Rosenwald -- Film Review Brian Wilson Performance, San Francisco-- Review Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine -- Film Review Irrational Man -- Film Review Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Marcia Marquez -- Review and Discussion

Rosenwald

Directed by Aviva Kempner

This is a film about someone doing something good in his life.  It is a straightforward, unaffected documentary.  It starts with Julius Rosenwald's immigrant father, Samuel, who arrived in the United States with his wife from Germany in 1854, and marches right through Julius Rosenwald's death in 1932.  It is a story that merits retelling and exposure to a wide audience.  I went with a friend who is Jewish and he had never heard of Rosenwald.  All of the events related in the film were news to him as well as to me.  It is an incredibly rich and touching story of human goodness, something you don't see very often. 

There are many points that could be made about this film and about Rosenwald's life.  Rosenwald became the head of Sears corporation and brought Sears to the pinnacle of retail merchandising in America through most of the twentieth century.  Sears was the Amazon.com of its day, and Rosenwald's managerial skill and vision were largely responsible for this preeminence.  Rosenwald became one of the wealthiest men in America.  But this is not the main focus of the film, that is, the amassing of his fortune and the growth of Sears.  The substance of this film is what Rosenwald did with his wealth and the social good that he was able to accomplish with it. 

Rosenwald, through an alliance with Booker T. Washington, funded and built over 5000 community schools for black children throughout the South in the era of segregation.  

Rosenwald gave grants that supported black artists, musicians, writers, who became a substantial portion of the black cultural and intellectual leaders in the twentieth century.  Some of Rosenwald's schools were burned down by the Ku Klux Klan.  He rebuilt them, sometimes more than once. 

The film draws upon a wide variety of historical sources, but what is most convincing in the film is the first person testimonies from so many people who benefited from the schools and the grants that Rosenwald's foundation made: Maya Angelou, Julian Bond, Clarence Page, and many others.  It is an overwhelming outpouring of praise and gratitude that touches the heart. 

The source of Rosenwald's motivation was his Jewish heritage.  There is a doctrine within the Jewish tradition called Tikkun Olam, which loosely means "repairing the world," or perfecting the world in accordance with God's will through our behavior, attitudes, and actions.  There are different conceptions of this doctrine within Judaism, as there is with almost anything Jewish, but Rosenwald took it very seriously.  Many Jews feel a natural affinity for the plight of African Americans, because the Jews had at one time been slaves in Egypt, and they have been oppressed and discriminated against and excluded from the mainstream of society all around the world for centuries.  My friend told me that when he was growing up it was stressed in his synagogue to assist black people.  He himself participated in voter registration drives in poor neighborhoods in accordance with this principle.  Jews value education and cultural achievement, and therefore Rosenwald built schools and funded artists and intellectuals.  The social impact of this has been impressive, positive, and lasting.  It is a monument to the good that can be done within a society with the right thinking and motivation. 

There is nothing like this in Christian tradition.  I grew up in a community dominated by evangelical Christianity and later in Catholic Chicago.  My observation and experience over many years is that Christians despise education and deeply mistrust it as a threat to blind faith in the simple minded conception of the world that they subscribe to.  Christians favor only one kind of education, namely, education that indoctrinates people in Christian ideas and norms of behavior, particularly sexual conservatism, or rather, asceticism.  They only book they really value is the Bible -- which they don't understand, and often misuse to support the silliest notions. 

Some Christian groups will do outreach to poor communities in the form of food drives, and soup kitchens, giving away clothes and toys at Christmas and so forth.  These are palliative measures to alleviate suffering.  Some Christians do show compassion for human suffering, but in principle Christians do not believe in "repairing the world."  They fundamentally despise the world; they see it as doomed and the tendency of Christians is to withdraw from the world and isolate themselves from it as much as possible.  The engagement of Christians in social action inevitably takes the form of hostile campaigns to suppress what they see as public manifestations of sin.  You never see a Christian group promoting anything constructive in society akin to the Rosenwald foundation. 

It is refreshing and uplifting to see a film with an overwhelmingly positive message and an example for constructive living.  I hope this film will gain some traction and some popularity.  It sets a good example, something rarely seen in today's world and something badly needed.  

Brian Wilson Performance

Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco

September 11, 2015

I just have to say something about this.  It was so good.  I wasn't planning to attend.  I was talking with a friend to whom I was advocating the film Love and Mercy (also reviewed in this blog).  He happens to be a nightclub singer, who sings a lot of the good old stuff, and he told me this story that he had once opened for the Beach Boys long ago in Dallas.  It was one of the shows where Glen Campbell filled in for Brian Wilson, who at that time was becoming increasingly withdrawn and averse to public performance.  I couldn't verify the story about my friend doing the opening act, but it is true that Glen Campbell began filling in for Brian Wilson and touring with the Beach Boys in Dallas in late 1964.   Anyway, I mentioned to my friend that Brian Wilson had this upcoming concert scheduled at Davies Hall.  The Jazz Center had sent me the brochure.   I told him I wasn't planning to go.  I had already spent enough money on concert tickets, and furthermore had low expectations for the show.  He prevailed on me, "Oh, let's go.  Go on.  Get the tickets.  It will be good just for historical interest, if nothing else." 

Historical interest is not one of my normal criterion for selecting a concert to attend, but I got the tickets and we went.  It was a fabulous show.  I'm very glad we were there and part of it.   That band Brian Wilson put together is a killer rock and roll band.  In terms of musicianship, they are probably better than the original Beach Boys.  There were twelve guys on the stage including Brian and Al Jardine.  Two percussionists, three guitars, two keyboards, a sax and flute guy, plus Blondie Chaplin, who played off and on throughout the show.  Chaplin goes back to the old days, and has played for many years with the Rolling Stones.  Does that add up to twelve?  Who am I leaving out?  Maybe I didn't count Matt Jardine, Al Jardine's son, who played guitar and did some vocals.  That lead guitarist in the back --  I believe his name is David Marks, but I didn't write it down and there were no credits in the program --  I throw you a bouquet. 

This band had power and verve and energy.  This was the real stuff.  They were a driving rock and roll band that really brought the classic Beach Boys songs to a resounding new level of vigor.  They started with Heroes and Villains, and then Don't Worry Baby, Wouldn't It Be Nice and so on.  There were lot of Brian's new songs from his most recent album, No Pier Pressure.  I have to say, the new stuff just isn't in the same league with the classics, but it was a good balance.  The sound was good.  Not too loud.   There were only a few technical glitches that I noticed.  This concert really worked.  Brian's voice is holding up for the most part.  He struggled some with God Only Knows and Good Vibrations.  He doesn't get those high notes like he used to.  Al Jardine's voice was strong and capable, and the instrumentalists filling in the background vocals were excellent.  The question is not did they do the Beach Boys justice, but do the Beach Boys do them justice. 

I didn't keep track of the set list.  I never like to keep track of anything at a concert, so here is what I can remember.  I'm sure it is incomplete and these are not in order.  I'm sorry, but I don't know the names of the newer songs. 

Heroes & Villains

Don't Worry Baby

Little Deuce Coupe

Surfer Girl

Wouldn't It Be Nice

God Only Knows

Good Vibrations

Surfin USA

In My Room

Sloop John B

Help Me Rhonda (encore)

Barbara Ann

I would like to pin gold stars on In My Room, Help Me Rhonda, which was a knock out, Surfer Girl, Little Deuce Coupe,  Barbara Ann, Don't Worry Baby.  Everything was top flight.  There was nothing weak in this concert.  It closed with Brian at the piano doing Love and Mercy from the recent film.  Great night.  Thanks, Brian.  

Steve Jobs:  The Man in the Machine

Directed by Alex Gibney

This film is a prep for canonization.  It amounts to an infomercial for Apple Computer.  It reminds me of how the Republicans turned Abraham Lincoln into the cultural icon and mythical figure that he is today through many years of determined falsification, hyperbole, and selective inattention.  This film is the hagiolatry of Steve Jobs:  the Great Leader, the Conquering Hero, the Brilliant Innovator, the Romantic Maverick, the Benevolent Father to his Apple customers -- which he never was to his own children.  It portrays Steve Jobs the way he would like to be presented, I think.  The film was made by CNN, which might help explain why it was such a whitewash.  A corporate media titan would not want to antagonize a colleague and formidable corporate Goliath such as Apple. 

I can't really say much about Steve Jobs based on this film.  The film simply does not delve into his character in sufficient depth.  There are suggestions and provocative hints, there are interesting details and incidents, but I don't get a clear enough picture to comment on him specifically.  One crucial circumstance that the film did note is that Steve Jobs was put up for adoption by his biological mother and raised by the Jobs family.  But the film did not explore the significance of this on Jobs' character, nor the influence of his adoptive parents.  I surmised from the film that Jobs was an only child, but this is not correct.  He had an adopted sister several years younger.  The film yields almost nothing about his family and upbringing. 

The film opened with the worldwide outpouring of grief and public mourning that occurred upon his death, and  rightly asked the source of this collective sense of loss and sadness.  Although the film did ask this question, it did not provide a satisfactory answer.  I remember the night Steve Jobs died.  I was with my young girlfriend at the time and I was surprised and taken aback at the intensity of her grief over the loss of Steve Jobs.  She was crying and upset all through the night and it went on for some days.  She loved her iphone, and she often urged me to get one, which I never did.  But she didn't know diddly about Steve Jobs.  He was little more than a name and a face to her.  Why was she so upset as if she had lost a family member?

I think that this mass grief that Steve Jobs inspired had a number of sources.  For one thing Steve Jobs died in the prime of his life and this created a sense of untimeliness that everyone could share.  But more importantly, I think, is the fact that Steve Jobs' ambition for Apple products was they be of a sort that people would not only use, but love.  He cared about the aesthetics of his products, he cared about how they felt in the hands, he wanted them to be intuitive, easy to use, he imagined all the different uses a person might have for his device and built it in.  He had great empathy for his customers.  It was a salesman's empathy.  Jobs wanted to seduce people with his products, but people responded to his understanding of their needs, their wants, their own limitations, and his desire to accommodate them and enable them to achieve things and do things that they might not have dreamed of before, with a personal attachment.  Furthermore, Steve Jobs put himself out there as the public face of his products.  He was good looking and physically attractive.  He had great personal charisma, which is very unusual in nerds.  People associated him with these products that he produced which they loved -- really loved.  And that love carried over to him.  People used his products every day -- all day long, in fact.  They began to live their lives through his products.  The iphone, the ipod, the imac became daily companions for millions of people.  Necessities.  And Steve Jobs was right there too.  His face, his name, were consciously and indelibly identified with the devices he sold.  By design and by craft. 

This is why he gave the finger to IBM in that telling photograph as a young man -- another question the film asks, but does not adequately answer.  IBM is a sterile, regimented corporation.  It is The Organization Man writ large.  It prescribed how its employees were to dress right down to their socks and underwear.  Their products are effective and useful, but devoid of aesthetics and personal touches.  No one knows who the CEO of IBM is.  Steve Jobs represented the revolt of aesthetics and empathy against mere utility and impersonality.  And people warmed to it, and to him.  But this does not reach the depths of who he was as a person. 

Steve Jobs liked to think of himself as making the world a better place through the devices he created and sold.  I don't know that Apple's products have made the world a better place.  Jobs wanted them to unleash creativity.   That they probably have done.  But creativity in and of itself does not improve the conditions of life.  It can, but it can also make things worse.  Creativity is a capability, a potential, and Apple products are tools, implements that facilitate achieving whatever ends to which they are applied.   It all depends on what one does with this new found capability. 

The guy who invented the bow and arrow made it possible to kill buffalo, and elk, and fish with much greater ease and safety.  Maybe that helped feed a lot more people and lay up food stores that enabled a people to survive a long winter.  But on the other hand the bow and arrow made warfare more lethal and more effective.  So did it improve the world or not?  Has harnessing nuclear energy made the world a better place?  Many people switch on their lights and their computers with electricity produced in nuclear power plants.  But we also have Fukushima, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, etc.  Is the world better because we can split the atom?  It's arguable.  Has the industrial revolution made the world a better place?   The carbon dioxide we're emitting from it is heating up the earth and may kill us all within a few generations.  Would anybody care to go back to the 18th century and spin your own thread, weave your own cloth, and sew your own clothes?  Isn't it better to have slave labor in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and China do all that?  Industrialization and technology are problematic in terms of their impact on humanity and the world.  It all depends on what you look at. 

What makes the world definitively better are things like the eradication of diseases such as polio, smallpox, malaria, etc.  Improvements in medical care, surgery, infection control, antibiotics, etc.  Constitutional government guaranteeing civil rights.  The improvement of public sanitation.  The availability of clean water.  Refrigeration.  Electricity.  Social security.  Universal health care.  Head Start.  Social tolerance.  Social inclusion.  The elimination of poverty.  The availability of universal education.  Steve Jobs never did anything to advance any of those causes.  He terminated all philanthropic activities at Apple.  He had no social vision beyond getting his products into the hands of as many people as possible.  He didn't care what they did with them, or what social ramifications resulted from it. 

One thing the film revealed that got my attention was the extent to which Silicon Valley corporations are in cahoots with local law enforcement agencies up and down the Peninsula, and how police departments are at the behest of these companies to serve the role of occasional muscle to intimidate, harass, or squelch people or are seen as threatening or disruptive.  There was an incident reported where a new incarnation of the iphone 4 was negligently left in a nightclub by one of Job's irresponsible lieutenants and ended up in the hands of an online publication called Gizmodo, which published an article about it, infuriating Jobs.  At Jobs' behest the San Mateo County police and prosecutor went after the journalist. 

It goes to show that this "disruption" ethos, which one hears proudly brandished by some Silicon Valley executives, reflects the arrogance, aggression, recklessness and shortsightedness of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.  They like disruption as long as they are the ones doing the disrupting.  As long as it is YOUR life that is being disrupted, and not THEIRS, disruption is good.  It's cool to screw other people up.  It's cool to violate the rules and make a mess out of things if you can make a lot of money at it.  It's the triumph of arrogance over social responsibility.  Godzilla tramples Gotham.  That's the mentality of the Silicon Valley.  But when disruption goes against a Silicon Valley corporation in the form of a journalist writing an unfavorable story or an employee or group or employees demanding better treatment, they respond with the heavy handed thuggishness that the film depicts.  Steve Jobs resorted to this as he needed to, but the film only reveals the surface of the ugly, voracious predation that is becoming increasingly out of control in the Silicon Valley, with local government agencies and officials acting less as regulators and overseers of Silicon Valley corporations and more like the road they drive on.  We are living in a technocracy in the Bay Area today, and Silicon Valley corporations are running the show around here.  The film, to its credit, obliquely noted this trend.

This film is like a scrapbook, a compendium of highlights.  It is a tantalizing overview, but with no real analysis or attempt at understanding or interpretation.  The only identifiable theme is the greatness and achievements of Steve Jobs.  Psychologically it is very superficial, very unsatisfying.  I am waiting for something a lot better about the character of Steve Jobs. 

Irrational Man

Directed by Woody Allen

I hated this practically from the moment it started, although I did like the Ramsey Lewis Trio's version of "The In Crowd" -- perhaps the single redeeming feature of this film.  After less than two minutes I said to my friend, "Let's go."  But he ignored me, and we sat through the whole thing.  The characters in this film are drawn from two groups of people I know something about:  philosophy professors and pianists, and neither in this film is convincing.  Abe (Joachin Phoenix) is totally unconvincing as a philosophy professor, however, he is more convincing as an alcoholic, and a complete loss as a murderer.  Jill (Emma Stone) bears no relationship to a pianist or musician, and she seems rather older than an undergraduate student.  The problems with this film are not the actors' faults.  The script is badly written.  There are so many things wrong with this film.  I am not going to spend a lot of time on this.  I am just writing this to warn you off.  The characters are poorly drawn and the plot makes no sense whatsoever.  Woody Allen is trying to do a contemporary version of Crime and Punishment, but it really crashes.  He made a big mistake setting this in academia.  It seems like he is out of his element.  He doesn't understand murder or crime either.  An alcoholic who is on the verge of suicide does not suddenly find a meaning in life by plotting to kill a stranger in order to make the world a better place.  Please.  People do kill strangers on the flimsiest provocation, or for no obvious reason at all, but it is an expression of pathos rather than a reasoned attempt at self regeneration.  Any pianist who can perform Bach's Prelude in C minor in a public recital on a college campus must have a life dominated by the piano.  But we never see this girl practicing.  She takes her piano lessons, just as she goes to her philosophy class, but if she were preparing for a recital, she wouldn't have time to be chasing around with her philosophy professor.  She would never be available.  Serious pianists don't have lives.  So this movie could not happen.  The final, climactic scene has a tragicomic hilarity to it.  My friend and I both broke into laughter.   But I won't spoil it for you.  At the same time I don't recommend waiting through to the end to see it.   This is a bunch of nonsense.  Read Crime and Punishment instead.  

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

By Gabriel Garcia Márquez [2006, (2004)]  Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman.   New York:  Random House, Vintage International. 

This is a story about a man in late age.  It is his ninetieth birthday and he is reflecting on his life, the passing of the years, the plight of getting older and metamorphosing into an old man.  He has never married, has no children, has lived his entire life in the house where he was born and grew up.  He was a newspaper editor and wrote a column for forty years.  His accomplishments are modest, but his life has not been uneventful or dull by any means. 

At eleven, when the edition closed, my real life began.  I slept in the red-light district, the Barrio Chino, two or three times a week, and with such a variety of companions that I was twice crowned client of the year. (p. 14-15)

I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay, and the few who weren't in the profession I persuaded, by argument or by force, to take money even if they threw it in the trash.  When I was twenty I began to keep a record listing name, age, place, and a brief notation on the circumstances and style of lovemaking.  By the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once.  (p. 12)

Otherwise he was very solitary.

I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York.  By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives. (p. 15)

The story seems to have been inspired by Yasunari Kawabata's story, House of the Sleeping Beauties (1969),¹ which is quoted in an epigraph, and which I have also discussed on this blog.  It is apparent that this story could not have taken place in the United States or been written by an American.  I actually read it three times, which I don't usually do, but I felt like I did not get a good fix on it with the first read, so I went back through it informed by a first exposure, and still again to compose this review.  There are many aspects of this story one could lift up and explicate.  It is not too long, but it is rich in substance.  I am sure I will leave things out of this discussion that some readers may feel I should have mentioned. 

Our hero is a man of modest means who, turning ninety, decides to spend a month's worth of his income on a night of wild passion with a young virgin.  He phones a brothel madam, Rosa Cabarcas, with whom he has had dealings in the past, and within a couple of hours she finds him a willing girl of fourteen who meets the essential criterion of being a virgin.  She lives with her mother and younger siblings.  She works long hours in a sweat shop sewing buttons.  She is poor and needs the money. 

This man is very limited in his capacity for human connection.  He is confused in his sentiments toward women with an admixture of profound hostility.  This hostility is manifest not through antagonism and belligerence, although there is one violent outburst directed at the brothel rather than the girl, but mostly through avoidance.

I was ignorant of the arts of seduction and had always chosen my brides for a night at random, more for their price than their charms, and we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were. (p. 29)

The indifference to the arts of seduction indicates a lack of empathy as well as a lack of  interest in making contact with the girl on an emotional level.  This kind of sex is very simple and undemanding.  One could almost call it disengaged.  The random choice of his bed partners and having sex in the dark so that fantasy might predominate in the encounter emphasizes the self absorbed quality of the experience.  Marquez's narrator was not interested in the women themselves, who they were and what they liked and what excited them.  His was a self absorbed, narcissistic experience, where the woman was needed as a participant, but not for who she was, but rather in the imaginary role into which he had cast her.  It is more cathartic than interactive.  This is also the case with the young girl, Delgadina, who is the object of his interest in this story.  We don't really learn very much about Delgadina as a person.  She spends most of the book supposedly asleep. 

The opening of Chapter 2 recounts his youthful marriage engagement to Ximena Ortiz, who pursued him quite aggressively.  They crocheted little booties for the babies they expected to have, but the engagement ended in a conflagration when he stood her up at the church on the wedding day. 

The tempestuous farewells to bachelorhood that they gave me in the Barrio Chino were the opposite of the oppressive evenings at the Social Club.  A contrast that helped me find out which of the two worlds in reality was mine. . .  (p. 36)

Whenever someone asks I always answer with the truth:  whores left me no time to be married. (p. 39)

This marriage fantasy, that is, of living predominantly, if not exclusively, with a single woman with whom one has babies and raises children was not in his repertoire.  Fortunately, he had the self awareness and the fortitude to reject it and stay clear of it.  Many less adept men get sucked into stifling marriages in which they are not emotionally invested and which become the bane of their lives.  One important factor that saved the protagonist in Marquez's story from that dismal fate was the existence and availability of a thriving brothel culture. 

In the United States the brothel culture, which used to be ubiquitous, has been outlawed, made illicit, and forced underground for over one hundred years.  Government policies have actively promoted monogamous heterosexual marriage as the exclusive foundation of social life in this country.  This has forced countless men into marriages that they might not otherwise have entered into, with devastating effect on women, children, and society.  In the United States today sexual violence and rape is a major public health problem.²  While you will not find a study on sexual violence that mentions the absence of a legitimate commercial sex culture as a contributor to the problem, I believe it is a major, ignored factor. 

The absence of sanctioned, legitimate commercial sex, creates a bad atmosphere between the sexes throughout society.  Men, who are the ones who patronize commercial sexual services and readily avail themselves of this kind of casual, emotionally unencumbered sex when it is available, are given the message that there is something wrong with their desires, and thus with them.  With easy, straightforward sources of sexual satisfaction shut off, they are forced to bring the myriad variants of their desires home to girlfriends and wives, who are not equipped to deal with them effectively, and who furthermore are conditioned to be rejecting and condemning of such desires.  The result is every woman in a public or private space becomes a target of lust.  American women feel besieged by male desire as a condition of their daily lives.  They live in a perpetual state of wariness, mobilized at all times for defense, and for the most part, simply bypassing or avoiding men as much as possible.  People begin to feel a sense of detachment and a lack of connection to other people and to society.  The common official response is to blame men and exhort them to greater self control.  And in lieu of that to apply increasingly heavy-handed coercive pressure from the government and the police.  But it is not working and the situation is deteriorating.²  It has everything to do with the absence of safe, easily accessible brothels.

The Latin culture understands and values the vital human need to express one's essential self through particular forms of sexual striving much better than the American.  America's narrow prejudices about the scope and form of propriety in human relations are a major reason why American culture is so isolating and lonely.  People from all over the world, and especially from Latin America, notice this about America right away when they come here for the first time. 

Marquez's hero, has the luxury, at age ninety, of being able to call Rosa Cabarcas after twenty years of silence, and ask for a girl who is a virgin for a night of sex, and within a couple of hours she has one for him.  Of course, it will cost him a month's pay, but for a man in the United States such a thing would be unimaginable.  Not that it could never happen in the United States.  It certainly can and does, but were an American man to seek out such an entertainment, it would have to be clandestine in the utmost, he would most likely be dealing with organized crime, it would likely be difficult and time consuming to achieve -- never mind exorbitantly expensive -- and if discovered he would face draconian punishment. 

In Marquez's story the relationship is ostensibly illegal also, but without the heavy handedness that exists in the United States.  It is illegal with a wink and a nod.  Only officially.  But in practice there is toleration.  The ease and speed with which Rosa Cabarcas is able to find a young girl to willingly participate speaks to this.  The support and encouragement of older women in fulfilling it also evinces the  atmosphere that exists in the Latin society, that understands, accepts, and cooperates in satisfying such a desire.  Nothing like that exists in the United States.  In the United States it is sinister, sordid, and highly dangerous to pursue such an impulse.  It is the easiness and straightforwardness with which a man can pursue his desire and women who will do what they can to accommodate it that creates an ambience that is less stressful and more sympathetic between the sexes.  This is the most outstanding difference between the Latin and American sexual cultures reflected in this book. 

The girl's role, is simply to sleep in the nude while the narrator stays beside her through the night, watching her, touching her, kissing her, fondling her body, but having no real interaction with her.  The girl becomes as passive and inert an object as she can possibly be without being dead.  It is a scenario Marquez lifted from Yasunari Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties, which I also discussed in this blog.  In both stories the girl is drugged so that she remains deeply asleep, although in Marquez's story the girl seems a little more sentient, and as it develops there is an undercurrent of implication that the girl is actually participating much more than Marquez is telling us.  This is due to the blurring of the boundary between fantasy and reality that pervades the book. 

Psychologically, I see it as a projection.  The sleeping, inert girl, mirrors the deadness the narrator's own inner self.  It is an attempt to get in touch with this deeply detached and lifeless part of himself that is unable to respond and interact with other human beings.  It ultimately began with the unresponsiveness of his own mother long ago that set up this severe handicap, this inability to interact emotionally and form deep attachments to other people.  This whole quest is not about interacting with the young girl.  Not at all.  It is about dealing with something inside himself.  One could see it as an attempt to awaken that deadened aspect of his own inner self.  It is not an accident that he would choose his ninetieth birthday to embark on this quest.  He has lived his whole life limited and hampered by this very severe liability, which he was able to assuage through his encounters in the brothels.  The superficial stimulation constituted a salve, but it did not heal the wound.  Now, at ninety, he resolves to confront the demon that has shaped his entire life.  He really needs this young girl.  And it works, up to a point.   He is able to fall in love for the first time at age ninety.  It is a tribute to the power of regeneration within the human spirit. 

But why must it be such a young girl, and why must she be a virgin?  He did not ask Rosa for a particular age, what he insisted on was virginity.  Rosa offered him other possibilities, but who were not virgins, which he rejected.  The need for virginity implied the young age of the girl.  This need for virginity reflects a need for specialness and emotional significance on the part of the male.  This is a man who has a deep sense of his own insignificance which he seeks to overcome through acquiring a significant place in the life of a young girl.  Every girl will remember the man who deflowers her, whether she loved him or hated him, whether it was a good experience or a bad experience.  This is a man who at ninety feels he has no significant legacy.  He wants to live on in the mind of this girl.  Deflowering a virgin is a way of creating a legacy for a man who feels he has none.  This kind of significance is not the same thing as love, and it will not necessarily have a great emotional impact on the girl's life.  In fact, the girl will quite likely go on to much better and much more significant experiences in her sexual and romantic life.  But he has no such ambitions.  It is a rather minimal objective of a man of mediocre capabilities in relating to women.  It is a little better than buying a plaque with your name on it to hang on a building or a sidewalk or a park bench.  But that is the idea.  The insistence on deflowering a virgin is a quest for significance -- in lieu of actually playing a significant role in the girl's life. 

In Memoirs of a Geisha there is a description of Dr. Crab's small wooden case with forty to fifty glass vials that held blood samples of the virgins he had deflowered. (Golden, p. 282)  In the geisha culture of Japan the right to be the slayer of the maturing geisha's virginity was highly prized and quite expensive.  It was the subject of competitive bidding between wealthy men.  Dr. Crab kept these somewhat ghoulish mementos of his accomplishments, each labeled with the girl's name.³ 

The virgin collector is a man who wants to feel some importance.  It is also an affirmation of masculinity in a man who is very unsure of himself as a male.  While the virgin collector retains the tokens of the virgins he has taken, the deflowered virgins move on.  The virgin collector temporarily assuages his faltering sense of insignificance, but he must forever continue the quest as the underlying psychic deficit is not repaired by these isolated, temporary experiences.  It is rather pathetic and sad, this futile quest, but it is a common insecurity of males in many cultures and is the main reason for the overvaluation of virginity and the excesses to which men will go to defend it.⁴ 

Marquez's hero gives the young girl the name Delgadina.  Although the story presents the relationship as being chaste, where the man only touches, fondles, kisses and then sleeps beside the nude girl, who has been heavily drugged into a deep sleep, I interpret this as a gloss, a ruse, and in fact this evolved into an intense sexual relationship with strong, reciprocated passion.  There are incidents reported to have occurred in his residence, as fantasies within his own mind.  But I would say, they really did happen.  Delgadina really was there in his apartment, feeding his cat and helping him restore order after the hurricane.   Marquez disguises the relationship with this fog of unreality in order to preserve plausible denial. 

In the beginning of the new year we started to know each other as well as if we lived together awake, for I had discovered a cautious tone of voice that she heard without waking, and she would answer me with the natural language of her body.  (p. 75)

I began to read her The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry, a French author whom the entire world admires more than the French do.  It was the first book to entertain her without waking her, and in fact I had to go there two days in a row to finish reading it to her.   We continued with Perrault's Tales, Sacred History, the Arabian Nights in a version sanitized for children, and because of the differences among them I realized that her sleep had various levels of profundity depending on her interest in the readings. (p. 76)

She is not asleep.  This is a very thin artifice Marquez is using to keep the book from being labeled "child pornography" and having it banned.  It is a clever technique, presenting the story as occurring in the girl's sleep, so that her participation and physical interaction with him is ostensibly denied.  But anyone can see through this.  This was a passionate relationship with strong sexual feeling and the girl's full participation.  On the last page Rosa tells him that the girl is madly in love with him.  How does one fall in love in one's sleep? 

In Chapter 4 an incident occurs in the brothel that disrupts his relationship with Delgadina.  An important client, a prominent banker, is murdered inside the brothel in a decidedly compromised position.  It is suspected (likely, I think) that the client's companion was another man.  Rosa Cabarcas awakens the narrator in Delgadina's room during the night and summons him to help her dress the body.  They worry about what to do with Delgadina and Rosa recommends that the narrator take her with him.  He refuses, to Rosa's contempt, and Delgadina subsequently disappears, along with Rosa.  In her absence he becomes obsessed with her and realizes he is in love with her.  After a month Rosa calls him, and that evening he is reunited with the girl.  But things have changed.  She seems older.  She is made up with jewelry and tawdry clothes and cheap perfume.  He accused the girl of being a whore, threw a tantrum, and trashed the place.  It was the only violence he displayed in the whole book and he did not harm the girl. 

This furor illustrates the confusion and hypocrisy of Marquez's hero, and perhaps it is a feature of the Latin culture.  The girl is a whore.  First and foremost for him.  He is the one who started her down this path.  He had the chance to take her home make her part of his life and he refused.  It might have turned into a very different story if he had.  So this fit over her growing into the role for which he has groomed her is the most brazen self deception and disingenuousness.  Rosa rightly despises him.  His behavior is akin to the confusion many father's feel about their growing daughters' emerging sexuality and their unwillingness to allow them to develop and grow up as sexual women.   It is a deep seated fear of attachment and abandonment being played out.  It is part of what has kept his relations with people to a minimal level of involvement throughout his life.  There is a preconscious recognition that women like to be whores, they enjoy being promiscuous, they enjoy selling themselves, or using sex to gain favors and advantages from men.  They enjoy violating the rules that men make for them.  It is in their nature.  Men who resist this or try to suppress it have a hard, contentious life.  They spend their lives either avoiding deep involvements with women or trying to build fences around their women, and forever battling the illusion that their efforts are being thwarted or circumvented.  I would also note in passing that the murder of a man likely engaged in sex with another man is a repudiation of homosexuality as an interpretation of Marquez's character as an explanation for his need to have the girl asleep and non-interacting.

In the final chapter after this blow up and estrangement, he meets by chance one of his former paramours from his younger days in the brothels.  She is an old woman now, but they go back to her teen years.  He unburdens his saga with Delgadina to her, and it is through her that he is able to achieve a reconciliation and a resolution of this contradiction in his attitude toward women that has been limiting him all of his life.  She listens sympathetically and tells him

Do whatever you want, but don't lose that child. . . Find that poor creature right now even if what your jealousy tells you is true, no matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.  But one thing, no grandfather's romanticism.  Wake her, fuck her brains out with that burro's cock the devil gave you as a reward for cowardice and stinginess.  I'm serious, she concluded, speaking from the heart:  Don't let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love. (p. 99-100)

He makes amends with Rosa and prevails upon her to find Delgadina for him once again.  There is a long recitative before his reunion with her wherein he reviews his life and comes to terms with his imminent mortality.  Chapter 5 is an almost triumphant resolution of the major issues in his life.  It ends with him leaving Delgadina's bed in the morning joyful at the prospect of spending perhaps another ten years with her happily and mutually in love.  It is a very positive book that offers the hope of reconciliation, regeneration and new love even at ninety in a man who had lived within a very limited scope of emotional possibility in his relations with people throughout his entire life. 

This story rebukes many of the lies and delusions that grip American society in regard to sexual relations.  First and foremost is the idea that sex harms children or exploits children, or some variant thereon.  That sexual relations between children and adults are inherently abusive or damaging to the young person is a silly idea on its face, but one that has been promoted in this country with great success mainly by Christians.  

The laws excluding children from sex are so broadly written and so severe that they have created an atmosphere of extreme anxiety surrounding the care of children.  People who deal with children in their daily lives feel intimidated and uneasy, including parents.  Men who supervise or care for young children are automatically suspect and subject to surveillance.  Making sex with children illegal harms them much more than any amount of sex.  It deprives them of close emotional and physical relationships with adults and creates an atmosphere of anxiety and mistrust and hostility that pervades relations between children and adults.  It estranges men from children and discourages them from developing close relationships with them.  It casts women in the role of being the "defenders" of children against the desires of males creating antagonism and suspicion between adult men and women.  The whole society becomes mobilized to defend children from sex -- something they are naturally interested in and respond to quite readily.  Every way you look at it, these laws are destructive of children's interests and of constructive, positive relations between the sexes.

The undesirability of a long age difference between lovers is another common prejudice of American society that Marquez repudiates as well as the tendency to dismiss old people as sexually disinterested or incapable.  Ninety and fourteen is about as wide an age gap as one is likely to see, and it seems to have been mutually beneficial.  Marquez is to be congratulated for presenting a sympathetic, beautifully written story that highlights the ambiguities and conflicts and deep seated emotional needs that are pursued and struggled with and fulfilled in the world of commercial sex.  The Latin culture recognizes, understands, values and such personal pursuits much more than the American.  In fact, I would say, American culture devalues the personal and individual, and instead, stresses conformity even in one's personal needs and desires for connection to other people.  American society has become very intolerant over the last century or so and the trend is growing and becoming increasingly heavy handed.  This book that provides a strong rebuttal to many of the righteous prejudices that American society thoughtlessly takes for granted and is unfortunately promoting around the world.

Notes

1.  Kawabata, Yasunari (1969)  House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories.  Translated by Edward Seidensticker.  Tokyo and New York:  Kodansha International. 

2.   Prevalence and Characteristics of Sexual Violence, Stalking, and Intimate Partner Violence Victimization -- National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, United States, 2011.   Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Morbidity and  Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR)   September 5, 2014. 

Spousal abuse is also credited as a leading cause of homelessness in women in the United States.

Spousal Abuse:  The 'Silent Illness' Driving Women into Homelessness.  By Lisa De Bode.   Al Jazeera English  August 14, 2015.   http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/8/14/female-homelessness-intimate-partner-violence.html

The CDC's recommendations in regard to sexual violence in the United States are as follows.

Promoting respectful, nonviolent relationships is key to preventing intimate partner violence. CDC’s prevention strategy is focused on principles such as: • Identifying ways to interrupt IPV perpetration. • Better understanding the factors that contribute to respectful relationships and protect against IPV. • Creating and evaluating new approaches to IPV prevention. • Building community capacity to implement strategies that are based on the best available evidence. Primary prevention of IPV must begin early. Opportunities for prevention include: • Promoting healthy relationship behaviors among young people, with the goal of reaching adolescents prior to their first relationships in order to develop healthy relationship behaviors and patterns for life. • Building positive and healthy parent-child relationships through parenting skills programs, including efforts to support relationships between fathers and children.   (Overview)

CDC (2010)   National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey.

The CDC recommends promoting healthy sexual relationships between young people, but in the United States healthy sexual relationships are illegal for young people.  If the government finds out about a healthy sexual relationship involving a young person it will destroy the relationship and everyone connected to it.  How can parents have a positive, healthy relationship with their children, if all sex must be excluded?  Only the most sterile, superficial, emotionally shallow relationships are possible.  The children will never feel close to their parents and never feel like the parents understand them.  They must be exposed to their parents' sexuality from an early age to really know and feel close to their parents. 

Consider the following recent example from the news media.

Mark Joseph West, 25, was arrested July 16 by San Jose police after the girl's legal guardian found several sexually explicit images on the teen's phone, according to the police report.  West, who has been charged with two felony counts of sending harmful matter to a minor and four counts of misdemeanor annoying or molesting a minor, is scheduled to appear in court Thursday morning for a plea hearing.  Police say West met the teen on social media in January after playing online video games with the girl's teen boyfriend, according to the report.  West and the girl became friends and communicated online for several months.  Sometime in May, the relationship and discussions turned sexual in nature, according to the report.  West and the girl met several times during which he touched her inappropriately, police say.  San Jose Mercury News  August 26, 2015.

Since when does a man need permission from the police to touch a girl's body, who voluntarily meets him on her own initiative in a relationship that has been going on for months?  How did we ever get to this crazy place?  The complaint wasn't made by the girl herself.  It was made by her "legal guardian," whoever that is, who snooped on her cell phone and then ratted on her to the police for what?  Having a sexually explicit picture.  The legal guardian is the one who should be charged with a felony, for gross disrespect and invasion of the girl's privacy.  Why do the police need to be involved in this at all?  They should have laughed the legal guardian out of the police station. 

This incident appeared in the San Jose Mercury News just within the last couple of days.  But this kind of harassment by the police of perfectly benign personal relationships is happening on a daily basis all over the United States.  Hundreds, if not thousands of men, are being arrested, charged with crimes, and jailed for nothing more than having or sending "sexually explicit pictures" or "inappropriately touching" young girls.  It's insanity. 

Sexual violence cannot be understood without thinking about sex.  The economy, poverty, and the stresses of modern life may all make a contribution, but sexual violence has everything to do with sex, gender roles, and power.  In the United States, the pervasiveness of sexual violence is caused by government policies that foment antagonism between the sexes throughout society.  There will always be a certain amount of misunderstanding, conflict, and resentment between the sexes, but it only devolves into the kind of unrelenting animosity and violence that we have in the United States under special conditions.  In the United States we have institutionalized and exalted those conditions with the result that the fractious relations between the sexes are deteriorating and intensifying.

There are probably people within the CDC who know what needs to be done, but they cannot speak forthrightly for fear of losing their jobs.  The problems with America's sexual culture are not difficult to analyze.  It is rather simple and straightforward:  we need to decriminalize sex across the board and absolve the government of the role of defining what sexual relationships are "appropriate" and "inappropriate."  The terms "rape" and "sexual assault," which have been expanded in recent years to include all sorts of perfectly benign activities and relationships, need to be restored to credible definitions. 

The difficulty will be in the implementation because there is a hairball of nefarious interests implacably opposed to any reform.  First and foremost is the Christian religion, which opposes all progressive changes that would foster a more tolerant, congenial sexual culture; the victim culture, which is an outgrowth of the Christian mentality that worships a victim and turns him into a god; and the sex abuse industry, which has learned how to use the perverseness of our legal system and the victim culture to make money.  These interests are a formidable propaganda machine, but the forward strides made by gay people over the last half century illustrate what is possible and how much things can change.  America is not hopeless by any means, but the challenges ahead of us are daunting.  One thing in our favor is that the way forward is clear.  We have to get the Christian influence out of our sexual culture and especially out of our legal system governing sex. 

3. Golden, Arthur (1999 [1997]) Memoirs of a Geisha.  New York:  Vintage/Random House. 

4.  According to the CDC Report Violence by Intimate Partners.  July 2008. 

In many places, notions of male honour and female chastity put women at risk (see also Chapter 6). For example, in parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, a man’s honour is often linked to the perceived sexual ‘‘purity’’ of the women in his family. If a woman is ‘‘defiled’’ sexually – either through rape or by engaging voluntarily in sex outside marriage – she is thought to disgrace the family honour. In some societies, the only way to cleanse the family honour is by killing the ‘‘offending’’ woman or girl. A study of female deaths by murder in Alexandria, Egypt, found that 47% of the women were killed by a relative after they had been raped.  (p. 93)

This linkage of male self esteem with women's sexual "purity," that is, virginity, is a dangerous cultural feature for women.  It seems to be the norm in the Middle East, parts of Asia, and also in Latin America, perhaps to a lesser extent.  This has to do with the cultural understanding of masculinity.  I think that uncoupling male identity and female chastity will be difficult in cultures where it is entrenched, but it will depend on a general elevation in the educational level of the population and a declining influence of religion in the culture. This is a topic for another time and place.