UK: The new ages of man

LONDON, England / The Independent / Life & Style / Health & Families / March 6, 2012

By TimWalker
Adolescence is ever longer, while 'middle age' gets more elastic. Now those in between must grapple with 'emerging adulthood'. It's time to redefine our life stages, says Tim Walker

One thing that can be said of "Middle Age" is that it's moving further from the middle. The annual British Social Attitudes Survey suggests just a third of people in their 40s regard themselves as middle-aged, while almost a third of those in their 70s are still clinging to the label, arthritic fingers notwithstanding. In A Shed of One's Own, his very funny new memoir of male midlife crisis and its avoidance, Marcus Berkmann reaches for a number of definitions for his time of life: "Middle age is comedy, and also tragedy," he says. "Other people's middle age is self-evidently ridiculous, while our own represents the collapse of all our hopes and dreams."

He cites the late Denis Norden, who said: "Middle age is when, wherever you go on holiday, you pack a sweater." And the fictional Frasier Crane, who maintains that the middle-aged "go 'oof' when [they] sit down on a sofa". Shakespeare's famous Seven Ages of Man speech, delivered by the melancholy Jacques in As You Like It, delineated the phases of human development by occupation: the schoolboy, the adolescent lover, the soldier, and the – presumably, middle-aged – legal professional. We have long defined ourselves compulsively by our stages in life; we yearn for maturity, then mourn the passing of youth. But to what extent are these stages socio-cultural (holidays/sweaters) and to what extent are they biological (sofas/"oof")?

Patricia Cohen, New York Times reporter and author of another new study of ageing, In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age, might not be overly sympathetic to Berkmann's plight. The mid-life crisis, she suggests, is a marketing trick designed to sell cosmetics, cars and expensive foreign holidays; people in their 20s and 30s are far more vulnerable to such a crisis than their parents. Cohen finds little evidence for so-called "empty nest syndrome", or for the widespread stereotype of the rich man with the young "trophy wife".

She even claims that middle age itself is a "cultural fiction", and that Americans only became neurotic about entering their 40s at the turn of the 20th century, when they started lying to census-takers about their age. Before then, "age was not an essential ingredient of one's identity". Rather, people were classified according to "marker events": marriage, parenthood and so on. In 1800 the average American woman had seven children; by 1900 she had three. They were out of her hair by her early 40s and, thanks to modern medicine, she could look forward to a further 20 years or more of active life.

As Berkmann laments, "one of the most tangible symptoms of middle age is the sensation that you're being cast adrift from mainstream culture." Then again, the baby boomers, and the more mature members of "Generation X", are the most powerful of economic blocs. The over-50s spend far more on consumer goods than their younger counterparts, making them particularly valuable to advertisers – and perpetuating the idea of the middle-aged as a discernible demographic.

David Bainbridge, a vet and evolutionary zoologist, also weighs in on the topic in his latest book, Middle Age: A Natural History. Middle age is an exclusively human phenomenon, Bainbridge explains, and doesn't exist elsewhere in the animal kingdom, where infirmity often follows hot on the heels of parenthood. It is, he argues, "largely the product of millions of years of human evolution... not a 20th-century cultural invention." He urges readers to embrace middle age as "flux, not crisis" – which is probably what he said to his wife, when he bought himself a blue vintage Lotus soon after turning 40.

A similar clash of cultural and biological factors occurs at the other end of adulthood. "Teenager" is a self-defining cultural term, but its corollary, adolescence, is an occasionally painful psychological and physiological process. In Teenagers: A Natural History (2009), Bainbridge explained that we homo sapiens take more time to mature, and are reliant on our parents for longer, than almost any other species. In fact, he argues, the evolutionary insertion of adolescence into the life cycle – 300,000 years ago, give or take – is what helped our brains to make the "great leap forward" into humanity. With adulthood afflicting us only in our second decade, we have more time to learn important skills, to acquire analytic and creative abilities – and to optimise ourselves for reproduction.

In a recent essay for the Wall Street Journal, Alison Gopnik – Professor of psychology at Berkeley, and an expert in the development of infant minds – argued the teenage brain is moulded by the differing circumstances of each generation. Twenty-first-century teenagers are hitting puberty inexplicably early, yet the responsibilities of adulthood are conferred on them far later than their forebears. Shakespeare's Juliet falls for and marries Romeo aged 13. "Our Juliets," writes Gopnik, "may experience the tumult of love for 20 years before they settle down into motherhood."

This puts two crucial neural and psychological stages out of sync: in puberty, chemical changes in the body turn teenagers into intense, restless rebels without a cause. At the same time, they would traditionally take on the skills and experience required for adult life, controlling emotional impulses and focusing them on learning. "For most of our history," Gopnik argues, "children have started their internships when they were seven, not 27." The adolescent brain is perceptibly altered by the delay to such lessons – be it in cooking, driving or machete-wielding.

Teenagers (and their behaviour) might be biologically explicable, but they're also a product of social change. The term "teenager" entered the vernacular in the postwar years, when youth culture and its commercial manifestations began to dominate all popular culture. But, as Jon Savage argued in his 2007 book Teenage, its roots stretch deeper, to the street gangs of the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution, when they were removed from their families and brought together in workhouses and factories. Later, with the advent of child labour laws and universal education, mere adolescents metamorphosed into the modern teenager.

Even childhood is widely considered to be a cultural construct, invented as part of Rousseau's philosophy of education, and popularised by the works of Charles Dickens, before whom the under-12s were thought of simply as small adults. And in the past decade, a whole new developmental category has been identified: twentysomethings, increasingly unstable in their careers and relationships, are now said to be in a distinct life stage labelled "emerging adulthood". In America in 1960, according to the US Census Bureau, 77 per cent of women and 65 per cent of men had completed their educations, left home, achieved financial independence, married and had children by the age of 30. In 2000, fewer than half of 30-year-old women and one-third of men had passed all five markers.

Plainly, this is symptomatic of fluctuating jobs markets and modern medical advances, but some psychologists also see it as a measurable developmental period. The term "emerging adulthood" was coined in the journal American Psychologist in 2000, by Professor Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, who in 2010 told the New York Times that it was "analogous to what happened a century ago, when social and economic changes helped create adolescence – a stage we take for granted but one that had to be recognised by psychologists, accepted by society and accommodated by institutions that served the young".

Meanwhile, those who've survived their middle years may not be allowed to relax and enjoy straightforward "Old Age" just yet. The two decades between 55 and 75, writes Cohen, have started to acquire their own academic titles, which may or may not achieve cultural traction: "the encore generation", "midcourse" and "the third age". Oof, indeed.

'A Shed of One's Own – Midlife Without the Crisis', by Marcus Berkmann (Little, Brown, £12.99); 'In Our Prime', by Patricia Cohen (Scribner, £16); 'Middle Age: A Natural History', by David Bainbridge, will be published by Portobello Books on 8 March, £14.99

© independent.co.uk
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Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

FRANCE: A Bibliophile in Paris

LONDON, England / The Economist / Culture / December 27, 2011

Books, Art & Culture 
PROSPERO


George Whitman
A bibliophile in Paris 

INDIFFERENT as he was to modern amenities, George Whitman took some convincing to snuff out the candles for good and install electric lights in his Paris bookshop in 1959. His ramshackle labyrinth of dusty nooks and sagging bookshelves, some secured with twisted coat-hangers, was more a commune than a shop. Over the 60 years since he bought the place from an Arab grocer, using inherited money, an estimated 40,000 travellers have slept among the books, on makeshift beds or the floor, in his “socialist Utopia that masquerades as a bookstore”.

Mr Whitman expected guests to recite or write (choosing “cannonball” words, preferably), or at least help with chores. Most stayed a week or so; several settled in for half a decade. Le Mistral bookshop, renamed Shakespeare and Company in 1964, was a fitting endeavour for a self-described communist. He liked to say that all humanity was his teacher.

Over the years he bought more bits of the 16th-century building at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, just opposite Notre Dame on the Left Bank. He otherwise spent little. Vacation, he said, was moving from the book-lined third-floor flat that filled up for weekly breakfasts and afternoon tea parties, to the first-floor “writer’s room”. Usually reserved for favoured guests, it held prized first editions (including James Joyce’s “Ulysses”) and books signed by guests including Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and the Beat Generation icons William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg.

Although increasingly wealthy, Mr Whitman lived as though he were poor. His few part-time employees were paid modestly. Travellers in his “Tumbleweed Hotel” helped out for nothing. He even put shoppers to work. Occasionally pretty young female shoppers would be asked to watch the till for a few minutes. He sometimes returned hours later.

Rather than fuss with cleaning products, guests were told to scrub the floor with water and newspaper. The carpet could be glued down just fine with pancake batter and a hot iron. Mr Whitman encouraged shoppers to donate old shopping bags. Perfectly good food could be scavenged from rubbish bins.

Security, too, was lax. Mr Whitman couldn’t be bothered with alarm systems. Unwilling to buy a safe or make daily bank runs, he stored large wads of cash in books displayed for sale behind the cashier’s desk and even elsewhere in the shop and reading rooms. More than once, incredulous shoppers handed over cash-stuffed books to the guests manning the till.

Priority for the roughly 15 sleeping spots was given to travellers writing poems or a book. He gave hopefuls a yes or no within seconds. Some who were let in later surmised that he wanted to teach them a lesson. Mr Whitman once pulled off a sock and handed it to a guest who gave himself airs. He was to mop up the shop-cat’s mess and return the sock clean. Seeing him recoil, Mr Whitman announced that he had failed “a test of character, man.”

Poetry and smoke

At 12 he had spent a year in China, where his father, Walter, taught physics at Nanking University. After a Salem and Boston education he began, from 1935, to travel, often on foot, through Mexico and Central America and, after finding work on a sugar freighter, in Hawaii. Military service took him to Europe in 1941. After the war he opened a “book lounge” in Taunton, Massachusetts, and then settled in Paris in 1948. Rather than travel any more, he brought the world to himself.

Famous guests included James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Lawrence Durrell, Langston Hughes, Jacques Prévert and Richard Wright. “I’m ready for some fun!” he would say, before plunking down in a squeaky chair behind the cashbox to make small-talk and wisecracks, and to offer shoppers tea, wine or invitations to the next poetry reading or communal dinner. His generosity was sometimes misunderstood. Once, after telling three young female backpackers that he had a bed for them, the reply was, “I bet you have, you dirty old bastard!”

In 2000 the daughter he fathered at 69, Sylvia Beach Whitman, returned to live in Paris. Her mother had whisked her to England when she was six, breaking her father’s heart. Now he seemed to grow younger and less crotchety. He officially retired in 2006, but continued to live upstairs and roam the shop his daughter owned and ran. Shakespeare and Company now has a real cash register, a phone, a website, wireless internet, proper heating and fewer bugs. The beds are still free.

On a September evening ten years ago Mr Whitman lit a candle again, held it to his head, burned away clumps of gray hairs and patted out the flames, as he had done for decades, to the delight and feigned horror of two teenage girls. In the smoky writers room, he then recited a love poem penned in his youth. It ended thus:

"Each dream, each midnight and each dawn
Are garments, thoughts of her put on
Each beam of light from the empyrean blue
With her enfolds the good, the beautiful, the true"

Perhaps no man has ever given as much to travelling strangers, lest, as an inscription on a shop wall reads, “they be angels in disguise”.

Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2011
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UK: Christopher Hitchens, Essayist and Contrarian, has died aged 62

LONDON, England / The Telegraph / Books / Culture / Obituaries /December 16, 2011

Christopher Hitchens, who has died aged 62, described himself as an “essayist and a contrarian” and, as a journalist, critic, war correspondent and bon vivant, enjoyed a 40-year career as one of the world’s most ubiquitous, prolific and provocative public intellectuals.

Author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens  Photo: REX FEATURES

He began as a leading iconoclast of the Left and, during the 1970s, was a voluble member of a talented and raffish gang, with Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and James Fenton, which gave the New Statesman magazine its glittery literary edge. But he got tired of British politics and, in 1981, moved to America where, despite occasional disagreements with his erstwhile comrades (as when he took Britain’s side against the Argentine junta in the Falklands conflict), his repeated assaults on such hate figures as Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger continued to guarantee him a welcome in radical circles.

All this changed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, an event he interpreted as a turning point in “a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate”. He became an outspoken opponent of “Islamofascism”, forging a breach with the Left which became a permanent rift after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

While his erstwhile colleagues were out on the streets proclaiming “Not in Our Name” (a slogan he found nauseating in its “unstinting self-regard”), Hitchens emerged as one of the fiercest cheerleaders for George W Bush’s strategy of “regime change”. To the inevitable accusations of betrayal (George Galloway described him as the “first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug”), Hitchens responded with characteristic gusto: such attacks, he said, washed off him “like jizz off a porn star’s face”.

But, as Hitchens confessed in his memoir Hitch-22 (2010), there had always been a “Janus-faced” side to his personality. When he was a child, his mother told his father, during an argument over whether they could afford to send him to private school: “If there is going to be an upper class in this country, Christopher is going to be in it.”

At the time this was more her aspiration than his, yet Hitchens acknowledged that alongside the donkey-jacketed revolutionary “Chris”, veteran of the Aldermaston marches, there was the suave, good-looking and socially ambitious “Christopher” – “Hypocritchens”, as he was known at Balliol – who enjoyed the company of “confident young men who owned fast cars” and frequented the Union and the Gridiron Club.

Christopher Hitchens Courtesy: Edward Sorel/The New York Times

The young man spraying pro-Vietcong slogans on car plant walls or marching the streets toting some insurgent flag, might, the same evening, be found at a Right-wing dining club happily gobbling up a pudding called “bombe Hanoi”. Friends later joked that the sentence least likely to emerge from Hitchens’s mouth was: “I don’t care how rich you are, I’m not coming to your party.”

Though he claimed to keep “two sets of books” when it came to political purpose and social ambition, his “Mr Both Ways” approach was as much intellectual as social. He claimed to be faithful to the values of “Left opposition” heroes, such as Rosa Luxembourg, Leon Trotsky and George Orwell, but was always too sceptical and independent-minded to fall for the tedious dogmas of mainstream Marxism – or any other “ism”.

He took pride in “asking annoying questions at every opportunity” and, as a journalist, made a point of going out to see things for himself, whether it was a war zone or a convention of Civil War re-enactors. Even at the height of student radicalism in 1968, he spotted, on a trip to Cuba, the oppressive side of the Castro revolution, acknowledging, when he found himself bombarded by showers of pebbles and the taunt “Sovietico” from the street urchins of Havana, that he had been granted a glimpse of “unscripted public opinion”.

The author or co-author of 17 books, as well as pamphlets and collections of essays, Hitchens was a prolific columnist and, particularly in America, a formidable participant in public debates. He found it difficult to see a sacred cow without lobbing a hand grenade, and his more eminent targets included Mother Teresa (whom he portrayed as a fundamentalist Catholic bigot who gladhanded totalitarian regimes and was “a friend of poverty” rather than of the poor); Bill Clinton (the subject of No-One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton (1999)); and God, the subject of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007).

Hitchens’s natural pugnacity seems to have earned him grudging admiration in some unlikely quarters. In his memoir he recalled an encounter with Mrs Thatcher (whom he found “surprisingly sexy”) not long after her election to the Tory leadership; their inevitable argument ended with the future Iron Lady ordering him to bend over so that she could spank him on the bottom with a rolled-up parliamentary order paper, afterwards mouthing the words, “Naughty boy!”

It was only later, he confessed, that he appreciated the glimpse of the “smack of firm government” which he had been afforded.

The elder of two sons (his younger brother is the journalist and author Peter Hitchens), Christopher Eric Hitchens was born on April 13 1949 in Portsmouth, where his father, a naval officer, was stationed, and was brought up as “a Navy brat” in Malta and Scotland.

His father was a kindly, decent but emotionally inhibited man whose world view epitomised an old-fashioned English conservatism and whose way of showing affection to his son, while he was at prep school, was to send him complicated naval knots tied out of pipe-cleaners, which, of course, Christopher never mastered. (Later, Hitchens was much affected by the discovery that his father was secretly giving his friends Christmas gift subscriptions to his “pinko” magazine, the New Statesman).

His mother, Yvonne, a glamorous but tragic figure whose carefully concealed Jewish ancestry Christopher would discover only when he was in his 40s, eventually left her husband for a unfrocked vicar, with whom she became a devotee of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (“the sinister windbag who had brought enlightenment to the Beatles in the summer of love”), and with whom she died in a suicide pact in an Athens hotel when Christopher was 24.

Hitchens’s account of this “lacerating howling moment” in his life and his journey to a junta-governed Greece to identify Yvonne’s body was one of the most powerfully moving passages in his memoir, the tragedy compounded by the revelation that, in the hours before she died, she had tried to phone him repeatedly but had failed to get through. Characteristically, though, he still found the time to file a piece for the New Statesman on the political situation in Greece.

At the Leys School in Cambridge, Christopher discovered a passion for literature, dabbled in homosexuality and was introduced to the pleasures of Marxism by the headmaster who, in a vain attempt to inoculate him against such a heresy, presented him with a copy of the Communist Manifesto.

He developed all three interests at Balliol College, Oxford, where he went up ostensibly to read PPE, but devoted more energy to sit-in and picket line duties (as well as joining the Labour Party, he became a member of the Trotskyist International Socialists) and to cultivating friendships among a camp and reactionary circle of students and academics.

These included John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls and a hate-figure for the Left, who once mischievously ambushed Hitchens in full rant at some student demo to remind him they had a date for dinner. Hitchens’s claim, in his memoirs, that, while at Oxford, he had bedded two future government ministers under Margaret Thatcher would set off an – ultimately futile – orgy of press speculation which did little to damage sales of the book.

After graduating with an inevitable Third, Hitchens launched his career in journalism as “social science correspondent” at the Times, a “Gogol-like ghost job which I held for six months before its editor said something to me that made it impossible for me to go on working for him”. (In a footnote, Hitchens noted that the exact words were: “You’re fired.”)

In the 1970s, as well as working as a freelance, he took various “mainstream” jobs, from being a researcher for the Insight team at the Sunday Times to working as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express, before joining the New Statesman as a staff writer and editor under Anthony Howard. At the same time he became a regular at the famous Bloomsbury “Friday lunches” at which such luminaries as Clive James, Peter Porter, the Amises (père et fils), Craig Raine and others would swap jokes and gossip.

As the decade wore on and Old Labour tottered towards the political graveyard (“Weimar without the sex”, as Hitchens described the Callaghan government), Hitchens became increasingly disillusioned with the British Left and confessed to harbouring an “odi et amo” complex about Mrs Thatcher, whom he felt was “right on essential matters”. By the 1979 election (in which, for the first time, he did not vote Labour) he was starting to feel “the strong gravitational pull of the great American planet”.

Hitchens’s decision to settle in the United States was a turning point in his life, both personally and politically. As a columnist for The Nation, he continued to fulminate against familiar targets – American imperialism, military fascism, religious fundamentalism – but his rightward political odyssey rolled inexorably on, driven by a disgust with the empty pieties of the Left and an appreciation of the dynamism of the American political tradition.

Gradually he expanded his columns to the pages of mainstream publications such as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Harper’s Magazine, Newsday and, appropriately, Dissent. He also lectured and accepted visiting professorships at the Universities of Pittsburgh and California and the New York School for Social Research.

Vanity Fair: Tribute to Christopher Hitchens - December 16, 2011

Hitchens’s ideological shift was driven also by a concern at the growing threat of Islamic extremism to Western freedoms. He was appalled by the “tepid reaction” of the European Left following Ayatollah Khomeini’s issue of a fatwa against Salman Rushdie and also by the events of September 11 2001, which, in his view opened up a “whole new terrain of struggle”. In 2007 he took the oath of American citizenship at a ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial presided over by George W Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff.

Hitchens opened his memoir Hitch-22 with a story about a false rumour of his own mortality. A catalogue for an exhibition of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery had mistakenly described him as “the late” Christopher Hitchens, a mistake he used as a peg to muse on the subject of mortality (it was not so much the mourners at the funeral that came to mind, he wrote, but the “steady thunk of emails into my in-box on the day of my demise”). But as he toured to promote the book, he was diagnosed with oesophagal cancer and forced to cancel the remainder of his engagements.

Among other causes, Hitchens, a heavy smoker and drinker for much of his life, had been a vocal defender of smoking, and staunch opponent of smoking bans. When commentators pointed out that smoking and drinking are also the main causes of squamous cell carcinomas, he was honest enough to admit that he had “been 'in denial’ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light”.

Though notorious for his view of religion as “a terrible fetter on the mind, and a maker of slaves”, he claimed to be touched by the number of Christians who were praying for his soul.

Christopher Hitchens married, in 1981, Eleni Maleagrou, with whom he had a son and a daughter. The marriage was dissolved, and in 1989 he married Carol Blue, with whom he had another daughter.

Christopher Hitchens, born April 13 1949, died December 15 2011

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2011

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BANGLADESH: Nation Mourns Death of Guardian of Cultural Activists and Litterateurs

DHAKA, Bangladesh / New Age / TimeOut / December 13, 2011

'National Professor' Kabir Chowdhury Dies, Aged 88

Professor Kabir Chowdhury at the birth anniversary celebration 

of Shaheed Munier Chowdhury on November 27, 2011. 

at Shilpakala Academy. It was his last public appearance.

It was like the death of a guardian for the cultural activists and litterateurs in the country. They are deeply shocked at the death of the national professor Kabir Chowdhury, an educationist, translator, playwright and more.

Professor Kabir Chowdhury died at the age of 88 at his residence at Shantinagar, Dhaka on Tuesday. He was suffering from heart disease.

Professor Kabir Chowdhury appeared as the guardian of the cultural activists just after the independence of the country in 1971. He was the founder president of the troupe Theatre and patron of other cultural organisations. Till his death he was the inspiration for the cultural activists in the country.

‘He was the nucleus of the cultural activities in the post war Bangladesh,’ commented Nasiruddin Yousuff, president of Shammilito Sanskritik Jote.

Labeling his death an indispensable loss Yousuff added, ‘His absence can never be filled up.’

Deeply shocked poet-playwright Syed Shamsul Haque said, ‘Professor Kabir Chowdhury was the guiding light and the voice of the people of this country. We must follow the trail of the great man and continue the intellectual endeavor he started.’

Professor Chowdhury wrote over 250 books, most of which are translations of the foreign classics. Once in an interview Kabir Chowdhury said that he translated world classics in Bangla to introduce the golden treasures of the world to the Bengali readers, who scarcely read English texts.

One of his many translations Godor Protikkhyay form Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot became a very popular theatre production. Director of the play Ataur Rahman told New Age, ‘He requested all of us to stage his translation. And I took the challenge of staging the theatre of absurd. The play became very popular in Bangladesh and India. Even the students of Theatre School still stage the play directed by me.’

Terming professor Chowdhury a noble soul, Ataur Rahman said, ‘I still remember his guidance when we attended the International Theatre Institute conference in Munich, Germany under his leadership after Bangladesh became a member of ITI in 1982. He was the founder president of ITI Bangladesh Centre.’

Professor Kabir Chowdhury was the current chairman of Bangla Academy. Remembering professor Chowdhury, director general of Bangla Academy Samsuzzaman Khan, told New Age, ‘He has struggled till his last breathe for building Bangladesh a country of secularism. Kabir Chowdhury has a permanent place in our society as a man with wisdom and a progressive intellectual.’

Professor Kabir Chowdhury is always a source of inspiration for his students. Playwright-actor Khairul Alam Sabuj said, ‘He was a very good teacher and a very nice man.’

Not only to the students of Dhaka University, professor Chowdhury taught world literature to theatre students being the lifelong principal of country’s oldest school on theatre named Theatre School. A student of the school, actor-director Apon Ahsan said, ‘We were just amazed seeing his depth of knowledge at the class room.’

Born on February 9, 1923, Kabir Chowdhury began his illustrious career as a teacher at Pabna Edward College. He joined the English Department of Dhaka University in 1974.For his contribution to education, literature and social movements, Kabir Chowdhury was honoured nationally and internationally with prestigious awards such as Shadhinota Padak, Ekushey Padak, Bangabandhu National Award, Bangla Academy Literary Award, William Carey Award (India) and others. In 1998 he was made National Professor of Bangladesh.

Copyright © New Age 2009-2011
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CHINA: No pause at menopause

BEIJING / China Daily / Life / December 9, 2011 

By Chitralekha Basu, China Daily

Author Xu Xi has portrayed Hong Kong, where she was born and grew up, as a backdrop and theme in many of her works. Provided to China Daily

A new collection of short stories from Xu Xi focuses on themes close to the author's heart -namely mature women, sex and Hong Kong. Chitralekha Basu reports.

Chinese-American novelist Xu Xi's new book is a collection of 13 short stories, titled Access, inwhich the distinguished academic, author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies about Hong Kong is largely concerned with middle age.

Her band of menopausal women - who appear as central characters in most of these tales - are often angsty and insecure as they teeter on the brink of losing husbands/boyfriends, jobs,security and the meaning of life. But they are also capable of rising above their situations -sometimes, inexplicably, reconciling with them.

For most of these women - often confident, sassy and powerful, even if they might have their unguarded moments - there's no pausing at menopause.

"Perhaps the stories reflect the fact that I'm 57," Xu says, in a phone call from Hong Kong. The woman, who "inhabited the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand" until about two years ago, is more or less stationed in Hong Kong now. That's to be close to her twin concerns - a 92-year-old mother suffering from Alzheimer's and a fledgling writing school focused on writing from Asia. 

"I'm around people nearing retirement age. I'm interested in what aging does to the body, mind and spirit," Xu says.

For some of her women protagonists, menopause seems to accelerate desire, and how! They love their husbands but sleep with their friends' husbands, without apology (in the story Anon).They take off for Europe to have clandestine rendezvous with their boyfriends who are married to someone else, but when the date does not show up, they take a walk down the back streets of Stockholm, reflecting on the way their lives have panned out (Iron Light).

There is a lot of sex, and it comes in various forms, sometimes violent, illicit and even incestuous.

"There's always a lot of sex in my novels," Xu says, laughing. "It's probably the reflection of aworld in which nothing sexual is held sacred anymore, the way it was before the coming of the Internet."

Her engagement with sexuality - which Xu says began with a curiosity to find out about unusualsexual phenomena when she was still quite young - has opened up newer vistas, pushing her to explore spaces in which desire blurs the lines between gender identities.

"What gender we are is not a very clear-cut idea anymore, physically or otherwise," Xu says. "We have allowed homosexuals to come out. Women are no longer just seenas baby-making machines.

"This new openness has changed our ideas of society.Now we can use sexuality as a tool to explore humanity abit more provocatively. It's one part of ourselves we're nolonger totally in control of."

In the story Lady Day, the protagonist's apparently aberrant sexuality is a "deformity" that sets off a chain of personal disasters - being disowned by family and abusedby bullies in a British public school - but is turned into a weapon, a source of power, later in life.

As a posh hermaphrodite prostitute who services business tycoons and Saudi princes in her plush apartment not too far away from Wall Street in New York, Lady Day lives lifeon her own terms, even as her high-profile clients take a tumble after a journalist runs an expose. She even gets herrevenge on the high school bullies.

The great thing about Xu's protagonists is that none ofthem ends up a loser, although they could easily have done so, as the situations they find themselves in arepotentially lethal.

In Crying With Audrey Hepburn, a danseuse past her prime is relegated to taking part in cheap striptease shows. She had married for love, but her dancer husband could notcope with the strains of having to prostitute his art and committed suicide. Her solitary existence is fraught withlonging as well as an understated sense of betrayal.

"But even she doesn't feel like it's the most terrible thing to have happened to her," Xu says.

"She's not unhappy with her life. There is a sense of being at peace with her state."

Xu's protagonists are as disparate as they come - amasseur, an MIT graduate-turned-gambling pro, a 75-year-old proprietor of a New York-based financial magazine trying to hang on to the old order while coping with the tide of new-age marketing strategies.

The settings vary, too. They shift from a sprawling house with an un-weeded garden on theeast coast of New Zealand's South Island to the opulently laid-out Plaza Suite in New York.Often, the setting becomes a character invested with a role.

Hong Kong, of course, remains the pivot. It's where Xu keeps coming back in her stories, just asshe does in real life.

Born to Chinese-Indonesian parents - a businessman and a pharmacist, who always encouraged her to write and indulged her curiosity about things - Xu grew up in Tsim Sha Tsui district.

Although the city has featured both as backdrop and theme in most of her previous works -Evanescent Isles, Overleaf  Hong Kong, The Unwalled City, Hong Kong Rose, Chinese Walls -Xu finds Hong Kong an inexhaustible repository of stories.

The most significant change since Hong Kong's reunification with the mainland in 1997, Xusays, is that "Hong Kong feels like it's lost its way. It probably needs 'access'".

Hong Kong is also something of "a cliche in the Western world", she says.

"It is associated with cheap plastic flowers from the 1960s. Whatever informs our image of places also misinforms our ideas about them. It's this difference that's interesting to watch."

For her, watching Hong Kong seems like a lifelong occupation.

Copyright 1995 - 2010 China Daily Information Co.
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USA: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans

NEW YORK, NY / The New York Times / Health / December 7, 2011

Hearing The Elderly
By Paula Span


Karl Pillemer, the Cornell University gerontologist, has published noteworthy research on a range of subjects related to aging: family dynamics, nursing home interactions between staff and family members, elder abuse, long-term care.

More recently, Dr. Pillemer has taken a different tack. Instead of the usual carefully randomized study comparing outcomes after controlling for characteristics X and Y, he and his colleagues have been interviewing people over age 70 — “experts,” he calls them — to ask what lessons they have learned in their many decades and what they would like to tell younger people about aging.

He has been at it for five years now, and one result is the book, “30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans.” Another is an accompanying Web site, The Legacy Project.

The advantage of the Web site is that video interviews allow users to meet the “experts,” hear their laughter and listen to their counsel (sometimes easier when they’re someone else’s parents) about marriage and family, work, health, faith, life in general. You can see why Dr. Pillemer has been captivated.

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

© 2011 The New York Times Company
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Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

JAPAN: Famed Japanologist Keene gets museum in Kashiwazaki

TOKYO,Japan / The Asahi Shimbun / Asahi Japan Watch / December 5, 2011

People
By Koji Shimizu / Staff Writer

Donald Keene reads a book in the study of his home in New York. 

The museum in Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture, will feature 

a faithful replica of his study. (Bourborn Corp.)

KASHIWAZAKI, Niigata Prefecture--Along with permanently moving to Japan, renowned Japanese literature researcher Donald Keene has brought the living room and study of his New York home with him, donating it to a museum here as the centerpiece of an exhibit on his work.

Keene, 89, visited Kashiwazaki on Dec. 3 to attend a ceremony to donate his vast collection of books and furniture, among other items, to the museum.

The 360-square-meter museum, the brainchild of Bourbon Corp., a leading confectionery based in Kashiwazaki, is scheduled to open in autumn 2013.

It will be housed on the second floor of the company's training center.

The museum will display Keene's donation of about 1,700 books, 300 records and CDs, and 100 pieces of furniture, apart from the living room and study, his base for more than 30 years to bring his study of Japanese literary works to the world.

Keene has been living in Tokyo's Kita Ward since September. He decided to acquire Japanese nationality and live in Japan for the rest of his life after the country was hit hard by the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake.

In the ceremony on Dec. 3, Keene said he believes the devastated Tohoku region will experience a miracle similar to the one that occurred in Tokyo, which was rebuilt into one of the world's largest cities after it was firebombed into charred rubble during World War II.

Keene, a professor emeritus at Columbia University in New York, is known for introducing Japanese literature to the world over the past six decades.

Ties between the Japanologist and Kashiwazaki go back to 2007, when Keene proposed an endeavor to revive an ancient puppet play accompanied by the samisen set in the city.

Local artists gave the puppet play performance in June 2009, for the first time in 300 years.

Bourbon said that Keene's proposal gave hope to the city's residents, who were still reeling from the devastating Niigata Chuetsu-oki Earthquake in 2007.

Copyright The Asahi Shimbun Company
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USA: Actors used to be butterflies - now they are mayflies

NEW ORLEANS, LA / Reader's Digest /  November 1, 2011

Books & Entertainment Blog
By Jim Menick


Old Age in Hollywood is Younger Than Ever


In America we live in a culture where people expect to live longer and healthier than previous generations. That’s the promise of our society, at any rate, if we hold up our part of the bargain, and don’t eat a lot of junk and get out of our seats and move around every once in a while.

The opposite is true in Hollywood, which never has been much like the rest of America. If you’re in the movies, you expect to live shorter and disappear more quickly than previous generations. Not your real self, though: your movie self.

Tom Shone, writing in Slate, analyzes the life spans of stars today versus stars in earlier years. Youth has always been prized on the screen: the rest of us like to look at healthy young faces rather than sickly old faces, which makes sense when you’re talking about escapist fare. If everyone in Star Wars had been as old as Alec Guinness, there would have been a lot less jumping around and running away from those Imperial Troopers, and it wouldn’t have been half as much fun. Do we really want to see Indiana Jones using a walker? Would Harry Potter have held our attention if all the attendees at Hogwarts were newly retired grandparents pursuing their childhood dreams of the magical education they never got? The problem with this is not that stars peak young, but that we may be losing older actors as the arcs of their careers shuffle them off before they acquire the experience to become great.

Shone writes: ‘Actors used to be butterflies—now they are mayflies. Your teens are when you break out, your twenties your prime acting real estate, and 30 the age at which the women win their Oscars, at which point they either go to work for HBO or disappear into Paltrow-esque semi-retirement, and the men announce their plans to direct.”

Where is this all going? Hard to say. Read Twinkle Twinkle, Little Stars to find out where it is.

© 2011 The Reader's Digest Association, Inc.
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Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

CANADA: An element of autobiography in 'The Cat's Table'

LONDON, England / The Economist / Books, art and culture / September 21, 2011

The Q&A By Prospero


MICHAEL ONDAATJE, now 68, a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist, has spent his career depicting the lives of misfits and migrants; people often absent from official histories. With poetic language, he has inhabited the world of Toronto’s eastern European bridge-builders in the 1920s—in his early masterpiece “In the Skin of a Lion”—and of a Sikh bomb-disposal expert during the second world war in his more famous “The English Patient”, a romantic epic that was turned into a successful film.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE began his career as a poet. He published his first collection, "The Dainty Monsters", in 1967, and then took nearly a decade before releasing his first novel, "Coming Through Slaughter", in 1976. Although he is better known for his fiction, having won the Booker prize in 1992 for "The English Patient" (which went on to become a successful Hollywood film), his books of poetry outnumber his novels two to one (ie, 12 v six).

His latest novel, "The Cat's Table", appears to be his most autobiographical (reviewed by The Economist - below). Set in the 1950s, it tells the story of an 11-year-old boy's journey on a ship called the Oronsay travelling from Sri Lanka to England (Ondaatje made just such a passage himself). During the voyage the young boy—also named Michael—befriends two other boys of the same age: a tough guy called Cassius and the timid, philosophical Ramadhin. It's a coming-of-age story, written in the sensuous prose typical of Ondaatje's fiction, a richness of language that betrays a poet's eye and ear.

Michael Ondaatje spoke to More Intelligent Life about building a novel from a single image, his preference for prose over poetry and why he believes there is an ultimate truth in fiction writing.
Click here for full interview
.
The Cat’s Table
By Michael Ondaatje.
Jonathan Cape; 293 pages; £16.99

Paradise lost
A good spin on it
Dreams within dreams

For his sixth novel, Mr Ondaatje offers a more personal story of dislocation. Using the “colouring and locations of memoir” (as noted in an afterword), “The Cat’s Table” charts the 21-day sea voyage of an 11-year-old boy named Michael, who travels from Ceylon to England in 1954 to join a mother he has not seen for years. Mr Ondaatje made such a journey, before emigrating to Canada aged 19. His fictionalised portrait of the artist as a young man is recalled by an older, disillusioned narrator. What begins as an enchanted adventure of youth becomes freighted with trauma and loss.

The ocean liner, the Oronsay, is a floating microcosm of 1950s social mores and hierarchies. Michael dines at the “cat’s table”—the “least privileged place”, farthest from the captain (who, it transpires, is “not fond of his Asian cargo”). This is where he befriends two other Ceylonese boys and escapes the supervision of an almost-aunt in first class. Such social invisibility lets the boys observe any drama unseen. Events on the ship will ultimately seal Michael’s distrust of the “authority and prestige of all Head Tables”.

The ship affords a rich array of characters, from a “brutal financier” suffering from rabies (a half-comic lesson in the impotence of wealth) to a jewel thief who swans about in first class. Michael and his friends spy on board a manacled convict, rumoured to have killed an English judge in Ceylon. Yet a plot to free the prisoner—involving Michael’s distant cousin Emily and a troupe of Indian acrobats—forever changes the children.

In a novel superbly poised between the magic of innocence and the melancholy of experience, Mr Ondaatje probes what it means to have a cautious heart. Children may learn to protect themselves against vulnerability. But in deflecting trust and intimacy, such “cold-blooded self-sufficiency” can also wreck lives.

Picture credit: Kanaka Menehune (via Flickr)

Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2011
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Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

USA: What Would Humanity Be Like Without Aging?

BOONE, IOWA / Discover Magazine / Health & Medicine / September 9, 2011





By Kyle Munkittrick

The cover of The Postmortal is one of the coolest images I’ve seen in a long time. Death impaled by his own scythe – be not proud, indeed.

The idea behind Drew Magary’s great new book is simple: aging, as it turns out, is caused by one gene. Shut that gene off and you stop aging; accidents and disease are still a problem, but you’ve cured death by natural causes. Now compound that discovery with the fact that any person who gets the Cure simply stops aging. People don’t become younger, they just don’t get older, frozen at their “Cure age.” What happens next?

In an effort to find out, Magary takes us through the life of John Farrell, a New York lawyer who gets the Cure for aging at the age of 29 in the year 2019. From that point on, things go rather poorly for John and the rest of humanity. As one might expect, curing aging doesn’t cure social ills, over-population, ennui, or a host of other human hangups. Mark Frauenfelder has an excellent synopsis of the book over at boingboing.net, and I share his opinions about the book’s bleak tone and high quality.

Magary’s argument through the text is essentially this: death creates meaning. Not mortality, but guaranteed natural death due to aging. The idea that no matter what you do, how you live your life, the concept that you will be born, mature, grow old, and die creates human meaning. Magary has a point: from the riddle of the Sphinx to Tyler Durden to the final books of Harry Potter, aging and death seem to be at the epicenter of human thought. I don’t deny him that at any moment any one of us could meet a tragic end. Life is precious in part because it is not meant to last.

But here is where I struggle. The Postmortal is not about a post-mortal society, it is about a post-aging society. Lots and lots and lots of people die in Magary’s vision. In fact, he seems to argue that in the absence of death, people will not only seek death but will create circumstances that create death and thereby, create meaning. It is only when Farrell’s life is most in peril that he finds purpose in existence. But Farrell is never immortal, no one is. So my question is: is the process of aging as meaningful as the condition of being mortal?

This question vexed me, because I know a great many people who have aged with grace. They wear wizened white beards or crinkled smiles that highlight eyes behind inch-thick spectacles. Some people are just awesome at being old. They have custom canes and smoke ivory pipes and say saucy things that only they can get away with. To reference Harry Potter again, Voldemort, Mr.Flees-From-Death himself, is contrasted with Albus Dumbledore and Minerva McGonagall, both of whom are walking idealizations of what the aging process should look like.

But that’s just it, isn’t it? They are idealizations.

Reality presents a grimmer picture. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and a laundry list of other late-onset diseases savage the body just enough that modern medicine can step in to keep the heart beating and the organs limping along while the mind deteriorates to the point of nothingness. Aging in the modern era is about slow unstoppable loss – of hearing, of memory, of mobility, of continence, of dignity. What part of that process creates meaning in our lives? Or is it that to get the benefits of death, we must past through the fires of desperate and futile attempts to prevent it?

Magary’s vision is encapsulated by a character who appears at the end of the book. She is a prostitute who wants to die. She had her age frozen at 18 and, as a result, is seen as a perpetual teen mentally. That is, her additional decades on the planet have done nothing to shape her perspective, beyond making her more cynical. And so it is with everyone else on post-Cure Earth. In Magary’s mind, the stop of physical aging is the stop of maturation.

In this sense, I suspect Magary’s indictment is not of those like Aubrey de Grey who seek the end of aging, but of those who resist maturation. Magary’s values are essentially conservative. It isn’t until the main character is about to die that he realizes what matters: namely, his son (out of wedlock), getting married, and protecting an unborn life. Life in the post-aging world is plagued by those who devalue marriage, childbearing, and religion. Yup, even the secular “Church of Man” is shown to be the “right” answer by the end of the novel. While I don’t deny that these are all valuable pursuits (substituting religion for the broader philosophy of the examined life) I do deny that they would be annihilated by agelessness.

Human beings do not settle down because they age anymore than people have quarter-life or midlife or three-quarter life crises because they age. People are content or discontent based on the life they are currently living. I find it fascinating that Dumbledore and Ms. McGonagall are both single as they approach the sunset of life. Both are examples of doing precisely what Magary critiques, pursuing one’s passions while putting commitment and reproduction on hold. As it so happens, one can live a life of value to humanity, one can, in fact, contribute to the greater good, without maturing and aging as he prescribes. Only if Dumbledore and McGonagall didn’t have to age, one could argue they could have become master magicians and raised a family, had they so chosen. Why aging creates more options in Magary’s mind, I’m not quite sure.

Death, I don’t deny, creates meaning. Finitude and limits give us something against which to define our existence. But my meaning is not created by the knowledge that I will die at the ripe old age of 98 but simply by the knowledge that I will die. Maybe I’ll get lucky and live to be 500 only to be obliterated during an alien invasion. Or maybe I have a tumor right now and will be gone before this time next year. I don’t know. But knowing when we will die, be it young or old, has never been what created meaning. And gray hairs and crows feet have never been the cause of wisdom, merely the first signs of the very high cost of living long enough to acquire it.

Personally, I like the idea of having 100 years of wisdom and experience in the youthful body of a 29 year old. But maybe I’m not old enough to know better yet.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter

Copyright © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.
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Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

USA: "Living to 100 and Beyond"

BETHESDA, Maryland / The Futurist / August 28, 2011

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith

Humanity is on the cusp of an exciting longevity revolution. The first person to live to 150 years has probably already been born.

What will your life look like when you live to be over 100? Will you be healthy? Will your marriage need a sunset clause? How long will you have to work? Will you finish one career at sixty-five only to go back to school to learn a new one? And then, will you be happily working for another sixty years? Maybe you’ll be a parent to a newborn and a grandparent at the same time. Will the world become overpopulated? And how will living longer affect your finances, your family life, and your views on religion and the afterlife?

In 100 Plus, futurist Sonia Arrison takes us on an eye-opening journey to the future at our doorsteps, where science and technology are beginning to radically change life as we know it. She introduces us to the people transforming our lives: the brilliant scientists and genius inventors and the billionaires who fund their work. The astonishing advances to extend our lives—and good health—are almost here. In the very near future fresh organs for transplants will be grown in laboratories, cloned stem cells will bring previously unstoppable diseases to their knees, and living past 100 will be the rule, not the exception.

Sonia Arrison brings over a decade of experience researching and writing about cutting-edge advances in science and technology to 100 Plus (Basic Books, 2011), painting a vivid picture of a future that only recently seemed like science fiction, but now is very real. 100 Plus is the first book to give readers a comprehensive understanding of how life-extending discoveries will change our social and economic worlds. This illuminating and indispensable text will help us navigate the thrilling journey of life beyond 100 years.

About the Author
Sonia Arrison is a Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute and a columnist for TechNewsWorld. Her work has appeared on CNN and in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. She lives in Atherton, California.

Copyright World Future Society
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JAPAN: Death of a sci-fi pioneer

NEW YORK, NY / The New York Times / Arts / August 11, 2011

Sakyo Komatsu, 80, Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 80

By Dennis Hevesi

Sakyo Komatsu (Photo courtesy: houseofjapan.com)

Sakyo Komatsu, one of the leading science-fiction writers of Japan, whose 1973 best-selling book, “Japan Sinks,” rattled a nation that sits on one of the most earthquake-prone zones in the world, died on July 26 in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. He was 80.

The cause was pneumonia, representatives of his publication, Sakyo Komatsu Magazine, told Japanese news organizations.

Mr. Komatsu’s premise in “Japan Sinks” was that the tectonic plates that grind beneath the Japanese archipelago undergo a sudden colossal shift, setting off a chain reaction of volcanoes that spew torrents of lava, tsunamis that inundate cities, earthquakes that shatter the countryside and the deaths of millions of people.

The unpredictability underlying the theme was made clear this year on March 11, when Japan was struck by an earthquake and a tsunami that set off a nuclear-plant disaster. In the issue of his quarterly magazine published on July 21, Mr. Komatsu said he hoped to see how his country would evolve after the catastrophe.

“I had thought I wouldn’t mind dying any day,” he wrote. “But now I’m feeling like living a little bit longer and seeing how Japan will go on hereafter.”

Beyond the apocalyptic plot, the book delves into interpersonal relations, how the Japanese might cope with the end of their world and how dispersed survivors might fare in willing host countries. But there is no resolution; the story ends with boat people watching the waves swallow their homeland.

“Japan Sinks,” one of more than a dozen books by Mr. Komatsu, sold more than four million copies in Japan, was published in the United States three years later, and inspired two Japanese disaster movies (one in 1973 and a remake in 2006) and a television series.

A 1973 article in The New York Times said that “Japan Sinks” is “a chillingly realistic work of science fiction” by an author “who evidently knows his geophysics.”

Among Mr. Komatsu’s other books are “Peace on Earth” (1961), a parallel-world story in which World War II does not end in August 1945 and a young man prepares to defend Japan against the Allied invasion, and “Nihilistic Corridor” (1999), which tries to envision how humanity might survive by evolving into some other species.

With Shin’ichi Hoshi and Yasutaka Tsutsui, Mr. Komatsu was considered one of the masters of Japanese science fiction.

Mr. Komatsu was born in Osaka on January 28, 1931. He received a degree in Italian literature in 1954 from Kyoto University and later worked as a magazine editor, a factory foreman and a comedy scriptwriter before turning to science fiction.

He was haunted by memories from his teenage years of the devastation caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mr. Komatsu told the Japanese newspaper The Daily Yomiuri in 2006.

In a world suffused by nationalism and ethnicity, he said, “I began to think how people in Japan would live if they lost their land,” adding, “I sometimes wonder if our intolerant territoriality is really justifiable on this planet, where continents are constantly drifting.”

© 2011 The New York Times Company
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Credit: Reports and photographs are property of owners of intellectual rights.
Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

USA: ‘Senior sexpert’ shatters a sexual taboo

SANTA ROSA, California / ThePressDemocrat / Living / August 6, 2011

Sebastopol author finds niche in talking about sex beyond 50

By Susan Swartz - For The Press Democrat

Joan Price’s new book, “Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud About Senior Sex,” follows “Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk About Sex After Sixty,” which broke the “don’t ask, don’t tell” taboo of older-life sexuality.

Both published by Berkeley’s Seal Press, the books have bestowed a new label on the former high school English teacher and fitness instructor, that of “senior sexpert.” We caught up with Price, 68, at her Sebastopol home in between book tours.

Erica Jong wrote in the New York Times that sex between older people is the new unmentionable, “the thing that makes our kids yell, ‘Ewww, gross!’” Why gross?

Part of my original mission, why I wrote the first book, was to fight the “ick” factor and normalize the idea of ageless sexuality. To show that older bodies are still sexual and sensual. Part of the negative response to older sex comes from the media, which generally see older people as invisible, and if it portrays us at all we’re subservient to younger people who drive the story. The media also treats sex as something only the young enjoy.

Joan Price’s new book is aimed at readers in their 50s and older. Crista Jeremiason/PD

Do you see older people anywhere in the media portrayed as sexual beings?

There are notable exceptions. The older couple in the TV show “Parenthood,” is one. Meryl Streep in the movie with Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin (“It’s Complicated”), which showed older people being sexually desirable, was realistic in a Hollywood-y way. Of course, Meryl’s gorgeous and who wouldn’t want her?

When you talk about senior sex, what age group are you addressing?

In my first book, I talked about sex after 60, but I heard from retailers that people in their 50s, especially the post-menopausal years, wanted the same information. The people in this book range in age from 49 to 86.

What makes you a “senior sexpert?”

I didn’t come up with that title. Others started calling me that. But I have spent six years researching the field and found a lot of information that is not common knowledge. It’s more than a writing job for me. It’s a calling.

What is the difference in your first and second books?

My first book was more personal, about my life with Robert (the late artist Robert Rice), and how we celebrated what we had romantically, sexually, professionally, all of it. When I met Robert, I was 57 and he was 64. I had young people say they were buying my book for their parents and grandparents and that they were surprised by the joyfulness in it.

My second book came out of that first book because people wrote to me about not having good sex. The second book addresses those issues and problems. I have 135 reader stories in the book. And 45 sex experts, doctors and health professionals.

What are the most common questions and concerns you hear from the audience at your book readings and talks?

My body has changed and my sexual responses have changed. I don’t know how to talk to my partner. Is sex over? For women, the top concerns are lack of desire, vaginal pain, unreliable orgasms. For men, erectile difficulty is the main one.

You say that sex is good for our health. In what ways?

It helps protect against heart attack and stroke, as does all exercise. It reduces stress and increases self-esteem. It bolsters the immune system. It can alleviate chronic pain, including migraines. It helps us get to sleep. Those are some of the benefits Dr. Barb Depree mentions in the book.

So is this a big trend? Are all older people embracing their sexuality?

No. I get negative comments, people telling me, “Quit trying to push sex on us.” I don’t advocate anything. A couple may decide to not have sex, and that’s fine as long as both partners go along with it. On the other hand, I’ve met 75-year-old swingers.

Does all the advertising for Viagra and such products, showing silver-haired couples sitting in hot tubs watching the sunset, advance the cause of older sexuality?

At least they do let people know that sex goes on. However, while Viagra and other medications can be a solution to having erections, they are not a solution to relationship problems or to the lack of desire. The pills are not a panacea and can be injurious depending on various health conditions. For example, they can cause a bad reaction if mixed with anti-depressant medications.

Who are some of the experts you’ve interviewed?

One of my favorites is sex educator Peggy Brick, who has a Ph.D. and leads sex ed courses for seniors. I discovered a growing movement in sex educators and therapists. There are specialists in sex and cancer, in disabilities and sex. You can find a certified sex therapist at the website www.aasect.org (American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists).

Dr. Dean Edell, who wrote a blurb for your book, said “as far as sex in the senior years ... the best is yet to come.” Some of the people in your book claim that their sex lives are more satisfying today than when they were young. Why is that?

As we get older, men and women become more equally matched. We both need a longer arousal time and more interaction. And that’s good. It’s something a lot of women have always been wishing for.

Price will talk about her book August 16 at the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco.
Info: sexandculture.org. For more go to http://www.nakedatourage.com./

Susan Swartz is a freelance writer and author based in Sonoma County. 
E-Mail: susan@juicytomatoes.com.

Copyright © 2011 PressDemocrat.com
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Credit: Reports and photographs are property of owners of intellectual rights.
Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.