Rhino alert

The Economist has run an obituary of George W. Bush’s nostrils. I do not speak rhetorically.

Elderism #27

Watching Larry King–who turned 75 today–try to wrap his mind around the pregnancy of Thomas Beatie last night was like watching a country store clerk who’s lost his spectacles in the barley.

“Do you feel gay?,”

King asked the transsexual and his wife, Nancy, before going on to the nitty gritty:

King: Where did you learn how to do this? From the Internet you said, right. You can’t have the normal kind of intercourse, right?

Thomas: We can.

King: Oh.

Nancy: Not to make a baby.

Thomas: Because of hormones, my–my clitoris has enlarged and it looks like a penis.  I can have intercourse with my wife.

King: That’s fascinating to me.

(CNN)

Elderism #26

Apparently the most unusual exhibit in the new B.B. King Museum in Indianola, Miss. is a “blood-building tonic” called Peptikon.

According to Page Six, King tells next month’s Relix magazine that in 1948 he was hired to sing the tonic’s jingle (“Peptikon, sure is good! Peptikon, you can get it anywhere in your neighborhood!”).

“I’m 83 now, and people my age then–especially church people–boy, they bought it like there’d never be any more,” King tells the magazine. He elucidates,

“it was 12 percent alcohol.”

Elderism #25

As we get older, do we develop a better understanding of how others perceive us? The case of playwright and character actor Wallace Shawn would suggest not.

In an article by Dave Itzkoff in today’s Times, Shawn talks about having played the “little homunculus” in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan.” (It’s the role that launched the acting career of this wonderfully talented, smallish, baldish, gnomish man.) “I was making a living from a joke about my appearance that I didn’t understand, and in a way still don’t, because when I look in a mirror it doesn’t seem funny to me.”

Now, thirty years later, Shawn (who, at 65, is admittedly only a semi-elder despite being quoted here in Elderisms) is doing his urban garden gnome thing again on the TV hit, “Gossip Girl.” And he’s still confused that people find him comical:

“It is a little bit puzzling, because I don’t think of myself in any way. I just seem like a kind of blob or blank to myself.”

Elderism #24

In 1975, Paul Theroux made a name for himself with The Great Railway Bazaar, an account of his train trip from London to Tokyo and back. 30 years later, Theroux–“no less inquisitive, but considerably goutier,” as Toby Lichtig puts it the Times of London–re-took the trip and has published his account, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.

Though Theroux has taken some heat for the new book’s narcissism and occasionally patronizing tone, most agree that the work is not without its juicy bits, like when Theroux describes walking on Bangalore’s crowded streets as

“a monotony of frotteurism.”

Turkmenistan, where beards, ballet, and gold teeth have been banned, beckons Theroux with its

“emptiness of lizards and a landscape like cat litter.”

At one point, he states that,

“a country’s pornography offers the quickest insight into the culture and inner life of a nation,”

so he takes a tour of Tokyo’s sex industry with novelist Haruki Murakami, who tells him that  Truman Capote slept with literary badass Yukio Mishima, an event unmentioned in Capote biographies.

By book’s end, Theroux–who’s 67–seems to suggest that still-inquisitive-but-much-goutier has its benefits:

“Most of the world is worsening, shrinking to a ball of desolation. Only the old can really see how gracelessly the world is aging and all that we have lost.”

Age, Theroux writes, gives you

“the gift to evaluate decay.”

(New Statesman)

Rosetta Reitz (1924-2008)

“Louis Armstrong was a sideman on records in the ’20’s with singers like Sippie Wallace, Eva Taylor, Hociel Thomas, Virginia Liston and Margaret Johnson. These women’s records were made as their records. But when they come out now, they’re reissued as Louis Armstrong records, when actually he was not that important on them.”

That’s what feminist Rosetta Reitz told the New York Times in 1980 about a group of forgotten women, some of whom hired their own musicians, wrote their own songs, and produced their own shows. So, borrowing $10,000 from friends, Reitz resurrected these gals’ music and re-released it on a record label she called Rosetta Records.

Reitz passed away in New York City on Nov. 1. Her last name, wonderfully, is pronounced “rights.”

(The Villager)

Elderism #23

Totally bizarro coincidence: having, two days earlier, published an Op Ed in the New York Times about the guerilla tactics I employ when confronted by strangers’ bad manners, I was dumbstruck to witness the following. (You’ll definitely think I’m making it up, but I promise I am not.)

Around noon yesterday, I was walking on Mercer St. toward the N.Y.U. library when a bike messenger—who was riding on the sidewalk—swerved to avoid hitting a woman of a certain age (think Ruth Gordon, in a down parka.)

Woman of a Certain Age (to bike messenger): Fuck you!

Bike messenger: (Inaudible.)

W.O.C.A (to me): I’m gonna go after him if I see him again.

Me:  You should.

W.O.C.A: We’re evenly-matched: bicyclists are tippy, like old people.

Me:  You’re gonna need a cudgel or weapon, though.

W.O.C.A:  I’ll get a cane. And put it in his spokes. Or against his ass.

Elderbloggers: Hear Them Roar

I was asked by Blogs.com to list my ten favorite blogs by, or about, senior citizens. The full list is here, but I wanted to give some context on some of these wonderful elderbloggers and their sites:

Dad’s Tomato Garden Journal, written by a Knoxville gentleman named Ray White, who signs all his correspondence “Dad,” and who started the blog “for the main purpose of helping others produce a good home grown tomato”

Freaque Waves: An emeritus research physical oceanographer’s blog that offers “Personal views, not necessarily in the mainstream or conventional, on freak waves, rogue waves, as well as wind generated waves in general”

A Little Red Hen, who describes her worldview as “peace, politics, yarnlife after 60,” and whose safe-sex activism sees her knitting amulets to store condoms in

Dogwalk Musings: “This blog is a compilation of things I think about while walking the dog”

Grandma’s Musings, by an 80 year-old “pilgrim and wayfarer” of the Roman Catholic persuasion

The Late Life Crisis, written by an 85 year-old gent named Pete Lustig, one of whose “Great Truths About Growing Old” is, “When you fall down, you wonder what else you can do while you are down there.”

Golden Lucy’s Spiral Journal, kept by “a reasonably sane senior able to appreciate a good joke as well as a lovely dinner at a nice restaurant”

Elderism #22

On Tuesday, Gertrude Baines, a daughter of former slaves who is 114 years old–i.e., in her lifetime she has seen women and blacks gain the right to vote–was spied by the Los Angeles Times voting for Obama. Baines shyly murmured,

“What’s his name? I can’t say it.”

Elderism #21

“To rule a country, one must act with care, as when frying the smallest fish.”

That’s from the Tao Te Ching, the 6th century BC book of aphorisms. Legend has it that the book was written by Lao Tzu, a disgruntled historian of the Chou dynasty  who was sick and tired of how the local aristocracy was running things, and so retired to the mountains to Thoreau-ify. En route, a gatekeeper asked Lao Tzu to write down his teachings. Et voila the Tao Te Ching, which Lao Tzu–if indeed he existed–wrote in the aphoristic style of the I Ching, which he would have known well.

I did a radio commentary about the Tao Te Ching for NPR’s “All Things Considered” yesterday. It is here. [Sound of gong.]