Reading The Modern Mind

My current reading is a rather hefty book called The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century. It offers a synthesis of a hundred years' worth of developments and discoveries in science, philosophy, art, music, and literature, and, what's more, manages to do it in an extremely engaging manner. As Library Review put it, "the mosaic he creates can best be illustrated by this typical sentence: "On 25 October 1900, only days after Max Planck sent his crucial equations on a postcard to Heinrich Rubens, Pablo Picasso stepped off the Barcelona train at the Gare d'Orsay in Paris."

The author, Peter Watson, states at the outset that he sees the twentieth century primarily as "a coming to terms with science." The first several chapters point out that so many of the scientific fields only received their fundamental grounding in the first decades of the century. In physics, the aforementioned Planck discovered the quantum; Rutherford's gold foil experiment proved the existence of the electron; Niels Bohr determined the structure of the atom; Einstein realized time is relative, not a constant. Geologists determined the age of the earth, and realized that the continents had once been a single great landmass. The 19th-century work of Gregor Mendel was taken up again, leading to the birth of the science of genetics, which was linked to Darwinism. Anthropology was born from the work of Franz Boas, who developed the concept of "culture" and introduced the idea of cultural relativism to a West that was obsessed with racial and genetic superiority of the white upper class. Freud's theories of the subconscious and of repression heralded the arrival of psychology and psychiatry. This is a breathtaking litany of accomplishments--and I've only read up to the mid-1920s! We take so many of these discoveries for granted today, when we learn them in grade school geography and high school chem class. We've all "always" known about continental drift, electron shells, the gene, but in reality it's all so incredibly recent. The 5th-century BCE Athenian philosopher Democritus theorized about the existence of discrete, indivisible particles of matter that he called "atoms," but science didn't really understand it until the 1920s CE.

The book itself is not overwhelmingly about science, however; all of the components of intellectual history are addressed (repeatedly exposing my woeful grasp of modern philosophy). I like the way the author is able to bring together the threads to show the intellectual atmosphere of a certain place, like Vienna, at a certain moment in time. Another review of the book criticized it as too "breezy and anecdotal;" perhaps that's accurate (I'm not sure I'm qualified to judge), but I wonder how much more deeply one could plumb such a massive amount of material while still creating a book that someone would actually want to read. This book is already 770 pages, with copious footnotes and a 75-page bibliography. Moreover, it's clearly intended as popular reading, not as an academic treatise, and from what I've seen so far it's both successful and enjoyable. I did notice one regrettable error, though; in his discussion of Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, which is one of my favorite books, he notes that the main character's crisis is precipitated by his best friend murdering his wife and being sent to prison. Paul does shoot his wife, but it's just a flesh wound; she doesn't die. Yes, it's a minor failing in the scheme of the mammoth undertaking of Watson's project, but as a fan of the novel, it bugs me.

I've tagged a couple of things in the book that really struck me, including these:

• Watson identifies pragmatism as one of the chief characteristics of America early in the century, a trait that allowed us, at a remove from European battles over ideology, to "cherry-pick what was best in the old world, and eschew the rest." Skyscrapers, powered flight, and film were all "fiercely practical developments," as opposed to European creations like abstraction and psychoanalysis.
• Horrified by the punitive clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, John Maynard Keynes wrote a book entitled The Economic Consequences of the Peace that predicted that Germany would encounter disaster if forced to comply with the program of reparations. This book later was seen to support the argument that the economic devastation that followed Versailles inevitably gave rise to Hitler. However, there were some who criticized Keynes for drawing undue attention to aspects of the treaty that were, ultimately, never fully enforced; these detractors claimed that Keynes' book actually helped to foster a powerful sense of resentment among the Germans. One of these critics later published a book entitled The Carthiginian Peace; or, The Economic Consquences of Mr. Keynes.
• Who does this sound like: "We are a movement...of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock..." That's not the Tea Party. Or Glenn Beck. Those are the words of Hiram W. Evans, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Anti-intellectualism has a long, long history in this country.
  

Finally, I've also added several items to my "to be read when I have time" list, including Proust's Swann's Way and Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. One book I cannot bring myself to add, though, is Ulysses. I just don't think I can handle 900 pages of Joyce; my adolescent experience of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man still rankles.

Reading Virginia Woolf

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction..." This is Woolf's statement at the very outset of her 1928 essay, "A Room of One's Own." She wonders why so few women have made significant contributions to literature, and this prescription contains the answer: historically, they have had neither the time nor the money to do so. Moreover, they have consistently been told by male authority figures that they cannot and should not write. At one point, she describes a poignant scenario in which Shakespeare had an equally talented sister, who, denied any opportunity to exercise her gift and forced into marriage by her father, winds up taking her own life, while her brother goes on to win the world's acclaim.

The conclusion that only economic and personal independence can foster individual expression may seem a little obvious to us today, and her earnest claim for equal rights for women strikes less of an urgent chord forty years after the feminist movement began in earnest (in fact, the way she traces the social obstacles that prevented women from taking up writing reminded me a lot of the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin's well-known essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?") Woolf, of course, was writing in a very different period, less than a decade after women had won the vote in Britain, and when women's attempts to move beyond the home sphere was still being met with open derision. At the beginning of the book she describes being barred from entering the quadrangle of an Oxford college, where she had just been a guest at a sumptuous luncheon, because she didn't have a (male) Fellow of the college to escort her. That evening, she has dinner at the women's college, where she is dismayed to find the food utterly unappealing, and the surroundings grim. Her recognition that although these female students have managed to make a foothold in the otherwise male territory of higher education, they are far from being able to compete on equal footing (or funding) leads her into the general contemplation of the kind of liberty that is required for creative endeavors.

Later on, she writes about how society judges the value of cultural products according to gendered expectations:

"Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying clothes "trivial". And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deal with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop..."

I think that this still holds true in some respects today. If you asked someone who had never read Tolstoy or Austen (but who had a basic understanding of what each wrote about) which author was greater, I'd bet that they would privilege the one who wrote about "important" themes like politics, revolution, and tragedy over the one who wrote about "insignificant" things like women's relationships. I'm not trying to claim that either writer was, in fact, better than the other (although, considering the fact that I spent most of Anna Karenina eagerly awaiting the title character's suicide, my personal preference is definitely Austen), just that those types of value judgments based on gender stereotypes still exist.

Although Woolf is clearly a believer in the equality of men and women, she's also a passionate defender of the value of the difference between the sexes:

"It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity, and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself "superior."

There are instances where Woolf reveals that she too has unconscious prejudices, formed from her own particular historical and social circumstances. For instance, like all British writers of the earlier era, she has a strongly defined sense of class, and no interest in how those boundaries might be made permeable or overturned altogether. She's not concerned with working class women or single mothers; only middle- and upper-class women interest her, because they are the only ones she imagines capable of works of genius. Her suggestion of the complementary nature of men and women's kinds of creativity is another example. She is only capable of envisioning this in heteronormative terms, with the very best result achieved from the union of masculine and feminine creative impulses.

I don't find Woolf particularly easy to read--the thread of her writing moves like a fish in a stream, darting this way and that, lyrical and modern at the same time. What was she like to talk to, I wonder? I'll add her to my list of famous personages I'd like to meet. Hm, do you know what I just realized, thinking over my list? There are no other women on it! Instead there are men who did "important" things, like conquer (Napoleon, Alexander), lead great nations (Churchill), create masterpieces (Michelangelo). I've never thought about wanting to meet Jane Austen, for example. I suppose it's because I've always imagined myself meeting people who had firsthand experience of some of the great events in history, and, due to the very obstacles Woolf describes, those individuals were very rarely women. Then again, it's not like I've ever given much thought to the list; if I had, I'm sure I could do women a bit more justice.

New Things, Pt II

My new netbook came today! This is my early birthday present from Sean, although it required quite a bit of cajoling to convince him I needed a second computer. I do, I swear! Thanks to Rae, I got it ridiculously cheap, too--she clued me in that Woot.com was offering a refurbished model of the exact type I wanted for $177, instead of the $300 I was going to pay for it. It's the same netbook Linda has, so I already knew I liked it. It's so little and cute! Look it at it next to its big sister:


Ironically, once I'd set it up and found that nice Georgia O'Keeffe background, I put it away--there's not much point in using a netbook at home when I have a laptop. Trains, planes and automobiles, that's another story! This little baby only weighs two pounds. That is awesome, compared to the size and heft of my laptop. I don't even need to put any software on it, because I take notes directly into Zotero. It even came with Skype pre-loaded, so I'm all set.

I downloaded a program called Gimp for my laptop, which is basically an open-source version of Photoshop. It's pretty awesome, and to someone of my limited Ps abilities, it seems pretty much the same as the original. I'm going to have to take a tutorial or something, though, because it took me a really long time to make this image for my laptop background:

It's just a matter of putting two images together, but that whole "layers" thing really confuses me, what can I say. The image on the left is Eakins' Portrait of Louis N. Kenton, frequently called "The Thinker," and on the right is Velazquez' famous portrait of Pablo de Valladolid. I think I've written about this on here before, but Eakins was extremely impressed by the Spanish Golden Age painters he saw in the Prado, chief among them Velazquez, and it's clear that he was thinking back to the earlier portrait in creating this one of his brother-in-law.

This is the first time I've changed my laptop background since I first bought it and installed Holbein's portrait of Sir Thomas More (I have a think for portraits, I suppose). I was looking through images I have saved from various school projects, and these guys caught my eye. Juxtaposed like this, it seems like Pablo is gesturing for us to take note of Kent--encouraging us to consider the contemplative life, perhaps?

To balance this acquisition, I happily divested myself of some unwanted goods today, thanks to Freecycle: my old laptop case, the wireless card, and both my undergrad and master's graduation gowns. I want to give away the laptop, too, but it's too screwed up to let me erase the hard drive. I tried physically removing the hard drive, but the screws mounting it to the cage are also screwed up and won't open. Everything from college is on there, lurking in some form on the disk drive, so I'm not giving it away with the hard drive intact. For now, it's been relegated to storage again.

Changes and New Things

The new school year has (almost!) begun. Yesterday was the new student orientation, which I attended as the president (cough-dictator-cough) of GAHO. We have 22 new students, which is just a huge group. There are even three, count 'em, THREE male students, including a kid from Taiwan who's going to be working on American road photography. Another one of the guys, who I actually met last year when he visited, moved to the neighborhood next to mine, and takes the R7 from the next stop.

Orientation was fun, at least the parts where were got to talk to the new students. Listening to the professors go over the minutiae of graduate requirements, not so much. (German language exams: get thee behind me, Satan!) Immediately after giving a tour to half the group, I ran back to Tyler for my meeting with Dr. Cooper re: my entire future. I'll finish my coursework this year, meaning I'll be taking my exams in the fall of 2011. However, in order to get funding for my fifth year and beyond, funding to go do research in Venice, I have to apply for grants which have deadlines in late November and December. Problem: in order to qualify for those grants, you need to have had your dissertation proposal submitted and accepted before the deadline. Meaning, within less than a year and a half, I need to have studied for and taken my preliminary exams AND figured out what I want to write a dissertation on. That's not going to be easy. Dr. Cooper pointed out that studying for the specialized field part of the exams should basically be providing you with the background for your dissertation, so hopefully that will make things easier. Right now, a rough idea of my areas is Venice and the Mediterranean, 1450-1550 for my broad field, and Venice and the Veneto for my boutique field.

Dr. Cooper also wants me to attend the annual Corso at the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura in Vicenza next year. It's a weeklong program every August that usually focuses on Palladio; all the major names in the field of 16th century architecture attend, there's a ton of networking (according to her), and you get guided tours of a whole bunch of Palladio's villas, including those that aren't open to the public. There are scholarships for grad students to attend, although airfare and hotel would be on me. Two problems: one, everything is in Italian, and two, this would be smack in the middle of exam prep. Dr. Cooper seems to think this is no big deal--she even suggested I look into opportunities that might allow me to go abroad to gather material and dissertation ideas before taking my exams, which I told her I definitely couldn't imagine doing from a psychological standpoint--but I'm not so sure. The jury is out on this.

Tomorrow begins what I hope will be a regimented, daily involvement with my Berlitz materials to focus on honing my speaking skills. Still, I don't know if I'll be up to listening to a week of not only Italian speakers, but Italian academics--if they talk anything like they write, they like to use a looooot of words to say very little. I'm also applying to participate in an online paleography course hosted by the Medici Archive project in Florence that trains people in reading 16th-century archival material. Jasmine did it last year and liked it; that was their first run, so it was free for everyone, but now they're charging $350. Still, I think it will be worth it.

Finally, Dr. Cooper encouraged me to let Dr. Hall know that I'm interested in being considered for the department's Rome fellowship, which sends one of the Renaissance/Baroque students to Rome for a semester every year. She thinks I could still be considered even though I have departmental funding. Of course, I have to be able to convince Dr. Hall that there's material for me to study in Rome that will be beneficial to my larger research interests--in other words, I have to dig up some Venetian stuff to tell her I want to look at.

Obviously, this is a lot to consider. There are some drawbacks to moving so quickly through the PhD coursework like I've done. Usually, people have to do three semesters of classes, and then use the fourth semester plus that summer to prepare for exams, take the exams in the summer, and then have until late fall to prepare a proposal. Jasmine did everything in record time last year, and Dr. Cooper expressed her conviction that I can handle everything just as smoothly. Well, I don't have Jasmine's near-photographic memory, so we'll see how this goes. Mainly, I need to focus on incorporating as much exam prep into the next two semesters as I can, and hopefully I'll figure out a fascinating and sale-able dissertation topic!

Self-Portraiture and Summer Pasta

Raphael, Self-Portrait with a Friend, c. 1519

Sean and I both slept in today, and then spent the remainder of the day reading. It being Sunday, Sean insisted on having "dinner" in the early afternoon, following the Italian tradition. I had agreed to cook--cook, in this instance, meaning "chop up some basil, garlic, arugula, and grape tomatoes, toss with oil and vinegar, and mix with pasta." So simple, but so good!

Speaking of good food, we went to an Afghan restaurant for dinner Friday night. We had tasted the food at Sean's professor's house early in the summer, and it was so flavorful that we knew we had to go to the actual establishment. The scent of the mingled spices when you walk in the door is incredibly enticing. Sean tried to compare it to Indian, but I resisted, because Indian restaurants smell like feet, and this place smelled like awesome. Now, I'd told myself that I was going to get chicken or something and not the lamb, because I've given up red meat, but when I was actually in the environment, with those spices tickling my nose, there was just no way I was not getting lamb. And it was absolutely delicious--I got it cooked in peppers and onions, with the best basmati rice I've ever tasted. Yeah, I'm getting a little hungry just thinking about it. This week will be my last in Charlottesville, and I probably won't be back again until January, so we're planning a bit of a restaurant cruise, including a tapas restaurant (Sean has been craving sangria, and they have croquetas!), Greek pizza from our favorite pizza joint, and maybe, just maybe, a bit more lamb from the Afghan place. Yum.

As for reading, I finished Joanna Woods-Marsden's Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist. My working procedure right now is to take notes as I'm reading, then go back and write a short summary so I can refresh my memory when I'm studying later on. After that I go on JSTOR and look for a couple of reviews. It seems to be a fact of grad school (or maybe just me and Sean) that if you're reading a well-written scholarly book, you often find yourself in general approbation of it once you're finished. You enjoyed it, you learned from it, the pictures were pretty. But then you read a review that--while not ripping the author the proverbial new one--points out flaws in the argument or the structure, and places where the author over-reached, or didn't go far enough. That forces you to step back and realize, hey, this book isn't perfect. On the other hand, if you notice that certain books received near-universal acclaim from other scholars, that's a good sign of a Very Important Book that you need to slot into your grasp of the historiography.

I enjoyed Woods-Marsden's book while I was reading it, but then I found a review that pointed out a series of limitations, chief among them the structure of the book. She only looked at about 25 self-portraits, all of which were Italian. They were also all "autonomous" self-portraits, meaning she excluded the many examples of the long-standing tradition of self-insertion in a wall fresco or other painting. A second reviewer pointed out that the division of the book into short chapter, nearly every one dealing with a separate artist and focusing a lot on biography, smacked a little too much of the archetypal "Vasarian" structure.

The first reviewer also found fault with the book's theoretical underpinning. I won't go into it at length, but suffice it to say that he thought her attitude toward self-portraits was too limited, in that she interpreted them merely as a function of the artists' desire to improve their social standing at court. She persisted in seeing the self-portraits simply as crafted, fictitious personae, rather than allowing for any "creative friction" between the artists' inner and outer selves. In sum, although thic could count as an Important Book, it doesn't qualify among the pantheon of the VIBs! Sorry, Joanna.

Travels

I've logged a little over 1,000 miles on my car since last Sunday, when I left Charlottesville for Philadelphia, eagerly awaiting Sean's return from the Netherlands. We spent a couple of days in New Haven and had Sean's slightly-belated birthday dinner, featuring crab sauce and Linda's delicious pistachio cake--it tastes nothing like pistachios, which is good because I don't like them! That in itself is actually surprising, because normally I love salty things. I associate pistachios with my mom and Jen. They would buy a bag of the (very expensive) nuts at Homsy's, the foreign-food store near my grandparents' house where we stocked up on Syrian bread and the allspice-formerly-known-as-Syrian-pepper, and then spend the evening filling the air with these sounds: crack! (shell opens) plink! (shell tossed in little glass bowl) chomp! (nut enters mouth). I think they could go through a pound of pistachios in a single sitting. It used to annoy me no end, especially since I couldn't join in, having tried them and found them, gasp, too salty.

But I digress. On Thursday, I headed north while Sean went south, he to Charlottesville, and I to Massachusetts. I had lunch with my aunts and my cousin Lisa (at an Applebee's, bleh), and then headed to the Wiegers compound in Mendon to see Carla. I hadn't seen her since December! It's kind of like living apart from Sean--the longer the separation, the easier it becomes in some ways, but then you see the other person and realize just how much you've missed them in the interim. (Thankfully I get to see Sean a lot more frequently than I get to see Carla!) She'll be back again in February to renew her visa and plans to visit me in Philadelphia, yay!

While at Carla's I read the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, about a relationship that springs up between a young writer living in 1947 London and a group of Channel Islanders who lived through the Nazi occupation of the islands during the war. It's a fascinating story; I'd never even heard of the Channel Islands before, much less that they were occupied--indeed, they were the only part of the UK that Hitler ever managed to conquer. The added narrative twist is that everything plays out in letters (an epistolary novel, thanks Mrs. Juda!) between the columnist, Juliet, and various residents of the island of Guernsey, as well as letters to her friends, her editor, and the wealthy American who wants to make her a trophy wife. Definitely a good read.

After leaving her house yesterday I went to Worcester to visit Rae. Her cat, Ophelia, is adorable (and is properly friendly to me, unlike Carla's cat Salem, who decided to be absolutely terrified of me on this visit). We had lunch, and then she took me to her lab at UMass to watch her do some Science. Prior to this when I talked to Rae while she was at work, I envisioned her in a space like Ms. Zubrowski's chem lab at NWC, but it was quite different. More stuff, less white surfaces. Rae also doesn't wear a lab coat--another illusion, smashed!

From there, I went back to New Haven, and this afternoon came down to Philadelphia. Tomorrow, the last leg--back to Charlottesville, and Sean. It has been a LOT of driving, and my 1998 Corolla finally hit 100k miles, but it's been a really good week!

A Bit of Raphael

Today was another successful day in the library! I managed to read (nearly) all of Lisa Pon's Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print, which offered a lot of intriguing context and analysis of the ways prints functioned in the early 16th century. The book centers around the relationship between Raphael, the greatest painter of the High Renaissance, and the printer Marcantonio Raimondi, with whom he had an active collaboration in Rome. Raphael embraced the rise of mechanical reproduction, not only because it offered a wider audience for his work, but, as Pon argues, because his own technical interests were closely allied to the art of engraving. Pon challenges several traditional ways of thinking about prints, like the tendency to automatically regard a print made after a painting as a faithful reproduction of the original-- something that is especially fraught if the original painting has been lost or damaged, and the print is all we have left.

In contrast to the Italian duo, Durer represents an artist who tried to maintain absolute control over the reproduction of his images in an age before copyright. He became enraged when he found out that Raimondi had only copied his Life of the Virgin engravings and was selling them in Venice--complete with Durer's AD monogram. He petitioned the Venetian Senate for damages, making this the first case brought by an artist over intellectual property rights. He ultimately won, but the judgment only decreed that Raimondi could no longer include the monogram in his images, not that he couldn't make copies at all. Now, this is a oft-told story, and one that usually makes Raimondi sound little better than the guys selling the knock-off Gucci bags in New York City. According to Pon's recreation of the context of early 16th-century printing, however, not only were such borrowings traditional and generally accepted, but the secondhand engravers and printers viewed themselves not as counterfeiters, but as working in collaboration with the original makers--hence their inclusion of authenticating insignia like Durer's monogram. She also points out that even though the verb used to denote the process, contrafare, is a cognate for "counterfeit," it had a much more neutral connotation during the 16th century.

Durer and Raphael worked in very different ways; the former by himself, the latter as the head of a large and very busy workshop of apprentices, associates, and specialists--the entire production of which, however, was recognized as being "by the hand of Raphael." (Long before Don Draper, Raphael had some serious brand recognition). Pon also reproduced a drawing that I'd never seen before today, a study for Pythagoras in the School of Athens.

At left, a group of young men cluster eagerly around a bald-headed artist who's sketching a nude male model in the center. The same model appears at the right, robed and slightly larger in scale. Although the uniform use of highlights make the left and center appear unified, this is actually a composite image. The turbaned man and the bald man each appear twice as separate characters; the bald sketcher is elbow-to-elbow with himself as an onlooker, and the turbaned man is both model and student. Pon also points out that the scale of the seated figure relative to the model makes it clear that the latter must be further back in space.

What interested me in this image is the way it represents workshop practice. Sketching from life was a major component of artistic education and practice in the Renaissance, and Raphael clearly made use of his own employees as models, posing them in different roles and then combining those drawings into the group shown here. More unique, though, is what the drawing reveals about how artists' models managed to contort themselves into appropriately sinuous positions long enough to be drawn--they used a prop! Raphael's drawing demonstrates two phases of preparatory drawing: the nude model with the crutch visible, and the more finished figure at the right, the crutch hidden beneath the fall of drapery.

In the actual fresco (I'm skipping over the stage of the cartoon, which is basically one giant preparatory drawing that is used to transfer the design to the wall), the artist and his pupils are transformed into Pythagoras and his students, while the model becomes another ancient philosopher. The grace and harmony of the finished fresco thus conceals two of the realities of artistic practice: the use of the same models (by altering their facial characteristics and hair) and the use of the crutch to achieve the perfect contrapposto pose.


I like this comparison so much that I'm going to work it into the AWW section that covers School of Athens. We try to put a lot of focus on materials and techniques, as opposed to style, because students tend to like the concrete stuff more. I think this demonstrates very clearly how an artist could move from idea to playing with a composition to a finished work, while also revealing the "special effects" that helped make the final illusion possible.

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.