Elderism #59

“I don’t dislike babies, though I think very young ones rather disgusting.”

-Queen Victoria

I Shall Wear My Trousers Rolled

One of the observations I make in “How to Live” is that old age, like divorce, can be more difficult for men than for women because men tend to have fewer social networks than women do. Also, some older women experience a burst of late-in-life feminism; women of this generation, having already established their lives by the time feminism was in full flower, sometimes don’t reap the benefits of that movement until they hit their old age.

I was mostly working from anecdotal evidence, but now Anne C. Roark has done a lot of the legwork in her post on the New Old Age blog on the New York TImes’s website. She points out that older men don’t eat as well, are less likely to seek medical care when sick, and are more prone to substance abuse. Men over 65 are five times more likely than women to commit suicide.

Oof. Gentlemen, let’s burn our bathrobes.

Older Folks Who Are Not Doing What You Think They’re Doing

-Philip Roth: The New Grace Jones? According to Galleycat, the journalist James Marcus has used a sample of Philip Roth shouting–taken from an interview Marcus did with the literary great–to create a dance remix called “The Jewish Shouting Mix 3”

-Buzz Aldrin has recorded a rap single with Snoop Dogg, causing the latter to opine, “Buzz has the biggest buzz on the street right now.”

–The Birds star Tippi Hedren, who, some years ago, adopted Thriller and Sabu, two of Michael Jackson’s tigers,  told the Guardian that shortly after Jackson’s death she telepathically related to the two cats that Jackson had died.

Ortgasbord

I have a story in today’s New York Times about leftovers–or, as we crossword puzzle-doers know them, orts. (The story is here.) And just minutes ago I was granted the opportunity to be on John Hockenberry’s public radio show, “The Takeaway.” The other guest on the show was the charming, skinny Times food writer, Melissa Clark, who served me something delightfully duck fatty out of her handbag. (It–the “Takeaway” segment, not the handbag ort–is here.)

Elderism #58

“If you are an old man and you go into a bar wearing pajamas, people will buy you drinks.”

–A resident of the Duplex Nursing Home, as quoted in the zine,  Duplex Planet

Viva vecchi!

Some weeks ago, my book about the wisdom of old folks, “How to Live”, received a lovely three-page write-up in the magazine section of Italy’s lefty newspaper, La Repubblica, for which I’m entirely grateful. I’ve been remiss in acknowledging the story, though, because it is written in, uh, a language I don’t read or speak. But finally today I realized that– though it is fast and loose and entirely unprofessional to do so–I could plug the article into one of those free online translation sites. The results are, how you say, bracing.

As for my publisher’s decision not to put the picture of an old person on the cover of my book, I tell La Repubblica,

“‘They chose for a dog with the wrinkles. From the birth.'”

We also discuss my book’s title. Given the non-scary, if not rosy, picture of death that some of my interviewees offer–people like “historians tromboni Harold Bloom, or the dramatist Edward Albee, author of cult Who has fear of Virginia Woolf”–I say of the title,

“‘Little it is ironico,’ relieves he, one taken to us in turn of the handbook of self-help, or the aphorisms from paper of chocolates.”

But, my amico, let’s get down to the tacks of brass here:

“It has talked about sex in the interviews? [To which I respond:] ‘Certainly that yes. They do it! In the hostels occupied from the generation of elderly come Viagra there is the new problem of sexual transmission of aids. In the houses of rest they repeat themselves the dynamics of the colleagues.'”

Capisce? And, lest we all labor under the preconception that humor does not translate, let the record show that, when the La Repubblica writer trotted out a term I’d not heard before to describe my peers who face old age reluctantly–Baby Gloomers–I fired back with a witticism that only improves with free online translation:

“The sole pain for them was to burn itself the tongue with the swills of Milk Mocha Starbucks”

–yea, even topping it with the absolutely boffo,

“They should draw the chairs to rollers with the reloading for the iPod.”

The truth, she is universaling.

More Gloria Vanderbilt

A little something from page 5 of Obsession: An Erotic Tale, the new novel by octogenarian Gloria Vanderbilt, mother of newsman  Anderson Cooper:

“I have filled a bowl with warm, sugared cream ready to circle my breasts, exciting them to swell into the size you most favor for biting. Knowing they were fair bursting to be treated less gently you held back until I couldn’t stand it a moment longer and had to beg mercy before you gave me surcease with the mercy of your teeth. You never deny me. How can I not crave more?”

Elderism #57

The writer Ellis Weiner’s mother, to him:

“Hip is shit!”

Elderism #56

Groucho Marx, to a chatty bore:

“You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.”

Elderism #55

In her new novel, Obsession: An Erotic Tale, octogenarian Gloria Vanderbilt allows as how one can slather oneself with gardenia oil and a touch of honey aphrodisiac such that one

“can let loose shaking onto the breasts a goodly amount of chocolate sprinkles, which will adhere prettily.”