Slow Reading

I'm actually not using that title to refer to the movement, which has recently received attention on NPR and elsewhere, that lauds the pleasures and benefits of reading slowly. Those stories made me feel a little guilty, because I'm not a slow reader most of the time; my ability to read quickly with a high level of comprehension has been something that I've been proud of since I was in elementary school (except for in 5th grade, when Mrs. Barber in her infinite wisdom decided to pair the fastest reader in the class with Larry, the very slowest; torment ensued), and it's continued to be useful in graduate school, where you're often faced with parsing huge amounts of text in a short amount of time. I recognize the downsides to this method. If you read quickly, you're bound to miss things, and you don't experience the flavor and texture of language as fully as you would if you read very slowly. Or, as some of the people involved in the movement suggested, read out loud. I don't really like the sound of my voice when reading, so that's not going to happen.

The title refers more to the pace at which I am accomplishing the reading that I wanted to get through during these weeks Sean's away. I've kind of given up on prepping my Eakins paper for a journal submission after recognizing that there's just not enough original content there to merit it. Even though my professor encouraged me to do so, he hasn't looked directly at my sources, and I don't think they need the synthesis that my paper offered. So that was one thing I was planning to accomplish that is now out of the way.

I've been making very slow progress through Marilyn Lavin's The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches, 431-1600. It's one of those books that holds an important place in the canon of literature because Lavin did a very important thing--she looked at all (literally, all) the extant narrative cycles in churches, determined in what order the episodes of each cycle were presented, and then formulated theories as to why certain patterns were more suited to a location, context, patron, or theological argument. It had never been done before; no one had bothered to ask why the episodes of, say, the life of St. Francis appear in a triple wrap-around pattern in one place and in a weird zig-zag pattern in another, sometimes even in chapels painted by the same artist, or two chapels in the same church. She also used a computer database to compile the data, something that was new in the early 1980s, especially in art history. Again, an important accomplishment, but unfortunately one that makes for pretty boring reading. Especially since she describes, in detail, the organization of each pattern, even though there's also an accompanying diagram.

Today, I finally betook myself to the library to prevent myself from becoming permanently affixed to Sean's computer chair. What's been preventing me from doing that daily is that I have to walk there, about a mile, and in Charlottesville it's usually 90 degrees and humid by 10am (with a high of 100 or more daily). Today was different, though; no humidity, and only 83 when I left at 9am. I was dreading the walk home, but it hit just 91 today, which is pretty awesome. I started with a couple of hours reading Patricia Brown's Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio, which turned out to be a lot like Lavin's in terms of interest, and then I moved to Griselda Pollock's Old Mistresses: Women, Art, Ideology, which was much more interesting.

It's thirty years old now, so some of the complaints that were raised by the first feminist art historians have been addressed (for example, in the 1960s there were no women in art history survey texts at all, which is no longer the case), along with some of the secondary complaints addressed toward over-zealous feminist art historians, like the tendency to place every woman artist that could be dug up as on par with great men artists of their times, even when their skill level was clearly inferior. Pollock wrote her book after the first flush of feminist art history was over, so she was able to zero in on these and other ways in which feminist scholarship, for all its good intentions, succeeded in nothing more than either the continued marginalization of women artists, or the tacit acceptance of male-dominated standards for artistic merit. An example of the former might be a book titled something like "Women's Art History"--something that sets women apart, as though they existed separate and distinct from the social and cultural forces that shaped men. At the other end of the spectrum is scholarship that tries to prove that women painters were just as good as men, which, as Pollock points out, just implicitly accepts that men are the gold standard. She argues that there shouldn't be a competition, but rather an examination of why and how women created the art they did, considering their particular positions within societies and cultures, and even their limitations (lack of access to education and materials, etc). I think most art historians, feminist and otherwise, have tried to follow this more balanced option since the turbulence of the 1970s. Like Lavin and Brown, then, Pollock's is a Very Important Book, but one that was much more engaging to read for a few hours.

The Book of the Courtier

Part of my reading this week is The Book of the Courtier, the famous 16th-century book of manners written by Baldassare Castiglione (shown above in his equally famous portrait by Raphael, a great friend of his). I picked it up at a used bookstore in town, together with Stendhal's The Red and the Black, for $1.50, which is a pretty awesome deal.

Like Vasari's Lives, the Book of the Courtier is one of those texts with which you can be pretty familiar without ever having read, so thorough has been their osmosis into the cultural ideals of the Renaissance and beyond. Presented as a conversation among the courtiers of the Duke of Urbino, the prescription is pretty simple: the ideal courtier should be able to do just about everything, do it well, and yet be able to make it look like he wasn't trying at all. That last requirement is the quality of sprezzatura, which is usually translated as "nonchalance."

As you would expect in books of this kind, there's lot of advice on what type of musical instruments the courtier should be able to play (strings are fine, but not flutes, because they make you contort your face unattractively), and how it's acceptable to mimic the vocal patterns and gestures of a famous person for laughs, but not their physical deformities (because that's just mean). The part I was just reading admonished gentlemen against the use of "enchantments, charms, sometimes force, sometimes sleeping potions and other such things" in order to, er, "enjoy a lady to the full." Roofies are nothing new, it seems, and neither are creeps.

There were a couple of passages that I marked. First, this one made me feel better about not being able to play chess well:

Signore Gaspare replied: "And what do you say about the game of chess?"

"That is certainly a refined and ingenious recreation," said Federico, "but it seems to me to possess one defect; namely, that it is possible for it to demand too much knowledge, so that anyone who wishes to become an outstanding player must, I think, give it as much time and study as he would to learning some noble science or performing well something or other of importance; and yet for all his pains when all is said and done all he knows is a game. Therefore as far as chess is concerned we reach what is a very rare conclusion: that mediocrity is more to be praised than excellence."

This one just amused me because of the author's obvious contempt for fops and dandies:

"...I don't want him to appear soft and feminine as so many try to do, when they not only curl their hair and pluck their eyebrows but also preen themselves like the most wanton and dissolute creatures imaginable. Indeed, they appear so effeminate and languid in the way they walk, or stand, or do anything at all, that their limbs look as if they are about to fall apart...since Nature has not in fact made them the ladies they want to seem and be, they should be treated not as honest women but as common whores and be driven out from all gentlemanly society, let alone the Courts of great lords."

Methinks Baldassare would not have been over-fond of the metrosexual look!

More Travels

A lot has happened since my last post! Anna and TJ's wedding went off beautifully, despite a little bit of rain, and the reception was a blast. It was great to see the Fairfield crowd again! Two of our friends, Mike Talmadge and Michelle Holmberg, recently got engaged themselves, so we were able to give them our congratulations in person. Sara, Zac, and Heather were also in attendance, plus special guest star Melissa, who was DJing, that is, when she wasn't dancing with a blazer-wearing Heather (who also shouted at one point in the evening, "That's my jam! Imma take off mah jewelry!" and then actually did so at the DJ's table). Basically, the only person missing from this wedding was Rae, so I'll just give her a shout-out here: we love you, Rae!!

I mustn't forget to mention the wedding favors, a box of delicious, delicious fudge in both chocolate and coconut that tasted like frosting that died and went to heaven. Tragedy occurred when Sean and I forgot ours while we were scrambling to join Sara and Zac in the shuttle back to the hotel, but! Zac was kind enough to give us his. Speaking of the hotel, that was not the best Courtyard I have ever stayed in. Bitches made you pay $12 for breakfast! Not cool! Making it more worthwhile, however, was that we ate with Meredith, Pimp Juice, and his lovely girlfriend, Becky, with whom he's now living in Stratford (his parents moved out to...Texas, maybe? with his younger sister, and sold him their house, making him the first of my college friends to be a homeowner). Then we hit the road once again, this time headed for Connecticut, where we (or more specifically, I) spent a week being slowly driven mad by Hubbard's...eccentricities.

While we were there, we journeyed to northern Connecticut for a swing through my old haunts. We went by the house first. Nothing had changed from the last time I visited, but it was still sad driving down all the streets I spent the first twenty years of my life looking at, and knowing that they're just not mine anymore; it's not my neighborhood, and not my house. Even though I absolutely hated that house, it was still my home, and I don't have one anymore. Philadelphia feels like home to me, of course, but I don't have an ancestral home, for lack of a better term, a place where my family is rooted, where I have lifelong memories. That sucks.

From the house we went by the cemetery, even though neither Sean nor I feel any connection to gravesites whatsoever. We never even get out of the car; you don't have to, since my parents' stone is at the very corner where the road turns left at the rear of the cemetery. We usually just laugh at whatever crappy memento someone (read: Jen) has left there (the stupid angel she put there years ago is still there, but she added a pair of praying hands cupping another angel. There is also an angel carved on the stone, at her behest. My poor parents are literally beset with angels.) From there we went to Northwest Park, but the barn was closed, so we couldn't feed treats to our old friends: the Cotswald ram, the two pygmy goats, and the cow with the disturbingly long tongue that only Sean will feed. Our pal the lonely donkey was gone from the paddock outside, too, replaced by a pair of horses.

We didn't just go there for a maudlin memory tour, though; we were headed to East Windsor to have dinner with Jen and her boyfriend Vinny. Sean hadn't met him before, but they got on really well. That's kind of surprising in a way, if you think that they're involved with sisters who have spent so much of their lives being diametrically opposite in personality, but it's a good thing all the same. I think Vinny is a keeper, and I really do like him. We had dinner at Ad's, the pizza dive that's a favorite of Jen and Monica's, and then we played Scrabble. Now, a word about Scrabble. Sean and I play pretty frequently, and it's a known fact that he plays strategically while I fail at that, bigtime. The result is that in five and a half years, I've won Scrabble once. Once! This time, I had such a chance to win, I was in the lead for the whole game, until Sean whips out a 66-point word ("jive" on both a double-letter and triple-word score) to zoom by me for the win. Balls!!

We also had dinner with Ron and Kathy while we were in CT, which is always a good time. It always happens that Ron will monopolize Sean's conversation (though he insists that women, in fact, are the ones who dominate) and I'll always be catching scraps of whatever scandalous story he's telling while Kathy and I are having a more grown-up conversation on the other side of the table. I'm always envious, because hey, I love Kathy, but I want to hear about how Ron dropped LSD before a chemistry test and scored higher than anyone else in his class when he was at Berkeley in the 60s! Anything that involves Berkeley in the 60s is going to be more interesting than a new exhibition at the Acropolis museum; I'm sorry, it's just a fact. This time, we actually spent more time conversing as a group than we ever have before, so I got to hear some of the tales direct from the horse's mouth, as it were. Those two really are a riot, especially in tandem, and as per usual, we left their house some six hours and four bottles of wine later. I cannot wait to be like them when we're older.

We left Connecticut Friday morning and headed back to Philadelphia just in time for the worst of rush hour traffic. We hit everything, including an accident on the Tappan Zee that closed all four lanes, so it wound up taking us five hours to get there. We used the time wisely, though, to set up dinner with Richardson and Kim, who braved the traffic from New Jersey. We were going to take them to Baci's, but time constraints led us to the Trolley Car Diner instead, and leaving the mega-bottle of Chianti that Sean had picked up for dinner for my personal enjoyment back in Charlottesville (and yes, I'm drinking it now). Then we went to see Twilight, which I had somehow convinced Sean to agree to see when it came out, but we never ended up going. It was perhaps not as bad as I had expected, but it was plenty bad enough, so I was thoroughly amused. Sean's expressions alone were pretty priceless. Kim turned out to be an actual hardcore fan of the books, though, so there was no out-and-out mockery.

Finally, yesterday was the day I sent Sean off to the Netherlands. As I told Rae, I really wasn't on top of my game for the pre-trip planning; I nearly forgot about calling Bank of America for his debit cards, he didn't get a phrasebook, and I forgot to give him extra batteries for my camera. Oh, and his umbrella, which was in the backseat of my car. Minor errors aside, I know he arrived safely, since he emailed me this morning from Leiden. After dropping him off at the airport, I hit the road back down to C-ville, and made awesome time--just under 4 hours, when it's supposed to take 5. Go me!

The apartment is lonely without him. I'm getting a taste of how difficult it will be to go back to living apart in September after spending the summer together. At least in September I can pick up the phone and call him whenever I want to. My phone rang a little while ago (the best mother-in-law ever, checking on me) and my first thought was "Sean! Oh, wait..." I know he's going to have a great time, but I miss him already.

On the Road

We packed up this morning and left Charlottesville for Philadelphia, with a brief stop in Cherry Hill to pick up Sean's tux for the wedding this weekend. It was in the 90s in VA when we bid a mournful goodbye to the central air in Sean's apartment, anticipating how hot it would be in Philadelphia. And damn, is it hot. Unfortunately, while our house has the ability to stay pretty cool for a long time in the heat, once it heats up it also tends to hold it in. It must be 90 degrees on the third floor, because it's 85 on the ground floor. Phyllis was nice enough to turn on the air conditioner in my room this morning, so it's nice enough for the two of us in here, but leaving the room is like walking into a wall of heat.

This has required some tinkering with our travel schedule. First, off, we're going to go straight home to CT from Anna's wedding, instead of coming back to Philly to wait out the weekend traffic. We'll come back next Friday, so we just have to spend the one night there before Sean goes to Amsterdam on the 17th. After I drop him off at the airport, I'm going back down to his apartment! I just can't stay here and roast for two weeks, I'll kill myself! Also, it would be ridiculously inefficient to keep my air conditioner running for that long, when I can have an entirely cool apartment to myself in Virginia. Hopefully, by the time I get back to Philly for good at the end of August, things will have cooled down a bit.

Ragged Mountain

Sean and I finally made it to Ragged Mountain to go hiking this morning! We'd planned to go a bunch of times, but something (read: the as-yet-still-incomplete project) kept getting in the way. It was already 87 degrees and humid when we left at ten in the morning, but luckily it was much, much cooler in the woods, and once we got near the lake there was a nice breeze. The trail is 3.5 miles long, and is very steep in places--especially in the beginning, when it rises more than 300 ft in the first half mile. We were both rather out of breath by the time we reached the first crest, so it was good that it was at the beginning!

It took us about an hour and a half to do the full circuit (the website said 2-3 hours, but we were moving at a pretty fast clip), which takes you around the two lakes in the center of the preserve. It was beautifully serene and quiet. Aside from some squirrels, the only other creature we saw was a deer browsing through some foliage. At one point, you cross a land bridge between the upper and lower lakes that gives you an unrivaled view of the splendor of the water, surrounded on all sides by the forest. That was where we saw the curious structure in the photo above: a rickety old cabin built on top of a stone pier rising some some thirty or so feet from the water. The front door was padlocked, which was kind of ridiculous since it's in midair. However, we judged from a lip of stone protruding out from under the door that there must once have been some kind of walkway between the cabin and the land bridge, but what they needed an elevated cabin for, I have no idea.

All in all, it was a tough hike, but totally worth it. I was definitely glad that I hadn't gone on my own, as I had thought of doing a couple of weeks ago. My spirits would have flagged much faster without Sean there to keep them up!

They Like Me, They Really Like Me!

I got great reviews from my students from last semester! Sadly, no one called me a fox this time around, but several kids mentioned my impressive understanding of the subject matter (aw, shucks) and willingness to answer questions as what helped them most during the semester. One (guy, I think) even said that my sense of humor was what helped him most!

To the question "what would you change about the course," most kids didn't respond, while a couple mentioned less homework, and one urged me to be more lenient in my grading (unlikely).
The third and last question is about the instructor's sensitivity to diversity, and while several students pronounced me "very sensitive," one student bluntly assured the reader: "She's not racist or anything like that." Thanks guys!

Blacked Out

We lost power during a terrific thunderstorm yesterday at 5pm, and only got it back (albeit with repeated brownouts) at 11am this morning. Winds were gusting up to 85 mph, the rain was practically moving parallel to the ground, and when I ran out to the car at 5 to pick Sean up from work, getting totally drenched in the process, the wind was actually rocking the car. Sean's car is really low and heavy, so that was a little unnerving. Trees and powerlines were down all over Charlottesville, as we discovered when we tried to go out and find somewhere with power to get dinner and got caught in a huge snarl of traffic and heard on the radio that nearly every major road in the town was blocked by fallen trees. I think we traveled one or two miles, max, and it took us 30 minutes or more to get back to the apartment.

Since Sean doesn't even own a flashlight, and scoffed when I told him that my parents also kept candles and matches around for emergencies (he noted, not without basis, that my dad was totally paranoid), that meant we only had enough light as the sky would give us. Not having air conditioning wasn't pleasant either, but luckily the storm had cooled things down from the 104 degrees it had reached earlier that day. I was able to read on the balcony until 9 o'clock or so, but it was freaky not being able to turn on any lights in the apartment. It was also eerie to look out at the other buildings in the complex without seeing a single light, but at the same time hearing lots of people's voices as they mingled outside in the cooler air.

I ended up going to bed at 10 o'clock and listening to NPR on my earphones until midnight or so. It was so warm that we stripped everything off the bed and just lay there, but neither of us were able to get into anything resembling a deep sleep. I was pretty sure the power would come back on during the night, and I kept repeatedly dreaming that it had, only to crack open an eye at the clock and see nothing but its blank face. At 5am I was restless, and going out on the balcony I saw, to my great joy, that there were lights on in the laundry room of the complex facing ours. Saved! Except our power wouldn't go on, even after I flipped the breakers repeatedly. It turned out that that lucky apartment block was the only one in the whole damned complex (there are a lot of buildings) that had their power; everyone else lost theirs. Still, at the time I was certain that this meant that ours would come back at any moment.

A little later in the morning, with still no power, I went in search of the maintenance people to ask if they knew anything about when it would come back. We had a lot of perishables in the fridge, including some catfish fillets, that I was worried about. They told me to call the power company, so I called Sean's mom from the laundry room, where I was charging my phone, and she gave me the number as well as the news from their website that 48,000 people were without power in our area. The power company then told me the power was expected to return by 10 o'clock tonight. Unbelievable, especially with the temperature predicted to hit 93 today!

I ended up going to Walmart around 9am to get a cooler so we could pack the perishables with ice. Most of the street lights were out, and cops had to direct traffic at the intersections along Route 29, which is the single main artery leading out of Charlottesville. By the time I stopped back at the gas station near the apartment, they were down to their last couple of bags of ice, which I snagged. Luckily I had a few dollars in my wallet, because despite being open, their power was still down too: cash only. It's times like that that you realize how dangerous it can be to rely on plastic. Anyway, I got back to the apartment, stuffed as much as I could into the cooler, and began making plans with Sean to spend the day at the library, then find an unaffected restaurant and movie theater so we could stay away from the apartment. Just about 11, though, the wonderful sound of the air conditioner kicking in alerted us that the power was restored. The people rejoiced! Literally! There was some booing, later, when the power kept flicking off and on, but mostly it was rejoicing. Sadly, the catfish could not be saved; it had begun to smell fishy. We consulted the FDA's website and learned that technically, I shouldn't have eaten that soy milk with my breakfast either (but that was like 8am and I haven't died yet). We're keeping the other two cartons, which were unopened anyway. The jury is still out on everything else, like Sean's yogurt )which he tends to stockpile as if it were the yogurt-alypse), the mayo, etc.

Anyway, we survived the great blackout of 2010! What have we learned from this? Well, for one thing, we now know that JTD was not wrong to have plenty of flashlights, candles, and even a very old, black-and-white, battery operated TV on hand. It is really, really boring not to have electricity once it's dark. Also: air conditioning is AWESOME.

Night on the Town

Yesterday evening Sean and I drove to Staunton, a small city about 45 minutes away from Charlottesville, to see a production of Beaumont's "The Knight of the Burning Pestle" at the American Shakespeare Center. We had dinner beforehand at a cute little place called The Pampered Palate. We both had Greek salads with the tastiest feta imaginable on top, and Sean also bought a bottle of blueberry wine, which we have not yet tried. I vetoed his attempted purchase of peach-flavored port, however.

The theatre at the ASC is a re-creation of the Blackfriars Theatre in London, which after 1609 was taken over by a group of actors from the King's Men, including William Shakespeare. It became their winter playhouse, while the more famous Globe continued to be their summer venue. Blackfriars was one of the earliest indoor theaters, and (according to Wikipedia, as ever) was the first to use artificial lighting and to play music between the acts. The ASC won't let you take photos inside, but here's one from Google:

We had seats in the fourth row from the stage, which cost a pretty penny today but, as Sean pointed out wryly, would have been the cheap seats back in the day. The ASC tries to present its plays in as close to the original format as possible: that means the lights stay on, audience members are up on stage (and, in last night's show, occasionally pulled into the action), and the actors double or triple up on roles with minimal costume changes. I've seen Shakespeare done that way before, most notably the Macbeth we saw in high school (three orgasmically-writhing witches, anyone?), but not any of the comedies.

The play is an exercise in meta-theatre; it starts out with a company of actors doing a comedy about a couple of lovers, when a guy gets up out of the crowd (the row behind us, actually) and starts heckling. He and his wife (both dressed not in Jacobean, but contemporary middle-class attire, with her looking particularly Jersey-ish) start demanding changes to the play, and the rest of the show revolves around the players' increasingly farcical attempts to both satisfy their demands and keep their own play going at the same time. Beaumont's original play apparently included a lot of contemporary music, and the program noted that they substituted modern music instead so that it would more relatable for the audience. Translation: when we went in to sit down before the show, the actors were in the balcony, in full costume, singing "Eye of the Tiger," and at another point a harried husband fends off his wife by singing a version of Lenny Kravitz: "Jacobean woman, stay away from meeeee...." All in all, I thought it was pretty hysterical. It was a powerful reminder about how hard it is to do justice to a play, especially a comedy that calls for lots of physicality and bawdy gestures, just by reading it; a couple of times as I was laughing particularly hard, I found myself thinking that I probably wouldn't have found the lines funny at all by themselves, but acted out they were awesome.

We're going to go back on Sunday night for a free preview of Othello. It'll be interesting to see the range these actors can play in just the space of a couple of nights!

Mmmm

That's two pounds of fresh-picked sweet cherries, courtesy of yours truly! Yesterday we went to a potluck dinner held by one of the faculty in Sean's department, and one of his professors told us that she had just been cherry picking with her kids the day before, and said that although it's the very end of the season, I might be able to get some if I went today. Sean didn't come, as he was supposed to be working on his project (due to the same professor), but as I type this he's continuing what must be a near-record streak of procrastination.

On the map, the orchard was pretty close, only 15 miles away, but getting there reminded me how very rural Virginia can be, and how much of a surburbanite I really am. After heading down Route 29, a major thoroughfare, I turned off onto county road 633 (everything hereabouts is a county road), which is a pleasant, if narrow, little road that runs by some farms. Then it got really narrow, with no shoulder, leaving me uneasy how this would work if another car came around one of the turns. Then this skinny little strip of blacktop stopped being paved at all, and became a very bumpy gravel lane that started to rise steeply, winding through the mountains. Every fifty feet there was a completely blind curve, so I was driving about 20 miles an hour and hoping that no local was about to come speeding through. The road was so rough that I thought the car might shiver to pieces right underneath me, it was shaking so badly, and the road behind the car was completely obscured by the dust and dirt it kicked up. This was terrain suited to a pickup truck, not a 1994 Buick LeSabre!

By now I was in a densely wooded area, with the trees occasionally breaking to reveal beautifully lush valleys below. At one point I glanced out the window at a particularly nice view, only to look back and see a deer running across the road in front of me. I'm used to deer, but not in broad daylight. As the car shuddered further up the road, there were a few houses dotted here and there. Their sheer isolation caused my inner suburbanite to wonder, How the hell do they deliver mail up here? Jesus, what do they do when it snows? I mean, Sean was trapped in his apartment complex for four days this past winter, because no one in Charlottesville owns a shovel and there are so few plows. What did this people do, ski down the mountain?

Going seven miles on this road took about twenty minutes, but eventually I reached the orchard. It was indeed the very end of the cherry season, so the trees had been almost completely picked over, but I was able to come up with my two pounds of cherries after about an hour of squinting under the tree branches, looking for that elusive bit of dark red. It's more fun to pick cherries than it is blueberries (though we plan to do that too, in August), but it's not cheap: my two pounds cost $9, more than they would in the supermarket. But the taste. They're fucking delicious! Granted, I'm not a connoisseur, having only begun to eat fresh cherries last year in Spain, when our grocery-store breakfasts consisted of them together with bread and jam. Still, Sean was in agreement that these were the best damned cherries he'd ever tasted.

Next year I'll have to come down earlier so that we can hit the orchard when the trees are still loaded with fruit. Honestly, I'm not sure what I'd do with more than a couple pounds of cherries (blueberries freeze really well, so they're easy), but hey, a surfeit of delectable fruit is never a bad thing. Next time, too, Sean can drive!

A Change of Scenery

Last weekend was a long one! I traveled from Philadelphia to NJ to NY for a wedding, a bridal shower, and a bachelorette party, then back to Philadelphia and on to Virginia. Quite the whirlwind tour, but it was fun! Now Sean and I will be in Virginia until the beginning of July, when we head north again for Anna and TJ's wedding.

Virginia really is lovely, there's no denying that. Since Charlottesville is only 20 miles away from the Blue Ridge Mountains, you can see them towering in the distance whenever you're on a slight hill. I've been to a couple of the parks in the past week, both of which were serene and beautiful, if not particularly challenging in terms of their trails. When Sean has a day off (he's working Tues-Sat) and the weather is nice, we're going to go to Ragged Mountain, where the trail climbs 300 ft in the first half-mile!

We also have tickets to see a play called "The Knight of the Burning Pestle" at the American Shakespeare Center in a couple of weeks. This is the description: "Imagine Homer and Marge Simpson buying tickets to a Chekhov play and then climbing on stage to redirect the show with Bart as the star, and you have some idea of the fun Beaumont unleashes in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Loaded with laughter and song, this play is a celebration of the way Elizabethan audiences expected to be a part of the action." I'm excited!

Relaxation

The last few days have been like a real vacation. The weather has been very obliging, in the 70s with very little humidity, and after my grocery run on Friday I've had nothing to do but read, take walks, and read some more. Yesterday morning I read Death of a Salesman, and in the afternoon, Rebecca. It's been a long time since I've had the leisure to read a whole book in a day, much less a book and a play. Today I read The Ugly American, and after I finish this post I'm going to read All My Sons.

Death of a Salesman is supposed to be sad--it is a tragedy, after all--but the character of Willy Loman has particularly resonance for me because he reminds me of my dad, not so much in personality (my dad would have despised him for being a liar and a braggart), but in the way both of them were captives to, and victims of, the American dream. Both of them fell for the line that it's possible to succeed in America purely on the basis of hard work. The rub is that failure is then wholly personal, attributable to some interior fault rather than the interaction of more complex factors. Of course, my dad didn't fail in the way Willy does, by losing his salaried position and being forced back into the ranks of the traveling salesmen in middle age, but he was bitter about the fact that he hadn't achieved the rank of vice president that he felt he should have, as well as the attendant symbols of prosperity: bigger house, nicer vacations, etc. He felt that he had worked hard for those things and that they should have been his. Not having them made him feel like a failure, presumably compared to other men.

I think one of his biggest flaws was the lack of a critical faculty. My dad couldn't recognize the ideology under which he was raised as ideology, something that had been drummed into him since childhood. I'm not claiming to speak from an objective point of view on this. As Louis Althusser points out, we are all in ideology. The difference lies in being able to recognize that it's there, that it has a concrete agency in our lives and how we think and act. I think many more people of our generation are capable of sensing this than of our parents' generation. Education is definitely a factor in that--but then again, my dad had a master's in nuclear engineering and he thought he was a failure because he couldn't afford a boat. That he didn't know how to sail. *facepalm*

What I said before, that my dad didn't fail like Willy Loman? Well, it's always been a question in the DiMarzo house about what his life, and ours, would have been like if he hadn't died when he had. There was a strong possibility that he might have been laid off in the near future. He had already tried looking for other jobs in the past, but nuclear power was on the decline in the late 90s, and even through a head-hunting agency he came up with exactly one job, in Illinois, that my mom refused. She told us that he'd talked to her about getting his teaching certification and becoming a math teacher if he were to be laid off, which is an amusing prospect to consider, but my mom also confided that she thought he would have been a suicide risk. She thought the humiliation of a layoff would have been too much for him. Would my dad have made the same decision as Willy Loman? Would he have thought that he was worth more dead than alive? I'm thankful that I'll never have to find out, but it's still saddening to know that he died thinking himself a failure, when I would never have called him that. I wish he knew.

First Anniversary

Sean and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary on Sunday! Actually, celebrations ended up being a little split between Sunday and Monday, due to Sean feeling some after-effects from Richardson's bachelor party Saturday night. I had spent that night at the camper with Linda and Gary, but for some reason I woke up at 6:30 feeling really nauseous. Luckily for Sean, I turned on my cell phone when I woke up. He texted me an hour later asking me to come pick him up ASAP because his friend McTague had gotten sick all over the hotel room during the night and turned it into a biohazard. Linda and I drove to Mohegan, a few miles away, in our pajamas. Naturally, Sean was fully showered and dressed, but he passed out when we got back to the camper.

Eventually I was able to rouse him, and we drove to Norwich and checked into the Lathrop Manor Inn. The innkeepers were a husband and wife (unfortunately, I totally forgot their names) who were really, really nice. They were doing work in the back of the property putting in a new patio, so they offered us the choice of rooms upstairs, since the one I'd booked overlooked the back, and we were the only ones there on a Sunday night. We picked the room that was much bigger (and more expensive, which is why I'd picked the other one originally), with an incredible king-size bed that was so high off the ground I had to fling myself onto it, and cool furniture, including a couple of chairs in front of the fireplace.



The inn dated to the 18th century, but it was actually taken down to the foundations and rebuilt, with the original materials, in the 1960s. The husband was a serious jack-of-all-trades. The only non-period room was one that they turned into a den, with cushy leather chairs and a huge TV, and he had created custom wood panelling for the whole room that looked both professional and appropriate to the tone of the rest of the house. He built a lot of the furniture in the house, including a huge dining room table with period wood; he did the wiring and the plumbing, and was at work creating the extended patio himself when we arrived. Did I mention that he also spent 30 years as a chef? In the morning, we came downstairs to find personalised menus in the drawing room, with a spread of cinnamon buns, cheese, fruit, and bread already waiting in the dining room. Sean opted for blueberry pancakes, which he praised as the best blueberry pancakes he had ever tasted, and I chose the traditional country breakfast--eggs, toast, bacon (yeah, I gave up red meat, but it was my anniversary), all of it washed down with fresh-squeezed orange juice. IT WAS SO GOOD. Honestly, best B&B food ever, and we've stayed at a few.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We checked in, and then went over to the Slater museum, which has an incredible cast collection of famous statuary from all over the world. These casts were all made directly from the originals (something that is almost never allowed these days, but this was back in the more permissive 19th century). The ground floor has Greek and Roman pieces, while the mezzanine has Renaissance sculptures. Visiting this museum is like a whirlwind tour of some of the world's most famous art pieces: we're talking full-size casts of the Parthenon pediment sculptures, the Hellenistic altar of Pergamon, the Laocoon, the Apollo Belvedere; upstairs, there's Michelangelo's Pieta, his Moses (beautifully situated in front of a stained-glass window), as well as Donatello's and Verrocchio's Davids. It's awesome, even if things are a bit crowded together. When we visited the first time while we were in college, we hadn't seen any of these pieces in real life, but this time it was cool to walk around and note how many of them we have seen. There are some places that remain on the list, like London, home of the Parthenon marbles, and Berlin, for the Pergamon museum, but it was just so damned cool to be reminded of all the wonderful things we've seen on our travels.

After this excursion we went back to the inn, where Sean promptly passed out again. I spent the afternoon watching television from the gigantic bed, which actually was quite relaxing. Unfortunately, when Sean woke up again he was pretty out of it, so I ended up getting us some takeout from a little Italian place down the road, rather than go out for an official anniversary dinnner. After dinner, we did something scarily domestic; we sat in the chairs by the fireplace and I read to him from Lake Woebegon Days, which I'd found in the library nook. All that was missing was a roaring fire, and maybe some snow outside (we've already decided to come back in the winter, perhaps for our other anniversary).



Then it was time for the series finale of Lost, so we repaired downstairs to the TV room with our complimentary bottle of wine. Turns out I needed it, because the finale was ridiculous, and not in a good way. Hey, spoilers, but WTF? That ending totally obviated everything that happened ON the damned island. The writers just said "Oh hey, it's OK, they all meet up again after they die, so forget about all that weird stuff that happened while they were alive, and that whole battle-of-good-versus-evil thing. Doesn't matter. Look, it's Shannon! And Juliet!" UGH.

Despite this disappointment, we went to bed and slept perfectly, which is saying something if you know about Sean's finicky sleeping habits. The next morning, before we had World's Best B&B food, the owner told us that people always ask what mattress that room has, and it's a Stearns and Foster Plaza mattress (which apparently retails for about $2,000). He and his wife really were awesome. When we checked out, we discovered that they'd given us 15% off because of the construction in the back (which was not an issue at all). So not only did we not pay the price for the super-nice room, we paid even less than the price for the smaller room. They also insisted that we take the two remaining giant cinnamon buns so that they wouldn't be tempted to eat them. Sean proceeded to eat one of them in the parking lot of Gillette Castle, and the other went to his grandmother.

All told, it was a pretty great anniversary, and so very us: a little culture, some delicious food, some sit-on-your-ass-ing, rounded out by a bit of a nature. I love my husband!

Graduation

Top left: Cate, me, Ruth, Lisa
Bottom: Nicole, Laura

I officially graduated with my master's in art history yesterday! I wasn't very enthusiastic about it going in, not only because I had to pay a lot of money for a gown with ridiculous sleeves that I will never wear again, but also because I hate long, boring ceremonies. And Fairfield's graduation was definitely long and boring.

However, there was definitely a kind of infectious excitement among my classmates and I as we hung out in Tyler, fixing each other's hoods and preparing to march over to the Baptist Temple. Then I was able to spot Heather, and with her, Phyllis, immediately upon entering, which cheered me because I knew I wouldn't have to engage in the kind of post-graduation frantic searching that occurred after Fairfield's graduation. Add to this the fact that the ceremony was mercifully brief--1.5 hours, with only one tepid speech from an undergrad--and you have a reasonably enjoyable ceremony. I spent most of it commenting on the shoes of all the art students, because we were about at eye level with people's feet. In fact, I was right beneath the podium, which was fine with me because it meant I didn't have all the professors staring at me the whole time. Dr. Cooper didn't come, which was a little disappointing, but Dr. Hall came and wore her giant 60s-style sunglasses through the entire ceremony, and then blatantly stopped clapping after all the art history students were done. Heather spotted her from her seat and declared her a fierce lady, which is certainly true!

The best part of the ceremony was at the very beginning. Our most recent PhD, Barbara McNulty, sat on stage with the professors, in a plain gown without her hood. Before the rest of the ceremony took place, the dean read out her name and her dissertation title, and then invited her advisor, Dr. Evans, to formally "hood" her, and then presented her to the entire crowd as "Dr. Barbara McNulty." I don't think I can really capture how inspired I felt by that, seeing the culmination of so many years of work. I was present at her defense, and I was there in the hallway when Dr. Evans addressed her as Dr. for the first time, but this really felt special. There's something to be said for ceremonial, after all. Of course, I was also thinking of that fact that that will be me, in four or so years, being hooded by Dr. Cooper on that stage. Just that moment alone was worth attending graduation, because I can think of that in my mind's eye when my inspiration flags.

It was wonderful to have Heather and Phyllis, since Sean couldn't be there. We took some photos after the ceremony, as requested by Linda, and then headed to South St, where Phyllis had reservations at an AWESOME Italian restaurant, Core di Roma, owned by an actual Roman. I had the matriciana sauce, which was the owner said was his favorite (and it might be mine too; I ordered it almost every time we ate out in Rome because it's the city's specialty), and it was just divine. Phyllis brought a bottle of champagne (really, really nice champagne) and a bottle of wine, and we indulged quite freely, so after dinner we walked around South St for a bit till Phyllis decided she was good to drive. Phyllis absolutely loves Heather, and we had a great time.

Now I'm back in CT, waiting for Linda to get home so we can go for some celebratory Thai...yum!

Done!

Last night I finished grading exams, put all the grades I'd had piled up in an Excel document into GradeCenter, and then entered final grades. Now I'm just fielding a few last-minute "uh, how do I find my grades again" emails--though one of those kids also told me that he thought class was interesting and fun, so that warmed my heart a little.

Their grades were better than expected; my class averages for final grades were 81 and 82, up from last semester's 78 and 76, I think. Part of that, I'm sure, is the fact that this was my second time teaching the course, while another part of it was that we made the exams as simple as possible. That's not to say that they're actually easy, as the several kids I failed or gave low grades to can attest, but they're not designed to trick you like some exams I remember from college classes. As I've told several people, teaching AWW is like being on a constant search for the lowest common denominator. When we're writing the exams, someone will say, "Ask what narrative moment Bernini chose to represent in his David," and someone else will say "Narrative moment? Ha! Try 'what part of the story is this?'" No lie, though--that will still confuse some kids.

For the last two exams, we also purposely did a practice compare-contrast exercise in section using the same artists (though not the same artworks) that we were putting on the exam (the compare-contrast is worth 20% of their grade, but that never seems to stop some kids from giving me a single paragraph). The last class day before an exam is always a TA-led review, and I tell my students flat-out that while there are no guarantees, whatever we covered in the review was very, very likely to be on the exam. So you can see that we're not trying to make this really difficult! All you need to do is show up, take notes, read the book, and memorize some stuff, and you can get a decent grade (the definition of "decent" being very different for most of my students than it would be for me; mainly, they just want to pass, and they only need a C- for that).

Despite all our best efforts, of course, you will always have that student who looks at the slide of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial and tells you that it is made of steel poles and nylon fabric, or that Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People was a reaction to WWII, or that one of the unconventional materials used by Jackson Pollock was "dreams." These are indeed the times that try [wo]men's souls.

Something that I didn't truly understand about grades until I became a teacher, though, is the amount of subjectivity that goes into deciding grades. It's actually rather difficult to decide whether to take eight or ten points off an essay, for example, or whether to give a "meh" paper a B- or a C+. Quite often it comes down to my impression of the student: their effort level in class, their attentiveness, whether they've ever fallen asleep in section, whether I spot them on facebook during lecture, etc. Basically, it can come down to: do you piss me off, or do I like you?

The same thing applies at the end of the semester. Although most things are determined by what I put into GradeCenter, attendance and participation is really entirely up to me, and that's 10% of the final grade. Obviously, if you missed ten classes you're getting a low grade --even if you participated those times you were in class--but I will be more lenient toward a kid who's there every class but never talks, versus one of those kids who is also there every class but is clearly doing something besides taking notes on his computer. If you sass me, or fall asleep, or send me rude emails, or spend your time passing notes, or give me that "you are so beneath my notice" look when I tell you to take notes, then yes, I will give you the lowest participation grade that is ethically possible. Perhaps most critically, this principle comes into play with final grades when I'm deciding whether I will give a student who is on the cusp between B/B+ that extra half-point nudge of goodwill, or give them exactly the grade indicated by GradeCenter's calculations. Again, I will do it if they've made a positive impression on me, while I will refrain from doing it if they're a slacker or have pissed me off in some way.

It's not that I would only do this for good students or smart kids, either. One of my kids, nice though he seemed to be, totally fit the stereotype of "big dumb lug." He could not wrap his mind around the concept of paraphrasing, even after I sent him a tutorial website; in fact, he wrote back to ask if he should include the original quote when he paraphrased it. *facepalm* He also got fairly low grades on the first two exams, and basically flunked the quizzes; yet, he was always willing to raise his hand in section, even though his answers were frequently wrong, and while his emails made me want to strangle something, they were always polite. So when GradeCenter told me his numerical grade was a 76.3 (a C) I bumped him up to a 77 and gave him a C+. Not for being intelligent, but just for trying.

Of course, this was not a principle that I fully understood when I was in college, and it's obviously not something you could ever tell students without risking accusations of unfairness. But all my friends who are teachers agree that there is always a level of subjectivity in grading decisions. When we tell kids to accept responsibility and act mature, it's for their own good. Really.

ETA: I just got this email from the kid I mentioned above:

Mrs. DiMarzo,

I saw the grade. I had a good time with your class and just wish I would have done a little better on the first two tests, but its my fault. Thanks for teaching and you did a great job.
Best of luck with your future plans.

See what I mean? So polite!! (Even if he did call me my mother.)

Virginia Post-Script

I just got back from a brief trip to Charlottesville to see Sean--brief as in I left Philadelphia at 11 on Tuesday, and left his apartment around 1 this afternoon. Unfortunately for us, I have to be present to proctor the AWW exam at 9 (ughhh) tomorrow morning, and Sean has three papers and a final in the next couple of weeks (double and perhaps triple ughhh).

Last night we went to a party for his Field Methods class at his professor's house. In Sean's department, everyone refers to professors by their first names, so his professor is Lise and her husband, an anthropology professor, is Ira. They had two completely adorable children, who managed to be both extremely energetic and well-mannered, and the food was exceptional; they ordered it from an Afghan restaurant in town, and I stuffed myself on basmatic rice, chick peas, spicy chicken, and lamb kebobs (I know, I'm off red meat, but I decided that for last night's purposes, lamb is white meat). Dessert was an applesauce cake that tasted like a riff on my mom's pumpkin squares recipe, complete with cream cheese frosting. After dinner, Lise's kids demanded that we play, so there were games in the front yard, and Sean and I faced off across a badminton net (we were equally awful at spotting that little shuttlecock in the growing darkness). Their house had a lovely yard that sloped to a creek. That sort of thing always gives me hope for Sean and I someday!

There were also a couple of dogs in attendance; Lise's dog Tatti, a Shitzu, and one of the other students brought his Sheltie, which was named...Sheltie. It was even bigger than Sheena, with a monstrously fluffy coat; since it was an old dog, it was decidedly not interested in the antics of the Shitzu, and spent most of the evening trying to avoid it by ducking behind other people. Sean mentioned to me that he'd kind of like to have a dog, but the problem (besides the expense) is that his apartment would be best suited to a small dog like Tatti, while he wants a dog that he could go jogging with. We looked at Charlottesville's ASPCA website and cooed over many adorable faces, but no sale.

After we came home, Sean and I faced off again, this time over Scrabble, and he kicked my ass again. Now, I have a reputation for being a totally sore loser at Scrabble, but that is only with Sean, and that's because I never stand a damned chance with him! I think I have won ONE game in all our time together. One! So naturally, when he scores a huge amount of points in some strategic location (usually exactly where I wanted to put MY next word) I get grumpy, because I know I just lost the game. Meanwhile, Sean likes to say falsely encouraging things like "oh c'mon, sweetie, you're only ten points behind me....twenty...fifty...." and then suddenly the final score's 216 to 158. Sigh.

In other news, I came home to find my signature pages from Dr. Cooper finally arrived. It turns out I cursed her name for nothing--she actually mailed them in NJ on April 28, and somehow that took until May 6 to arrive. That's ridiculous. Now I know not to trust the post office--no wonder they're losing business!

A Passing

Phyllis put Thomas to sleep today. He wasn't sick, exactly, not in any pain as far as we could tell, but his back legs stopped working properly, he couldn't use his litterbox, and he stopped eating. The vet couldn't find anything in particular that was wrong, and he was about 12 years old, so she suggested he just might be fading away. He had become a shade of his former annoying self the past few days, no longer able to follow us around the house like he used to, no wailing from the ground floor when he wanted to hear the sound of his own (surprisingly loud) voice, but he was still probably the cutest cat I've ever seen, and certainly one of the gentlest. In all the time I've known him, he never bit or scratched, never so much as hissed. I couldn't say the same for any of my other cats, not by a longshot!

Yesterday he also lost control over his bladder, so Phyllis kept him on the porch until nightfall, when she made a bed for herself and him on the porch. Today she took the day off and spent it with him, and I got home from school as she was making the appointment with the vet to have him put to sleep. I drove, with Phyllis holding Thomas in her lap in a blanket. He was nervous, especially in the vet's office, and he cried piteously when they put the needle with the sedative in. Once he was asleep, the vet administered the other drug. The only other time I saw this done was with Pepper, freshman year of high school, and I'd forgotten how fast it is: he stopped breathing pretty much instantaneously. Phyllis and I were both crying.

As it turns out, cat cremation is very expensive ($250!) so she opted to take him home for burial. They gave us a little box, which is currently sitting--open--on a table by the window on the porch. Phyllis decided to have him "lie in state" for a day; she said she had a Buddhist roommate once whose cat died and who had him lie in state for three days to make sure his spirit had passed on, and Phyllis said she wanted to make sure Thomas had the opportunity to do the same. We toasted him with peach brandy, and Phyllis even poured a little out in a dish, like the Greeks would have done.

Dear Thomas, as much as I made fun of your for your stupidity and grew irritated with your yowls, you were a good cat, and we'll miss you. Requiescat in pacem.

One Last Step

Well, my thesis is done and uploaded to the graduate school, so now all I'm missing is Dr. Cooper's original signature page, which she claims to have mailed but which I have not yet received. Sigh. I emailed her again just to gently remind her, in case she did forget, because they need that by Monday, no excuses. I'd really rather not have to ask her to Fedex overnight a single page, but if it turns out she forgot, I will be so irritated. And I will know, too, because you bet I'm going to look at that postmark.

Tomorrow is my last section for the semester! Sean got a round of applause from his class today, but I know that's asking too much. Especially since I plan to publicly shame any jackass who hands their paper to me without a staple in it. I gave them a rousing "you're-in-college-you-can-find-a-goddamned-stapler" speech last week, and even reminded them via email yesterday, so we'll see who dares risk my wrath with a dog-eared final paper. Amy suggested that we should just "lose" the other pages and then give them an F for handing in something incomplete, but no one's that much of a bitch. Yet.

:-)

This is the email I got from Dr. Hall this morning:

Dear Michelle,

I have read your impressive thesis and attached it with a half dozen editorial comments.

You have done a most admirable job of examining this subject from multiple points of view, demonstrating your ability to work with whatever methodology is applicable and useful in the context. There is architectural history, social history, ideological analysis, and even stylistic analysis here. You demonstrate the wide range of your skills in a wonderfully well-written essay. Dr. Cooper is a better judge than I, but I would think this was publishable.

It is certainly among the very best Masters theses I have read.

Complimenti!

Yay!

ETA further awesomeness: Dr. Cooper was copied on the email above, so she replied congratulating me for getting such praise from Dr. Hall, and suggested that they put their heads together on how I might get this published!

They're also both going to email a mutual friend (who happens to be co-chairing the session at CAA next year to whicb I'm submitting an abstract based on my thesis) "in support of [my] acceptance." It came as a bit of a surprise to me upon entering grad school to discover how much of your success is dependent on who you know, or, more to the point, on who your advisors know. This is not merely the means of getting your first paper at a conference or a publication; it extends to job searches as well, hence the interest in getting your degree at an institution where the faculty are well-respected and thus hopefully well-connected. Luckily for me, anyone who does Venice knows Dr. Cooper, especially after her last book, Palladio's Venice, won the Gordan Prize from the Renaissance Society of America, and pretty much everyone and their mother in Renaissance studies knows Dr. Hall. I'm perfectly content to let this work in my favor; after all, if you don't get an Ivy degree, you really need to seize any and all potential advantages.

The important thing at the moment, though, is that they both really liked my thesis! Actually, I was kind of surprised by just how much they evidently liked it, especially Dr. Hall, who is not always particularly forthcoming with praise. I won't pretend that I didn't think it was good--I certainly did--I just didn't think it was earth-shattering. Of course, I've been staring at this information, in one form or another, for going on seven months, so I've kind of lost a bit of objectivity.

I told a couple of my friends at school about this, but only because they're both PhD students (and neither did their master's at Temple). There's obviously a line between being properly proud of your own accomplishments, and touting them at the expense of someone else's feelings. I was therefore a little surprised when Dr. Hall mentioned during our class this afternoon how I had just written an excellent thesis that managed to present just the right amount of information, neither over-taxing nor infantilizing the reader. It so happened that a major fault of the paper that we were discussing was the author's assumption of a vast amount of knowledge of textual sources on the part of the reader; that meant her comment was timely, but since one of the other students in our class of seven is currently struggling to finish her thesis, and Dr. Hall is one of her advisors, it was also kind of awkward.

Now it's time to convert my thesis to a .pdf and upload it to the dissertation and thesis site. Drumroll!

New York Vignettes

I just returned from a lovely visit to New York to visit Heather and Sara. Friday night we stayed at Heather's apartment and went out with some of her friends. On Saturday Heather had a lesbian wedding to attend, so Sara and I went to the Natural History Museum, where we met up with her boyfriend Zach (my first time meeting him). The museum is quite vast and a little overwhelming, both in terms of the amount of information being thrust at you and the number of people in it on a weekend afternoon.

However, I saw the dinosaurs, plus the model of the giant fucking whale that reminded me immediately of why I find oceans kind of creepy, because they can harbor things like that and you will never know until they're trying to eat you. Fine, yes, blue whales eat plankton, not people, but the principle is the same: large scary things live in oceans. I have a kid's book in a box in my closet called Animals You Will Never Forget, and there was a page in there that I had to skip each and every time I read that book because it scared me so damn much. It was an illustration of a man on a raft floating next to an orca. I just couldn't handle the difference in scale that that image presented.

That book was awesome, by the way. I just looked it up and it's out of print, but people posted comments on Amazon about how that title is no joke because they still remember so many of the stories in there. Despite my own awful memory, I can think of at least a dozen of those stories, and even picture the illustrations that went with them. Some of them were just fun (Rascal the raccoon, or the one about the otter called "Ring of Bright Water"--see? I even remember titles!) but some were heart-wrenching. The one that made me cry every time was about a family that adopts a duckling named Waddles, who sort of thinks it's a dog and is very protective of the little girl. At the end of the story, the little girl was outside in their backyard when the mother heard on the radio that there's a rabid dog in the neighborhood. She looked outside, and lo and behold, said rabid dog was slinking into her yard and making for the kid--but just as it tried to attack, Waddles ran at it, wings flapping and squawking, giving the woman time to grab the little girl and run inside. When the police finally arrived and shot the dog, they called her outside and showed her where Waddles was lying with his neck broken and his beak covered in blood--he'd kept attacking the dog until he'd driven it past the gate:

"I don't think the bullet was necessary," said the officer, looking with wonder at the dog's mutilated head. Some inborn instinct from his wild, dim past must have inspired Waddles to hold out until he drove his last enemy from the little plot of earth he held sacred.

OK, I didn't remember that bit on my own, nor did I remember it being named Waddles, or even that it was a duck (I thought it was a goose because he's white in the illustration, and are there even white ducks?). I went into the closet and pulled out the book to look at it. Yes, I cried again while reading this story. It's just such a brave little goose/duck! Also, just to test myself, I looked at the page with the illustration of the guy with the orca (such is the strength of my memory of this book that I saw the story title "Life Among the Elephants" and thought "Oh hey, it's the one right before this one!") Anyway, it still gives me the creeps. It's just so big, and he's so small...well, actually, I'm forcing myself to look at it again, and I think the whale might be portrayed just a bit out of scale. I'm thinking of the images of that trainer who was recently drowned by the orca she was feeding--there wasn't quite as great a discrepancy in size as there is in this image. Whatever. This freaked me out as a child and still does.

Man, I semi-forgot how awesome this book is! It's also older than I thought (1969), which on second thought explains why almost all the stories are from the earlier part of the 20th century. I learned about a lot of world events indirectly from these stories; I remember one story involving the Spanish influenza epidemic in the US in 1918, and another about the dancing horses of Vienna and how General Patton rescued them during in WWII after they performed for him. Ha, I just found another favorite, "The Rooster That Served the Lord." This is set in a rural farming community where the pastor decides to have everyone take money from the collection plate and invest it somehow, with the profits payable to God. The narrator's father dubiously takes five dollars and buys a clutch of Leghorn eggs, of which only one hatches, and that one a rooster, which can't lay any eggs to sell. The rooster, named Prunejuice, causes a lot of trouble, like getting his leg run over the by the family car, and picking fights with the cat in which cream is spilled and glass gets broken, so the father keeps a record of how much the rooster has cost them vs. what is "to the good." In the end, someone comes looking for a Leghorn rooster for his chickens. On account of Prunejuice's crooked leg, he only offers fifteen dollars, but that still means that not only has Prunejuice finally "squared his account," but he's made a little bit for God, as well.

Wow, how did this post get from my weekend to my extensive recollections of a book from my childhood? Whatever: it's a damned good book. In fact, I think I'm going to go re-read it now!

Yay!!

Dr. Cooper sent back the remainder of my thesis this morning with only a few edits, and this concluding note: "A terrific thesis! Brava!"

*cue Cheshire-cat grin*

Reading List

I heard from Dr. Cooper today! She said she's going to try to finish my thesis tomorrow while on the train from Scotland to London (that's 8 hours by car according to Google Maps, so yes, I think she'll have time). That means my time as a lady of leisure will be coming to a close, but I'm OK with that.

On the plus side, I've done quite a bit of reading in the past few weeks, more than I think I've done at any point during grad school so far. I think the beginning of this stretch started with a new biography of Cardinal Wolsey that just came out, but unfortunately, it wasn't academic enough to be proper history and it wasn't well-written or interesting enough to be popular history. Then I re-read Jane Austen's Emma with a much more sympathetic eye than I did the first time around. I've never liked Emma's character because she's snobbish and a know-it-all, but having watched and enjoyed the recent BBC miniseries, I was able to enjoy the book as well. The light-hearted charm of the actress who played Emma in the miniseries, Romola Garai, undoubtedly influenced me in this regard.

After Emma, I read the collected short stories of Mark Twain, which were as satirically funny as anything you'd expect of the original Man in the White Suit (sit down, Tom Wolfe). If I were making a list of famous dead people I'd want to meet, he would be on it, hands-down. This year is the 100th anniversary of his death, and a new biography of him just came out that I saw reviewed very favorably in the Economist. I haven't laid hands on a copy from the library yet, not for lack of trying!

Twain was followed up by Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, a satire of the early 20th-century newspaper industry, which follows an absurd series of events befalling a group of newspapermen all trying to get the exclusive story on a coup in a made-up North African nation (which was based on Waugh's own experience covering the anticipated Italian invasion of Abyssinia, modern-day Ethiopia, in 1935). It was entertaining, but not terribly memorable.

The next item on the list was All Quiet on the Western Front, which I hadn't read since high school. I re-read it after a conversation with Sean in which he mentioned someone having posed the question of what were the five books that had changed your life the most. We both agreed that this is a very difficult question, because you can certainly enjoy books and re-read them time and again without them ever having changed your view of the world (Harry Potter, for instance). Sean said that All Quiet would definitely be on his list, and since it had made quite an impression on me when I read it, I decided to give it another go. Well, it still makes quite the impression, let me tell you. It's bleak and savage and at the same time completely heart-rending. You see the way that Paul and his friends have to completely deaden themselves of all normal human emotion in order to survive the horrors of the front, but then that same survival instinct renders him completely unable to connect with his family, with the rest of the world, when he's home on leave. When Paul talks of how he knows that everything he's bottled up is just going to come exploding out of him one day after the war is over, I can't help but think of soldiers coming home today from Iraq and Afghanistan, struggling with PTSD and rage and depression after having survived the battlefield. As much as the machinery of war has changed, the experience of the soldier seems, in many terrible ways, to have remained the same.

I have a strong recollection of the first time I read this book, which is pretty rare for someone with my bad memory. It was on the couch in the tv room downstairs, the old hideous orange and white couch that was wooly and scratchy, and I remember not being able to put it down, so I read it through in one afternoon. When I opened the book this time, I found a ticket stub from a showing of the Sixth Sense in the summer of 1999. Was that mine or Jen's? I don't know. I know I had already read it by the time it was assigned in high school, so maybe. Side note: our copy of this book was my dad's from college, and I noticed that he had written his college address inside the front cover: Bourgeois Hall. JTD, the bourgeois-iest of them all!

My string of early-2oth-century literature continued then with E.M. Forster's Howards End. It's all about the inter-relationships between three groups of people in England around 1910: the artsy, literary Schlegel family; the rich capitalist Wilcox family; and the poor Leonard Bast and his wife. At heart is Howards End, a country house belonging to Mrs. Wilcox, who dies and tries to leave it, on the spur of the moment, to Ms. Schlegel, only her husband and son never tell Ms. Schlegel, who in time becomes the second Mrs. Wilcox, while her sister gets knocked up by the poor guy who gets beaten to death by Mr. Wilcox's nasty son, who goes to jail at the end while Mr. Wilcox, Mrs. Wilcox, her sister, and her sister's illegitimate kid all wind up living together at Howards End. Um, yeah. According to Spark Notes, which I read after the fact, these groups and Howards End stand in for the author's question of who would inherit England in the 20th century: the dreamy idealists, the rough capitalists, or the working class? Since Leonard dies, I think we can safely rule out the working class, but the odd living situation at the end of the book suggests that there's not going to be any one victor, but more likely a combination of influences. Anyway, for this big-picture thinking wrapped in a domestic tale, this book is considered a classic of Brit lit.

It was not to my taste. A lot of it had to do with the characters, none of whom I found sympathetic. They were the same type of characters that populate the other Forster novel I've read, A Room with a View (except here there's not the ameliorating element of Florence as a backdrop): the upper middle class. The Schlegel sisters are independently wealthy, so they spend all their time being cultured: going to concerts, speeches, and parties where they discuss the problem of poverty with other equally-well-off women. Margaret is the older one, more sensible, less attractive; Helen is the young, passionate, beautiful one who acts without thinking (their types are evidently taken from Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility). Of course, they don't work, and they have no responsibilities of any kind, so their vapid moralizing on how best to help the poor is ridiculous, because it's meaningless.

Howards End is the type of novel where nearly every utterance coming from a female is followed by "' --!'she cried out." That annoys me to an inexpressible degree. I also don't like books that decide to tell you something about characters, over and over, rather than actually demonstrating it. In this case, it was the original Mrs. Wilcox, whose interactions with Margaret in the beginning of the novel are brief, half unpleasant and the rest awkward, and the lady herself says barely anything--yet the rest of the book she's referred to as "selfless" and "omniscient." WTF? Where did that come from?

The novel is also considered to be ahead of its time in terms of studying gender relations, but I don't know that I found it so wonderful on that point either. When Margaret receives an unexpected proposal from the really rather stupid, brash, and unpleasant businessman Mr. Wilcox, she decides she will love him, and she tells herself that she will recognize his every fault, and forgive it, and simply over time make him a better man. That is the dumbest idea ever, so even though the narrator keeps telling you that she's the sensible one, I didn't agree. One of his "faults," apparently, is that he likes women to be completely submissive. Actually, he acknowledges that he finds it ever so precious that she's smart and argues with him, just so long as she ultimately gives in and meekly admits his greater experience and authority on every topic. And she does. She recognizes that this is what he wants her to be, and she willingly becomes it. Gah!!

To be fair, Margaret finally reaches a breaking point at the end of the novel and tells her husband off and decides to leave him. It had come out earlier that he had had an affair with poor Leonard's gross wife, Jacky, when she was a prostitute in Cyprus, and Margaret forgave him meekly because...just because. Later, when it comes out that Helen had pity sex with Leonard (who left a perfectly good job on the basis of Mr. Wilcox's casual advice, and then sank into poverty) and got pregnant, Mr. Wilcox gets on his moral high horse and says he can't have a 'fallen woman' staying in the house with him. Margaret freaks out on him when he refuses to acknowledge that what he did and what Helen did are the same thing, and decides to go to Europe with her sister. That's the point at which Leonard gets offed by the unpleasant Wilcox son, and the shock of his son going to jail turns Mr. Wilcox into an invalid. That's how, at the end of the story, Margaret winds up ruling the roost at Howards End, the house she was supposed to inherit anyway, and forcing her husband to get along with her "fallen woman" sister. So I guess there's a tiny bit of a gender-relation upset there, but the problem is that Margaret spent the majority of the book being a total idiot, and I hated her, and I hated Helen, Mr. Wilcox, and basically every character in the book! The only reason I finished it was that halfway through I had flipped to the end out of exasperation to see if there was anything there that could convince me to keep reading. I saw that Leonard got killed by Wilcox's son, and I was really puzzled as to why he would kill him, and what's the poor guy doing at the country house, and thus I was suckered into finishing it. Well, that's it for you, E.M. Forster. You shall not darken my bookcase again.

Now I'm reading Catch-22, which I read once before, for Dr. Regan's class on comedy when I was a freshman in college. It's absurdist, dark humor, and I keep catching myself expecting some little episode or vignette to have a satisfactory ending, or indeed any ending at all that doesn't go around in a circle or just cut off, but that's not what you get in Yossarian's world. I think we watched part of the film version in class, and all I remember from that is someone getting their head accidentally cut off by a helicopter while they're all out swimming. I haven't gotten to that part of the book yet, though. Cheery reads I've chosen lately, right?

Now Something Totally Different

My last post inspired me to go rooting through the documents that contain my poems going back to sophomore and junior year of high school. Some were good (mostly the later ones), some mediocre (throughout) and some really, truly awful (thankfully, mostly the early ones!). I was looking specifically for all the ones I'd ever written about my dad (there are lots and lots of those), but along the way I was much more entertained by some of the humorous poems I'd written, like the Christmas ballads for Fitz junior year, as well as the one I wrote for Mr. Luddy, the physics teacher, in the same year.

Now, Mr. Luddy was a dear, but I had neither the aptitude nor the interest in physics, and certainly not of the AP variety. When the AP exam came around, I tried to weasel out of it, but my mom said if I stayed home with anything less than a deadly illness, I owed her the $85 exam fee. I didn't even have a job at that point, so I went in and took the exam. Actually, "took" is kind of overstating it. I pretty much threw in the towel half-way through, accepted the score of 1 I knew I would be getting (I did), and spent the rest of the time playing MASH in the testing booklet and creating an intricate doodle of Greg's name. Fine, except one day in class a few weeks later when Mr. Luddy gave the test booklets back, mine fell open to the back cover and revealed what I'd spent my time doing. Awkward. At some point after that, he asked something about if people had had a lot of extra time at the end, and as I looked at him sheepishly he said "Besides Michelle, of course." Ouch! Luckily, Mr. Luddy was a really nice guy and didn't hate me for it (and I mysteriously still managed an A- in the class), but I felt compelled to offer him something to prove I wasn't just a total jackass who had wasted his time in the class. Thus, at the end of the year I gave him the following poem:

Anti-Physics

I live in a different world,

In a place where there are no more abstractions,

where x and y no longer control the universe.

Here components enjoy each other’s presence,

and do not feel the need to resolve.

Gravity goes unseen;

Negatives mean bad things,

and friction is trouble between friends.

Here, “buoyancy goes hand in hand with girlancy”.

Pendulums are only in Poe’s imagination.

Footballs make touchdowns,

not parabolas.

Relativity is reserved for holidays,

weddings, and funerals,

and the only spectrum you’ll ever see

is a rainbow.

Elements are forgotten, save for those in jewelry.

Here Alphas, Betas, and Gammas are fraternities,

not particles,

and the earth revolves around our own front door.

The only attractive forces are between friends

and lovers.

Here vacuums exist to scare dogs;

Space is reserved for astronauts

and aliens,

and time moves one second at a time

all the time.

Here the laws of physics still apply

--I just don’t need to know about it.

This is my world;

welcome to reality.

OK, now looking back, that last stanza was kind of unnecessarily brush-off-ish of physics. Maybe I just couldn't find another way to end the damned thing, who knows? In its original non-blogger form it was also weirdly indented all over the place, but I was 16, and in half my poems I thought I was the reincarnation of e.e. cummings, so it could have been way worse.

I'm happy to say that Mr. Luddy (today Dr. Luddy, fulfilling every absent-minded professor stereotype) was thrilled by the poem, and even talked of trying to get it published in one of the physics journals. That never happened, of course, but I was still glad that I was able to give him something, if not a decent grade on the AP exam!

ETA: Also, the "buoyancy goes hand in hand with girlancy" thing was a classic Mr. Luddy joke. Yeah, there were lots like that.

Thursday Is the Deathcade

That's what Sean and I decided to call this April 15, the tenth anniversary of my dad's death. Deathcade! It has such a nice ring to it (it also kind of sounds like the name of a band, but that's probably just because I'm thinking of Deathcab for Cutie). Sean will be in VA and I'm in PA, so there will not be any organized celebrations of the kind we talked about (pie-eating contests and the like). We'll have to raise our pints of vanilla Haagen-Daz to JTD separately, alas.

So: ten years. In a way, it's just a meaningless milestone. What does ten years mean that nine didn't, last year? The distance between the past and the present seems to accumulate at a slower rate as time goes on. Nine, ten, eleven, it's still been a really, really long time since he's been here.

At the risk of repeating what I know I've said many other times here, it's always such a moment of sadness to look back and see all the things in my life that he missed. I mean, when he died, I was pretty much at my nadir, both in looks and personality. I had ugly glasses, uglier braces, I didn't know how to do makeup or fix my hair properly, and I wore clothes that still today chill me to the bone to remember (I was wearing a blue tie-dye tanktop the day he died, the kind that was made to look like you were wearing two layered tanks. Shudder.). Add to that the fact that I was 14, hormonal, kind of a bitch (although I guess that really peaked around the time I got the keys to the Tahoe), prone to wandering about the house for hours with my headphones glued to my head, and constantly getting into high-pitched screaming fights with Jen, and I can only imagine that I was not always the most pleasant person to be around, or to parent. I got better (really!), he just wasn't there to see it.

Of course, I always remind myself that if he had stayed around, I likely would have turned out very different. In that his death will always be different from my mom's death; I was almost 21 when she died, pretty much formed in my beliefs, opinions, and personality, and having already developed a firm idea of my course in life. If she were still alive, I don't think she would have necessarily impacted many of the choices I've made since her death. My dad, on the other hand, undoubtedly would have, and since he was not the healthiest person when he died, physically and emotionally, I don't think I would have been the better for it. Sad, maybe, but true. I still miss him on some levels,, but the pain of that loss has faded a great deal over the years, helped, I think by Sean and my transformation of him into the humorous family icon that is JTD. When I think of him these days, it's hardly ever with sadness.

One thing that has changed dramatically over the course of the past ten years is my opinion on the afterlife. Despite having given up on most other aspects of religion, I used to cling to the belief that I would see my dad again when I died because I couldn't handle the idea that this life is all there is. I couldn't handle the idea that I would never have the chance to tell him that I loved him, that he was a good father, that I forgave him for all his failings. I couldn't handle the idea that he was gone forever. Today I can say that I no longer believe in heaven, or the immortality of the soul, or any of that--not even God, really (though I'm hesitant to identify as an atheist because a., you can't prove a negative, and b., many atheists treat it as its own religion). Is that a painful thought? Yes, the more so now that my mom is gone too, but just because it would be more comforting to imagine our celestial reunion is not a reason to try to believe in something that everything else I believe challenges as ridiculous and untrue.

Three Weeks

That's how long it's been since I sent my thesis to Dr. Cooper. I haven't heard anything from her while she's been abroad, despite her assurances that she would have full internet access and we could "handle the whole thing from Italy." Yeah. Uh-huh.

New levels of Victorian-era boredom were reached yesterday: not only did I take A Long Walk in the Countryside, I also spent three hours stitching hems for the green curtains that I finally bought for the bay window in the front room while watching Anne of Green Gables on DVD. I've also been reading Mark Twain's collected short stories. Apparently, I'm in some kind of period mood.

Lazy Days

My time as a lady of leisure continues, as Dr. Cooper has still not returned the remainder of my thesis. She sent the second chapter back on Friday with minimal suggestions, again making me wonder, why exactly did this take two weeks? Now she's in Venice, so I can only imagine how long the rest of it will take. To save time, I gave Dr. Hall my front matter and first two chapters yesterday. True to her sphinxlike reputation, her reaction was not exactly what I expected: she asked me how long it was, and when I said about 65 pages she groaned "I thought yours was supposed to be short!" Er, sorry my scholarly thoroughness took a little longer than the forty pages I expected? She was off to Venice herself today, where she and Dr. Cooper will be joined by Jasmine, who's giving a paper at the first session of the Renaissance Society of America. (It is "of America," but in deference to its large foreign membership, every five years the conference is outside the US). Geloso does not even begin to cover it.

I did accomplish some practical thesis-related things today, but all of them were boring mechanical things, like re-numbering my images according to the Chicago style, which I had done incorrectly, and then going over Temple's dissertation and thesis manual to make sure that I complied with the pages and pages and PAGES of specific instructions. Example: you have to double-space between your footnotes, which you would never do in a paper because it takes up a ridiculous amount of space. I also mastered the trick of getting Arabic and Roman numerals to co-exist peacefully in the same document (thank you, Google!) Now with my front matter, text, and bibliography joined together, I have about 80 pages. The last thing will be integrating my images, but I can't do that at home because then the document would be way too big to email to myself, which is how I preserve copious numbers of back-ups.

Besides that, I spent part of the afternoon in the backyard reading Something Rotten and attempting to get some color on my white-as-can-be skin, which hours later seems to have been a dismal failure. Blast!