Well, my thesis is done and uploaded to the graduate school, so now all I'm missing is Dr. Cooper's original signature page, which she claims to have mailed but which I have not yet received. Sigh. I emailed her again just to gently remind her, in case she did forget, because they need that by Monday, no excuses. I'd really rather not have to ask her to Fedex overnight a single page, but if it turns out she forgot, I will be so irritated. And I will know, too, because you bet I'm going to look at that postmark.
Tomorrow is my last section for the semester! Sean got a round of applause from his class today, but I know that's asking too much. Especially since I plan to publicly shame any jackass who hands their paper to me without a staple in it. I gave them a rousing "you're-in-college-you-can-find-a-goddamned-stapler" speech last week, and even reminded them via email yesterday, so we'll see who dares risk my wrath with a dog-eared final paper. Amy suggested that we should just "lose" the other pages and then give them an F for handing in something incomplete, but no one's that much of a bitch. Yet.
''One morning, I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.''
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
:-)
This is the email I got from Dr. Hall this morning:
Dear Michelle,
Yay!
ETA further awesomeness: Dr. Cooper was copied on the email above, so she replied congratulating me for getting such praise from Dr. Hall, and suggested that they put their heads together on how I might get this published!
They're also both going to email a mutual friend (who happens to be co-chairing the session at CAA next year to whicb I'm submitting an abstract based on my thesis) "in support of [my] acceptance." It came as a bit of a surprise to me upon entering grad school to discover how much of your success is dependent on who you know, or, more to the point, on who your advisors know. This is not merely the means of getting your first paper at a conference or a publication; it extends to job searches as well, hence the interest in getting your degree at an institution where the faculty are well-respected and thus hopefully well-connected. Luckily for me, anyone who does Venice knows Dr. Cooper, especially after her last book, Palladio's Venice, won the Gordan Prize from the Renaissance Society of America, and pretty much everyone and their mother in Renaissance studies knows Dr. Hall. I'm perfectly content to let this work in my favor; after all, if you don't get an Ivy degree, you really need to seize any and all potential advantages.
The important thing at the moment, though, is that they both really liked my thesis! Actually, I was kind of surprised by just how much they evidently liked it, especially Dr. Hall, who is not always particularly forthcoming with praise. I won't pretend that I didn't think it was good--I certainly did--I just didn't think it was earth-shattering. Of course, I've been staring at this information, in one form or another, for going on seven months, so I've kind of lost a bit of objectivity.
I told a couple of my friends at school about this, but only because they're both PhD students (and neither did their master's at Temple). There's obviously a line between being properly proud of your own accomplishments, and touting them at the expense of someone else's feelings. I was therefore a little surprised when Dr. Hall mentioned during our class this afternoon how I had just written an excellent thesis that managed to present just the right amount of information, neither over-taxing nor infantilizing the reader. It so happened that a major fault of the paper that we were discussing was the author's assumption of a vast amount of knowledge of textual sources on the part of the reader; that meant her comment was timely, but since one of the other students in our class of seven is currently struggling to finish her thesis, and Dr. Hall is one of her advisors, it was also kind of awkward.
Now it's time to convert my thesis to a .pdf and upload it to the dissertation and thesis site. Drumroll!
Dear Michelle,
I have read your impressive thesis and attached it with a half dozen editorial comments.
You have done a most admirable job of examining this subject from multiple points of view, demonstrating your ability to work with whatever methodology is applicable and useful in the context. There is architectural history, social history, ideological analysis, and even stylistic analysis here. You demonstrate the wide range of your skills in a wonderfully well-written essay. Dr. Cooper is a better judge than I, but I would think this was publishable.
It is certainly among the very best Masters theses I have read.
Complimenti!Yay!
ETA further awesomeness: Dr. Cooper was copied on the email above, so she replied congratulating me for getting such praise from Dr. Hall, and suggested that they put their heads together on how I might get this published!
They're also both going to email a mutual friend (who happens to be co-chairing the session at CAA next year to whicb I'm submitting an abstract based on my thesis) "in support of [my] acceptance." It came as a bit of a surprise to me upon entering grad school to discover how much of your success is dependent on who you know, or, more to the point, on who your advisors know. This is not merely the means of getting your first paper at a conference or a publication; it extends to job searches as well, hence the interest in getting your degree at an institution where the faculty are well-respected and thus hopefully well-connected. Luckily for me, anyone who does Venice knows Dr. Cooper, especially after her last book, Palladio's Venice, won the Gordan Prize from the Renaissance Society of America, and pretty much everyone and their mother in Renaissance studies knows Dr. Hall. I'm perfectly content to let this work in my favor; after all, if you don't get an Ivy degree, you really need to seize any and all potential advantages.
The important thing at the moment, though, is that they both really liked my thesis! Actually, I was kind of surprised by just how much they evidently liked it, especially Dr. Hall, who is not always particularly forthcoming with praise. I won't pretend that I didn't think it was good--I certainly did--I just didn't think it was earth-shattering. Of course, I've been staring at this information, in one form or another, for going on seven months, so I've kind of lost a bit of objectivity.
I told a couple of my friends at school about this, but only because they're both PhD students (and neither did their master's at Temple). There's obviously a line between being properly proud of your own accomplishments, and touting them at the expense of someone else's feelings. I was therefore a little surprised when Dr. Hall mentioned during our class this afternoon how I had just written an excellent thesis that managed to present just the right amount of information, neither over-taxing nor infantilizing the reader. It so happened that a major fault of the paper that we were discussing was the author's assumption of a vast amount of knowledge of textual sources on the part of the reader; that meant her comment was timely, but since one of the other students in our class of seven is currently struggling to finish her thesis, and Dr. Hall is one of her advisors, it was also kind of awkward.
Now it's time to convert my thesis to a .pdf and upload it to the dissertation and thesis site. Drumroll!
Sunday, April 25, 2010
New York Vignettes
I just returned from a lovely visit to New York to visit Heather and Sara. Friday night we stayed at Heather's apartment and went out with some of her friends. On Saturday Heather had a lesbian wedding to attend, so Sara and I went to the Natural History Museum, where we met up with her boyfriend Zach (my first time meeting him). The museum is quite vast and a little overwhelming, both in terms of the amount of information being thrust at you and the number of people in it on a weekend afternoon.
However, I saw the dinosaurs, plus the model of the giant fucking whale that reminded me immediately of why I find oceans kind of creepy, because they can harbor things like that and you will never know until they're trying to eat you. Fine, yes, blue whales eat plankton, not people, but the principle is the same: large scary things live in oceans. I have a kid's book in a box in my closet called Animals You Will Never Forget, and there was a page in there that I had to skip each and every time I read that book because it scared me so damn much. It was an illustration of a man on a raft floating next to an orca. I just couldn't handle the difference in scale that that image presented.
That book was awesome, by the way. I just looked it up and it's out of print, but people posted comments on Amazon about how that title is no joke because they still remember so many of the stories in there. Despite my own awful memory, I can think of at least a dozen of those stories, and even picture the illustrations that went with them. Some of them were just fun (Rascal the raccoon, or the one about the otter called "Ring of Bright Water"--see? I even remember titles!) but some were heart-wrenching. The one that made me cry every time was about a family that adopts a duckling named Waddles, who sort of thinks it's a dog and is very protective of the little girl. At the end of the story, the little girl was outside in their backyard when the mother heard on the radio that there's a rabid dog in the neighborhood. She looked outside, and lo and behold, said rabid dog was slinking into her yard and making for the kid--but just as it tried to attack, Waddles ran at it, wings flapping and squawking, giving the woman time to grab the little girl and run inside. When the police finally arrived and shot the dog, they called her outside and showed her where Waddles was lying with his neck broken and his beak covered in blood--he'd kept attacking the dog until he'd driven it past the gate:
OK, I didn't remember that bit on my own, nor did I remember it being named Waddles, or even that it was a duck (I thought it was a goose because he's white in the illustration, and are there even white ducks?). I went into the closet and pulled out the book to look at it. Yes, I cried again while reading this story. It's just such a brave little goose/duck! Also, just to test myself, I looked at the page with the illustration of the guy with the orca (such is the strength of my memory of this book that I saw the story title "Life Among the Elephants" and thought "Oh hey, it's the one right before this one!") Anyway, it still gives me the creeps. It's just so big, and he's so small...well, actually, I'm forcing myself to look at it again, and I think the whale might be portrayed just a bit out of scale. I'm thinking of the images of that trainer who was recently drowned by the orca she was feeding--there wasn't quite as great a discrepancy in size as there is in this image. Whatever. This freaked me out as a child and still does.
Man, I semi-forgot how awesome this book is! It's also older than I thought (1969), which on second thought explains why almost all the stories are from the earlier part of the 20th century. I learned about a lot of world events indirectly from these stories; I remember one story involving the Spanish influenza epidemic in the US in 1918, and another about the dancing horses of Vienna and how General Patton rescued them during in WWII after they performed for him. Ha, I just found another favorite, "The Rooster That Served the Lord." This is set in a rural farming community where the pastor decides to have everyone take money from the collection plate and invest it somehow, with the profits payable to God. The narrator's father dubiously takes five dollars and buys a clutch of Leghorn eggs, of which only one hatches, and that one a rooster, which can't lay any eggs to sell. The rooster, named Prunejuice, causes a lot of trouble, like getting his leg run over the by the family car, and picking fights with the cat in which cream is spilled and glass gets broken, so the father keeps a record of how much the rooster has cost them vs. what is "to the good." In the end, someone comes looking for a Leghorn rooster for his chickens. On account of Prunejuice's crooked leg, he only offers fifteen dollars, but that still means that not only has Prunejuice finally "squared his account," but he's made a little bit for God, as well.
Wow, how did this post get from my weekend to my extensive recollections of a book from my childhood? Whatever: it's a damned good book. In fact, I think I'm going to go re-read it now!
However, I saw the dinosaurs, plus the model of the giant fucking whale that reminded me immediately of why I find oceans kind of creepy, because they can harbor things like that and you will never know until they're trying to eat you. Fine, yes, blue whales eat plankton, not people, but the principle is the same: large scary things live in oceans. I have a kid's book in a box in my closet called Animals You Will Never Forget, and there was a page in there that I had to skip each and every time I read that book because it scared me so damn much. It was an illustration of a man on a raft floating next to an orca. I just couldn't handle the difference in scale that that image presented.
That book was awesome, by the way. I just looked it up and it's out of print, but people posted comments on Amazon about how that title is no joke because they still remember so many of the stories in there. Despite my own awful memory, I can think of at least a dozen of those stories, and even picture the illustrations that went with them. Some of them were just fun (Rascal the raccoon, or the one about the otter called "Ring of Bright Water"--see? I even remember titles!) but some were heart-wrenching. The one that made me cry every time was about a family that adopts a duckling named Waddles, who sort of thinks it's a dog and is very protective of the little girl. At the end of the story, the little girl was outside in their backyard when the mother heard on the radio that there's a rabid dog in the neighborhood. She looked outside, and lo and behold, said rabid dog was slinking into her yard and making for the kid--but just as it tried to attack, Waddles ran at it, wings flapping and squawking, giving the woman time to grab the little girl and run inside. When the police finally arrived and shot the dog, they called her outside and showed her where Waddles was lying with his neck broken and his beak covered in blood--he'd kept attacking the dog until he'd driven it past the gate:
"I don't think the bullet was necessary," said the officer, looking with wonder at the dog's mutilated head. Some inborn instinct from his wild, dim past must have inspired Waddles to hold out until he drove his last enemy from the little plot of earth he held sacred.
OK, I didn't remember that bit on my own, nor did I remember it being named Waddles, or even that it was a duck (I thought it was a goose because he's white in the illustration, and are there even white ducks?). I went into the closet and pulled out the book to look at it. Yes, I cried again while reading this story. It's just such a brave little goose/duck! Also, just to test myself, I looked at the page with the illustration of the guy with the orca (such is the strength of my memory of this book that I saw the story title "Life Among the Elephants" and thought "Oh hey, it's the one right before this one!") Anyway, it still gives me the creeps. It's just so big, and he's so small...well, actually, I'm forcing myself to look at it again, and I think the whale might be portrayed just a bit out of scale. I'm thinking of the images of that trainer who was recently drowned by the orca she was feeding--there wasn't quite as great a discrepancy in size as there is in this image. Whatever. This freaked me out as a child and still does.
Man, I semi-forgot how awesome this book is! It's also older than I thought (1969), which on second thought explains why almost all the stories are from the earlier part of the 20th century. I learned about a lot of world events indirectly from these stories; I remember one story involving the Spanish influenza epidemic in the US in 1918, and another about the dancing horses of Vienna and how General Patton rescued them during in WWII after they performed for him. Ha, I just found another favorite, "The Rooster That Served the Lord." This is set in a rural farming community where the pastor decides to have everyone take money from the collection plate and invest it somehow, with the profits payable to God. The narrator's father dubiously takes five dollars and buys a clutch of Leghorn eggs, of which only one hatches, and that one a rooster, which can't lay any eggs to sell. The rooster, named Prunejuice, causes a lot of trouble, like getting his leg run over the by the family car, and picking fights with the cat in which cream is spilled and glass gets broken, so the father keeps a record of how much the rooster has cost them vs. what is "to the good." In the end, someone comes looking for a Leghorn rooster for his chickens. On account of Prunejuice's crooked leg, he only offers fifteen dollars, but that still means that not only has Prunejuice finally "squared his account," but he's made a little bit for God, as well.
Wow, how did this post get from my weekend to my extensive recollections of a book from my childhood? Whatever: it's a damned good book. In fact, I think I'm going to go re-read it now!
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Yay!!
Dr. Cooper sent back the remainder of my thesis this morning with only a few edits, and this concluding note: "A terrific thesis! Brava!"
*cue Cheshire-cat grin*
*cue Cheshire-cat grin*
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Reading List
I heard from Dr. Cooper today! She said she's going to try to finish my thesis tomorrow while on the train from Scotland to London (that's 8 hours by car according to Google Maps, so yes, I think she'll have time). That means my time as a lady of leisure will be coming to a close, but I'm OK with that.
On the plus side, I've done quite a bit of reading in the past few weeks, more than I think I've done at any point during grad school so far. I think the beginning of this stretch started with a new biography of Cardinal Wolsey that just came out, but unfortunately, it wasn't academic enough to be proper history and it wasn't well-written or interesting enough to be popular history. Then I re-read Jane Austen's Emma with a much more sympathetic eye than I did the first time around. I've never liked Emma's character because she's snobbish and a know-it-all, but having watched and enjoyed the recent BBC miniseries, I was able to enjoy the book as well. The light-hearted charm of the actress who played Emma in the miniseries, Romola Garai, undoubtedly influenced me in this regard.
After Emma, I read the collected short stories of Mark Twain, which were as satirically funny as anything you'd expect of the original Man in the White Suit (sit down, Tom Wolfe). If I were making a list of famous dead people I'd want to meet, he would be on it, hands-down. This year is the 100th anniversary of his death, and a new biography of him just came out that I saw reviewed very favorably in the Economist. I haven't laid hands on a copy from the library yet, not for lack of trying!
Twain was followed up by Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, a satire of the early 20th-century newspaper industry, which follows an absurd series of events befalling a group of newspapermen all trying to get the exclusive story on a coup in a made-up North African nation (which was based on Waugh's own experience covering the anticipated Italian invasion of Abyssinia, modern-day Ethiopia, in 1935). It was entertaining, but not terribly memorable.
The next item on the list was All Quiet on the Western Front, which I hadn't read since high school. I re-read it after a conversation with Sean in which he mentioned someone having posed the question of what were the five books that had changed your life the most. We both agreed that this is a very difficult question, because you can certainly enjoy books and re-read them time and again without them ever having changed your view of the world (Harry Potter, for instance). Sean said that All Quiet would definitely be on his list, and since it had made quite an impression on me when I read it, I decided to give it another go. Well, it still makes quite the impression, let me tell you. It's bleak and savage and at the same time completely heart-rending. You see the way that Paul and his friends have to completely deaden themselves of all normal human emotion in order to survive the horrors of the front, but then that same survival instinct renders him completely unable to connect with his family, with the rest of the world, when he's home on leave. When Paul talks of how he knows that everything he's bottled up is just going to come exploding out of him one day after the war is over, I can't help but think of soldiers coming home today from Iraq and Afghanistan, struggling with PTSD and rage and depression after having survived the battlefield. As much as the machinery of war has changed, the experience of the soldier seems, in many terrible ways, to have remained the same.
I have a strong recollection of the first time I read this book, which is pretty rare for someone with my bad memory. It was on the couch in the tv room downstairs, the old hideous orange and white couch that was wooly and scratchy, and I remember not being able to put it down, so I read it through in one afternoon. When I opened the book this time, I found a ticket stub from a showing of the Sixth Sense in the summer of 1999. Was that mine or Jen's? I don't know. I know I had already read it by the time it was assigned in high school, so maybe. Side note: our copy of this book was my dad's from college, and I noticed that he had written his college address inside the front cover: Bourgeois Hall. JTD, the bourgeois-iest of them all!
My string of early-2oth-century literature continued then with E.M. Forster's Howards End. It's all about the inter-relationships between three groups of people in England around 1910: the artsy, literary Schlegel family; the rich capitalist Wilcox family; and the poor Leonard Bast and his wife. At heart is Howards End, a country house belonging to Mrs. Wilcox, who dies and tries to leave it, on the spur of the moment, to Ms. Schlegel, only her husband and son never tell Ms. Schlegel, who in time becomes the second Mrs. Wilcox, while her sister gets knocked up by the poor guy who gets beaten to death by Mr. Wilcox's nasty son, who goes to jail at the end while Mr. Wilcox, Mrs. Wilcox, her sister, and her sister's illegitimate kid all wind up living together at Howards End. Um, yeah. According to Spark Notes, which I read after the fact, these groups and Howards End stand in for the author's question of who would inherit England in the 20th century: the dreamy idealists, the rough capitalists, or the working class? Since Leonard dies, I think we can safely rule out the working class, but the odd living situation at the end of the book suggests that there's not going to be any one victor, but more likely a combination of influences. Anyway, for this big-picture thinking wrapped in a domestic tale, this book is considered a classic of Brit lit.
It was not to my taste. A lot of it had to do with the characters, none of whom I found sympathetic. They were the same type of characters that populate the other Forster novel I've read, A Room with a View (except here there's not the ameliorating element of Florence as a backdrop): the upper middle class. The Schlegel sisters are independently wealthy, so they spend all their time being cultured: going to concerts, speeches, and parties where they discuss the problem of poverty with other equally-well-off women. Margaret is the older one, more sensible, less attractive; Helen is the young, passionate, beautiful one who acts without thinking (their types are evidently taken from Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility). Of course, they don't work, and they have no responsibilities of any kind, so their vapid moralizing on how best to help the poor is ridiculous, because it's meaningless.
Howards End is the type of novel where nearly every utterance coming from a female is followed by "' --!'she cried out." That annoys me to an inexpressible degree. I also don't like books that decide to tell you something about characters, over and over, rather than actually demonstrating it. In this case, it was the original Mrs. Wilcox, whose interactions with Margaret in the beginning of the novel are brief, half unpleasant and the rest awkward, and the lady herself says barely anything--yet the rest of the book she's referred to as "selfless" and "omniscient." WTF? Where did that come from?
The novel is also considered to be ahead of its time in terms of studying gender relations, but I don't know that I found it so wonderful on that point either. When Margaret receives an unexpected proposal from the really rather stupid, brash, and unpleasant businessman Mr. Wilcox, she decides she will love him, and she tells herself that she will recognize his every fault, and forgive it, and simply over time make him a better man. That is the dumbest idea ever, so even though the narrator keeps telling you that she's the sensible one, I didn't agree. One of his "faults," apparently, is that he likes women to be completely submissive. Actually, he acknowledges that he finds it ever so precious that she's smart and argues with him, just so long as she ultimately gives in and meekly admits his greater experience and authority on every topic. And she does. She recognizes that this is what he wants her to be, and she willingly becomes it. Gah!!
To be fair, Margaret finally reaches a breaking point at the end of the novel and tells her husband off and decides to leave him. It had come out earlier that he had had an affair with poor Leonard's gross wife, Jacky, when she was a prostitute in Cyprus, and Margaret forgave him meekly because...just because. Later, when it comes out that Helen had pity sex with Leonard (who left a perfectly good job on the basis of Mr. Wilcox's casual advice, and then sank into poverty) and got pregnant, Mr. Wilcox gets on his moral high horse and says he can't have a 'fallen woman' staying in the house with him. Margaret freaks out on him when he refuses to acknowledge that what he did and what Helen did are the same thing, and decides to go to Europe with her sister. That's the point at which Leonard gets offed by the unpleasant Wilcox son, and the shock of his son going to jail turns Mr. Wilcox into an invalid. That's how, at the end of the story, Margaret winds up ruling the roost at Howards End, the house she was supposed to inherit anyway, and forcing her husband to get along with her "fallen woman" sister. So I guess there's a tiny bit of a gender-relation upset there, but the problem is that Margaret spent the majority of the book being a total idiot, and I hated her, and I hated Helen, Mr. Wilcox, and basically every character in the book! The only reason I finished it was that halfway through I had flipped to the end out of exasperation to see if there was anything there that could convince me to keep reading. I saw that Leonard got killed by Wilcox's son, and I was really puzzled as to why he would kill him, and what's the poor guy doing at the country house, and thus I was suckered into finishing it. Well, that's it for you, E.M. Forster. You shall not darken my bookcase again.
Now I'm reading Catch-22, which I read once before, for Dr. Regan's class on comedy when I was a freshman in college. It's absurdist, dark humor, and I keep catching myself expecting some little episode or vignette to have a satisfactory ending, or indeed any ending at all that doesn't go around in a circle or just cut off, but that's not what you get in Yossarian's world. I think we watched part of the film version in class, and all I remember from that is someone getting their head accidentally cut off by a helicopter while they're all out swimming. I haven't gotten to that part of the book yet, though. Cheery reads I've chosen lately, right?
On the plus side, I've done quite a bit of reading in the past few weeks, more than I think I've done at any point during grad school so far. I think the beginning of this stretch started with a new biography of Cardinal Wolsey that just came out, but unfortunately, it wasn't academic enough to be proper history and it wasn't well-written or interesting enough to be popular history. Then I re-read Jane Austen's Emma with a much more sympathetic eye than I did the first time around. I've never liked Emma's character because she's snobbish and a know-it-all, but having watched and enjoyed the recent BBC miniseries, I was able to enjoy the book as well. The light-hearted charm of the actress who played Emma in the miniseries, Romola Garai, undoubtedly influenced me in this regard.
After Emma, I read the collected short stories of Mark Twain, which were as satirically funny as anything you'd expect of the original Man in the White Suit (sit down, Tom Wolfe). If I were making a list of famous dead people I'd want to meet, he would be on it, hands-down. This year is the 100th anniversary of his death, and a new biography of him just came out that I saw reviewed very favorably in the Economist. I haven't laid hands on a copy from the library yet, not for lack of trying!
Twain was followed up by Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, a satire of the early 20th-century newspaper industry, which follows an absurd series of events befalling a group of newspapermen all trying to get the exclusive story on a coup in a made-up North African nation (which was based on Waugh's own experience covering the anticipated Italian invasion of Abyssinia, modern-day Ethiopia, in 1935). It was entertaining, but not terribly memorable.
The next item on the list was All Quiet on the Western Front, which I hadn't read since high school. I re-read it after a conversation with Sean in which he mentioned someone having posed the question of what were the five books that had changed your life the most. We both agreed that this is a very difficult question, because you can certainly enjoy books and re-read them time and again without them ever having changed your view of the world (Harry Potter, for instance). Sean said that All Quiet would definitely be on his list, and since it had made quite an impression on me when I read it, I decided to give it another go. Well, it still makes quite the impression, let me tell you. It's bleak and savage and at the same time completely heart-rending. You see the way that Paul and his friends have to completely deaden themselves of all normal human emotion in order to survive the horrors of the front, but then that same survival instinct renders him completely unable to connect with his family, with the rest of the world, when he's home on leave. When Paul talks of how he knows that everything he's bottled up is just going to come exploding out of him one day after the war is over, I can't help but think of soldiers coming home today from Iraq and Afghanistan, struggling with PTSD and rage and depression after having survived the battlefield. As much as the machinery of war has changed, the experience of the soldier seems, in many terrible ways, to have remained the same.
I have a strong recollection of the first time I read this book, which is pretty rare for someone with my bad memory. It was on the couch in the tv room downstairs, the old hideous orange and white couch that was wooly and scratchy, and I remember not being able to put it down, so I read it through in one afternoon. When I opened the book this time, I found a ticket stub from a showing of the Sixth Sense in the summer of 1999. Was that mine or Jen's? I don't know. I know I had already read it by the time it was assigned in high school, so maybe. Side note: our copy of this book was my dad's from college, and I noticed that he had written his college address inside the front cover: Bourgeois Hall. JTD, the bourgeois-iest of them all!
My string of early-2oth-century literature continued then with E.M. Forster's Howards End. It's all about the inter-relationships between three groups of people in England around 1910: the artsy, literary Schlegel family; the rich capitalist Wilcox family; and the poor Leonard Bast and his wife. At heart is Howards End, a country house belonging to Mrs. Wilcox, who dies and tries to leave it, on the spur of the moment, to Ms. Schlegel, only her husband and son never tell Ms. Schlegel, who in time becomes the second Mrs. Wilcox, while her sister gets knocked up by the poor guy who gets beaten to death by Mr. Wilcox's nasty son, who goes to jail at the end while Mr. Wilcox, Mrs. Wilcox, her sister, and her sister's illegitimate kid all wind up living together at Howards End. Um, yeah. According to Spark Notes, which I read after the fact, these groups and Howards End stand in for the author's question of who would inherit England in the 20th century: the dreamy idealists, the rough capitalists, or the working class? Since Leonard dies, I think we can safely rule out the working class, but the odd living situation at the end of the book suggests that there's not going to be any one victor, but more likely a combination of influences. Anyway, for this big-picture thinking wrapped in a domestic tale, this book is considered a classic of Brit lit.
It was not to my taste. A lot of it had to do with the characters, none of whom I found sympathetic. They were the same type of characters that populate the other Forster novel I've read, A Room with a View (except here there's not the ameliorating element of Florence as a backdrop): the upper middle class. The Schlegel sisters are independently wealthy, so they spend all their time being cultured: going to concerts, speeches, and parties where they discuss the problem of poverty with other equally-well-off women. Margaret is the older one, more sensible, less attractive; Helen is the young, passionate, beautiful one who acts without thinking (their types are evidently taken from Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility). Of course, they don't work, and they have no responsibilities of any kind, so their vapid moralizing on how best to help the poor is ridiculous, because it's meaningless.
Howards End is the type of novel where nearly every utterance coming from a female is followed by "' --!'she cried out." That annoys me to an inexpressible degree. I also don't like books that decide to tell you something about characters, over and over, rather than actually demonstrating it. In this case, it was the original Mrs. Wilcox, whose interactions with Margaret in the beginning of the novel are brief, half unpleasant and the rest awkward, and the lady herself says barely anything--yet the rest of the book she's referred to as "selfless" and "omniscient." WTF? Where did that come from?
The novel is also considered to be ahead of its time in terms of studying gender relations, but I don't know that I found it so wonderful on that point either. When Margaret receives an unexpected proposal from the really rather stupid, brash, and unpleasant businessman Mr. Wilcox, she decides she will love him, and she tells herself that she will recognize his every fault, and forgive it, and simply over time make him a better man. That is the dumbest idea ever, so even though the narrator keeps telling you that she's the sensible one, I didn't agree. One of his "faults," apparently, is that he likes women to be completely submissive. Actually, he acknowledges that he finds it ever so precious that she's smart and argues with him, just so long as she ultimately gives in and meekly admits his greater experience and authority on every topic. And she does. She recognizes that this is what he wants her to be, and she willingly becomes it. Gah!!
To be fair, Margaret finally reaches a breaking point at the end of the novel and tells her husband off and decides to leave him. It had come out earlier that he had had an affair with poor Leonard's gross wife, Jacky, when she was a prostitute in Cyprus, and Margaret forgave him meekly because...just because. Later, when it comes out that Helen had pity sex with Leonard (who left a perfectly good job on the basis of Mr. Wilcox's casual advice, and then sank into poverty) and got pregnant, Mr. Wilcox gets on his moral high horse and says he can't have a 'fallen woman' staying in the house with him. Margaret freaks out on him when he refuses to acknowledge that what he did and what Helen did are the same thing, and decides to go to Europe with her sister. That's the point at which Leonard gets offed by the unpleasant Wilcox son, and the shock of his son going to jail turns Mr. Wilcox into an invalid. That's how, at the end of the story, Margaret winds up ruling the roost at Howards End, the house she was supposed to inherit anyway, and forcing her husband to get along with her "fallen woman" sister. So I guess there's a tiny bit of a gender-relation upset there, but the problem is that Margaret spent the majority of the book being a total idiot, and I hated her, and I hated Helen, Mr. Wilcox, and basically every character in the book! The only reason I finished it was that halfway through I had flipped to the end out of exasperation to see if there was anything there that could convince me to keep reading. I saw that Leonard got killed by Wilcox's son, and I was really puzzled as to why he would kill him, and what's the poor guy doing at the country house, and thus I was suckered into finishing it. Well, that's it for you, E.M. Forster. You shall not darken my bookcase again.
Now I'm reading Catch-22, which I read once before, for Dr. Regan's class on comedy when I was a freshman in college. It's absurdist, dark humor, and I keep catching myself expecting some little episode or vignette to have a satisfactory ending, or indeed any ending at all that doesn't go around in a circle or just cut off, but that's not what you get in Yossarian's world. I think we watched part of the film version in class, and all I remember from that is someone getting their head accidentally cut off by a helicopter while they're all out swimming. I haven't gotten to that part of the book yet, though. Cheery reads I've chosen lately, right?
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Now Something Totally Different
My last post inspired me to go rooting through the documents that contain my poems going back to sophomore and junior year of high school. Some were good (mostly the later ones), some mediocre (throughout) and some really, truly awful (thankfully, mostly the early ones!). I was looking specifically for all the ones I'd ever written about my dad (there are lots and lots of those), but along the way I was much more entertained by some of the humorous poems I'd written, like the Christmas ballads for Fitz junior year, as well as the one I wrote for Mr. Luddy, the physics teacher, in the same year.
Now, Mr. Luddy was a dear, but I had neither the aptitude nor the interest in physics, and certainly not of the AP variety. When the AP exam came around, I tried to weasel out of it, but my mom said if I stayed home with anything less than a deadly illness, I owed her the $85 exam fee. I didn't even have a job at that point, so I went in and took the exam. Actually, "took" is kind of overstating it. I pretty much threw in the towel half-way through, accepted the score of 1 I knew I would be getting (I did), and spent the rest of the time playing MASH in the testing booklet and creating an intricate doodle of Greg's name. Fine, except one day in class a few weeks later when Mr. Luddy gave the test booklets back, mine fell open to the back cover and revealed what I'd spent my time doing. Awkward. At some point after that, he asked something about if people had had a lot of extra time at the end, and as I looked at him sheepishly he said "Besides Michelle, of course." Ouch! Luckily, Mr. Luddy was a really nice guy and didn't hate me for it (and I mysteriously still managed an A- in the class), but I felt compelled to offer him something to prove I wasn't just a total jackass who had wasted his time in the class. Thus, at the end of the year I gave him the following poem:
OK, now looking back, that last stanza was kind of unnecessarily brush-off-ish of physics. Maybe I just couldn't find another way to end the damned thing, who knows? In its original non-blogger form it was also weirdly indented all over the place, but I was 16, and in half my poems I thought I was the reincarnation of e.e. cummings, so it could have been way worse.
I'm happy to say that Mr. Luddy (today Dr. Luddy, fulfilling every absent-minded professor stereotype) was thrilled by the poem, and even talked of trying to get it published in one of the physics journals. That never happened, of course, but I was still glad that I was able to give him something, if not a decent grade on the AP exam!
ETA: Also, the "buoyancy goes hand in hand with girlancy" thing was a classic Mr. Luddy joke. Yeah, there were lots like that.
Now, Mr. Luddy was a dear, but I had neither the aptitude nor the interest in physics, and certainly not of the AP variety. When the AP exam came around, I tried to weasel out of it, but my mom said if I stayed home with anything less than a deadly illness, I owed her the $85 exam fee. I didn't even have a job at that point, so I went in and took the exam. Actually, "took" is kind of overstating it. I pretty much threw in the towel half-way through, accepted the score of 1 I knew I would be getting (I did), and spent the rest of the time playing MASH in the testing booklet and creating an intricate doodle of Greg's name. Fine, except one day in class a few weeks later when Mr. Luddy gave the test booklets back, mine fell open to the back cover and revealed what I'd spent my time doing. Awkward. At some point after that, he asked something about if people had had a lot of extra time at the end, and as I looked at him sheepishly he said "Besides Michelle, of course." Ouch! Luckily, Mr. Luddy was a really nice guy and didn't hate me for it (and I mysteriously still managed an A- in the class), but I felt compelled to offer him something to prove I wasn't just a total jackass who had wasted his time in the class. Thus, at the end of the year I gave him the following poem:
Anti-Physics
I live in a different world,
In a place where there are no more abstractions,
where x and y no longer control the universe.
Here components enjoy each other’s presence,
and do not feel the need to resolve.
Gravity goes unseen;
Negatives mean bad things,
and friction is trouble between friends.
Here, “buoyancy goes hand in hand with girlancy”.
Pendulums are only in Poe’s imagination.
Footballs make touchdowns,
not parabolas.
Relativity is reserved for holidays,
weddings, and funerals,
and the only spectrum you’ll ever see
is a rainbow.
Elements are forgotten, save for those in jewelry.
Here Alphas, Betas, and Gammas are fraternities,
not particles,
and the earth revolves around our own front door.
The only attractive forces are between friends
and lovers.
Here vacuums exist to scare dogs;
Space is reserved for astronauts
and aliens,
and time moves one second at a time
all the time.
Here the laws of physics still apply
--I just don’t need to know about it.
This is my world;
welcome to reality.
OK, now looking back, that last stanza was kind of unnecessarily brush-off-ish of physics. Maybe I just couldn't find another way to end the damned thing, who knows? In its original non-blogger form it was also weirdly indented all over the place, but I was 16, and in half my poems I thought I was the reincarnation of e.e. cummings, so it could have been way worse.
I'm happy to say that Mr. Luddy (today Dr. Luddy, fulfilling every absent-minded professor stereotype) was thrilled by the poem, and even talked of trying to get it published in one of the physics journals. That never happened, of course, but I was still glad that I was able to give him something, if not a decent grade on the AP exam!
ETA: Also, the "buoyancy goes hand in hand with girlancy" thing was a classic Mr. Luddy joke. Yeah, there were lots like that.
Thursday Is the Deathcade
That's what Sean and I decided to call this April 15, the tenth anniversary of my dad's death. Deathcade! It has such a nice ring to it (it also kind of sounds like the name of a band, but that's probably just because I'm thinking of Deathcab for Cutie). Sean will be in VA and I'm in PA, so there will not be any organized celebrations of the kind we talked about (pie-eating contests and the like). We'll have to raise our pints of vanilla Haagen-Daz to JTD separately, alas.
So: ten years. In a way, it's just a meaningless milestone. What does ten years mean that nine didn't, last year? The distance between the past and the present seems to accumulate at a slower rate as time goes on. Nine, ten, eleven, it's still been a really, really long time since he's been here.
At the risk of repeating what I know I've said many other times here, it's always such a moment of sadness to look back and see all the things in my life that he missed. I mean, when he died, I was pretty much at my nadir, both in looks and personality. I had ugly glasses, uglier braces, I didn't know how to do makeup or fix my hair properly, and I wore clothes that still today chill me to the bone to remember (I was wearing a blue tie-dye tanktop the day he died, the kind that was made to look like you were wearing two layered tanks. Shudder.). Add to that the fact that I was 14, hormonal, kind of a bitch (although I guess that really peaked around the time I got the keys to the Tahoe), prone to wandering about the house for hours with my headphones glued to my head, and constantly getting into high-pitched screaming fights with Jen, and I can only imagine that I was not always the most pleasant person to be around, or to parent. I got better (really!), he just wasn't there to see it.
Of course, I always remind myself that if he had stayed around, I likely would have turned out very different. In that his death will always be different from my mom's death; I was almost 21 when she died, pretty much formed in my beliefs, opinions, and personality, and having already developed a firm idea of my course in life. If she were still alive, I don't think she would have necessarily impacted many of the choices I've made since her death. My dad, on the other hand, undoubtedly would have, and since he was not the healthiest person when he died, physically and emotionally, I don't think I would have been the better for it. Sad, maybe, but true. I still miss him on some levels,, but the pain of that loss has faded a great deal over the years, helped, I think by Sean and my transformation of him into the humorous family icon that is JTD. When I think of him these days, it's hardly ever with sadness.
One thing that has changed dramatically over the course of the past ten years is my opinion on the afterlife. Despite having given up on most other aspects of religion, I used to cling to the belief that I would see my dad again when I died because I couldn't handle the idea that this life is all there is. I couldn't handle the idea that I would never have the chance to tell him that I loved him, that he was a good father, that I forgave him for all his failings. I couldn't handle the idea that he was gone forever. Today I can say that I no longer believe in heaven, or the immortality of the soul, or any of that--not even God, really (though I'm hesitant to identify as an atheist because a., you can't prove a negative, and b., many atheists treat it as its own religion). Is that a painful thought? Yes, the more so now that my mom is gone too, but just because it would be more comforting to imagine our celestial reunion is not a reason to try to believe in something that everything else I believe challenges as ridiculous and untrue.
So: ten years. In a way, it's just a meaningless milestone. What does ten years mean that nine didn't, last year? The distance between the past and the present seems to accumulate at a slower rate as time goes on. Nine, ten, eleven, it's still been a really, really long time since he's been here.
At the risk of repeating what I know I've said many other times here, it's always such a moment of sadness to look back and see all the things in my life that he missed. I mean, when he died, I was pretty much at my nadir, both in looks and personality. I had ugly glasses, uglier braces, I didn't know how to do makeup or fix my hair properly, and I wore clothes that still today chill me to the bone to remember (I was wearing a blue tie-dye tanktop the day he died, the kind that was made to look like you were wearing two layered tanks. Shudder.). Add to that the fact that I was 14, hormonal, kind of a bitch (although I guess that really peaked around the time I got the keys to the Tahoe), prone to wandering about the house for hours with my headphones glued to my head, and constantly getting into high-pitched screaming fights with Jen, and I can only imagine that I was not always the most pleasant person to be around, or to parent. I got better (really!), he just wasn't there to see it.
Of course, I always remind myself that if he had stayed around, I likely would have turned out very different. In that his death will always be different from my mom's death; I was almost 21 when she died, pretty much formed in my beliefs, opinions, and personality, and having already developed a firm idea of my course in life. If she were still alive, I don't think she would have necessarily impacted many of the choices I've made since her death. My dad, on the other hand, undoubtedly would have, and since he was not the healthiest person when he died, physically and emotionally, I don't think I would have been the better for it. Sad, maybe, but true. I still miss him on some levels,, but the pain of that loss has faded a great deal over the years, helped, I think by Sean and my transformation of him into the humorous family icon that is JTD. When I think of him these days, it's hardly ever with sadness.
One thing that has changed dramatically over the course of the past ten years is my opinion on the afterlife. Despite having given up on most other aspects of religion, I used to cling to the belief that I would see my dad again when I died because I couldn't handle the idea that this life is all there is. I couldn't handle the idea that I would never have the chance to tell him that I loved him, that he was a good father, that I forgave him for all his failings. I couldn't handle the idea that he was gone forever. Today I can say that I no longer believe in heaven, or the immortality of the soul, or any of that--not even God, really (though I'm hesitant to identify as an atheist because a., you can't prove a negative, and b., many atheists treat it as its own religion). Is that a painful thought? Yes, the more so now that my mom is gone too, but just because it would be more comforting to imagine our celestial reunion is not a reason to try to believe in something that everything else I believe challenges as ridiculous and untrue.
Three Weeks
That's how long it's been since I sent my thesis to Dr. Cooper. I haven't heard anything from her while she's been abroad, despite her assurances that she would have full internet access and we could "handle the whole thing from Italy." Yeah. Uh-huh.
New levels of Victorian-era boredom were reached yesterday: not only did I take A Long Walk in the Countryside, I also spent three hours stitching hems for the green curtains that I finally bought for the bay window in the front room while watching Anne of Green Gables on DVD. I've also been reading Mark Twain's collected short stories. Apparently, I'm in some kind of period mood.
New levels of Victorian-era boredom were reached yesterday: not only did I take A Long Walk in the Countryside, I also spent three hours stitching hems for the green curtains that I finally bought for the bay window in the front room while watching Anne of Green Gables on DVD. I've also been reading Mark Twain's collected short stories. Apparently, I'm in some kind of period mood.
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Lazy Days
My time as a lady of leisure continues, as Dr. Cooper has still not returned the remainder of my thesis. She sent the second chapter back on Friday with minimal suggestions, again making me wonder, why exactly did this take two weeks? Now she's in Venice, so I can only imagine how long the rest of it will take. To save time, I gave Dr. Hall my front matter and first two chapters yesterday. True to her sphinxlike reputation, her reaction was not exactly what I expected: she asked me how long it was, and when I said about 65 pages she groaned "I thought yours was supposed to be short!" Er, sorry my scholarly thoroughness took a little longer than the forty pages I expected? She was off to Venice herself today, where she and Dr. Cooper will be joined by Jasmine, who's giving a paper at the first session of the Renaissance Society of America. (It is "of America," but in deference to its large foreign membership, every five years the conference is outside the US). Geloso does not even begin to cover it.
I did accomplish some practical thesis-related things today, but all of them were boring mechanical things, like re-numbering my images according to the Chicago style, which I had done incorrectly, and then going over Temple's dissertation and thesis manual to make sure that I complied with the pages and pages and PAGES of specific instructions. Example: you have to double-space between your footnotes, which you would never do in a paper because it takes up a ridiculous amount of space. I also mastered the trick of getting Arabic and Roman numerals to co-exist peacefully in the same document (thank you, Google!) Now with my front matter, text, and bibliography joined together, I have about 80 pages. The last thing will be integrating my images, but I can't do that at home because then the document would be way too big to email to myself, which is how I preserve copious numbers of back-ups.
Besides that, I spent part of the afternoon in the backyard reading Something Rotten and attempting to get some color on my white-as-can-be skin, which hours later seems to have been a dismal failure. Blast!
I did accomplish some practical thesis-related things today, but all of them were boring mechanical things, like re-numbering my images according to the Chicago style, which I had done incorrectly, and then going over Temple's dissertation and thesis manual to make sure that I complied with the pages and pages and PAGES of specific instructions. Example: you have to double-space between your footnotes, which you would never do in a paper because it takes up a ridiculous amount of space. I also mastered the trick of getting Arabic and Roman numerals to co-exist peacefully in the same document (thank you, Google!) Now with my front matter, text, and bibliography joined together, I have about 80 pages. The last thing will be integrating my images, but I can't do that at home because then the document would be way too big to email to myself, which is how I preserve copious numbers of back-ups.
Besides that, I spent part of the afternoon in the backyard reading Something Rotten and attempting to get some color on my white-as-can-be skin, which hours later seems to have been a dismal failure. Blast!