John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent was June’s selection for The Mules, my all-male book club. I’ve always had the impression that Steinbeck is solidly ensconced in the pantheon of American novelists and that he represents the era when the best writers were defining what an American novel could or should be.

As pointed out by GG, one of our younger members, the title of the book comes from the first two lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III, a soliloquy by the Duke of Gloucester (the future King Richard III):

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York

(If you’re interested, you can read the entire soliloquy in the P.S., below.)

When I read Richard III in college, and then in graduate school, I was always slightly troubled by this soliloquy. I thought it was beautiful and thus worthy of my attention. So, I parsed and pondered the lines a dozen times, and was able to appreciate the cleverness of Gloucester’s words.

I eventually arrived at a Cliff Notes-level understanding of their purpose: to very succinctly introduce three of the principal characters and Gloucester’s hamartia (his tragic, fatal flaw). But I always felt that there was something more. Reading The Winter of Our Discontent filled in the blanks for me.

Business, Sports… and Defending the Apostrophe

I ask GP what he’s been doing since he retired late last year.

“Living the dream,” he tells me. “I walk along the beach almost every morning. Once or twice a week I golf. I fill in the rest of the time with crossword puzzles, watching sports or TV or a movie. With Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and the others, there are so many good things to watch.”

“Too many,” I say.

RS has a part-time job in a hardware store, which he likes. Having spent his life in construction, he knows a lot about building materials and tools. Sharing his wisdom with shoppers makes him feel good.

“I get that,” I say.

I ask him how he spends the rest of his time. Like GP, RS golfs, watches sports, and binge watches “true crime” series on the streaming services.

And then there’s the grandkids. GP and RS agree that time spent with the grandkids is the best. “So long as it doesn’t go more than a few hours,” they add. There’s just so much endurance an old person can muster up for toddlers.

GP and RS are old friends of mine. And they are good friends. But we struggle sometimes to have good conversations. I’ve been trying to figure out why that is.

Here’s my current theory: We grew into adulthood in an era when men were supposed to be the sole breadwinners. It wasn’t until we were in college that the women’s liberation movement kicked in. And even then, it wasn’t about men having less financial and parental responsibility, but about women exercising certain already established rights.

As we made room for women as equals in the workplace and elsewhere, we never expected that our financial responsibilities would be lessened. We would accept some responsibility for the housework and the child rearing, but our primary responsibility to our families continued to be to pay the bills. The more we earned, the better we felt about ourselves. And so, we continued to put most of our energy into our work.

One consequence of all of this was the effect it had on our conversation skills. In responding to the proverbial “What’s new?” we could talk at some length about the challenges, frustrations, and triumphs of our work. Work conversations were generally short and sympathetic, but they were interesting because of shared concerns. After that, the only commonality for most of us was professional sports. We talked about baseball or football or basketball.

For most of my life, I was satisfied with the conversations I had about work. I had plenty to talk about and was always interested in the experiences and opinions of my peers. As for sports, except for several years when I followed the Miami Heat, I had nothing to contribute to sports conversations. So they bored me. But that, as my friends always reminded me, was my problem. It was unnatural for a full-grown man to know nothing about professional sports. To my friends, though, my ignorance posed a different problem: Having nothing to say on the subject, I was, to them, a bore.

Today, almost all of my coevals are retired. That means we no longer talk about work. I am still working, but I’m acutely aware that it isn’t fair to burden my friends with stories of my business struggles. Instead, I talk about what they talk about: what we have done to replace the time we used to spend working – i.e., TV and movies and sometimes books… and the inevitable, golf.

And so, I find that some of the best conversations I have these days are with younger people, my colleagues and protégés that are still actively working. But that makes me sad, because I think that my best conversations should be with my best and oldest friends.

I’m drawing too grim of a picture here. My book club conversations are usually very good. And casual conversations with friends sometimes slip into philosophical discussions about politics, economics, and the disintegration of Western culture. Those I still enjoy. But it makes me second-guess the idea of retiring. I understand the allure of it, but I don’t want to spend the precious time that remains to me pissing away my time with trivial pursuits and then boring others by talking about it.

When we near retirement, we have several choices. One of them is between fixing on what we know or being receptive to continuous learning – narrowing our interests or opening up to more.

I read a short obituary in the WSJ about a British guy that decided to devote his retirement to “Defending the Apostrophe”:

After a career as a newspaper reporter and editor in England, John Richards took up the role of defending the apostrophe, an often-abused punctuation mark.

When he started the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001, there were only two members, Mr. Richards and his son, Stephen. Soon, however, he had more than 250 members, and some made unsolicited cash donations. Letters and emails arrived from all over with examples of misuse of the apostrophe. Many offenders left the apostrophe out of possessive phrases where it was needed (“The last word was John’s.”) or inserted it where it should not have been (“It’s title was Exodus.”).

He recalled an incident when he saw a restaurant advertising coffee’s: “I said, very politely, to the owner, that it wasn’t needed. That it was a plural. But the man said, ‘I think it looks better with an apostrophe.’ What can you say to that?”

“He was always great fun to listen to,” a mourner said. “If you asked him what’s new, he always had another story and something interesting to say.”

As Anna Quindlen once said, “A finished person is a boring person.”

Walking With Steve

Once a week, Steve Leveen, a friend and neighbor, and I would take an early morning walk. He’s a better walker than I am. And his dog is a better walker than Steve is. So, the pace we kept was halfway between Steve’s pace and his dog’s pace – which is to say, it was too fast for me.

When this ritual began, I forced myself to keep up with them for the 90 minutes we spent walking. I believed that what I was doing was good for me – i.e., loosening the hips and strengthening the walking muscles. But it had the opposite effect. It broke me down so that I could barely walk at all. It took me five weeks to recover.

Since then, I’ve realized that I’m better off accepting who I am as a walker – capable of walking for half the time at about 75% of the pace. Steve understood, so now we are walking together again, which means talking together again, which is the immediate pleasure of the experience.

This morning, we talked about foreign language acquisition, a subject about which I have a keen interest and Steve is fast becoming an expert.

Allen Midgette, the man pictured below, died on June 16 at his home in Woodstock, NY.

Yes, he looks a lot like Andy Warhol, who died in 1987, 34 years ago. That’s not a coincidence.

In 1967, either because he was too busy, too fatigued, or (more likely) because he thought it would be a novel form of performance art, Andy Warhol recruited Mr. Midgette to impersonate him in a series of lectures on pop art that he (Warhol) was scheduled to deliver.

When asked questions by the audience, Midgette would answer them by saying the first thing that popped into his head. “I knew Andy well enough to know I didn’t have to worry about talking too much, because he didn’t,” Mr. Midgette said. “And I knew I could deal with people much more easily than he could, because I did.”

Warhol thought he did a great job. “He was better than I am,” the artist said. “He was what the people expected. They liked him better than they would have me.”

From the NYT:

Allen Joseph Midgett – he added an E to the family name later – was born on Feb. 2, 1939, in Camden, NJ. His father, Jarvis Midgett, was a ship captain with the Army Corps of Engineers and later a harbor master in North Carolina, and his mother, Dorothy (Jones) Midgett, was a homemaker.

He lived in Italy for a time and acted in several movies there, including Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Grim Reaper” (1962, the director’s first feature) and “Before the Revolution” (1964). By 1965 he was back in New York and working at Arthur, the Manhattan discothèque, which is where, that year, he met Warhol, who had seen him in “Before the Revolution” and invited him to make films with him. Mr. Midgette became part of the scene at the Factory, Warhol’s studio, although he told Chronogram that he had not been as immersed in it as some of Warhol’s superstars.

Mr. Midgette also appeared in Warhol films, including “The Nude Restaurant” (1967) and “Lonesome Cowboys” (1968). And he continued to don the Warhol disguise occasionally, even playing Warhol in a 1991 Italian movie, “Suffocating Heat.” His acting career, though, was limited. In his later years he made artworks of various kinds.

In other fake art news…

A copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” – known as the Hekking Mona Lisa – which was painted in the 17th century and marketed by art dealer Raymond Hekking, was sold at Christie’s on June 18 for $3.45 million. That was about 10 times its estimated value.

And here’s one more…

I just read this in Bill Bonner’s Diary:

“‘Modern’ or ‘contemporary’ art always seemed like a hustle,” Bill wrote. “Now, however, an Italian artist has taken the hustle to a new level…. His work is invisible.” Then he quoted this from the New York Post:

Salvatore Garau sold his piece, entitled “Io Sono” (I am), to an unidentified buyer last month.

Italian auction house Art-Rite organized the sale of the “immaterial” statue in May with a beginning estimated value coming in between $7,000 and $11,000. [It sold for $18,000.]

“The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that ‘nothing’ has a weight,” the Sardinian-born artist explained…. “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”