Author Archives: Kat

Dido’s Boyfriends & Buskins

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Perhaps it’s a Latin thing. Every time I taught Book IV of The Aeneid, most recently in 2011, I could not help thinking of buskins. They are the chicest footwear in the ancient world, a kind of boot worn by actors in Greek tragedy. Unfortunately, I have nothing to wear with buskins.

Kirk Douglas As Spartacus, wearing short buskins

I have always wanted to wear buskins.  It’s the word, not the look, that appeals to me, because the look is appalling. Imagine a combination of sandals and boots, open-toed sandal with the straps climbing wrapped around the calves.

Here’s the thing:  this summer I ordered some buskins.  They were not called buskins.  They were described as elegant,  stroppy sandals, but were indeed  sandals whose straps went halfway up the calf.

When I opened the package, I was excited.  “I’ve got buskins!”

“You’ve got what?” my other half asked.

“They’re buskins!”  I said excitedly.  

He groaned.  He, too, knows all about buskins.  We are avid Aeneid fans.

Well, those of you who have read Virgil know that Aeneas is a fickle lover, though, granted, it is because Zeus sends him a message ordering him to go fight a civil war in Italy (not very tempting), and he admits to Dido that he doesn’t want to go.

But I don’t at all like the way Dido commits suicide after he leaves.  She has already fled her own country to found Carthage.  She’s tough.

I mean, why would a queen commit suicide?

Don’t let the bastards get you down, Dido.

And another reason not to leave?  She has buskins!

Anyway, I may have mentioned that I got a master’s in classics and boyfriend (of course the department didn’t know about the boyfriend part). Therefore I’m a matchmaker and have seen all the movies set in the ancient world,  Ben Hur, Spartacus, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Gladiator…

And, after musings and looking up the movies n Google, I’ve decided Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) would make a perfect boyfriend for Dido.

Here’s how a typical conversation would go.

DIDO: Spartacus, I love your buskins.

SPARTACUS: I got them at Niemanus Marcus.

DIDO:  Where?

SPARTACUS:  It’s a little shop near the forum.

DIDO:  I know that shop.  Niemanus Marcus is a cobbler, right?

SPARTACUS: The best cobbler.

DIDO:  Really handsome, too

SPARTACUS (glumly):  I suppose.

DIDO:  Well, he’s not in shape, though.

BEN:  Yeah, he’s s___ at fighting.

Dido inwardly sighs.  Aeneas is refined, and would never use a word like that. But do Dido and Spartacus marry?  I should say they do, and in the same cave where she “married” Aeneas, with Juno presiding.

Not at all sure what Spartacus would wear to the wedding though.  At Google, he is pictured wearing underpants and buskins.

What to Do at 4 a.m.

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It’s 4 a.m. and I can’t sleep, so I riffle through a women’s magazine. This usually leads to buying unsuitable clothes, or beauty products to which I’m allergic. Tonight I have circled everything I want, and will not, I promise myself, order anything till 4 p.m., when I’ve had time to think about it. And since I’m looking only at practical items, I’m not that vested in it.

Here’s what I want: the Hestan NanoBond Titanium Stainless-Steel 10-Piece Cookware Set, until I notice the price is $1,999.99. I gasp. My pans are from Target, and the price was perhaps, what, $99? I feel a major trip to Target coming on, because I want to replace a pizza pan I’ve been scraping bits of crust off for a year. But have you noticed that you can’t get out of Target without shopping off-list?

I don’t need to shop, so I contemplate my nonexistent beauty regimen. I recently read Nora Johnson’s humor column, “On Maintenance,” in I Feel Bad about My Neck, and was astounded by the amount of time she spent at the hair salon. Can you believe she spent 80 hours a year having her hair done twice a week, and four hours every six weeks having her hair dyed? And then she got addicted to blond highlights, which took much more time, she says, but she cagily does not reveal how much longer..

Ephron must have been the saint of hairdressing: I go out of my mind if I spend more than half an hour getting my hair cut. I used to get my hair cut at Hair Ph.D., and I loved their sense of humor, and chose them for their name. We had highbrow discussions of The Amazing Race. We hated Rob and Amber, who cheated like mad.

Although I do not have my hair “done” anymore, I have strong feelings on hair- do’s and -don’ts. Unless you’re insanely fond of hanging around with aluminum foil in your hair, get only the minimum done at the salon.  We are not Nora Ephron who doubtless met with Hollywood producers, and was required to adhere to a higher standard. We, on the other hand, are going to the grocery store to buy soy milk. .  The other harried shoppers are not looking at our hair; they’re looking for goat cheese or Kalamata olives.

And what about dyeing hair? That is a whole different culture. In early middle age, I dyed my hair, sometimes brunette, and finally blond, because aging is difficult, and it seemed more dramatic to be blond, and the eye naturally goes to the blond hair, or so I gathered from an article in a women’s magazine. Yes, I followed those slavishly!  But I stopped dyeing my hair when we moved to a house without a shower.  Some stalwart souls probably dye their hair in the bathtub but not I. No, my hair is natural now, as is that of most of my friends and relatives.

My hair-dyeing friends were appalled, though. “You should keep dyeing your hair!”

Actually, I think I looked cute with my graying hair in old pictures, and wouldn’t I just love to have my hair look like that again? 

 Of course cute is relative.  What’s cute now is trying to restrain my hair with a barrette or a headband in a high wind.  On good hair days, this keeps it out of my eyes.  On bad hair days, the hair does what it wants.

Later, I tell my husband I am contemplating dyeing my hair blond. He says it’s already blond, which is not true of course but he’s sweet, and it will save me a trip to a beauty salon. Like all the other tragically hip women of a certain age, I am now committed to the natural look.

Humor Columns for Women:  Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad about My Neck”

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Published in 2006, Nora Ephron’s collection of charming columns, I Feel Bad about My Neck, is a humor classic for women.

In the first essay, Ephron say she feels bad about her neck.  As she and her friends age, the look of their necks change.  They have “scrawny necks and fat necks, wrinkled necks, stringy necks, saggy necks, flabby necks mottled necks.”

She looks around the table and hilariously realizes they’re “all wearing turtleneck sweaters. Sometimes, instead, we’re all wearing scarves, like Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond. Sometimes we’re all wearing mandarin collars and look like a white ladies’ version of The Joy Luck Club.”

Aging is not easy for Nora Ephron, journalist, novelist, and director and screenwriter of Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail.  Whether it is living in New York, or her glamorous profession as a filmmaker, she must look her best before she steps out of her apartment. 

In “On Maintenance,” she describes her complicated beauty regimen. She gets her hair washed and blow-dried at a salon twice a week. She estimates she spends 80 hours a year there.  

And then there is the hair dyeing.

She says it’s not feminism, or healthy living, that makes women look younger these days.  It is hair dye.  Well… I’ve always worried about dumping chemicals on my head, but that’s probably a result of my tragically hip Women’s Studies class.

Ephron has a different take on it. She says hair dye “is the most powerful weapon women have against the youth culture.”  My gut disagrees, but on a practical level she may be right. 

I’m sure that being in the film industry depends at least partly on looks and appearance. Ephron goes way, way out in her hair-dyeing procedures.   She spends ninety minutes every six weeks getting her hair dyed, and when the hairdresser gives her blond highlights, it extends “the length of time involved in dyeing from unbearable to unendurable.”  But she loves the way it looks, and thinks she is absolutely beautiful, and that her husband wouldn’t recognize her.  Instead, he doesn’t notice. Yes, that’s real life! But she continues to get the blond highlights, time-consuming or not.

 But let’s move on from the beauty regimen. My favorite essay in the collection is about her love of cooking, “Serial Monogamy:  A Memoir.” Charmingly, she has imaginary conversations with her favorite cookbook writers, Julia Child, Michael Field, and Craig Claiborne. The imaginary conversations are so much fun, and seem in line with the creativity of her movies.

In this column, she explains the pressure of imaginary friendships. “…Field was full of prejudice about things like the garlic press (he believed that using one made the garlic bitter), and I threw mine away for fear he would suddenly materialize in my kitchen and disapprove.”

As time goes by, Ephron becomes a relaxed, creative cook, and instead of sticking strictly to the recipe, she adapts it for her convenience .  Best of all, she meets some of the famous cooks who were her imaginary friends. And at the back of her novel, Heartburn, she includes recipes.  

I love her wit and her writer’s voice, and if I’m unable to imagine the life-style, that is my fault, not hers.

Why I Changed My Name

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“No, wait!  You’re kidding!”  I said to a friend on the phone.

It’s me, Kat!

After the call, I told my friend I was changing my name to Kat. “Do not call me Kathy.”

 A few days ago, I was still Kathy, writing my blog, going to Zoom meetings, rereading a Russian novel, and taking walks.

And then I got the call.

“Remember Kathy in X City?” my friend said.

“Who?” 

“You know, the mousy one who tried to sabotage the conference you organized?”

I started giggling.  “Well, my friends gave her the cold shoulder.”

“Guess what?” 

It seemed that a friend of mine was spending a lot of free time with her. 

“Oh, no, no, no, no.”  This was WAY too perverse.  Did he have a thing for older women named Kathy (though I will always think of her as Kitty)?  What the fuck… 

Anyway, it was an eye-opener.  I can’t think of the word – he was not exactly a philanderer, but still it was a kind of going behind my back.  And here’s the truth: she was a phony, she was full of muted rage (she once sent me newspaper photo of an editor she disliked, with an inky moustache and beard scribbled on her face), no women liked her (and this is the first evidence I’ve heard that men liked her), and, believe me, she is not even pretty!

Anyway, I no longer answer to the name Kathy. EVERYBODY calls me Kat now!

On Reading Nora Ephron:  A Few (More) Words about Breasts

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It is always a pleasure to read Nora Eprhon. I love her humor writing, think her  journalism is even better, and am a fan of her comic films.

Ephron was a brilliant writer who sensed or knew what was going on in women’s minds.  And thus she gave us When Harry Met  Sally”  (the orgasm scene), You’ve Got Mail (the-kleenex-thrown- around-the-apartment scene), and Julia and Julia (the many, many cooking scenes).   I have seen her movies multiple times, and think it’s time to go back and watch You’ve Got Mail, because the protagonists own bookshops, and there’s something political going on in the bookshops, circa the late ’90s.

However, her funny, satiric but mostly serious essay, “A Few Words about Breasts,” is my favorite In the collection, Crazy Salad: Some Things about Women.

Her short, partly sardonic essay addresses the concerns of women who have small breasts. She grew up in the 1950s when breast size was, to women and men, an essential sign of female attractiveness. Ephron kept waiting for her breasts to grow, and they did not.

The ’50s and ’60s were also the age swimsuits came with built-in rubber bras. I had a swimsuit with a built-in rubber bra when I was 10. I had small breasts, and didn’t understand why I needed a built-in bra to go swimming, so I didn’t give it a thought.  But soon there was the hysterical insistence on wearing a bra.  Even in college, a friend asked, “Why do you bother to wear one?”  I hadn’t noticed till she said it, but her husband was staring at my breasts. This was a first for me, and I was embarrassed that she, one of my best friends, had thought I did it deliberately. And when I got home I looked in the mirror and realized my bra was almost transparent, so you could see my nipples  The next day I bought another bra. You couldn’t see my nipples through it, which was my goal.

When I was growing up, there was less worry about breast size than in Ephron’s day. What I noticed was that girls with bigger breasts called them boobs, proudly. I definitely didn’t have boobs. “The boobettes,” as a friend called them, were bragging and trying to make small-breasted girls feel bad for not having boobs.

I thought, Wait a minute.  I have breasts, if not boobs..  I considered stripping right there on the hockey field to show them that I did indeed have breasts. I also once had a boyfriend who affectionately referred to my “petite breasts.”

Do small breasts count as breasts? That was the question often seemingly raised by big-breasted women. Nora Ephron bought three different padded bras in high school, of three different sizes, which surely must have been noticeable, but no one said a thing about it. She came to school wearing a different padded bra every week but no one said a word about it.

She points out that there is a competition among women about breasts.  “You’re so lucky,”a friend said.  “My boobs are so big they hurt my back,” On another occasion, a woman complained that men liked her only for her breasts.  Again, I said nothing, though I sensed that men find women beautiful in proportion to their breast size.  But I didn’t like those guys much anyway. And then there was my favorite: If I didn’t wear a bra when I went jogging it would ruin my breasts, make them sag, hurt my muscles.

What she said was patently untrue, but I fear she was flaunting the fact that her own breasts would sag and get ruined (why would she be proud of it?).

I have a few unvoiced responses to women’s competition with women: 1. (Looking concerned:) “I’m sorry for your pain;” 2 (smiling brightly): “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” and 3) Catullus never wrote about  Lesbia’s breasts. Isn’t that charming?”

Now Catullus is the one who would get them, don’t you think?

But perhaps women with boobs aren’t very smart. That’s a comment that’s almost as monstrous as criticizing women with small breasts.

I never think about my breast size, and I imagine Ephron forgot about it, too.

It’s times like this that we feel grateful that we don’t really need a bra.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

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The other day, I wrote a piece about going to my first Zoom meeting.

 “I thought we’d be like the Lonely Hearts club, and I’m sure there WERE some lonely people, I among them, but this cheered everybody up. At least I hope it did. “

A commenter took offense. “Not sure it’s fair to categorize people who attend zoom workshops, groups, lectures, as lonely. I have family, a husband, and many friends and I still teach regular classes. . Why stigmatize us as lonely?’

First, let me say that there is no stigma to loneliness.  It is a part of life that tells you what you need..  I have been lonely, and then suddenly it’s over.  And you can be lonely even if you have a family and friends. No matter how many people are around, there are moments when you have to get away from them,  when you want to be alone, and being alone is not the same as loneliness.  So you’re hosting a party, and suddenly you want to get away from all those people, so you go downstairs and sit on the stoop, and  wonder why you thought you would have fun.  

I have to say I felt lonely at my party.  So I didn’t return. I just couldn’t bear it. Instead, I went over to my husband’s apartment a few blocks away – we were separated – and l was horrified by the bullet hole in the window. “You can’t live here. It’s dangerous.”

And  he couldn’t sleep.  Not at all.  He asked if he could come home with me, and I was so relieved.  I couldn’t sleep, either. And by the time we got home, the party had dispersed, and he was in my bed again,

When I need to cheer up I read my favorite short story by Allan Sillitoe, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” The narrator, who is in Borstal for robbing a bakery, is a cross-county star, the fastest runner the Borstal governor has ever seen. They let him train three days a week, and they are counting on him to win the race so the governor can flaunt the trophy. It will not be the runner’s trophy. 

The narrator loves to run.

“Over the first stile, without trying, I was still in the lead but one… I ran to a steady jog trot rhythm, and soon it was so smooth I forgot I was running, and I was hardly able to know that my legs were lifting and falling and my arms going in and out, and my lungs didn’t seem to be working at all, and  my heart stopped that wicked thumping I always get in the beginning of the race.”

And then he’s at the finish line.  The governor of the Borstal is cheering him on.  The Borstal boys are cheering him on.

And he stops.  He does not cross the finish line. He is my hero, one of my favorite characters in literature.  I admire impulsiveness, I admire rebellion, I admire anyone who refuses to toe the line.

In November, I told my husband that if Clinton won the election, I would quit my job. He thought that was a great idea.  He had told me not to take the job in the first place. :”You wouldn’t dare,” a frenemy said.  Oh, wouldn’t I?

Clinton won the election, I quit my job, I had to fight to get my final paycheck, but I was free.  Was I impulsive? I should say so.  Should I have crossed the finish line ?  Absolutely not. 

 Working at a job you dislike can be very lonely.  I was one of four women  “Every day feels like a rape,” one of them said.  It wasn’t quite that bad for me, because I was older and bossier, but it wasn’t pleasant.  Now I went home every night and was happy.

And so I stopped before the finish line, which would have been a dead end for me. It would have been better for them – I am not bragging when I say I was irreplaceable – they could not find a replacement -but I went home and wrote.  I wrote, wrote, wrote, and wrote some more. I

So loneliness can be a good thing.  It can tell you what’s important to you.  It can warn you not to be unhappy. There is no stigma to loneliness.

We need loneliness to tell us who we are and need to be. Fortunately, I haven’t been lonely in years, because I live with my husband and best friend.

Dido, Queen of Carthage:  Virgil’s  “Aeneid,” Book IV

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Dido, Queen of Carthage, is mad with love for Aeneas.  She is amens (out of her mind), infelix (unhappy), saucia (wounded), and furens (wild), A widow who fled from Tyre after her brother Pygmalion killed her husband, Sychaeus, she is now a queen, busy building the city of Carthage.  And she has much in common with Aeneas,  a refugee from Troy who is fated to found Italy.  

Most of Book IV of the Aeneid is from Dido’s point-of-view. The goddesses, Juno (a patron of Dido) and Venus (Aeneas’ mother),  arrange for the two lovers to take refuge from a storm in a cave and form a sexual bond, 

Juno, the goddess of marriage, says, “I will be present and join her permanently in a stable marriage.”

Their marriage in the cave mirrors the traditional ancient wedding ceremony, only in this case it is presided over by gods and nature: Earth and Juno give the sign for the wedding to begin, lightning flashes (the marriage torches), and the Upper Air, or Heaven, is the witness to the wedding, while instead of traditional marriage songs the nymphs wail instead.

And then they are married:  Juno has said so, and it is so. And very often Dido uses the word “marriage” to describe their relationship. And Aeneas is quite happy with his domestic life in Carthage. He even does construction work in the city.  This is not just a dalliance for him: Carthage becomes his city.

Two forces defeat Dido: Rumor and Zeus.  Who knew that Rumor was a goddess?  

The following is my translation:

“The goddess Fama (Rumor) went immediately through the great cities of Libya/ she is an evil than which there is nothing swifter. She grows strong with movement and soon raises herself high by her swift walking / first small with fear, but soon raises herself on breezes / and walks on the ground and hides her head in the clouds. … This horrendous monster has so many feathers on her body/ as she has  watchful eyes – mirabile dictu! – and as many tongues, as many mouths resound. “

And so Dido’s reputation is ruined. She knows that her barbarian suitors are likely to wage war.

And then Juppiter sends a message to Aeneas, saying that he must sail to Italy, where, alas, he must fight a civil war for the maiden, Lavinia, whose mother will oppose it. Another war. This is not good news.

Dido insists they qre married. Doesn’t he remember his oath? How can he leave his wife? In his last speech to  Dido, Aeneas denies  that they are married, and says he never signed a contract or made a pact.  He does, however, admit that he does not want to leave, and would not if the choice were his.

The theme of marriage – what is a marriage? -is repeated throughout the Aeneid. Dido is sure she is married. On other occasions, I have dismissed that possibility, but now her insistence seems true to me, becauase of the cave scene. Does Aeneas consider it a marriage, or did he not pick up on that?

It could go either way. Perhaps both were aware; perhaps only one.

T. S. Eliot, in his essay “What Is a Classic?” called The Aeneid the the only real classic in the Western canon. I can’t judge whether it’s the best of all classixs, but it is certainly the best Latin epic poem, an epic right up there with Homer’s.

Doris Lessing’s “If the Old Could…”

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Doris Lessing published the novel If the Old Could… under the pseudonym Jane Somers. She wanted to be reviewed on her own merit rather than as Doris Lessing. Somers’ two novels were well-reviewed: one feckless reviewer compared her to Barbara Pym. (There is no resemblance.) No one connected Somers with Lessing, except the editor Robert Gottlieb in New York, who asked, “Who are you kidding?”

I think this is one of her best novels, pseudonymous or not.  Certainly it is a long way from her experimental works The Golden Notebook or The Four-Gated City, and it should appeal to non-Lessing fans. Even readers of romance will find something here.

As it happens, Jane is a writer of romantic novels as well as a high-powered editor of a women’s magazine, Lilith. The fairy tale romance begins when she is on her way to work. Jane stumbles, not “minding the gap,” as she gets off the tube, and falls into Richard’s arms.  The next day, he is waiting for her at the tube stop: he tells her he hoped he would see her again.

Thus a romantic idyll begins, the kind one dreams about when one is young.  They are enchanted with each other. They spend whole days together, sitting in coffee shops or bars, chatting or being silent together, walking all over London, exploring parks, holding hands, sometimes embracing, but they don’t kiss, nor do they have sex. 

And that is partly because of their living circumstances.  They don’t share much about themselves, because Richard insists it will ruin everything.  (As it turns out, he has more to conceal than she does.) Jane’s incompetent “punk”niece, Kate, has moved in with her and rarely leaves the apartment, except to visit some squatters, who on one occasion trash Jane’s apartment.  Jane can hardly bring Richard to her bedroom with unhealthy Kate in the next room. And Richard’s daughter Kathleen is so infatuated with him that she stalks the couple. An unhealthy niece and an equally unhealthy daughter, Kate and Kathleen. The dysfunctional family of the 20th century may not have changed much.

Actually, Jane’s work also interferes with the idyll.  Jane must spend hours every day on her clothes, hair, and makeup in order to present herself as perfect in the office at Lilith magazine.  She is 50, and her beauty has waned, but she is still the most glamorous woman in the room.

And Jane has other commitments.  She is a volunteer assigned to visit a cranky old woman. Annie. Annie refuses to shower or use the toilet: the home help must wash her with a sponge, and Annie insists on using the commode.  Lessing describes Annie’s lonely, dragging days.  Even when she discovers that one of he home visitors is cheating her, and steals money from her purse, Annie is so desperate for company that she begs her to stay and have a cup of tea.

 Gradually, the couple tell each other about their private lives.  It’s not a case of “if the old could…” – Jane is only 50 – though Richard is older, perhaps 60 – it is a case of family obligations.  Richard has been married for 36 years to the same women, and has three children, and one of them has Down syndrome. Jane feels hurt when she learns of his long marriage. It is a stabbing pain.

And Jane begins to dream about her husband Freddy every night  She realizes that she never gave him what he deserved, that he was very much second-place in her life, and that she hadn’t loved him enough to give him all the care and love he needed when he was dying of cancer.

So Jane falls in love with Richard to learn about Freddy?  That is the question Lessing’s heroines would ask in one of her experimental novels.  It is a question I also ask.

Here is a paragraph that will please romance lovers:

“We were both of us filled with a wicked, wild racing delight, we could not stop smiling when we looked at each other with a frankness which, because it was so natural, was the best of it. He is weathered-handsome, tawny, with grey-blue eyes, not sea eyes like Jill’s, but direct and shrewd.  A handsome man:  what must he have been when he was younger?  And I was thinking how well we were matched physically, and how well we would have been, younger.”

If the Young Could… and If the Old Could... would almost be the same novel.

The Lonely Social Lives of Zoomers

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One cold sub-zero winter day, I spent the morning watching two screwball comedies, Balls of Fire and Harvey, and intended to spend the afternoon rereading Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey. Then my husband intervened.

“Would you like to go cross-country skiing?

The last time I tried to x-country ski, I ran into a tree.  But I do like sitting in the car and watching him ski.  Every time he emerges from the woods, I yell.  “Hurrah!” and remind him  I’ve got cocoa in the car.

Later, after pancakes at a restaurant, he suggests, “You could attend that Zoom meeting today.”

“Hm, maybe.”  A few hours ago it would have seemed like a bad idea, but I was reckless after watching him cross-country skiing.

Sponsored by a Victorian lit group, this Zoom meeting seemed less intimidating than most tech events.   There must have been 100 people there, mostly women, and a handful of men.  We went around the group, and each named his or her favorite Victorian writers. When it was my turn, I named three of the “Mrs.” writers: Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and Mrs. Oliphant.

One woman punched that hands-raised button and was allowed to speak.  “I’ve never heard of them.  How do you spell Oliphant?”

O-l-i-p- ….  It must have sounded like Elephant.

Never fashionable, usually be-jeaned, I love to see what people wear.  At the last minute, I had pulled a black sweater over my Cat Mom t-shirt, though originally I had opted for the Cat Mom look. The men were dead-casual: bearded and uncombed, wearing  boxer shorts and tatty Oxford shirts, or jeans with sweatshirts with University of __ stenciled on the front.  A young woman with flowing hair lounged in sweatpants on a divan: she was drinking wine.  An old woman in a very smart dress and so-called kitten heels drank coffee out of a Jane Austen mug.  A middle-aged woman in ancient Oshkosh overalls clutched a copy of Scenes of Clerical Life. 

I thought we’d be like the Lonely Hearts club, and I’m sure there WERE some lonely people, I among them at times, but this cheered everybody up. At least I hope it did.

Any favorite Zoom events? Technology for fun: that’s my goal.