With a Cheshire Cat Grin

I got an A on my presentation! Whoot! Dr. Cooper said that my presentation style was excellent and that I definitely have a future as a speaker (I hope at this point that I managed to keep the grin off my face; I did not, however, manage to contain the "ka-ching!" when she told me I got an A. I'm not entirely professional yet: sue me.). Her only criticism was with regards to the non-conclusion that I reached about whether Palladio had any influence on Sinan; she didn't have a problem with a non-conclusion in itself, but thought I should have taken it further and pointed out how scholars can be so determined to find these connections that sometimes we're willing to take on faith links that are, in reality, extremely tenuous.

Anyway, there is going to be much rejoicing in the land, because I also had a chat with Dr. Bolman, my medieval professor, and she complimented me on my contributions to the class discussions--which is pretty interesting, considering before last week I don't think I said a damn thing in the discussions. I only started forcing myself last week because I realized she was kind of taking notes on who said what and I was like...crap. Now I have to talk.

We've been talking about seeing through medieval eyes when you're looking at the art, and a really interesting concept that she introduced was the idea that in the early centuries, sight was considered a tactile sense. It was believed that when you looked at someone, rays went out from your eyes, touched the object, and returned to you, so when you looked at an icon, or a holy man, or a holy site, you were actually touching it with your eyes before you got close enough to touch it with your hands. I wanted to know from her whether this concept had any influence on the practice of veiling women, which has as much of a basis in Christian culture as it does in Islamic, even if it's not generally practiced by laypeople anymore; did women need to be veiled because if men looked at them, they were considered to be touching them as well? She didn't have an answer for me, but she seemed really excited by the question, so I was like "holy crap, did I just have an original idea? Yipee!!" Because one of my main fears about grad school, if I haven't expressed it before, is that I will have No Original Ideas and will be cast out into darkness forever and ever. So even if that's not something I'm going to follow up on myself, it was good to remind myself that I at least have the capacity to generate lines of new inquiry!

Sinan and Rain

Yesterday I gave my first real presentation of the year in my Palladio class. At the beginning of the semester we picked from a list of topics that Dr. Cooper had prepared, each of which had an article to use as a 'jumping off point;' I chose Palladio and the East, because that sounded pretty interesting. The article was about possible Ottoman influences in Palladio's Redentore church in Venice, and since the point of the presentation was to move in some other direction based on the theme (although I felt like a lot of people just reiterated the thesis of the article they read) I decided to lgo in exactly the opposite direction and look at Western influences on the Ottoman architecture of Sinan. Lo! a presentation was born.

Ironically, despite the fact that my entire presentation was based on circumstantial evidence and suggestive possibilities (for example, Palladio's treatise I Quattri Libri might have been available to Sinan, because his patron Marc'antonio Barbaro was in Constantinople as a consul when it was published in 1570 and he was buddy-buddy with the grand vizier, and wouldn't that have just made a swell gift? Not only was the plan for his very own country home in it, there was even a staircase he'd designed himself!), as well as one single concrete example of a time that Sinan seems to have seen something Western and used the idea in one of his mosques (support piers, very exciting stuff) I think it went off rather well. I tried to show that there was at least a context of cross-cultural communication in both directions, not just the East-to-West influence we're always led to believe, even though I couldn't actually say that Sinan ever directly adapted anything from Palladio in the way that Palladio might have adapted ideas from him. I've noticed that in academia you can get away with a lot of postulating as long as you're clear up front that you can't necessarily prove what you're saying.

I'll find out tomorrow how I did, but the feedback I got from the older students was positive, which was really good to hear. In addition to reading it aloud a few times beforehand, I had made Sean sit through the presentation, slides and all, while he was here on Saturday evening, even though he was suffering a cold and probably falling asleep. And then I made him look at a few of Palladio's buildings, which he was a good sport about, lol. At least I didn't make him look at mosques...it's probably my Euro-centrism, but I just don't find mosque architecture appealing, especially from the exterior. They look like weird blobs. For example, this is one of Sinan's most famous works (and incidentally, the one that may have been an influence on Palladio), the Selimiye in Edirne:


It just doesn't work for me; too many protrusions from the central mass, I think. Kind of like really symmetrical tumors.

Anyway, now that I'm done insulting masterpieces of Ottoman architecture...there's a one-day symposium on Palladio coming up in November at Columbia that I'm going to go to. Dr. Cooper is presenting a paper, and also a couple of the major names in the field (whose work you can't help but trip over no matter what) are going to be giving papers as well, so it's kind of exciting, even though I'm not really into architecture in general. Oh, and David Rosand will be there giving a paper on scenographic architecture in Venice--he's the guy from Columbia who works on Titian, and I met with him when I was applying, but of course then I didn't get in, so boooo to him. Yeah, except his work is amazing. Curses!

There are always those people who when you read their work, you really, really wish you'd written that, or thought of that; right now I can think of Billy Collins in the poetry department, as well as Rosand and also Patricia Brown at Princeton, especially "Private Life in Renaissance Venice". With her, though, it's not even so much her research that I admire (although that's stellar, of course) but the way she synthesizes different aspects of Venetian culture and relates them to the art and architecture of the period, and still manages to make it really readable and fascinating. I want to write books that people will actually want to read, books they'll enjoy reading, and I think she manages to do that really well.

On another note, it poured today, icy sheets of rain that were being propelled practically sideways by the strength of the wind. Very unpleasant to be walking in, especially with a $10 umbrella purchased at an airport gift shop that threatened to give way at any moment. I wound up spending the entire day in the library, which is fortuitously connected on the ground floor to the building where my classes are. The only time I left was to dash out to a kiosk for a Diet Coke--Temple's greatest flaw is that it is a Pepsi campus. Luckily, there are independent vendors on every corner. However, I did have to forgo my lunch of choice, which is a meatball sandwich from this little cart near the art history department. It's literally just bun and meatballs with some sauce, not even any cheese, but they're really good, and even better, they're $2.25. Who loves cheap food? Me.

I was also delighted to hear that a couple of my classmates, Alice and Agnes, are applying to the Rome program as well. Agnes is from Poland and is very friendly, and Alice is kind of like an awesome den mother. She's older, has several children our age and is a high school history teacher who already has two, count them, two other master's degrees, history and I think economics. Anyway, if we all get in we agreed to look for a place to live together, which would be a lot of fun, I think. Not anywhere near as much fun as Florence--for one thing, this will actually be real coursework, not 'study-abroad' coursework--but that's to be expected.

Finally, my dear Carla's first performance in an opera is on Youtube! Brava! She's the nun in the white habit.

Next Semester's Menu Features...

...a class on obscenity and censorship in modern and contemporary art, a class on Albrecht Durer and the Baroque in Germany, and a class on "visual performances of femininity and masculinity" in Eastern Mediterranean art. The last one sounds really interesting, since I've never really worked with gender theory before.

I can't believe I registered for next semester already--it throws into relief exactly how much I still have to do for this semester. Eep.

Cherish the Little Triumphs

I passed the Italian reading exam! Whoot! Let's ignore the fact that it was a ridiculously easy biographical essay on Raphael and instead focus on me not having to take it twice. Which leaves me staring down the specter of the German exam in December...and most likely again in February...and let's be honest, probably a third time next May. I don't foresee an easy victory, since most everyone who took it this time failed terribly. Suddenly I find myself wishing they would let me do French as my second language instead of German. Damn them for pioneering this field and making themselves and their stupid subordinate-clause-heavy language indispensable!

In other news...well, there isn't much. I have an entire day of studying in front of me, since my one class ended at 11 but I have a grad student meeting at 7:30. Sean suggested I just go home, but I know that I'd begrudge having to return again this evening, so here I stay.

That reminds me of a scene from the "Emily" series from LM Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables. In the first book, Emily's aunts are explaining how the family came to be living in whatever picturesque corner of Canada they're in: their paterfamilias was on a ship heading for New York, but after the crossing they stopped in Canada. His wife was terribly seasick the whole way, so they took pity on her and let her go ashore for a little while, but of course as soon as she got there she announced "Here I stay" and refused to go back on board. So the husband is forced to unload all their baggage and settle down in the hinterlands instead of cosmopolitan New York to his great dissatisfaction. The coda to this is that years later when she died, he had inscribed on her tombstone, a little bitterly, "Here I stay." Anyway, that was completely unnecessary and totally irrelevant to anyone who hasn't read those books (they're not as good as Anne, but I still enjoyed them) but as my own aunt would say (to Jen's great irritation): 'it is what it is.'

First (and Last) Post From Indiana

So, the reports are true; Indiana is quite flat. Notre Dame is also very, very large in addition to being flat. Yesterday was a game day and from the 12th floor of the library we could see into the stadium, which was overflowing with people.

My voyage here wasn't bad, except for my flight from Philadelphia leaving an hour late. Naturally, when I got to Detroit and had half an hour to make my connection, the gate was at the other end of the airport and the express tram was broken. There was running, but I made it onto the tiny puddle-jumper airplane that took me to South Bend. My flight out leaves at 1:30, and Sean insists that we only need to leave here at 12 because the airport is ten minutes away and it's South Bend so it's not like there's a line, but I have such a fixation with being over-early for things like appointments and plane flights that it was quite difficult for me to agree to head out less than two hours beforehand. I have a 2.5 hour layover in Detroit this time, which is fine because not only do I have three articles to read for Palladio class, I could also use some time to brush up on my Italian verbs, as my translation exam is tomorrow.

I'm sad to be leaving Sean here, even if it's only three weeks till he'll be coming to Philadelphia (it had been five weeks since we'd seen each other this time). Maybe it's because his apartment is so reminiscent of the Fairfield apartments, but I've had the strangest feeling like we're back in school together, living on the same campus, and I've just been too lazy to walk back to my townhouse the past few days.

Today, of course, is also my mom's two-year anniversary. Sean and I decided it should be called "Mrs. D-Day" in honor of my mom's hostile takeover of heaven, although "Operation Overlord" was also under consideration. Here's to you, mom--we miss you.

D.C. and the National Gallery

Yesterday I got up at the (literal) crack of dawn for our trip to D.C. It was a lot of fun; I haven't been to Washington since our family vacation in sixth or seventh grade, so it was amazing to see how little my memories of the layout of the Mall corresponded to the actual thing. For one thing, the National Air and Space Museum is directly across from the National Gallery; totally didn't know that. The bus driver tipped us off that the best food was to be had at the cafeteria in the American Indian museum, so several of us went there for lunch and afterward walked from the Capitol down to the Washington monument. One of the girls, Agnes, is from Poland and this was her first visit to Washington, so she was really excited. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to make it all the way down to the Lincoln Memorial, which I remember being incredibly awed by as a kid.

The National Gallery is purely amazing. The building itself is unbelievable--when you walk in the main entrance of the West building, you could be forgiven for thinking you just walked into the Pantheon. The main difference (aside from lacking the Pantheon's amazing multi-colored marble decoration) being that here the massive, coffered dome is supported by monumental columns of a dark green marble.

The galleries themselves are likewise beautifully constructed, although a bit labryinthine; Agnes and I walked around in the morning before lunch and thought we had hit most of the Italian and Flemish galleries. Um, no: we managed to miss the Raphael room, the Titian room, Bellini's "Feast of the Gods" and van Eyck's "Annunciation." D'oh! The latter painting I had no idea was in this museum, or even in North America--I expected it to be in Europe. It's really quite marvelous, but much smaller than I imagined: less than a foot wide by a couple of feet tall, maybe.

There was so many incredible pieces to see that I really felt I was only about to see about a quarter of them. After our group met with Dr. Hall I used the last 45 minutes to dash madly through the galleries taking photos of my favorite pieces with my cell phone. I hadn't even thought to bring my camera, but they're so much more relaxed about photos there than almost any other museum--I'm looking at you, Metropolitan! (Actually, the weirdest attitude toward photos was definitely the National Museum in Athens; they're OK with photos of the objects, but you're prohibited from taking a photo of yourself with the object. Sean and I asked a guard why after we saw him yell at this couple trying to photograph themselves with a statue of Neptune. His answer was basically that the artwork is important and part of history and you have no business putting yourself in there with it. Um, OK.)

Oh, and in the room with Canaletto (who I love for the reason everyone who's visited Venice loves him, for the picturesque tourist-postcard quality of his paintings) I saw this painting by his nephew and pupil, Bernardo Bellotto (who confusingly and perhaps fraudulently sometimes signed his own paintings with the name of his famous uncle):


I'm looking at it and thinking, that looks familiar. Then I read the title, "Campo dei S.S. Giovanni e Paolo," and remembered that that's where we had lunch with Jasmine when we met up with her in Venice. I got a porchetta sandwich from the excellent shop that was across the bridge you can see in the picture (and which was sadly closed when we tried to go back the next day, a Sunday) and we sat on those canal steps and I asked her every question I could think of about Temple. Talking to her was really one of the most influential factors in my decision to choose Temple, really, so seeing this tickled me.

Also, I think this church was on the route between our hostel in the remoteness of Castello and basically everything else in Venice, so it was one of the few landmarks that began to look familiar as we routinely got lost and walked in circles. That, and Rialto. That damned bridge!

Yay Kids, Learning Time!

Tomorrow I have my first class presentation in Making of a Renaissance Painting. All of the presentations are about articles detailing conservation efforts on particular works of art; the one Jasmine and I are presenting dealt with the 1967-9 cleaning and restoration of Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne" of 1520-3, now in the National Gallery in London. This is the painting as it was in 1967 with cleaning tests:



And this is the painting after it was cleaned and restored:


Pretty amazing, right? The article pointed out how hard it must have been hard for people looking at the painting in the "before" stage to recognize Titian as a master of color and paint. The culprit here, in addition to age, flaking paint, and dirt, was the layer of varnish that yellowed with time. It wasn't the original coat of varnish by any means; this painting had seen numerous cleaning and revarnishings in its lifetime, as it was possible to determine thanks to the detailed records of the National Gallery (they had records on this painting dated 13 years before they even bought it--how English!) While it's impossible to know if Titian originally varnished it himself when he was finished, varnish has been applied to virtually every painting up until the 20th century, both as a protection against the environment and also for the pictorial effect it has of giving everything the same sheen. Unfortunately, every couple of decades it turns yellow and has to be painstakingly removed and replaced.

The other focus of the article we're discussing is the set of scientific tests performed on the painting before beginning the restoration process. This includes X-rays (they can show damage to the paint layers and also changes made to the composition by the artist), infrared photos (they can show you underdrawing by reflecting off the carbon in black ink or pencil) and paint samples, which were extracted via syringe near areas of damage, photographed and blown up 200x so you can actually see the layers of paint and analyze the pigments contained in each.

For example, in the X-rays of this painting the figure of Bacchus was quite clearly defined, while the figure of Ariadne was an illegible mass of white. Because X-rays bounce off the lead contained in white paint of the time (which they unsurprisingly called lead white) it can be determined that Bacchus was probably painted early and not changed, while Ariadne was re-positioned, painted out, and re-painted while Titian tried to figure out what to do with her body, a process involving much more lead white than with Bacchus, hence the blot on the X-ray. The paint samples supported this conclusion by revealing in the Bacchus sample just a few thin layers of pigments over the gesso ground, while in the Ariadne showing first the ground layer, then layers of paint for the sea and sky, which were topped by several layers of flesh colors interspersed with lead white from the re-painting.

Chemical analysis of the pigments themselves can also provide interesting results. In this case, the conservators determined that not only was Titian using the fanciest, most expensive pigments, he was also using them in their purest form, which contributes to the boldness of his colors. The blues, for example, are depicted using ultramarine (crushed lapis lazuli, practically more expensive than gold at the time) for the sky and the cheaper azurite for the sea; the really cheap blues, indigo and smalt, make no appearance whatsoever. This makes sense considering the fact that he painted this work and two others in a series of Bacchanals for the Alfonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara; the patron had deep pockets and wanted the best.

So that, in a nutshell, is what I'm going to be presenting in class tomorrow. As it was pointed out in our class last week, since conservation info is rarely, if ever, included on a museum label, you have to be careful in writing a painting off for looking dingy or having dark, faded colors, as it may simply be in dire need of restoration; although on the other hand, it could be a Leonardo and then the smudgy darkness just all part of the "sfumato" effect.

I do find the topic of restoration quite interesting, although I would go insane if it were my job, both from the stress of worrying that I'm going to destroy a world-class painting with the wrong cleaning solution and from the amount of patience required to sit there for hours on end pressing down individual paint flakes with a heated spatula. God bless those people, because it's only through their efforts that we can appreciate a painting like this one in the way it was intended.

Party and a Cross-Town Journey

Last night Dr. Hall hosted her annual welcoming party for new graduate students. Her house is kind of hard to describe--one of those very modern, flat-topped constructions. The patio and yard were very nicely laid out,with definite a Asian-garden theme going on, and the interior sported a highly eccentric collection of paintings, sculpture, and other objets d'art, which apparently stemmed not only from Dr. Hall but also from her husband, a rather intense guy who has worked as an art restorer all over the world. For all that, the house definitely had problems with flow, and the rooms felt very boxy and cut off from everything else. It wasn't an organic design, I guess you could say.

This probably doesn't pose as much of a problem most years when the weather is nice, but it was raining last night, so all forty-odd guests were crammed inside, where it was quite warm and very loud. Eventually about eight of us first-years settled in a den/office that was cool and quiet and where we could actually hear each other talk. It was really the first chance any of us had had to talk to other "novices" about all things graduate school. It was a relief to hear the same concerns that have been running through my mind these past two weeks come out the other girls' mouths, and it was equally instructive when one of the older students in the doctoral program came in and started giving us the low-down on various things. A bunch of us are in the Palladio class together, for which we have an insane-sounding assignment due Monday that basically entails surveying the scholarly literature on Palladio since 1980 and developing a bibliography of ten sources that we feel best identifies current and future trends in the field. Our feeling on this: WTF. However, our informant told us that Dr. Cooper likes to assign these mind-blowing projects, without feeling that they're really all that difficult, and that we shouldn't stress over it too much, which was yet another relief.

All in all, it was a really good time, but as I had predicted to Sean earlier it didn't go too late; in fact, we emerged from the den around 9 to discover that most people had already left. What can I say, art historians just really don't party hard. Today I got up early, determined to snap a copy of Dr. Cooper's book from the Central Library in Philadelphia to tide me over until the copy I ordered arrived. This turned out to be more of a trek than I had anticipated. It did give me my first experience of Philly's subways, which aren't bad but which everyone's kind of leery of right now because some guy randomly attacked another rider with a hammer last week right in front of a security camera--and none of the other riders helped, naturally. After the subway it was about a five block walk, which isn't bad in itself, except that it was along a service street-slash-expressway, so more like a place where you feel you're going to be run over by a semi at any moment than a nice pedestrian avenue. The library, when I got there at last, was absolutely gorgeous. Unfortunately, the book I wanted was reference only--they don't like letting expensive art books circulate. So as not to make my visit pointless, I picked up a different Palladio book instead:the one she had mentioned was a good text for someone outside the field who knows little about architecture. Sold!

As the Italians Would Say, "Madonn'!"

Today I attempted my first full-scale article translation: an article on the three models created for the Redentore project. Several hours later, I'm on page five. Page five of nineteen. At the beginning of page three I decided to clock myself: it took me thirty minutes to get through the page--and this is while using an online dictionary to save the time of flipping through pages, mind you. At that rate it's only going to take me seven hours to read the rest of it! Yes!

Doomed to a Life of Early Evenings

News bulletin: graduate school is hard. Quite hard, in fact. I knew it would be, I expected it, but the view from underneath is certainly daunting. For today's seminar, which was Making of a Renaissance painting, we read two hundred pages of text on techniques of 15th and 16th century painting, which was interesting, if rather dense. With that much material you usually wind up with the over-arching themes fairly well-imprinted in your mind, but a lot of the specifics inevitably slip through. Not so with my professor, who responded to a question about the precise definition of a glaze with "It should be on page 237." It was. She didn't have a copy of the book in front of her; she hadn't even re-read these chapters recently, having put her copy in our grad lounge last week. That's just the kind of memory Dr. Hall has. Needless to say, that is not the kind of memory I have (far from it). Intimidating. She personally is not, though; in fact, all of my professors are great.

I think Dr. Cooper's class may be my favorite--that's a seminar on Palladio, this being the 500th anniversary of his birth. We chose research topics this week (which can be a rather tense jostling for the most popular choices, often with Dr. Cooper deciding which topic would be best suited, based on everyone's interests) and I managed to get the one that I wanted, which was Palladio and the East. Venice is a great laboratory for the co-mingling of Western and Eastern influences, having always had strong trading ties with first the Byzantine and then the Muslim worlds. There was actually a really interesting article in the Art Bulletin a few issues ago about a glass vessel in the treasury of San Marco that juxtaposed classicizing reliefs and Islamicizing script in its decoration.

Anyway, this topic is of course different because it's architecture, which is obviously not as easily diffused as doing faux-Arab writing on a dish to make it look exotic. The article assigned to the topic as its "jumping-off point" was on possible Ottoman influences in the church of the Redentore (redeemer) on the Guidecca in Venice:



Basically it argued that Marc'Antonio Barbaro, a friend of Palladio's who at the time of the commissioning of the Redentore had just returned from five years as a consul in Constantinople, might have been the means for transmitting some aspects of Ottoman-style architecture to Venice. I didn't find the article entirely convincing (a couple of minaret-like structures do not an Ottoman influence make, especially when they've been done elsewhere in Italy beforehand) but, as with all things in grad school, you can't form an opinion until you've done about five thousand pages of reading. However, my lack of familiarity with architecture beyond the basics made itself known when I sat down with a book on the Redentore and had to spend fifteen minutes staring at the ground plans before they started to make sense in terms of what the book was describing. When it got into a really theoretical discussions of spatial relationships within the structure, though, my eyes simply started to close.

Reading Italian is also going to come quite in handy, if I ever doubted it--this book was the kind that quotes directly from period documents with no translation, either in the text or in the footnotes. Of course, it's a lot easier for me to figure out modern Italian than 16th century Italian (think of how people wrote in English in the sixteenth century, ie, in needlessly complex sentences that went on for freakin' ever) so I'm lucky right how that I can get a general idea of what's going on.

The result of getting up early and spending many hours each day in a library is that I'm tired at a very early hour in the evening. I could totally go to sleep now, and it's 9:30. I am OLD!

Raining, Pouring

This is definitely a day when I wish I were a napper, but I'm not. I did finally buy some curtains (green, of course) for my bedroom today, so if I don't want the five-year-old boy who lives in the house next door constantly waving at me and yelling "Hi!", I can block him out.

This morning Phyllis and I checked out a rummage sale at a church nearby that had to be one of the biggest sales I've ever been to (is it a coincidence that the Episcopalians have all the best sales?) The church itself was really striking. It's Gothic style, like a lot of Episcopal churches, but this one actually observes more of the forms than just having pointed arches and stained glass; there are buttresses on the external walls, a 'crossing tower' where the nave meets the transept, and the tympanum over the entrance even had sculptural decoration, although, alas, Jesus was not depicted within the full-body halo called a mandorla. Every time I see one I think of Lucia Giardino, a very eccentric professor I had in Italy who always called it an "almond of glory." In fact I got so used to thinking of it like that I had really forgotten the actual name for a while.

After getting drenched coming out of Target later(thank you storm Hanna) I was quite cheered to return home and find a package waiting from none other than my dear expatriate roommate containing an(early) birthday present purchased in Malta. In just a few weeks I'll be 23, which is hard to believe--harder still is believing that it will be two years since my mom died. I thought of her this morning at the church sale (which she would have thoroughly enjoyed). Walking in with Phyllis, who is middle-aged and is about my mom's build and coloring from the back, I wondered if the women at the door thought I was her daughter when she paid the admission for both of us. It reminded me of so many rummage sales and flea markets when I would run up to my mom with whatever treasures I'd found and try to wheedle her into paying for them. Today, of course, I was paying, so while I looked longingly at a gorgeous baroque-style mirror, it was not worth $50 from my own pocket.

I think my mom and Phyllis would have gotten along quite well. I wish they could meet.

First Day of Class

I don't think I have ever seen as many students milling about at one time as I saw when I got to campus today. I think I hit right around the change of classes and lunchtime, which I was warned about by one of the older grad students. It was like a stampede! Although I knew the numbers already (Temple's entering freshman class of 4,000 just about equals the entire number of students at Fairfield) it was a fresh reminder that Fairfield was really quite small.

So I have my first class today at 4:10, the making of a Renaissance painting. I checked the syllabus and there's a field trip to the National Gallery in Washington on the 20th, which is really exciting. During our family vacation to Washington we saw many museums, including the Holocaust Museum, the Smithsonian, and one very long day spent entirely in the Air and Space Museum-- thanks to my dad, who managed to take dozens of pictures just of fragments of the Enola Gay. Of course, we skipped the big famous museum with the paintings in it, because my parents were not art people (to be fair, at age 12 or however old I was, I probably wouldn't have cared, so I can't hold it against them.) But I'll get to see it now!

Travel

Thanks to the wonderful flexibility of my class schedule (classes end for me Wednesdays at 11am) I'm planning to fly to visit Sean in Indiana later this month. By plane it's about four hours and a couple hundred dollars; by train, however, it's the same price, but fifteen hours! Madness. Meanwhile, for Sean to travel between Philly and New Haven when he's here, it's the same price for a train and a bus, but the bus takes twice as long. I don't understand how they're able to maintain those prices...who would opt for the bus in that situation?

As an aside for those of you living in New York, Amtrak to Philadelphia is rather expensive, but Bolt Bus is just $10!

Getting Settled

These are pictures from my new digs...I'm not sure what to call this room. It's not the bedroom, and it's really huge so I don't want to call it 'the den.' It's kind of a combination living room, office, library...thing. Anyway, loves it.

I had my orientation yesterday! There were about fifteen new art history students, a handful of doctoral entrants but mostly beginners like me. As always in art history, almost everyone is white and female, although there were actually two guys, one middle-aged guy who's going back to school after "35 years in the fish business" and one guy who looks like he could be Jack Black's darker-haired twin. The professors trooped in and introduced themselves, and we met many seasoned art history students, who told us about the Graduate Art History Organization or GAHO, which, believe it or not, they actually pronounce "gay-ho." Then we split up for tours of the campus, which was basically re-covering what I saw in April when I visited (I was quite proud that I managed to navigate to the right hall when I got off the train without having to look at a map like a freshman!). I also got my ID card, which is hideous in the way all IDs are required to be.

Then I signed up for classes--all three of them, if you can believe that! I was expecting four, but apparently nine credits a semester is just how Temple rolls. I'm taking a class with Dr. Cooper on Palladio, a course with Dr. Hall on the making of a Renaissance painting, and an undergraduate-level course on medieval art with another professor that I get to be the random graduate student in. I don't have too much background in medieval (beyond Lucia Giardino's Romanesque and Gothic class in Italy, which was, shall we say, not academically rigorous?) so that should be good. I also have to work on teaching myself Italian and German, though, sigh.

Later in the afternoon I went to a reception for people who received fellowships. Both I and this other girl I was talking to had assumed there would be some sort of program, like a speech or something, but as the dean told us when he introduced himself (his name is Achilles!) it was really just a chance for us to stand around and eat cheese with people we'll never see again.

Tomorrow Phyllis offered to take me on a sight-seeing tour of Philadelphia, which is awesome because I'd been planning to go myself anyway, but going with a local who has a car is just so much better! However, the commute to school is really easy; the train station is a block away, and then it's fifteen minutes to Temple. I purchased a monthly pass, which was not cheap ($116) but it works for all trains, buses, and subways, so that's pretty cool.

And now, I should get back to my 'homework': I'm re-reading the chapters of Stokstad that deal with medieval art so I'm not entirely clueless next week!

Now Reporting from Philadelphia

My very first post from my new hometown! Actually I will make this short, as I still have a car full of stuff to unload back at the house. My trip was as quick and painless as possible--3 and a half hours, beating the Google Maps estimate by a whole fifteen minutes. I'm at the library which is three blocks from my house, which is not nearly as well-supplied as the library in Shelton, but hey, it'll do for DVDs and novels.

It was pretty sad to leave my apartment this morning, and to drive away from Shelton. Such a great little town. But we're on to new adventures!

Baby's First (and Second) MRI

Three weeks later, the burning sensation on my left side has receded upward to occupy my left shoulder/upper back region; my right hand is still tingling; and if I bend my neck downward I get a strange electrical tingle through my right leg. Weird, but according to the spine and brain MRIs that I had last week, it isn't MS. Because that was what the neurologist was concerned it was--except he didn't tell me that at our first meeting because he didn't want to freak me out. No, he told me at our second meeting when he pronounced my spine MRI fine with great relief--and then followed up that piece of awesome info by telling me me he wanted me to have a brain scan too just to make absolutely sure. Gee, thanks for not freaking me out, Doc. So I had a spine MRI on Wednesday morning and a brain MRI on Friday. I had to wait until today at 1pm to find out the results of the brain scan, which left me with a wonderful four days to freak out that I have MS and my life is ruined. It was a good time, let me tell you. However, I can say thankfully that my brain scan came back completely normal, so although he can't tell me what it is, he can tell me it doesn't look like MS. Which is AWESOME, not least because I'm moving to Philadelphia tomorrow and it would really suck to be diagnosed with a disease the day before.

Anyway, now that I'm an old hand with this MRI business, I can say it's really not as bad as I thought it would be. Unless you're claustrophobic, because then it would be pretty awful. Hey, now I know I'm not claustrophobic! I was surprised how small it really is, though--the top of the tube was about six inches from my face, and you're far enough in that you can't really see the other end. So they stick you in there and give you a panic button to press if you freak out, and they give you some headphones and tell you to pick a station. The first time it was early morning, so I asked for NPR, but they didn't find the station with the news and I got classical music instead. That was fine, because turns out once the machine starts doing its business, it's kinda hard to hear the music anyway. It's like a jackhammer doing different rhythms around your head, not deafeningly loud, but enough to drown out the music.

After he told me I had to have a second MRI I was kind of annoyed that I hadn't just had everything done at once, but the nurses told me on the second round that that would have kept me in the machine for an hour and 15 minutes. As it is, the thirty minutes that the scans take is about as long as you really want to spend trapped in a tube. Even if you aren't claustrophobic, you start thinking things like "what if there were a fire? what if the machine broke and I got stuck?" etc etc. I was actually pretty surprised by how calm I was. During the first scan it was kind of unpleasant whenever I opened my eyes and saw the top of the tube so close to my face, but during the second one it was OK. Because both of my scans were with contrast, they pulled me out right before the end to inject me with a solution to make you light up from the inside and then popped me back in for another few minutes. Freedom! you think....and then not so much.

But on the whole, it's really not bad. For the brain scan I asked them for a copy of the images, both for myself if I needed to show another doctor and also because Rae giddily asked to see them, little scientist that she is. I was in my kitchen an hour after the exam, looking at pictures of my brain and emailing them to her. Everything looked OK to me, but what do I know? Luckily it was indeed all normal, so I have these lovely keepsakes of my intracranial beauty.

The freakiest part really is the waiting. For the first scan, because of some scheduling shuffles I was able to have my test at 8am and see the neurologist with the results at 10:15 (it helped that his brother was the radiologist who looked at the films). For the brain scan, when I was already hearing the refrain of "MS MS MS MS MS" in my head, I had four days to worry. Luckily, I was able to spend the weekend in New York with Sara and Heather, which helped to distract me a lot; of course, any moment when I wasn't actively engaged in something found me worrying about what they were going to tell me Monday.

Still, I'm really glad to know that my head got the all clear. I talked to my sister this morning (I hadn't mentioned the possibility of MS to her before because I didn't want her to freak out as well) and she told me that in the late 80's, after my grandmother died, my mom had all these weird pains and the doctors were concerned she had MS; she had tests and they didn't find anything, and it went away. So we'll see. Once my student health insurance kicks in I'll have to follow up with a doctor in Philly. For now, my symptoms aren't really so bad; I mean, I can live with a tingly right hand. At least it's not my left. And I really am grateful that I didn't hear something worse from the doctor today. Even though I don't believe in a God that intervenes in our lives (and thus I resisted the automatic urge to pray and bargain with God for a good result) I'm thankful for the life that I do have. After all, if God had never created everything that is, I wouldn't be here to enjoy what life has to offer.

Also--I'm moving tomorrow! My last post from Shelton, CT! I've really loved living here. The town is great, my apartment was fantastic, and it was really enjoyable year overall. I'll miss the Valley. Mount Airy, here I come!

Almost Gone

It's been a strange couple of weeks. In and among the general countdown to my last day of work (last Wednesday!)I woke up with a mystery ailment a couple of weeks ago that consisted of a burning sensation all along my left side down to my foot, and on the underside of my left arm. It wasn't severely painful (unless something cold touched me), but it was uncomfortable and extremely difficult to ignore, especially since I kept imagining the horrible diseases I could have that caused this. Then, two days later, the vision in my left eye was blurry, and I really freaked out because symptoms like that all on one side can be a sign of stroke--I know, I know, I'm 22, but stranger things have happened. Off I flew to the eye doctor, only to discover I had a small infection in my left eye, probably caused by scratching myself taking out my contacts, the cure for which was an antibiotic and a whole week spent wearing my glasses, which I hate, followed by an eye exam that pronounced my vision completely fine (aside from being near-sighted, naturally.)

The burning remained, however, even after the eye thing was gone, so I went to see a neurologist (after two visits to a walk-in clinic and a couple of entirely unhelpful prescriptions) who had no idea what could be causing the symptoms. By the time of the visit, I had also had really severe cramps in my right leg one night, my right hand was tingling, and--weirdest symptom of all--every time I yawned, my right arm would reflexively bend at the elbow. Freaky, right? The doctor said my overall neurological exam was totally normal, but he scheduled me for an MRI this week to make sure no nerves have been compressed in my spine.

Thankfully, the burning subsided gradually after hanging around for a week and a half and is now entirely gone, but the tingling in my hand is still there. The yawn reflex seems to be diminishing as well. I'm still going to have the MRI done, just in case (plus I might as well use my good health insurance from work before I switch to crappier school insurance!) but I'm much less freaked out now that I have some sort of unmentionable illness. It was a very stressful week, coupled with my worry that my move to Philadelphia was coming up and I wouldn't be able to lift anything, but luckily, things worked out and Sean and I were able to move almost all of my stuff this past Thursday. Driving a giant cargo van was interesting, but not as hard as I expected, and though we had a couple of near-misses when Sean took over (to be fair, he spent his first 45 minutes of van-driving navigating across Philadelphia in rush hour and into New Jersey to Richardson's place) it all turned out OK.

Now it's only a matter of days before Sean leaves for Notre Dame, and a couple more till I head south to my new home as well. Sigh. It hasn't set in, not really, and I'm sure I'll have a very sad moment of realization come Friday morning when I'm all alone in Connecticut. Gah! Even that sounds so depressing!

I will end this on a positive note. My house is amazing, I have more space than I know what to do with, and all of my books only fill the bookshelves halfway. Also, Phyllis (housemate) left me a plate of brownies and a Diet Coke for me on Thursday. Heaven!

The Momentous Occasion

I almost posted something here at the end of last week but refrained at the last minutes, because it was a pretty inconsequential post and it would have become the 900th entry to this little blog o'wonder. Somehow I felt like I should wait and have something really good to write. Lo and behold: I can now report that I know where I'll be living in Philadelphia for, quite possibly, the better part of six years.

I'll be sharing a gorgeous turn-of-the-century house with an older woman named Phyllis, who is really cool and works as a community organizer in Philadelphia. The house is in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia, which is basically a suburb and looks like the older, fancier parts of West Hartford (but with even more giant, beautifully landscaped houses that had Heather and I hanging out of the car window and gaping like peasants at every turn). It's a Craftsman house, which as Phyllis explained was a movement that focuses on workmanship and detail in architecture, so the house is full of these period details like leaded glass windows in the living room, an original chandelier in the entry hall, decorative woodwork, handmade tiles in the fireplace, etc.

Anyway, we drive into this neighborhood and it's just so gorgeous that I'm willing to take the apartment practically sight unseen. Then we meet Phyllis, who was really nice and down to earth. She bought the house in 1995 and has shared it with a succession of housemates; she was prepared with a rental agreement that stressed that it's a house share, not just renting an apartment, and that she always wants it to feel like a home. The house has three floors: the first floor is the kitchen, living room, dining room, etc, the second floor has four rooms that include her bedroom, office, and a really awesome-looking study/library, and the third floor (where I'll be) has two giant rooms, a storage room, a bathroom, a cedar closet, huge windows, and best of all, built-in bookshelves! There's even a backyard filled with flowers. You can imagine I was kind of in heaven. Did I also mention that there's a cat? His name is Thomas, he's gray and very adorable, but he's also small because he has the feline version of HIV, which is sad. So cute though. Phyllis mentioned that she doesn't really allow him to go upstairs, so hopefully if he stays out of my area it'll be OK for Sean when he's around.

Anyway, we talked with Phyllis for a while, and she seemed very easy to get along with. She was originally from CT and went to UConn for sociology, then she got a M.A. in finance so she could actually make a living, and now she works for a non-profit in Philadelphia called Impact Services. In the end, I gave her my application and left with fingers crossed, because she had one other woman coming by. As I told Heather, I didn't know what I would even do with myself if she didn't pick me! Luckily, she called me back about an hour later with happy news, and now I have a home to look forward to in Philadelphia. It's a couple of blocks from a train station on a line that goes right to Temple, too, which is just awesome. Plus, I feel a little better about moving to a city where I know no one, because at least I'll have some human interaction, instead of potentially going home to a tiny, anonymous apartment every day.

I can't even say how good it feels to know exactly where I'm headed. I don't have to spend the next month freaking out about having a place to live and whether I'll be living in the ghetto (which is where the apartments we looked at on Saturday were kind of located). Instead I can enjoy the fact that as of today, I have exactly one month left of employment! Whoot!

Of Grapefruit and Verse

Maybe it's my own fault for not having expanded my fruit-tasting horizons earlier in life, but I was completely unaware that grapefruit tastes like a really awful orange. It starts off so promising with that delightful hint of citrus, and then finishes with a mouthful of nasty. I tried putting some Splenda on it, but it didn't really help, plus I realized why in God's name should I have to ADD sugar to a fruit? They named a whole kind of delicious sugar after what's supposed to be found in fruit! Anyway, the sole reason for this experiment was that I bought a grapefruit for Rae to eat when she and Heather stayed over this weekend, but due to some unforeseen circumstances *cough* hangover *cough* she was not in a position to eat it the next morning, and I figured it shouldn't go to waste. Of course in the end, after a couple of wincing bites, that's exactly what happened to it.

This weekend, spent with two of my best friends (alas, Sara was busy moving apartments in NY) brought the realization that even though we were all so close in high school, there was so much we didn't know about each other, things we hid, things we weren't comfortable saying out loud. It reminded me of something Greg said to me after we broke up, that after everything it turned out that we didn't know each other's insides that well at all. You can only really know as much as the other person chooses to reveal to you, really, and I guess in adolescence there's only so much you feel secure enough to reveal, even to friends.

I was also reminded of the following poem by Phillip Larkin:

This Be The Verse


They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

July Already

A year ago this month, I had a newly-registered Corolla, a sister about to take the New York Bar, and a bruise the size of a grapefruit on my ass from hitting a rock while tubing on the Connecticut river.

Two years ago, I was headed to Massachusetts with my mom and Sean to finally introduce him to my grandfather, who told inappropriate stories about my grandma's cleavage and invited Sean to come back anytime, with or without me.

Three years ago this month, I got a signed poem from Billy Collins, the best delayed anniversary present ever.

Four years ago I dated Tommy, worked at Sofia's, and ran into Greg once while he was cutting the grass on the town green. I locked my keys in the Tahoe in the parking lot of the Trumbull mall, got my first massage, and was still friends with Wendy and Meghan.

Five years ago this month, I dated Greg, had a dog named Sheena, introduced Meghan to the art of coning, got perfect 5s on AP Bio and English, and went to a Harry Potter-themed sermon at Rae’s church. Sara moved to West Hartford, Rae and Heather had college orientations, and I pondered the future of my relationship with Greg.

Six years ago, I started working at Sofia’s, saved for the HILL trip, missed Greg while he was at Boy Scout camp, met him at the airport when he came home, drove Jen to her job every morning, and got a 5 on AP History but only a 1 on Physics.

Next year this month I will be married and just back from a month in Rome. What else? I don’t know yet, but I’ll be happy.

Already Tired at....9:15

I feel very...slow today. Not dumb, just tired/bored. Part of it is work, because now that my replacement-in-training has arrived, there's very little for me to do, and it's pretty freaking dull. I sort of wish I could just leave early, but I really can't, not only because of the paychecks I'd like to keep receiving until mid-August, but also because I know Paul has planned on having me around to train Deidre for the next couple of months and I don't want to disappoint someone who's been such an awesome boss. Plus I'd miss Work-Heather, and I'd probably be incredibly bored without somewhere to be for eight hours a day, and, yes, there's the paycheck thing again. My mind runs in silly circles.

Then I was saddened thinking about how things will be changing when I leave for school. It's more than a little frightening to be moving to a city where I know virtually no one. Sean will be ten hours away, and my closest friends will be in New York--and I can count Heather among them, because by then she'll have moved back to Brooklyn, according to her plan. It's been so awesome to be living near one of my best friends this past year. The four of us spent college in different states, so being able to dash down to Heather's after work on a Tuesday to indulge in some Stew Leonard's frozen pizza has been a pleasure that I'll really miss.

It's sad, too, that I'm leaving Connecticut, the last of us to strike out for new territory, and who knows, maybe none of us will ever call this state home again. Rae will probably stay in Massachusetts and be a doctor, Heather will live the glamor life in Brooklyn, and maybe Sara will stay there too, or maybe she'll move on to some other city. I have no idea where I'll end up, years and years down the line when I have my doctorate, and that kind of unsettles me too sometimes, but that's part and parcel of the path I've chosen.

Sometimes it seems forever since high school, since we spent all day in the same building, passing notes, hanging out after school, having sleepovers on weekends. It's been a long time, and they're still my best friends. Sometimes I flash back to Jen telling me when I graduated eighth grade that Sara and I wouldn't be friends in high school--but we were, even though we went through several different phases in our friendship, and we're friends now, which is nothing short of amazing, and the same is true for Heather and Rae. I try to remind myself of that when I peer into the future and wonder what it holds for us, when I wonder if in the years to come we will indeed be fabulously middle-aged women sitting around in a coffee shop, like Rae asked in a text message once. I try to think of it when I have one of those moments where I realize how sad it would be not to have them in my life.

Maybe also this introspection and weird sad-not-sadness is also being brought on by the combination of me getting my period and having gotten officially engaged this weekend. Everyone can't help but comment, and I totally agree, that it's so weird that I'm actually getting married. This time next year I'll be his wife, and even though my name won't be different (sorry, Sean) I'll still be introducing him as my husband. It's a change, and it's weird in the way all changes are, even the awesome ones.

And it's sad that my parents won't see it. The changing, the leaving, everything new--I guess I feel like it's all happening out of sight for them. My dad saw me into the beginning of high school, and my mom saw me through almost to the end of college, but now this phase they've never seen, and they never will. Leaving Connecticut will be like saying goodbye to them yet again, and getting married will be the second major life event after graduation that I won't have any parents to witness. Of course, if my mom were alive I'd probably be even more worried about moving away, worried about being too far away if she needed me. Irony.

My Diamond, Let Me Show You It

...Yeah, I just Lolcat-ed myself in regards to my upcoming nuptials. But hey, as of yesterday, it's official, and we're engaged! Whoot! I told Sean I refuse to refer to him as my 'fiance,' though. That just sounds ridiculous.

Besides Sean's grandmother, who happened to be in the house at the time (and who was disappointed because she apparently wanted me to use one of her diamonds)the first people to find out were Richardson and his parents, for the sole reason that he had invited us out to dinner so he wouldn't have to hang out with them solo. They started mentioning this cruise that they had signed their family up for in May, and we look at each other and are like...what day in May, exactly, because...

Happy was very proud that she could say we started 'dating' in her house three and a half years ago. Obviously, we refrained from correcting her that we just hooked up in her basement that New Year's, and only actually started dating a week later. Either way, the Richardson casa did mark the start of it all.

So now Sean's parents know (his dad was like, 'but I thought you were already') and Carla has been emailed, and Sara/Rae/Heather got a group text message (Sean commented that Sara should have gotten a voicemail, to make up for the not one, but TWO times I left her a voicemail regarding a parent who had died on me) and it strikes me that I haven't told Jen, but when I tell her I have to call my aunts too, and I'm too tired for that. She'll probably just grunt at me "Congratulations, Bob" and then tell me everything the cat has been doing to torment her today. I tried describing her to Richardson last night with little success. She's just Jen, ineffable, inimitable Jen. Ah, family.

.....

.....

.....

Dude, I'm getting married! WTF?!

The Age of Reason, Part 2

And from the conclusion of Part Two:

"…Religion, by such means, becomes a thing of form instead of fact; of notion instead of principle: morality is banished to make room for an imaginary thing called faith, and this faith has its origin in a supposed debauchery; a man is preached instead of a God; an execution is an object for gratitude; the preachers daub themselves with the blood, like a troop of assassins, and pretend to admire the brilliancy it gives them; they preach a humdrum sermon on the merits of the execution; then praise Jesus Christ for being executed, and condemn the Jews for doing it.

A man, by hearing all this nonsense lumped and preached together, confounds the God of the Creation with the imagined God of the Christians, and lives as if there were none.

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism; and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests; but so far as respects the good of man in general, it leads to nothing here or hereafter.

The only religion that has not been invented, and that has in it every evidence of divine originality, is pure and simple deism. It must have been the first and will probably be the last that man believes. But pure and simple deism does not answer the purpose of despotic governments. They cannot lay hold of religion as an engine but by mixing it with human inventions, and making their own authority a part; neither does it answer the avarice of priests, but by incorporating themselves and their functions with it, and becoming, like the government, a party in the system. It is this that forms the otherwise mysterious connection of church and state; the church human, and the state tyrannic."

… It has been by wandering from the immutable laws of science, and the light of reason, and setting up an invented thing called "revealed religion," that so many wild and blasphemous conceits have been formed of the Almighty. The Jews have made him the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to find pretence and admission for these things, they must have supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable; and the changeableness of the will is the imperfection of the judgement. The philosopher knows that the laws of the Creator have never changed, with respect either to the principles of science, or the properties of matter. Why then is it to be supposed they have changed with respect to man?"

The Age of Reason, Part 1

Below I've posted some extracts from the pamphlet "The Age of Reason" by Thomas Paine, known most widely to us as the author of the Revolutionary pamphlet "Common Sense." He wrote "The Age of Reason" later in life, living in France during the days of their Revolution, where he was quickly dismayed to see the ideals of freedom turned to bloody ends. Eventually the French imprisoned him as an enemy foreigner, and he passed the first part of the manuscript off to a friend as they hauled him off to jail.

According to Susan Jacoby, the writing of "The Age of Reason" was responsible for Paine's relative anonymity throughout much of the intervening two centuries. It was only in the 20th century that he was re-discovered by scholars; in the interim, he had been thoroughly tarred and feathered with the brush of secularism, atheism, blasphemy, and, most ironically, for such a staunch supporter of revolutionary ideals, lack of patriotism. "The Age of Reason" is a rational deconstruction of the claim of all religions to authenticity, but in particular, it is an attack on Christianity, which, unsurprisingly, earned it and its writer the full opprobrium of the Church.

The beginning and the end of the essay are the most powerfully written portions. The middle, where he basically goes book-by-book in the Bible showing how it's all nonsense, Moses didn't write Genesis, Luke and Matthew can't even agree on a geneology of Jesus, etc., is a little much, not in the least because that knowledge has become part of an educated reading of the Bible nowadays, even for many devout Christians. However, the passages where he defines Deism and where he attacks the way organized religion has clouded our perception of the world are quite striking.

And without further ado, from "The Age of Reason, Pt 1:"

"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

… Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.

Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all."

Creeping Up on 900 Posts

Anyway, ever wonder who those people are who manage to throw checks out? As it turns out, I'm one of them. Somehow, I discarded my federal tax return check and had to call the hotline to have them re-issue it. Sigh. So I'll be cashing that in about, oh, mid-July, if the government fulfills its 45-day promise.

This weekend Sean and I will be headed back to Pomfret to meet with the owner of Gwyn Careg, go over the estimate he sent me and maybe, just maybe, put down the deposit. Excitement! And on an unrelated carpe diem-ish note, below is a poem I enjoy.

To his Coy Mistress

by Andrew Marvell


Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Not on Secularism, But Thoughts Pt 2

My recent contemplation of my thoughts on religion and secularism has been provoking more and more of these little moments where I find myself mentally confronting another of those beliefs that has no rational basis, but which has managed to hang on determinedly in my mind all the same.

These kind of beliefs remind me of knick-knacks: they serve no purpose, take up space and are often kept around for purely sentimental reasons, but you know you still kind of like them. For example, why do I have in my den, among other things, a miniature carnival mask from Venice, a replica of the Eiffel tower, and a Native American pot? They're not high quality and I don't need them to remind me of where I've been; that's why I have photos. They're just tourist junk, but I keep them around all the same.

Anyway, in this particular instance the issues that came to mind were the existence of heaven, the immortality of the soul, and really, the existence of any soul at all. I was driving back from CVS on my lunch break and thinking about death (which is not that unusual, for me) and how I think it's kind of foolish for people to be afraid of what happens when you die. I mean, everyone fears the unknown, and of course we also fear the pain of dying, and what it means to be cut short from life, but really, if you're a good person, what do you have to be afraid of? If there is a God who has a heaven, you're probably going to go there. Alternatively, if there is no God or no heaven or just nothing, you won't know that until....ever. Because you'll be dead. End of story.

Then I stopped myself, because I started to question the assumptions that I was making. Does God, if he exists, necessarily have to have a heaven? My concept of God as a remote observer does not include the threat of eternal damnation, so I don't quite see that there would be the promise of eternal life, either. I find it entirely possible that there could be a God who offers nothing more than your single, finite life on this planet. Next, if I accept that there could be a heaven, what part of you resides there? Most religious authorities would say the soul. I'm not going to spend a lot of time going over the various concepts of the soul, but I think a lot of people would think of it as something that separates 'man from beast.'

Of course, then my question becomes the following: if I accept as scientific truth that humans emerged from so-called lower forms as part of a continuous (and continuing) process of evolution, instead of the dirt-and-rib creation myth, is it possible to identify a moment in that process where God stepped in and said "Well, the ape behind you had no soul, but you're a man now, so you have one. Go put on a fig leaf." It's kind of impossible to do so, especially since species don't evolve in an instant. There was never a time when there was one single homo sapiens that suddenly popped up among his soul-less Neanderthal relatives as the only creature on the planet with a soul. I don't believe God 'steps in' anyway. So this theory for the human soul doesn't make sense to me.

Alternatively, you could posit that what we think of as the soul is really just a by-product of evolution, a more highly developed sense of self-awareness that other species, given infinite time, would have at least the possibility to develop. This would obviously make a lot of people unhappy, because just as mankind clung so long to the theory of geocentricity as a way of underlining human exceptionalism in the universe, suggesting that our precious individual souls are nothing more an yet another evolutionary outgrowth would be a damaging blow to the collective ego of the species. Still, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. So, if I don't believe that God, at my conception, created a unique soul for me and sent it out into the world, how can I expect that, at my death, there is anything more special reserved for it than the same end the rest of me will meet?

The obvious and disillusioning implication of this theory is that if the soul does not have immortality and there is no afterlife, there is no chance that I'll ever see my parents again. That is a bitter thought, indeed. I remember being on the point of tears a few weeks ago in Zoi's Pizza when Sean casually mentioned, during a conversation on old age, that if I lived to be 85, when I died I wouldn't have seen my dad in seventy years. But like I said before, a lot of beliefs we keep because they're comforting, not because they're logical. Of course it's comforting to imagine my family waiting for me in heaven, but...I have to admit to myself that I don't really believe they are.

I think humans have spun tales of the afterlife for so long precisely because it is so terrifying to think that we have only this short span of life on earth, and that those whose are gone, are really gone. We want more--when haven't we wanted more of everything? Humans are frequently, if not inherently, greedy with food, money, status, and sex. Life is no different.

Viewed in another light, for those people who quake with fear at the thought of facing judgment when they die, this concept can really be more freeing than anything. What will you do with your life if there is nothing more beyond it? How will you use the time you're given, and how will you be remembered by the ones who loved you? To my mind, that's the only immortality we can hope to achieve. In that sense, then, my family is not only present, but enduring. As long as there are stories to be told of the Fat Man and Mrs. D., they'll live forever.

Gwyn Careg

Yesterday Sean and I visited the Gwyn Careg Inn in Pomfret, which was about an hour's drive from Sean's apartment. It was a pretty day and a very scenic drive, with more and more small farms as we got closer. When we turned down the inn's road, I looked to the right and there were two llamas grazing next to a fence. Awesome! You know I love the llamas.

The inn is, quite simply, fucking awesome, and we are getting married there. I knew this for a fact about ten minutes after we arrived and met Dennis, who along with his wife is the proprietor of the inn. He was really friendly and gave us a tour of the house, and the five suites on the second floor (his family lives on the third floor). The rooms were all awesome, especially this one two-bedroom suite with three queen size beds that could easily fit bridesmaids for the night beforehand...let's think about that, bachelorette party! The bridal suite was pretty awesome too, with a canopied bed and a huge baroque-style mirror.

Anyway, the inside is nice, but it's the 14 acres of beautifully landscaped grounds that are the real selling point. There's a lake, and there's a walled garden where people usually have the wedding ceremony (you can see my pictures here). As soon as we walked outside I told Sean "We're getting married here!" and he agreed. It's a very "us" place. Obviously, it's kind of out of the way, but it's been pointed out to me that people are generally pretty willing to go a little out of their way for a wedding, especially when there's food and possibly an open bar involved.

Now I just have to wait for Dennis to email me a quote, and figure out which is the best weekend in June for scheduling purposes. Sean will be graduating Notre Dame around mid-May, and we need enough time to get us both back to New Haven and put the finishing touches on everything. Sean thinks the 12th would be the better idea, but I'd prefer the 5th, for no other reason than I like the number 5 than the number 12. If I'm going to be celebrating this day for the rest of my life, I might as well pick something that appeals to me aesthetically, right?

Thoughts on Secularism, Part 1

I'm almost finished with Susan Jacoby's book "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism." In addition to filling in gaps in my knowledge about the way American society has grappled with the idea of the secular state as envisioned in the Constitution, it's really helped me draw together my own thoughts on religion and why I don't have one--namely, because I think religion, in all its incarnations, is essentially a barrier to human freedom, a freedom based on reason and logic instead of the fear of divine retribution.

I think people have a hard time envisioning a world without religion because we've been taught by the religious establishment that an irreligious culture is inherently more violent and more depraved, and that only religion can serve as a bulwark against moral chaos. People tend to think that morality can only exist within a framework of religious belief becuse so much mud has been flung over the centuries at people who live their lives outside of it. I don't think we need divine revelation to provide codes of proper human behavior. I don't think we need to be treated like wayward children by some paternalistic deity to know that killing and war are evil things, or that we should help the poor and extend rights to men and women of every color. Do I need the Ten Commandments to tell me that adultery is a bad idea, or that lying is wrong? Couldn't we figure that much out on our own?

Of course, to my mind, we DID figure that out on our own, because I don't think any religion's holy writings were inspired by God. I think it makes more sense that every religion is a man-made product of the time and people among whom it sprang forth, and reflects their understanding of what proper codes of behavior should be, reinforced with "by the way, this is Truth with a capital T, our God says so!" That, to me, is one reason why the God of the Old Testament, with his smiting of everyone who even looked sideways at the Israelites, wouldn't even recognize the touchy-feely "suffer the little children to come unto me" God of the New Testament if he passed him in a hallway. Different time periods, different cultural situations, many, many different writers.

So it's not that I'm saying that the moral codes on which many religions base themselves are inherently wrong; I just wish people would be able to remove the supernatural elements that keep everyone so at odds with one another. Forget the need to justify everything as coming from God in order to be right--trust human ability to determine what is right and wrong. Societies would be much more able to co-exist if we were emerging from a common, rationalist background, instead of vehemently defending this or that faith. Look at how much time the Catholic church spends claiming its supremacy over all other Christian faiths; look how much energy Muslims put into reviling infidels and apostates to their 'true religion.' Why do we have to assume that God intended to prescribe every inch of our behavior? Why were we provided with the capacity to reason, if not to make a better world for ourselves?

I do believe in God, incidentally. In my more cynical moments I wonder if that's because I find it too frightening to give up that last belief in an over-arching divine plan. On the whole, though, I don't find it incompatible with reason that there is a God. The universe began with the Big Bang, but who pushed the lever on that one? This is basically the "prime mover" argument, which provided the foundation of the Deism that was popular among America's founding fathers. In my mind, God set the wheel in motion and stepped back; he/she/it is a remote, though benevolent, observer.

I know that my frequent motto of "things work out the way they're supposed to" is not compatible with my ideas on God, and I recognize as irrational my persistent belief that in certain situations God 'steps in.' It's hard to shake it, not only because it's so ingrained but also because it's comforting--and who wants to give up what is comforting for what is more frightening? For example, it's easy to characterize my parents' deaths as having occurred because that was the way God wanted it, but really, let's be honest here, my father died because he was an overweight diabetic with too much stress, and my mother died because of years of anorexia weakened her heart, coupled with high triglycerides and diabetes. I don't believe God is sitting up there punching people's tickets.

I used to ask God to watch over my mom and keep her safe, because I was afraid of her dying and being left with no parents. I can’t really say that worked, obviously, but I still find myself nightly asking God to watch over Jen and Sean, because they’re the family I have left. I know I say it more for myself than anything, because as much as I do believe God is watching, I don’t really believe that God intercedes here or there on the basis of someone’s prayer. And yet I don’t consider it irrational to thank God for the good things that happen in my life. After all, if that prime mover had never begun this process in the first place, would I be here enjoying the fruits of creation? I like to give credit where I feel it’s due.

To bring this back to the subject of my post, Jacoby’s book helped me recognize that not only do I believe in a humanist morality based on reason, I think organized religion prevents people from utilizing their full faculty of reason and capacity for goodness. Religion convinces people of their own unworthiness and demeans them to a state where they have to rely on ‘divine revelation’ (transmitted through entirely fallible human conduits) to tell them how to live. Why else do Catholics say before Communion, “My Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed”? That accomplishes nothing besides keeping individuals in a state of intellectual and spiritual bondange. And people stay, not only because it's how they've been raised, but because it feels safe. Imagine how much freedom mankind has been willing to sacrifice in favor of being told what to do.

Weekend

This weekend I ventured into the hinterlands of Brooklyn to visit Jen for her birthday. It was lucky for me that it was a nice day; because of some construction the D dropped me off not at 20th Ave and 86th, about a five-block walk from Jen’s apartment, but at 20th and 63rd. Of course, it was worth walking thirty blocks to be greeted by Sapphire, aka “Feed Me,” who has, improbably enough, grown even more rotund since the last time I saw her.

As spending time with Jen goes, this weekend wasn’t bad—we didn’t even get into a single fight the whole time. Somewhat of a pall was cast by the fact that Bill’s mom is in the hospital and likely dying of cancer. Apparently it began as ovarian cancer and they didn’t catch it in time—she never went for the yearly OB/GYN exam, a reminder to all you ladies—and now she’s refusing chemo, pain meds, everything. It’s been very hard for Bill, who functions sort of as the paterfamilias in the absence of any more senior male members of the family. It’s also hard on Jen, because Bill tries to be one of those stiff-upper-lip guys and she doesn’t want to push, but she wants to be there for him like he was for her when our mom died. When she was trying to offer the kind of “you’ll make it though this” advice that I, personally, found extremely annoying to receive when you’re in the middle of a crisis, Bill pointed out that the situations are very different. It’s one thing to get the call that something awful has happened, and another to wait and wonder and not know, from day to day, if they’re going to die.

It sounds terrible, but I think it’s easier when there’s no hope. There was a difference between my dad’s and my mom’s deaths—when he collapsed and the paramedics were trying to revive him, I didn’t know if he was going to die or not. My mom said later she knew because his skin had turned a grayish color, but I didn’t know, so of course I was praying and hoping and making all kinds of deals with God, and I think that made it even more painful to get to the hospital and hear that they couldn’t save him after all. It was a terrible blow, too, to find out that my mom was dead, but it was already done with. There was no last, desperate chance that they might revive her and it would all be OK.

Anyway, in light of what’s going on with his mom, and it being Mother’s Day, naturally the conversation turned to death a few times. I was kind of surprised to find that Jen agreed with me that it was better for us the way our parents died. I thought she would have wanted to be able to say goodbye at any price, but she acknowledged she wouldn’t have been able to watch our mom waste away in a hospital bed. We also agreed that, when the times comes, that’s the way we want to go out. It’s the DiMarzo way.

However, I was also disturbed and saddened to find out my sister’s real feelings about our dad. I made some joking comment about how Bill is like him, and she got all serious and said that Bill never makes her feel bad about herself like he did. I was surprised, and naturally I tried to remind her about all the good times we had and how good a father he was, but she cut me off and told me that I’ve obviously glossed all the bad parts over in my mind and that I don’t remember things the way they really were. Which is not true—I remember the screaming fits that would start over nothing, I remember him making me cry, I remember being angry at him a lot of the time and swearing I’d never be like him. But what I also remember, and what Jen is choosing to forget, is all the laughs we shared and the fun we had, and how often he told us how proud he was, how smart we were, how we could do anything. My dad had flaws; he was depressed, he struggled with his expectations of what he wanted from life, and he took his frustrations out on his family. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t love us or that he wasn’t a good father. I know that a lot of who I am today is because of him, in a good way.

I also know that my relationship with him was different that the one he had with Jen. They were adversarial, always arguing, and Jen pushed his buttons on purpose, although she got mad and cut our discussion short yesterday when I mentioned that. I was the type to try to smooth things over with him, the type to try to avoid starting a quarrel, but Jen always had to get right in there and say something to set him off. She was the eldest, too, and everyone knows they get it harsher from their parents. I was younger, I never had any trouble in school, and I always tried to placate him as much as possible, so we wound up in fewer conflicts. I do remember him picking on her for things like her posture, her manners (which are still pretty bad to this day), the fact that she didn’t do well enough in math to make him happy. I remember a particularly hair-raising fight that came from her getting a C in math in high school.

Maybe it’s understandable why she remembers things differently; maybe he did make her feel bad about herself. But Jen also has a tendency to remember things in the most gloomy way possible—for example, her random assertion that she thinks we weren’t good daughters to our mom, or that she feels bad using any of the money we inherited because it was theirs and we don’t deserve it, or another gem that came out of this weekend, namely that my grandfather’s creepiness at the end “broke Mom’s heart” and contributed to her death. WTF? The man was senile! Yes, I’m sure it bothered my mom a good deal to be hit on by her father-in-law, but broke her heart is a little over-dramatic, and very….Jen.

Aside from the fact that I feel like my father’s memory is being a little tarnished by Jen’s over-dramatization, I also feel sad for her that she can’t draw on those happy memories. I guess I had always assumed that she told funny JTD stories too, and that she and Bill cracked jokes about him the way Sean and I do. I told Sean yesterday that sometimes I feel like Sean really knew him, even though he was dead long before we met, because of the way we joke about things he would have said or done. We talk about all my dead relatives that way: ‘Remember, your grandfather grew up a young Polish boy in Chicago!’ It’s comforting as well as being amusing, because it’s like they’re still around, they’re not just faces in photographs.

My personal favorite, of course, is Sean’s imagining of a little Mrs. D visiting her grown-up self and asking about the fate of her three deadbeat brothers: “What do you mean, we haven’t danced on their graves? What do you MEAN, we went first?!”

My Boss is Awesome...Again

So this morning I was kind of annoyed that in spite of my boss' return to the office after four days' absence, I still had absolutely nothing to do besides twiddle my fingers and roam the Internet's wild expanses, which, as this week has shown, gets old fast. Then as I was in the midst of a Wikipedia-fueled refresher course on the causes of the Civil War (see what I mean?) Paul called me into his office and had me shut the door. Ruh roh, you might say, except you are forgetting that Paul is (1) awesome and (2) thinks of me as some kind of office wunderkind who has the most amazing organizational skills ever. Definitely an exaggeration, but one that works in my favor.

Anyway, reason for the closed door was Paul decided to give me another raise, which is under any circumstances a reason of awesomeness. Then he tells me that he considered just giving it to me as a really nice bonus when I leave, but he decided that it would more helpful to me to be able to say to future employers that at my last job I was making X amount and have X be the largest possible number. So Paul is not only awesome, but thoughtful, too, even though I then burst his bubble by telling him the next time I'm negotiating a salary will probably be the better part of a decade from now, and they probably won't care what I was making the year before I started grad school.

We also discussed the issue of my replacement, the hunt for which started a few weeks ago and has already been a pain in the neck. We narrowed it down to two, but those two then neglected to send thank-yous after their interviews, and Paul is a big stickler for etiquette in these matters. I took the opportunity of asking where exactly he's planning on putting whoever we hire, for the three and a half months that I'll still be here. (I won't lie, foremost on my mind was protecting the fun times Heather and I have out front. It would be kind of difficult to share salacious stories of our pasts and make inappropriate comments about things posted on DListed if there's someone sitting right next to me, not to mention the adverse effect it would have on my own Internet surfing.)

To my chagrin, Paul said he thought he would put the new person at my desk and have me move to one of the two empty offices, to which I replied (in my mind) "Dear God, no." Empty Office 1 is what we call "The Batcave," a tiny windowless space in the back, with paperthin walls and a quirk of the heating/cooling system in there that results in the temperature being regulated by our next door neighbor's preferences. Empty Office 2 is the one next to Heather and I and is actually the largest one in the office, but it bears the taint of what befell the last two attorneys to occupy it. Namely, they're not in it anymore.

Thank God, though, that Paul is cool enough that he actually wanted my input on this. Future new person: welcome to the Batcave.

May Already

Time flies when you're having fun! Which I'm not, this week, because my boss is out of the office and left me with virtually nothing to do. Even the internet gets pretty boring after a few straight hours of impatiently checking DListed and Jezebel to see if they've been updated yet.

I also just remembered with great irritation that I forgot my book to read at lunch. In Paul's absence I'm deprived of my free New York Times, and I'm way too cheap to go buy one at the gas station. Yesterday I finished reading "Devil in the White City," which is a kind of narrative non-fiction that blends the story of the creation of the Chicago World's Fair in 1892 with the tale of America's first famous serial killer, a doctor who murdered dozens of young women (in addition to men and some children) who came to the city on their own looking for adventure and freedom. The book was extremely detailed and well-researched, and compellingly written, definitely on my list of recommendations.

Now I've moved on to Susan Jacoby's "Freethinkers," which is a history of American secularism, although of course I won't be reading any of it today because it's sitting on my couch at home. Tonight is also Thursday, which means one of the rare nights I'll actually watch TV. Ugly Betty and Lost, baby!