even including a scene in which Richard tied Philip spreadeagled on a bed and fucked him. Richard liked to go to the movies by himself on Saturday afternoons, and Philip told him that if he sat in a certain place in the theater, older men might approach him and masturbate him or even suck his cock in the dark. Soon Richard's paper delivery money was being spent on movie tickets, and he was associating cowboy movies with orgasms. By the time he graduated from high school, he knew he was gay. Richard never revealed any of this to me until the week we graduated, when we finally came out to one another. He told me that Philip, now 24, was about to get married, and he suggested that I should have a shot at him while he was still available. He arranged for the three of us to go out one night in a car and park in an isolated spot for some fun. Philip turned out to be at least 6'4" with sinewy muscles and silky blond body hair, not handsome but with a harshly masculine face and very butch in demeanor. He was obviously tense about the situation, but there was a hard bulge in his trousers. Richard encouraged me to take Philip's cock out and suck it, and I was stunned: it was the biggest one I had ever seen, and even more than a half century later, I don't think I have ever handled anything bigger. I could barely get my mouth over the head, and I couldn't imagine how Richard at 12 could have done anything with it. No wonder Richard had usually been the top in their activities. Philip got married a few weeks later, and Richard had only one further experience with him; about two years later, when his wife was out of town, Philip called Richard and invited him to come over for some fun. It was a repeat of the bondage and fucking scene. Richard had some poppers with him, and gave them to Philip, who reacted with much wilder abandon that Richard had even seen from him before. But he never heard from him again.

You are right. I remembered Audrey Hepburn, but I was confusing Maclaine with Sandy Dennis's role in The Fox (1967), another movie in which the lesbian had to die in the end. After a half century, my movie memories are not as sharp as my personal memories.

The early 1930s were actually more relaxed and open about homosexuality in plays and movies than they were after WW2. Censorship of the movies only started in the mid-1930s. I remember when the movie version of The Children's Hour was made in 1961, the subject matter was considered so daring that it could only be suggested obliquely, and of course the lesbian character played by Sandy Dennis had to be killed at the end. I took a girlfriend at the time to see it, and I actually had to explain to her what was going on in the plot, because she didn't get it.