I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.
—Dylan Thomas, “I See the Boys of Summer”
If you want to read an example of reporting with an obvious bias, exposed like a canine baring his sharp teeth, read this article about guys in their 40s renting a beach house in the Hamptons.
From Bar Harbor, Me., to Virginia Beach, there is a particular boy of summer who can be found preserving a postcollege life decades past his undergraduate days. While most party-oriented summer share houses are filled with single people in their 20s and early 30s, who seek weekends of beachside fun for several seasons before moving on to the more sober pleasures of marriage, a few share houses include men with more than 40 summers under their trunks.
These surfside Peter Pans survey each summer’s crop of young women on the sand like an incoming class of freshman co-eds on the quad. Theirs can be a bittersweet existence, where the highs of the evening’s party are occasionally doused by the recognition that matrimony and fatherhood may be slipping away with each relationship that dissipates on a cool September wind.
You can practically here the tisk tisk in the reporter’s tone. I kept thinking the writer’s name, Allen Salkin was a pseudonym for that douche bag, Dr. Phil. The assumption here is that matrimony and fatherhood is the endgame, that the sober pleasures of marriage is the zenith of life. This is a lie, unfortunately. While marriage and fatherhood can be wonderful in themselves, they are not the only choice in life. Believe it or not, you can have a happy life without them. And sometimes marriage and children can make you miserable.
But Salkin continues to beat a dead horse:
As he sipped beer in the fading light of the sun disappearing behind the Fire Island Lighthouse, Mr. Mahony, whose light brown hair is flecked with gray, considered how his life had brought him here tonight, one of the oldest people in a crowd drinking Heineken from plastic cups. “Relationships I thought were going to last didn’t last,” he said. “And to tell you the truth, the past five years, the older I get the shorter the relationships get, and now it’s like a game of musical chairs. There’s nobody left. It’s sad.”
People on death row contemplate how their life brought them to this point. Guys drinking crappy beer while looking at pretty girls in bikinis do not. Oh, and, Mahony, there are plenty of women out there of every age looking for long term relationships. Don’t give up, my gray-flecked friend.
Here is the Dr. Phil part, in which Salkin brings in a woman to judge:
There is something about the four-oh that turns many women off summer playboys. Adrienne Matt, 38, a strategist at an advertising agency, said she arrived for her first weekend at a Fire Island house a few years ago to find it was being run by a man in his 40s, who had done his best to fill the rooms with “vapid, insipid women.”
“It was disgusting,” she said. “He ran the house only to have sex with 25-year-old girls.”
One wonders if Ms. Matt considers older women and younger men hooking up disgusting as well, or for that matter, older and younger gay men and lesbians hooking up. If Matt was looking for intelligence and wit, perhaps she should have spent the weekend at a literary salon instead of a beach house. I can’t imagine her being much fun since she attacks both the women and the men, and comes off in the article as a shrew.
The article goes on with its braying, but I won’t bore you with that. The title of the article, “When the Boys of Summer Linger Till Autumn”, references the Dylan Thomas poem I quoted at the top of the post. Perhaps Salkin should have read the poem slower. The harsh narrator calls himself a son “of flint and pitch” (III, 5). Much like Salkin, he is not the kind of person who approves of fun. But Dylan himself knew fun quite well, and he lets the boys of summer reply:
We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
Green of the seaweeds' iron,
Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
Pick the world's ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the country gardens for a wreath.
In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,
Heigh ho the blood and berry,
And nail the merry squires to the trees;
Here love's damp muscle dries and dies,
Here break a kiss in no love's quarry.
O see the poles of promise in the boys.
(II, 13-24)
The images of the boys are light, nature, power and sex. The world of the critical narrator is where love’s muscle dies and kisses are broken like rocks in a quarry. I prefer the boy’s world of oceans and wreaths to the flint and pitch of the critic. While the poles of promise can be seen as a phallus, it’s a positive image nonetheless; the poles promise energy, sexual energy, energy that is preferable to staid boredom.
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.
—Dylan Thomas, “I See the Boys of Summer”
If you want to read an example of reporting with an obvious bias, exposed like a canine baring his sharp teeth, read this article about guys in their 40s renting a beach house in the Hamptons.
From Bar Harbor, Me., to Virginia Beach, there is a particular boy of summer who can be found preserving a postcollege life decades past his undergraduate days. While most party-oriented summer share houses are filled with single people in their 20s and early 30s, who seek weekends of beachside fun for several seasons before moving on to the more sober pleasures of marriage, a few share houses include men with more than 40 summers under their trunks.
These surfside Peter Pans survey each summer’s crop of young women on the sand like an incoming class of freshman co-eds on the quad. Theirs can be a bittersweet existence, where the highs of the evening’s party are occasionally doused by the recognition that matrimony and fatherhood may be slipping away with each relationship that dissipates on a cool September wind.
You can practically here the tisk tisk in the reporter’s tone. I kept thinking the writer’s name, Allen Salkin was a pseudonym for that douche bag, Dr. Phil. The assumption here is that matrimony and fatherhood is the endgame, that the sober pleasures of marriage is the zenith of life. This is a lie, unfortunately. While marriage and fatherhood can be wonderful in themselves, they are not the only choice in life. Believe it or not, you can have a happy life without them. And sometimes marriage and children can make you miserable.
But Salkin continues to beat a dead horse:
As he sipped beer in the fading light of the sun disappearing behind the Fire Island Lighthouse, Mr. Mahony, whose light brown hair is flecked with gray, considered how his life had brought him here tonight, one of the oldest people in a crowd drinking Heineken from plastic cups. “Relationships I thought were going to last didn’t last,” he said. “And to tell you the truth, the past five years, the older I get the shorter the relationships get, and now it’s like a game of musical chairs. There’s nobody left. It’s sad.”
People on death row contemplate how their life brought them to this point. Guys drinking crappy beer while looking at pretty girls in bikinis do not. Oh, and, Mahony, there are plenty of women out there of every age looking for long term relationships. Don’t give up, my gray-flecked friend.
Here is the Dr. Phil part, in which Salkin brings in a woman to judge:
There is something about the four-oh that turns many women off summer playboys. Adrienne Matt, 38, a strategist at an advertising agency, said she arrived for her first weekend at a Fire Island house a few years ago to find it was being run by a man in his 40s, who had done his best to fill the rooms with “vapid, insipid women.”
“It was disgusting,” she said. “He ran the house only to have sex with 25-year-old girls.”
One wonders if Ms. Matt considers older women and younger men hooking up disgusting as well, or for that matter, older and younger gay men and lesbians hooking up. If Matt was looking for intelligence and wit, perhaps she should have spent the weekend at a literary salon instead of a beach house. I can’t imagine her being much fun since she attacks both the women and the men, and comes off in the article as a shrew.
The article goes on with its braying, but I won’t bore you with that. The title of the article, “When the Boys of Summer Linger Till Autumn”, references the Dylan Thomas poem I quoted at the top of the post. Perhaps Salkin should have read the poem slower. The harsh narrator calls himself a son “of flint and pitch” (III, 5). Much like Salkin, he is not the kind of person who approves of fun. But Dylan himself knew fun quite well, and he lets the boys of summer reply:
We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
Green of the seaweeds' iron,
Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
Pick the world's ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the country gardens for a wreath.
In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,
Heigh ho the blood and berry,
And nail the merry squires to the trees;
Here love's damp muscle dries and dies,
Here break a kiss in no love's quarry.
O see the poles of promise in the boys.
(II, 13-24)
The images of the boys are light, nature, power and sex. The world of the critical narrator is where love’s muscle dies and kisses are broken like rocks in a quarry. I prefer the boy’s world of oceans and wreaths to the flint and pitch of the critic. While the poles of promise can be seen as a phallus, it’s a positive image nonetheless; the poles promise energy, sexual energy, energy that is preferable to staid boredom.
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