First Day of School

Today I had to wake up bright and early (as I will every Friday this whole semester, sigh) to be at school by nine to meet with Dr. Betancourt and the three other TAs for Arts of the Western World for a meeting, and then it was off to my first class! Being a TA in a giant, stadium-style lecture hall with 200 vaguely confused-looking freshmen is a lot like being a shepherd, since they seem to need someone to herd them into seats instead of all piling up at the top of the room and trying to steal the TA tables at the back. They were also unable to complete the simple task of circulating sign-in sheets around the room during a 50-minute class period, and many of them, rather than bother to look for their name on the helpfully color-coded sheets, just wrote them in at the bottom. Finally, five minutes before class was to end, they all began to put their stuff away and make general rustling noises, which is bad enough in a class of 20, but in a group this large it sounds like the prelude to a stampede. Amy had to get up and tell them to settle down, but Dr. Betancourt kind of ruined the effect of the chatisement by deciding to just end class there. Then there really WAS a stampede for the exit.

I knew this class was going to go quickly, but I had no idea how quickly. Today's 50 minutes was Egyptian art--all of it. Wednesday we will move on the to Aegean, and next Monday we'll be at the Parthenon. That's mind-boggling, especially if these kids have as tentative a grasp of history as the other TAs have informed me. They told me to be sure to go over the difference betwen BCE and CE, because they usually just don't know. Meep.

Yessssss

I finally found a video clip that I was worried might have been lost! I never re-uploaded it to my computer after I reinstalled the OS last summer, so it wasn't in the files I put on the new computer. It was on a backup CD of photos that was in my CD case, in my car (probably due to my own semi-JTD paranoia, in the hope that even if my computer perishes in a fire, the files will be elsewhere). It's one of three short clips of my grandfather and my mother, made the summer before they both died. It preserves his voice, and her laugh, and the fun that we used to have just sitting around making fun of one another. And, of course, it contains my grandfather's immortal line, uttered to my mom as she avoided me taking a video of her: "Joan, you think you're homely?" Classic Papa. Oh, and it has Jen's maniacal cackle in there too, for good measure. The concluding "Die, Bob, die!" is particularly ironic, since she and I are the only ones still alive, lol. Unfortunately, Blogger does not want to let me post it.

However, on the same trip up there I took a lot of photos of his house, because I was worried it might be one of the last times we would be there. I was worried he would die, but of course I didn't expect that when I would be there again, for his funeral, my mom would have been gone for more than a month. Some of my favorite pictures came from the basement walls, which my dad and aunts had begun covering in graffiti when they were kids, and to which all of us kids contributed over the years:


That's probably my grandfather's writing in the middle: NOTICE: Only assholes write on cellar walls--join the club!

My dad contributed plenty of his own writing, mostly in the form of geekiness:


Let me assure you that in all three DiMarzo generations, only one person would have been writing out calculus formulas on a basement wall. The same person who doodled Planck's constant in his journal. Dork.

Finally, my grandpa put this on the wall down in his workshop:


The very first grandchild. Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo of the wall by the stairs, which had all six of the grandkids' names in chalk (for some reason, I come last, even though I was the second! I suspect Jen had a hand in that...)

I'm so glad I found these discs, the pictures, and especially, the videos. One of the things that makes me sad about my dad is that I have trouble remembering his voice sometimes, but thanks to these, I won't forget my mom or my grandpa.

Reading Linda Nochlin

In 1971, Linda Nochlin published an essay that revolutionized the study of art. Entitled "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" it tackled the issue of how to connect feminist ideas to the reality of the dearth of great art produced by women. She noted that feminists usually took one of two paths in answering this question: either they quickly dredged up the limited list of well-known women artists, like Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun in France and Artemisia Gentileschi in Italy, or they claimed that there should be different standards of value for 'masculine' versus 'feminine' art. Nochlin evaluated and discarded both of these avenues: for the first argument, it is an unfortunate fact that these women artists do not, under any circumstances, rise to the level of a Michelangelo or a Rodin; for the second, you cannot define certain types of art as "feminine" without running into plenty of men who have worked in those materials or styles, like the dainty Rococo paintings of Fragonard in the early 18th century.

Nochlin then analyzed the concept of Genius as the "golden nugget" that was then still implicitly accepted as the semi-divine source of artistic ability. Basically, the idea went that if so many male artists could triumph over adversity to produce great art, women should have been able to do the same; the fact that they haven't suggests a lack of Genius in their entire sex. She argues that this myth doesn't hold water under any kind of sociological analysis--the fact that most great artists have been white males of the bourgeoisie (and very often members of artistic families) suggests the reason that members of other groups, including women and blacks but also, surprisingly, the nobility, have not produced great art is because their roles precluded a full-time devotion to artistic pursuits.

This seems somewhat like old hat three decades later, after the rise of feminist art history and the subsequent (and necessary, in my opinion) takeover by gender studies, but Nochlin was the first to really put this in print, to change the way people thought about the creation of art, and to replace feminist defensiveness with a well-reasoned explanation of a historical fact. I have to admit that today was the first time I'd actually read the essay, though I've seen to summarized and referred to in any number of places. I suppose that's a good testimonial to how well Nochlin's ideas have been absorbed into scholarly consciousness.

As for the picture, that's the so-called Bikini Venus, a Roman sculpture in the Gabinetto Segreto (read: erotic art collection) in the Naples Archeological Museum. I should have taken a detail so the gold paint could catch the light, but I love the design of her bikini. The way she's using that little male figure as an armrest is amusing too--he has his hands on his hips like, fine, lean on me, but hurry up and fix your sandal, dammit! Of course, this was probably sculpted by a man...

Still in Virginia

Back in Panera, using their free wifi again. They block DListed, though, which is annoying. My favorite website, too! How dare they.

Yesterday I hung out at the library to finish my paper while Sean attended the linguistics orientation. (Yes, the monster is finished and submitted! Whoot! Sean read it over last night and he actually liked it, which is frankly surprising.) Afterwards we went to look inside the Rotunda, and then I accompanied him to the general graduate student orientation, which was a spectacular waste of time--lectures on academic honesty, how to be a better TA, blah blah blah. Then we picked up Sean's car, which had indeed needed a $300 alternator. Oh, Bertha.

For dinner we went to a place that offered both Chinese and Japanese, which was pretty win-win because Sean likes sushi and finds Chinese boring, and I hate sushi and love my chicken and broccoli. Of course, in normal life, any restaurant that offers menus from two separate countries as though you shouldn't know that they're two different cultures should be cause for alarm, but we're in the south, we're prepared to forgive them some foibles. After dinner we ended the evening with a rousing game of Scrabble, in which Sean, as usual, kicked my ass, and I, as usual, peppered him with insults and kicks to the shin. That's married life, folks!

Virginia

I drove down to Charlottesville on Friday to help Sean move in. It was quite a pleasant drive, especially through Virginia, which is really beautiful; the only downside was a hurricane-like storm I had to drive through for about fifty miles south of Harrisburg. It was raining and blowing so hard that the cars were just crawling along with their hazard lights on for miles and miles, and just when you thought it would let up it managed to just pour harder. But Virginia is gorgeous, aand Sean's apartment is really, really awesome. It's even bigger than he thought it was going to be, and it has air conditioning, a dishwasher, a balcony, and the pool and the laundry room are right across from his building. Yeah, I'm a little jealous of the air conditioning....

Moving Sean in turned out to be less difficult than I was expecting because we had so many hands--Sean's mom, Gary, and Hubbard all came down to help as well. Linda said she didn't know how we would have managed it without Gary, because some of the furniture, like Sean's desk and the bookcases, were pretty heavy, and he's on the third floor. We let the menfolk do the really heavy lifting, but I don't think I have sweated that much in...well...a long, long time. It didn't help that it was like 95 degrees and humid as hell, either! Y esterday we spent more than four hundred dollars at Target and let Hubbard buy Sean $150 worth of groceries, so he should be set until....forever. His apartment looks like a real apartment, too, because he was able to take a lot of the furniture from his grandmother's house, which they're planning to sell at some point. In other words, not everything is from Ikea this time around.

We had some mild setbacks, like the fact that Hubbard went a little crazy at dinner the first night when Linda refused to let her pay; when we let them off at the hotel, she was smacking Linda with her purse, and we found out the next day that she spent half the evening yelling at Linda and trying to run away. She was even in a bit of a snit the next day, too. Then there was Sean's car; on our way back from dinner the battery light came on, the lights dimmed, and it was having trouble accelerating. Luckily it made it back to Sean's apartment, but barely, and now we have to find a garage tomorrow and hope that it's just the alternator.

Last night we all walked around campus, which is just plain spectacular. All the buildings on the main lawn were designed by Jefferson as part of the original "academical village." Everything is red brick and white accents--hello, American Neoclassicism! At one end of the huge green is the Rotunda, which is based on the Pantheon, and at the other end is a building with a Parthenon-inspired temple front, complete with pediment sculptures. Along the sides are the individual department buildings, connected by a stoa-like colonnade that houses student rooms. We were able to peek into a few, and of course Linda struck up a conversation with some parents who were sitting outside their daughter's room; there's no air conditioning, no bathroom, and the university provides you with wood for your fireplace--not my cup of tea, mind you.

All in all, this place is really beautiful, and I know Sean's going to be happy here. He's excited for tomorrow, which is orientation and signing up for classes, which start the very next day. My little husband, all grown up! :-)

Ah, Blue

This is probably a tie with yesterday's picture for "favorite blue sky." I took it on top of the Palatine hill, at the beginning of what turned out to be something like a five hour exploration of the ruins there and in the Forum below.


I have an excessive fondness for that kind of tree. This specimen, in particular, just seems so hearty and determined, all alone amid those ruins. I bet if that tree had to write a paper on Kant, it wouldn't procrastinate and write blog entries and read Dlisted. You're a better man (woman?) than I, tree.

In Which I Hate Kant

I accidentally slept until 11:30 today, which unsurprisingly cut down on my productivity. Which I don't have much of anyway with this paper--I'm only onto page 2, with 18 to go! Also, I have a paralyzing fear that I'm not going to get an A and will thus have screwed up my perfect 4.0 GPA, which shouldn't matter, because no one will ever look at my GPA again, but I'll know, dammit. It would annoy me no end if this class, of all things, ruined it.


I took this picture in the Roseto, the municipal rose garden on the Aventine hill. Through the trees you can see the campanile of Sta Maria in Cosmedin, best known for housing the Boca della Verita. I never bothered to go in there because it's basically a tourist trap--ooh, stick your arm in and lie and it's going to get eaten off! Oh wait....no it won't. Now smile, take your photo, and let the next sweaty tourist shove their appendage in.

The sky was so blue there. What makes that possible in the Mediterranean that we don't have here?

Orto Botanico

More than a few of my favorite Rome '09 pictures came from the botanical garden in Rome, where I spent a wonderful part of an afternoon just soaking up the goodness, like watching ducks and fish in the pond with the lilypads:



Being a botanical garden, there were labels on almost all of the plants, but since this is not somewhere they generally expect a lot of English-speaking tourists, the labels had the scientific name and the Italian common name. Boo. So this is a pretty common flower, but I have no idea what it's called (theme?):


I'm not even sure if you would properly call these things flowers, but they were pretty, too:


And of course, no trip to the botanical garden would be complete without wandering around in the bamboo forest!

Botanical Musing

Yesterday's beautiful weather has dulled back to clouds and humidity, although it is sprinkling pleasantly right now. I had to go into school to pick up the Venice and the Veneto volume that Jasmine had squirreled away in her carrell, and somehow the 1.5 hour round-trip voyage has tired me out, and I just want to sit here on my bed, and listen to the rain.

I fell in love with a particular type of flower in Rome, a bright purple one that grows in huge falling masses of color and leaves. Perhaps it's better referred to as a flowering plant, really. I don't know what it's called, and neither did Caitlin nor Alice, the resident botanists in our apartment, who helped me identify other delicious floral scents like honeysuckle and oleander. I encountered this plant all over the city, but I only took a few photos of it. The first was in Largo del Febo, a little curved bit of road somewhere above and to the left of the Piazza Navona. I think it was a Sunday morning and I was on a church-seeing expedition in the neighborhood. The photo doesn't capture the brilliant color of the flowers, but more so the plant's sprawling mass, a waterfall of green coming down the side of this building.


The second photo I took was up on the Parco de Traiano, which sits on a hill beside the Colosseum. This hill contains the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, or Golden House, which was decorated with such an embarrassment of riches that a later and more sensible emperor, Trajan, filled it in with rubble and built a bath complex for the people on top of it. When it was uncovered during the Renaissance, people discovered that what they thought was a grotto, or cave, was covered with paintings, and it became quite the thing to go spelunking down there to check them out. Michelangelo, Raphael, Ghirlandaio, and a whole host of other artists went in, often leaving a graffiti signature. The type of decorative motifs that were drawn from and inspired by these Roman wall paintings came to be know as 'grotteschi,' and from that we have ultimately derived the word 'grotesque,' referring to things that are strange and distorted, like the screaming heads enwreathed with foliage that the Romans liked to fill their walls with.

I didn't make it into the Domus Aurea on this trip, but I did go up to the park to look around and admire the view of the Colosseum. There are ruins up there, great hulking frames of a barrel-vaulted structure, and somehow, possibly because I'd had a little too much sun that day, I found myself thinking, Oh, is that the Domus Aurea? Uh, no, that is underground, hence the whole grotto thing. The ruins are Trajan's baths, and nothing really special about them. But the best part, I thought, was leaning over a railing and seeing these flowers cascading down about thirty feet. The angle of this photo doesn't make it seem like it goes down very far, but I had to huff and puff up a big staircase from the road next to the Colosseum to get up there, and the plant started up at the railing and went all the way down. Combined with that blue, blue sky, and the palm trees...heaven.



The last photo I took of the mystery flower was a day or two before we left, when I went exploring on the Aventine hill. I saw Santa Sabina, and then kept going up hill till I found the Priorate of the Knights of Malta, and then I turned around. On the walk back I saw these beauties, with graffiti written between the plants in Italian that said "you want to see that I love you? I love you!" Ah, romance. Of course, nothing will ever beat the graffiti Sara and I saw in Ravenna, which said "I love you because you make me dream"--even if that did lose points for being spray painted onto a Fascist-era government building.


That's it for my love affair with the purple plant. I wish I could find out what it is so that I could at least dream of planting it in the house we'll have someday. Well, I'd have to plant it well away from the house, or one day we might wake up and find purple flowers blocking out the windows. Dreams!

Laocoon, Lacan

I think I'm just going to start posting the couple dozen or so of my favorite photographs from Rome. At the very least, it'll make flipping back through older entries more visually stimulating. This, like the Boxer, is a Hellenistic Greek sculptural group called Laocoon. It was dug up in Rome in the early 16th century (Michelangelo, who was inspired by this type of emotional, writhing, athletic figure, was present at the disinterment). The group depicts the tragic fate of the Trojan priest Laocoon and his two sons; Apollo sent one of his sacred pythons to strangle the three of them after Laocoon warned his countrymen not to accept a certain wooden horse the Greeks were offering (obviously you can guess whose side Apollo was on in this tiff).


The statue now stands in the octagonal sculpture courtyard in the Vatican, right near the equally-famous Apollo Belvedere. I took this photo in between tour groups that generally cluster so tightly around the damned thing that you can't get a shot of it. It's a beautiful statue, and what's more, it perfectly captures my mood right now, struggling as I am against my own version of a murderous python, the 20-page paper I have to turn in in three weeks. In other words, Lacan, my old enemy.

Loving puns and wordplay as he did, I'm sure he would have appreciated the similarity between his own name and the statue, but he probably would have followed it up with some incomprehensible crap about how this sculpture symbolizes the anguished desire that is supposedly the chronic condition of every human being, since we are tormented by the lack of the Real, lost when we entered into culture via language. Right. The only thing tormenting me right now is the desire to be DONE with this paper. Except I haven't started it yet--this is just the note-taking portion! Ahhh!

Love

I just went through all my Italy photos on facebook and saved my favorites to my computer. I think this is my absolute favorite photograph that I took:


It's a detail of a Greek bronze from the Hellenistic period called the Boxer. This is the full image:


The entire sculpture is incredible for its veracity, right down to the cauliflower ears that modern boxers still get from being beaten about the head so much, and also for its emotional intensity (a hallmark of the Hellenistic style). The expression on his face is evocative, even if you can't figure out exactly what he's feeling--is it just exhaustion from the fight? Is he turning his head to speak to an admirer, or be heckled by a critic?

I love the close-up I took of his face because you can see the effort the sculptor put into to making this a realistic image. The bloody wounds and red lips are actually cast in a copper alloy which gives them a different color from the rest of the sculpture. The missing eyes would have been made of glass or stone, attached by hooks on the interior of the eyelids. I think I like it better without the eyes, with just those gaping, dark holes giving nothing away.

This sculpture, perhaps more than any other I saw in Rome, seemed to me like a living, breathing figure, a man who has turned his head briefly for a word or two, and who in a moment will finish unwrapping his hands, get up, and make his weary way home.

It All Works Out

Really, today's thwarting was partially my own fault; I could have stopped by the campus library yesterday before meeting my fellow GAHO officers for dinner, but my lazy butt preferred to simply take the R7 into Center City rather than get off at Temple, grab the books I needed, and then take the subway downtown. So I went back to Temple this morning (which is not so much as a hassle as it is an expense, since I don't have a metropass for this month) only to find that the one book I really, really needed was not there--despite being listed as in the library on the catalogue. I was so annoyed at having come back into the city for nothing. I need this book to plan out my independent study for the fall, so it's a matter of some urgency.

When I got home, I emailed Jasmine hoping she might have a copy (since it's a book on the Veneto), and then I went shopping for a dress for Heather's wedding. She's getting married at 11:30 on a Sunday, which kind of rules out the black dresses I own. Imagine my delight at finding not one, but two dresses! One is chocolate brown and one is blue. I haven't decided if I'll keep both; I want to show them to Sean next week. The pleasure of not being thwarted while shopping was great on its own, but to place a cherry on the cake, Jasmine emailed me back and sheepishly admitted that she had committed the same sin that I so often have--taking a book from the stacks and sticking it in your carrel without actually checking it out. It's just such a pain sometimes to haul everything downstairs, check it out, and haul it back upstairs. They should really put a self-checkout kiosk in the carrels! That would probably cut down on a lot of book-seeking rage like my own this morning. But even though this means I have to go into school again to collect said book from Jasmine's carrell, at least I know I can get it and I don't have to wait for PALCI. Ahh.

Dinner last night was fun, even if my fellow officers do get awfully tied up in bureaucratic crap like whether we should buy full bagels or minibagels for the orientation breakfast (hint: no one cares). Only at the end of dinner was there the inevitable comps discussion. Caitlin asked me outright if I was taking them in the fall, and when I just responded with an "Ummm...." she took that to mean I had decided to wait and do them in the spring instead (which I had totally forgotten was even an option, mostly because who in their right mind wants to write a thesis and study for comps in one semester?). It's not surprising that she thought I would put it off, either, considering that I have three courses and TA duty; Caitlin and Nicole are taking only two classes each to have enough time to prepare.

After Rachel sent me what the professors suggested in terms of prep, I have to say again (even though I've said it here how many times?) how glad I am that I'm not studying for these for real. For example, Dr. West, who does Northern Ren and Baroque, suggested no less than seven texts. Just for the North. Meanwhile, Dr. Silk sent a three page bibliography for modern and contemporary. Who the hell would have time to read all of that, much less memorize it, by October? Woof.

Getting Something Done

I finished the outline last night! It clocked in at 84 pages, which would almost work out to 10 pages of textbook per page of outline, except for that bit where I skipped the hundreds of pages dealing with non-Western art. Sorry, rest of the world.

I had originally planned to finish it this morning, but I was so tired of doing it that I pushed on until about 8 o'clock just to make.it.stop. I discovered that my knowledge of modern art pretty much stops in the 1970s, because I had a devil of a hard time trying to figure out what should be canon for the next couple of decades--unfortunately, my two survey texts disagreed with each other on most of the artists. I've come to rely more and more on Gardener rather than Stokstad, but it has definite flaws, like having no mention of Robert Maplethorpe, and no section at all on modern photography, just a couple of Cindy Sherman images.

This was the very last image that I put in my outline. It's too big to post here if you want to be able to actually read the text. Fitting, I think!

The Joys of Productivity

Today was a good day! I finally dropped off the JCrew dress that I'm returning at the UPS box and deposited the last hefty tax return that I'll be seeing for a few years, plus I made banana bread with some extra bananas Phyllis had picked up that were beginning to head south. And it turned out really well, as opposed to the time I tried to make it with her previous oven and it burned on the outside by the time it was done on the inside. Progress!

I'm also progressing nicely in my outline, having made it up to the 1910s and Cubism by the time I called it quits around 4pm. The outline is up to 68 pages, and if, fingers crossed, I manage to finish by Thursday morning, I plan to sneakily print it all out in the grad lounge when I stop by campus. Meredith asked me yesterday if I'm managing to retain anything from this, and the answer, somewhat surprisingly, is yes--the wider themes, along with artists and titles, yes; dates, not so much. Whatever. Meanwhile, in an example of just how randomly my mind does tend to cast up these bits of data, just as I was clocked on the head by a falling box of crackers while wrestling Phyllis' Cuisinart out of its storage spot, I mentally shouted, not 'fuck!' but rather, 'Tilman Reimanschneider!' I mentally cursed using the name of a 16th century German sculptor. Yes, I think this endeavor is paying off, and how!

In other relieving news, Dr. Cooper wrote back to me again and said that Dr. Bolman is figuring out what I should tell people about comps--but more importantly, she said that my friend Agnes is in the same boat. That's not surprising, since I knew Agnes has some kind of fellowship; she's been TAing since we started, the only other MA student to be doing so. I'm happy for her that she doesn't have to take the exam, but let's be honest, I'm more excited that I'm not going to be the only one in the leper colony once everyone else takes their seats in that exam room!

Finally

Thank you cards...finally...finished. It only took what, two months, and no end of squabbling and nagging. I had these high hopes that this would be Sean's task and that I wouldn't have to do it. Oh, pipe dreams. In the end, I wrote them all out and Sean offered suggestions for people who aren't my friends or family (about 80 percent of the guest list). Apparently his endless gifts of charm and faux-cheerfulness do not extend to the kind of platitudes necessary for thank-you cards, because you'd think I was asking him to wade into a snake pit, the way he acted. We also got into an argument a few weeks ago when he claimed that thank yous were 'obviously' invented by some wishy-washy Victorian woman and are an inherently female notion. Grrrrr.

In other news, I baked this morning! I made blackberry cobbler, which Sean had requested for his birthday. Judging from the fact that he ate half the pan in an hour, I guess it turned out pretty good. I'm so domestic.