Gaya Scienza

The Boring Story of a Marriage

No, this is not about the recent burst of same sex marriages in California, although it also has to do with California...

The Story of a Marriage (Andrew Sean Greer, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, 208 pp.) is unfortunately a dull novel. Greer's previous novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, published four years ago, was a bestseller.

Here the story is told through the voice of a woman, Pearlie Cook, remembering her youth at the end of her life: how in the early fifties the appearance one day at her door of a stranger claiming to know her husband transformed her life. The first words of the novel are promising: "We think we know the ones we love."

Set up in San Francisco, where Greer lives, the story is just not credible and seems artificially constructed, with several unexpected revelations along the plot. The book is beautifully written though, but the style does not realistically match the narrator's background...

In her very positive review in the FT earlier this month, Married to a stranger ("A thrilling portrayal of a relationship unraveling"), Melissa McClements reminds us that when The Confessions of Max Tivoli was published in 2004, John Updike, writing in the New Yorker, compared Greer to Proust and Nabokov... The New York Times also published two very positive reviews in April (Amid Social Shifts, a Wife of the ’50s Tries to Piece Together Her Shattered World) and May (The Fog of Love)... I still found this short novel boring...

2008.07.27

Marcus Aurelius in Love

The reason I did not publish a post last week is that I had made the mistake - should I confess it? - to promise the girls to take them to Disney World. Not that the actual stay in Orlando, which almost killed me (but that's another story), was the problem... In fact the simple thought of having to go exhausted me in anticipation the week before we went... But, fine, my daughters enjoyed it, and that was the purpose of the whole thing...

I want to tell you about a surprising little book, Marcus Aurelius in Love: The Letters of Marcus and Fronto (Edited, translated, and with an introduction and commentary by Amy Richlin, University of Chicago Press, 2007, 167 pp.), which I read during my journey from New York to Miami.

It's a new translation of letters exchanged between Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the renowned Roman orator of the second-century AD, and Marcus Aurelius, the famous emperor and author of The Meditations later in his life. The letters included in the small volume are from an earlier period, when the future emperor was a young man and Fronto was his teacher in rhetoric: 45 letters from 139 to 148 AD, more than half from Marcus Aurelius. The latter was aged 18 at the start of the correspondence when Fronto, 39, was hired as his teacher.

Fronto's correspondence was discovered in Italy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first French translation was published in 1830 while the first into English is the Loeb Classical Library translation of C.R. Haines from 1919-20, still in print. Scholars were disappointed by Fronto's correspondence: "The long-awaited Fronto was not at all what his nineteenth-century audience had expected, and his reputation immediately sank to a low that has persisted for almost two hundred years and kept most scholars from paying any attention to him at all," writes Amy Richlin in her introduction.

Amy Richlin, a respected professor of classics at the University of California, stumbled on these letters while doing research for a book on Fronto and his relationship with Marcus Aurelius. She decided to publish them separately in a new 'modern' translation in order to make them more readily available. She has done a great job, making the text very accessible to a contemporary audience, although by moments she displays boldness (for instance when she translates pulpamentum, 'bits of meat eaten as snacks', by 'hot dog'...). I was also surprised by her decision to use French to translate the Greek segments of the letters... The introduction, by a leading scholar in Latin and Greek sexuality, is a very good text.

"The letters between Marcus and Fronto provide what appears to be direct evidence of a loving relationship of some kind." Were they in love? Were they lovers? Why have the letters not been noticed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, "when so much else was noticed"? Amy Richlin provides interesting answers.

Read the letters yourself to make your own opinion. Maybe you will need to read them several times. I would have liked to look at the English commentary of Fronto's correspondence published by Michael van den Hout in 1999, as well as the notes and introduction of a new French bilingual edition in French published by Pascale Fleury and Ségolène Demougin in 2003 (Paris, Belles Lettres, Collection Fragments) to get other points of view. But here, at the southern tip of Florida, books are mainly used as towel weights...

2008.07.20

Charlie Crist and the Evolution's Rainbow

Snapshots from the last days of June: New York governor Paterson participated in the Gay Pride March in the City. In Malaysia, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was accused by an aide of participating in homosexual acts, which are punishable by up to 20 years in prison in that country.

I thought Florida governor Charlie Crist was being ironic last week when he ended his New York Times Magazine interview with Deborah Solomon with the words: "Stay tune" after being asked how come he could not find a woman in Florida... (see previous post) On Thursday he announced that he had proposed to a 'lady' from New York, a 38 years old divorcée with two young children. They plan to marry soon. The father of the two kids must have been delighted to learn that governor Crist was thrilled with the prospect of helping raise them... The governor's father told a reporter of the Miami Herald the amazing: "Charlie's been more serious in this relationship than I've seen him in a long time with a young lady." We are all reassured.

I also thought that seahorses were an hermaphroditic species. That was the reason why - he explained in his book, Art and Sex in Greenwich Village (Caroll & Graf, 2007) - Felice Picano named his gay publishing venture SeaHorse Press. But no, they are not. This is one of the things I learned in Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Joan Roughgarden, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004, 474 pp.). I had bought the book several years ago when it was published, after reading an interview with the author, a professor of biology at Stanford University who is also a transgender woman. I had left it in Miami. It is very stimulating intellectually and it somewhat disrupted my summer reading plans... The subject is sexual diversity. After defining ubiquious terms like male, female, masculine, feminine and gender, Part I, Animal Rainbows, is about sexual diversity in animals. We are told everything  we wanted to know about "the means of sexual reproduction", female-only species, species with more than two genders, hermaphrodites, same-sex relationships, etc, "spanning many styles of bodies, family organizations, and patterns of bonding between and within sexes, each with its own value and its own internal logic." The text is full of lively (often ironically anthropomorphic) descriptions of many fascinating animal species. My favorites are: the bush babies, nocturnal squirrel-like primates from central Africa, which copulation is unusually slow, lasting one to two hours; the seahorses where the female places her eggs in a male's pouch, the eggs are fertilized there and the male becomes 'pregnant'; male vampire bats hanging belly to belly licking one another, both with erect penis; and of course the bonobos, our closest cousins, with their extensively documented same-sex sexuality. Joan Roughgarden's conclusion is that Darwin's theory of sexual selection (but not natural selection) is false. She suggests a new theory which "accommodates variation in gender and sexuality. It envisages animals as exchanging help in return for access to reproductive opportunity, producing a biological 'labor market' for mutual assistance by employing reproductive opportunity as currency. This theory proposes that animals evolve traits that qualify them for inclusion in groups that control resources for reproduction and safe places to live and raise offspring."

Part II, Human Rainbows, deals with human development and includes extensive discussions of all variations in sexual behaviors, orientations, gender, anatomy, etc. In the end you have to admit that you get confuse... For example, motivations for transgender expression vary along a spectrum spanning from gender identification to fetishism...

The shorter, less convincing, Part III, Cultural Rainbows, is dedicated to a survey of gender and sexuality variation across cultures and through history.

Overall Evolution's Rainbow is an exciting reading.

***

I was happy to see that one of the books I took with me for the summer break was mentioned this week among the summer books recommended by the Financial Times (together with a full review): The Story of a Marriage. I will come back to it.

2008.07.06