Eclipsed: Trump and Afghanistan

August 22, 2017

It’s fitting that President Donald J. Trump should address the nation regarding our recommitment to the war in Afghanistan on a day when most of the continental United States saw a total solar eclipse.

Historians would say that Afghanistan has eclipsed all our other wars. Not for nothing is Afghanistan known as “the graveyard of empires.” Certainly, it’s the graveyard of modern empires. The British in the 19th century and early 20th centuries and the Soviets in the 1970s got bogged down in wars there but left without the victor’s laurel wreath. We Americans have been fighting there 17 years, our longest war. ...

Charlottesville, North Korea and the tough guy

August 15, 2017

I was planning to riff on novelist Jennifer Weiner’s New York Times piece about the body disconnect and the phenomenon she calls “skinny women eating cheeseburgers in magazines” – and I will in a future post.

But events of the past few days make it impossible to put that on the front burner. How can we talk about our ambivalence toward the body when the body politic is being ripped asunder? ...

Making America (Alexander the) Great again

July 18, 2017

Thursday, July 20 marks the anniversary of the birth of Alexander the Great in 356 B.C. in Pella, the capital of ancient Macedon, now Macedonia, a region in northern Greece.

Alexander has been an obsession of mine since childhood, when I read the legends associated with his conquests of the Persian Empire in 331 B.C. From Alexander, I learned how to navigate difficult parents and how to lead from the front – skills that would later serve me well in grappling with equally challenging bosses. Thanks to Alexander, I learned to work through pain, illness, grief. I figured if he could fight a battle with a punctured lung, I could gut life out. ...

Resurrection

April 16, 2017

As Lent ends and the Easter season begins today with Christians celebrating Jesus’ Resurrection, TV has once again presented its share of documentaries and films about Jesus’ Passion.

PBS’ “Last Days of Jesus” offers a detailed consideration of what it meant to die by crucifixion. I now no longer watch such scenes, just as I no longer watch horror movies. “Those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows,” as President Bill Clinton put it at the Democratic National Convention this past summer, prefer to dwell on happier circumstances. Not that we eschew suffering. Indeed, the surest way to prolong suffering is the refusal to endure it. It’s just that we no longer feel the need to go out of our way to create or endure needless suffering. ...

Vladdie and The Donald: A fine bromance

February 13, 2017

As a writer of homoerotic fiction, I consider myself a collector and connoisseur of male/male romances. I began with the ancient Greeks, who practically invented homoerotic relationships – all those youths beloved by Apollo, whose depiction reached an apotheosis in the paintings of neoclassical Paris (see Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s provocative book “Male Trouble”); and the relationships of Alexander the Great with his right-hand man, Hephaestion, and eunuch Bagoas, portrayed so movingly in Mary Renault’s “Fire From Heaven” and “The Persian Boy,” respectively.

Then there’s Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian,” a model for all aspiring historical fiction writers, which tells the story of the titular Greek-loving Roman emperor and his love for the tragic Greek youth Antinous.

Moving on to our own (mostly) gay-friendly, postfeminist time, there’s Gus Van Sant’s ingenious “My Own Private Idaho,” based on “Henry IV,” and Annie Proulx’s hauntingly spare novella “Brokeback Mountain,” made into an equally worthy film by Ang Lee. ...

Atlas shrugged? 2017’s mean season

January 8, 2017

My contractor and friend gave me a telling gift for Christmas – a Veronese bronze of the Greek Titan Atlas.

He brings a mature, Herculean masculinity to a collection that includes several younger Apollos, Davids and St. Michaels, along with, of course, many Alexanders. But beyond that Atlas’ burden is both illustrative of and instructive for our time.

After the Titans lost their battle with the Olympians, sky/chief god Zeus condemned Atlas to hold up the sky at the western edge of the Earth, so sky and Earth could not resume their amorous relationship. In ancient times, Atlas was depicted shouldering the celestial spheres, a tradition upheld in Lee Lawrie’s colossal bronze at Rockefeller Center. ...

My big fat Greek odyssey, Part V: Power and death in Vergina

December 11, 2016

With the recent death of Fidel Castro – and the return of “The Hollow Crown” series to PBS, based on Shakespeare’s Henry and Richard histories – my thoughts turn to Vergina, the highlight of My Big Fat Greek Odyssey and a place were leaders were made and unmade.

It was here in the ancient capital of Aigai that Philip II was assassinated on his daughter Cleopatra’s wedding day in a kind of “Godfather” moment. It was here that his son and Cleopatra’s full brother, Alexander, became king. And it was here that the ancient burial mounds of kings of Macedon were unearthed by archaeologist Manolis Andronokis in 1977.

Today, a museum sits on the site, with another coming. We arrived on a rainy morning and were immediately delivered into a world that is overwhelming. This is a dark space that throws the treasures it protects into dramatic relief. Crowns of gold leaves. ...