Endings and Beginnings

I left Charlottesville today for the last time. There are a lot of (edible) things I'll miss about it--Foods of all Nations; the gelato shop downtown; Ariana Kabob House; the Greek pizza from College Inn; the most delicious cherries I've ever tasted, fresh-picked. And while Virginia's politics may be fucked up (I was about to write frakked, which is how I know we watched too much BSG), otherwise it's a really beautiful place to live, with the Blue Ridge Mountains as your backdrop. I'll miss that loveliness.

True to form, however, I was really happy to be back in my house in Philadelphia, even though it's only for a couple of nights. After spending a month in Sean's apartment, which, although definitely very nice (and containing Sean, which propels it to first rank!) is still just an apartment, I relish all the space and the light that our house here has, the smell of all the wood, the creaking of the staircases going up. Clearly Phyllis has been enjoying herself in my absence, too, since I found an empty beer bottle in my bathroom, where she likes to enjoy a nice soak in the claw-foot tub. I'm not a bath person myself, but it's nice to look at, anyway. It's home!

That said, on Friday I depart for Middlebury, for an adventure that I'm both excited and really, really nervous about. I hope it's amazing, I hope I meet wonderful people and have a fantastic time, but a little part of me is worried well, what if no one likes me because I'm not funny and intelligent in Italian? What if no one wants to sit with me in the cafeteria? What if I forget how to say "do you guys want to have lunch?" (volete pranzare?) Wahhh!

No, it'll be fine. It's going to be great. Actually, it's going to be BUSY. Here's the schedule they list:

8:00 a.m. - Wake up, eat breakfast, and prep for class

9:00 a.m. - Morning classes (class time ranges from 3 to 5 hours in the morning, depending on the School)

1:00 p.m. - Lunch and rest

3:00 p.m. - Cocurricular activities, free time, homework, and class preparation

4:00 p.m. - Afternoon classes (afternoon class time varies, depending on the School)

5:00 p.m. - Films, lectures, or presentations

7:00 p.m. - Dinner

8:30 p.m. - Faculty office hours, cocurricular activities, homework, class preparation, dances

10:00 p.m. TV and . . . sleep (both in-language)

Like what they did there at the end? They're not kidding about this language pledge business!

Most of all, though, it's going to be hard being cut off from Sean, going from living together to just talking a few minutes on the phone every night, carefully out of earshot of the other dedicated Italian learners. He's going to be in C-ville for another month until the big move. I won't be able to see him until August 12...eleven days after his birthday. Sigh. I miss my husband already.

The Whirlwind

I should really try to recap the past few weeks on here, shouldn't I? Sean and I had a fantastic time in Turkey. It hasn't unseated the reigning champion of vacations, our trip to Greece, but then I don't know that anything is going to beat the magic of our first great adventure together. Still, Turkey gave it a good shot.

The night before we left, we stayed with Sara and Zach in Brooklyn and hung out with them and Heather. The next day our flight wasn't until 5, so we had brunch with Zach, who was then between jobs, and played with The Greatest Dog Ever Hands Down ( usually know by the shorter name of Oscar). I was surprised by how well Sean and Zach got along, actually, what with Zach being a hipster, and Sean being a "get off my lawn" old man, and all. But it turns out that they have compatible visions of world domination. *eye roll*

Our flight over went smoothly. We scored a pair of aisle seats, also known as Michelle's Magic Formala for traveling without killing your spouse (I hear some people fare perfectly well sitting next to their husband or wife on a plane, but those people have clearly not been married next to Sean "you're going to be my playtoy now" Gleason on a long flight). I even managed to get a few hours of sleep, which is rare. We landed in Istanbul at around 10am, and enjoyed the pleasure of seeing a sign with my (misspelled) name on it outside the arrivals gate. Being whisked away by a driver at the airport is nice, especially when it only costs 20 euros for you both. I want this to happen on every trip!

Our hotel, Hotel Peninsula, was located in Sultanahmet, which is the touristy district of Istanbul. Istanbul is a curiously sprawling city, divided by its two rivers, the Golden Horn (separating the more historical Ottoman/Byzantine neighborhoods, including Sultanahment, from the trendier and more crowded Beyoglu) and the Bosporus, separating the European and Asian halves of the city. Our hotel was a five-minute walk from the Topkapi Palace, the Hagia Sophia, and the Blue Mosque, which was our favorite architectural monument in the city.

The guy at the front desk of our hotel, Rohat, was an incredibly friendly guy--so friendly that you couldn't hand in your key and leave the hotel without at least a five minute conversation! He knew quite a bit about American culture (more than most Turks, though they are all quick to profess how much they love America), and wants to be a screenwriter, so he watches a lot of English movies. We also discovered, on our last night, that he was also a Kurd, so we got an interesting perspective into what it's like to deal with both Kurdish and Turkish identities, within an overwhelmingly nationalistic culture that wants you to deny one half of your background.

Turkey is crazy about nationalism. They made us look pretty normal, actually. Ataturk, the guy who basically made Turkey into a modern state in the 1920s, is seriously revered--his face was absolutely everywhere, including on a three-foot-high poster outside the duty-free in the airport! Likewise for Turkish flags--I don't think I've ever seen such a saturation of flags, except maybe right after 9/11, and I'm not sure even then. We're talking flags flying on nearly every building as you walk down a crowded street; flags all over the promenades, on all the boats in the harbor, on the subways; a massive flag suspended between two high-rise apartment buildings in the suburbs. (I was quite sick and tired of seeing that red with the crescent and stars halfway through our trip, honestly) It's still a crime to insult Ataturk, the flag, or 'Turkishness', and the Lonely Planet advised that those are definitely still being enforced.

We also witnessed one very interesting example of this incredible pride in Turkishness. Our arrival in Bergama coincided with the beginning of some kind of sports match in a little park. All of a sudden, we realized that not only had traffic halted, but everyone around us had frozen in their steps, women with their shopping bags, police officers, everyone. Then we realized that most of them were singing the national anthem, and the officers were saluting. Even people who weren't actively singing were frozen, though. It was like being in one of those movies where time stops around you! I can't imagine that ever happening for the American anthem, though. We're just...not that committed.

Turkey is also 99% Muslim, though it's technically a secular state, thanks first to Ataturk and now to powerful military that wants to prevent the erosion of its power by a theocracy. Never having been to a Muslim country before, I'll admit that it was a little strange to be surrounded by so many women in headscarves and burqas. There was, of course, a wide variety of dress; many Turks, as Rohat assured us, could really care less about their faith. Sultanahmet, however, is apparently a conservative neighborhood, so we saw a lot of traditional attire. Full-length burqas were less common, however, than just headscarves and modest clothing, but perhaps the most common sight was the particularly Turkish form of conservative dress, with a long button-down coat worn on top of extremely modest clothing. Like, a long heavy coat, despite ridiculous heat. I don't know how they weren't dying in those things. I mean, at least in a burqa you can imagine they're getting some air flow under there. Hell, they could be wearing a bikini and no one would be the wiser. In short, I couldn't help gawking at these women a little bit, mostly because I was trying to imagine how I would survive wearing what they were wearing.

The most obvious feature of being in a Muslim country, however, was not the women but rather the calls to prayer, five times daily. According to Wikipedia, these are at dawn, noon, midafternoon, dusk, and two hours after sunset, but we noted that the times didn't quite seem stable, whether in Istanbul or elsewhere in Turkey. In the old days, there was a guy basically yelling "get your ass in the mosque" from the minaret, but now they've been helpfully aided by technology, namely, loudspeakers. Dear god, you do not want to be walking beneath one of those puppies when it goes off, as we unsuspectingly were on our first afternoon in Istanbul. In fact, we were walking on a street with three large mosques in close proximity, so we're talking more than 10 loudspeakers going off with what sounded--to the non-Turkish speaker--like so many cats being skinned alive at high volume. I think I developed a twitch on the spot. The worst, though, was the dawn prayer. 5'o-fucking-clock in the morning. Did I mention there was a mosque behind our hotel? Closed windows, earplugs, these did nothing. Rohat even told us, apologetically, that while some muezzins are good at their job, some are not, and this one...was one of those. So, more like pre-pubescent cats getting skinned alive, I guess.

Among Turkey's other flaws are a lack of ready alcohol, and food that, while good, didn't overwhelm us with its tastiness. Oh, and let's not forget the pushiness of every vendor and shopowner in the entire country! Window shopping, in Turkey, needs to be conducted for 15 seconds or less, or someone is going to pop out and try to finagle you into their shop, and not just in the "oh, can I help you?" way that can be brushed off with an "just looking." No, they will smile, and wheedle, and offer tea, and generally make you feel awkward before you run away. Phyllis told me that their approach is simple; if you can talk to someone for long enough and be nice to them, you create a sense of obligation on the customer's part, where they feel like they have to go into the shop and pretend to consider buying a carpet, or whatever. In other words, window shop for only so long as it takes to see someone emerging from the store's depths, and then get the hell out of there.

We also learned that the carpet merchants are always among us. Hot spots: in front of the Topkapi, where we got caught our first day, and the Blue Mosque, where we spent 10 minutes in conversation with a genial man who had actually flung his arm around Sean's shoulder when he tried to escape. We also got snagged in Selcuk just walking on the sideway back to our hotel around 9pm. Look into the one shop window that's still lit, and BAM! There's a guy in front of you saying "we are still open! Where are you from? America? I love America! I was there a few years ago. Won't you come in? Oh, no money? No problem, we'll just talk. Come, come!" The thing is, they really are friendly, and these guys are a great source of information, like the guy at the ferry station who was shilling for a restaurant on one of the Prince's islands--he wrote the times of the return ferries on his card for me, as well as a map of how to get to his restaurant. Then, on the ferry, he turned up to offer us a glass of hot tea as we sat on the deck! Sadly for him, his attempt failed, and we didn't go to his restaurant. Anyway, you feel bad brushing these guys off or ignoring them altogether, but you also don't want to be roped into every carpet shop and restaurant you walk past.

That, more than anything, made me cool a little bit toward Turkey, because it felt like you always had to be on your guard; anyone who smiled at you, anyone who helped you in any way, might be waiting to spring the rug shop inquiry on you. It's no joke--on one of our last days, Sean spent 20 minutes talking to a guy in a park before the guy made the "come to my rug shop" pitch, and sure enough, by that point Sean felt obligated to go with him. He escaped being there longer (as well as the proffered cup of tea) by pleading that he had to meet his wife. He lied and said he'd bring me back with him. Freedom!

Other than that, Turkey was awesome. We had a great time exploring Istanbul with Carla for a few days, but our time in the south was really magical. We had a brand new Hyundai to tool around in (brand new = 500 miles on it!) and plenty of ancient sites to explore. True, I did get mild sunstroke, and then a sore throat, and then a cold, but, hey.

I would make this longer, but I'm a bit tired of typing. Plus, I feel like my photos recreate most of the trip for me; it's really the kind of impressions that I can't get in a photo caption that I need to record here.

Freedom! (Almost)

Today I proctored exams for both the class I teach and the one for which I've been a TA/slave for the last four semesters. I graded the latter's exams in record time and submitted final grades, meaning that Arts of the Western World and I have officially parted company for the last time. Hooray!!

Indeed, just 38 more exams stand between me and Turkey. We leave on Sunday evening for New York, to spend the night with Sara, Zach, and Heather, and then we fly out Monday evening, getting in bright and early on Tuesday morning. Carla will be joining us Tuesday evening. It's going to be lightly raining while we're in Istanbul, sadly, but it shouldn't be too terrible (nothing compared to the Venetian blizzard of '10, anyway). We'll have a couple of days to explore the city with her before Sean and I fly south to Izmir to spend four days driving around the ancient sites on the west coast. I'm excited, but also a little intimidated--I feel more unprepared for this trip than for any of our others. I don't even know how to say hello or thank you in Turkish yet--I'll be studying the guidebook on our 10 hour flight (lies, I really need to sleep so I'll be chipper when we arrive).

After we come back we'll be racing down to Charlottesville for Sean's graduation. The very next day will be our 2 year anniversary! Then I'll be down there, practicing Italian and planning for preliminary exams, until the third week of June, when I'll start my northward progress toward Vermont. I got the pre-arrival info today, and it really hit me for the first time the kind of immersive environment I'm stepping into...as well as the fact that I'm effectively returning to college for 7 weeks, complete with roommates, shared bathrooms, laundry rooms, the whole deal. I've been out of college for four years and now I have to decide if I want to rent a mini-fridge, and does Sean have extra-long sheets I can borrow, and do I need shower shoes--all crap you'd think would be far behind me!

Maybe I'll blog in Italian while I'm there. It'll be a good way to practice composition, after all...

Almost There

Things have been ridiculously busy since RSA. Between that and my week of being sick earlier in the month, I was pretty behind on work, and only by adopting Jasmine-esque habits (ie get up at 6am and be at school, working, by 7:15) did I manage to get things back on track. Now I have 2 of my papers written, which is a relief, but there's still another to write this week, plus 65 papers and 65 exams to grade before Turkey...which I haven't had any time to plan for! We have plane tickets, hotel reservations, and a rental car, and that's pretty much it at this point.

Dr. Cooper also threw me a couple of curveballs in the last few weeks. For one thing, she told me she thinks I'll need to spend some time in Venice before I turn in my dissertation proposal, which means it would have to be a trip I fund myself, because you can't really get funding until you have a dissertation proposal! My exams are going to fall at the end of next spring, meaning my proposal technically isn't even due until the fall, and I need to have it approved in early fall so I can apply for grants. Sean and I were planning on going to France next year (something I promised him if he accepted Yale!) and I'd already planned to incorporate a quick visit to Rome to see Jasmine and Carla, but that may turn into something more substantial (and expensive).

Dr. Cooper also alerted me to the fact that David Rosand, a major Titian scholar who just retired from Columbia, is teaching a seminar at Princeton in the fall. He's definitely someone I need to know, so taking the class makes sense, but I'm already going to be sitting in on Dr. Cooper's class, so it's going to be a lot of work in addition to the work I need to be doing (exam prep). I'm not looking forward to that--nor to driving to Princeton, over an hour, in rush hour traffic on Tuesdays. Sigh. What happened to my wonderfully paid year of reading, hm? At least I don't have to teach, though.

Sigh. I'm so tired, and I spent my entire day doing work--finishing a paper, and planning my lectures for this week. It looked beautiful outside, but I was in here. This semester really needs to end, soon.

RSA, Part Deux

I'm glad to be home, even if I did have an awesome time in Montreal. Four days is a long time to share a bathroom with three other girls!

Last night was a suitably fabulous ending to the conference. Dr. Cooper introduced me to another round of Venetianists after the last panel ended. To put this in perspective, I just looked at the table of contents for this pretty seminal work called Venice Reconsidered, and I met 6 of the 15 contributors in the last two days. I'm sure I would have met more if they'd been there; Dr. Cooper is pretty relentless in in terms of introductions! Dr. Hall is less gung-ho about it, though she did introduce us to Cheryl Reiss at Jasmine's talk; she remembered my name from having read my abstract for her CAA panel on merchants and said that she had liked it (even though I didn't manage to snag one of the spots), which was really flattering.

After that I only had a few minutes to go freshen up in our room before we were due back downstairs for the closing plenary talk. Dr. Cooper was going to be handing out the Gordon Prize for best art history book and she'd made clear that she wanted us there, so off we went, even if we weren't really thrilled by the prospect of a 45-minute lecture on 17th-century English literature. However, even if I didn't take a whole lot away from the talk (it was about how writers used the imagery of David rising from sheephook to scepter to argue for/against rising up against Charles I), the professor, a woman from Barnard, was easily one of the most engaging speakers I've heard recently.

That's not to say we weren't all glad when the talk was over so we could make a beeline to the reception! As a perk of being among the relatively few (perhaps 100?) who actually attended the lecture and didn't just hang around upstairs waiting for the food, we were able to stake out a Temple table and get food and alcohol before the room absolutely flooded with people. The food was fabulous, and more than made up for the opening reception, which was at this Jesuit library 45 minutes from the hotel where there was wine but no food. To be fair that turned out OK as well, since we met that girl Helen and had dinner at a faux-English pub where they gave me mayo with my fries. But I digress.

The wine flowed freely, and talk was plentiful and boisterous. Cate and I were scoped by an older Italian man near the bar, who said "Young women, what a joy!" before walking on. We rated various eminent scholars on their relative shag-worthiness. We even managed a photo-op that didn't make everyone look weird, all in all, a rousing success! The reception bar, however, closed at 9:30 and they turned the lights on abruptly at ten, so we had to move the party to the hotel bar, where, joined by Dr. Cooper, we drank ridiculously overpriced wine until 1am. It was pretty awesome, especially since sitting next to her we managed to have completely serious discussions about my future, publishing an article based on the paper I gave, etc., to completely silly things, like how she thinks we should hold clothing swaps in the department.

We were also joined by my new pal Emily and a couple of girls she knew from UCLA, who were both really cool. Apparently I should have brought more than two business cards to this thing, because there was a lot of number-swapping. Honestly, I wasn't expecting to make so many connections, and I certainly wasn't expecting to meet people I'd really want to have a drink with rather than just some stilted conversation under the watchful eyes of joint advisors, but I confess myself surprised. Also amusing: Cate and Jasmine told me that they were really impressed by my ability to socialize with all these new people--apparently I make it look effortless! It was ironic because hello, aren't I normally known for my general misanthropy and dislike of people? Lol. Of course, everyone's chatty when they've got five glasses of wine in them!

Anyway, it was worth being really tired this morning to have such a fun night. RSA was a wonderful experience, not least because I was there with friends. Dr. Cooper was right about having a 'conference buddy', or in my case, three buddies, because otherwise it would be overwhelming and lonely. Next year RSA is in Washington DC, so I anticipate an even larger contingent of Temple people will be in attendance. Jasmine is even planning to make a return from Italy if she can get funding.

Oh, and we'll be rehashing all of RSA on Tuesday in Dr. Cooper's class, since she requested Jasmine put in a special appearance for the evening. I think the Robocop story will be told. I think it must.

RSA

So I have been having an absolute blast at RSA. I can't believe tomorrow is the last day! Time is flying. My presentation went really well, first thing Thursday morning. My session organizer, Catherine Harding, really enjoyed it; Dennis Romano (a big Venetian historian) told Dr. Cooper he liked it; and another historian, Richard MacKenney, tracked me down at another panel to tell me how much he liked it and how well I presented. He also gave me his card and asked how far into my dissertation I was, only to be quite surprised that that was from my MA thesis! I feel really much more confident about my scholarly-ness now, I must saw, and this made me really determined to get this published.

I've also been meeting scholars right and left. Jasmine introduced me to her undergrad adviser, Julia Delancey, who worked on Venetian vendicolori, as well as Holly Hurlburt, a historian who I had actually exchanged emails with re: Bergamo. At another panel I introduced myself to Gabriele Neher, who works on Brescia, and she told me to email her and that she's thinking about putting together a panel for next year's RSA that perhaps I could get in on. I spotted Dr. Escobar as I came down the escalator today by his bright orange vest, which he still has after all these years! He tried to entice me to his Spain panel, but alas, there's a LOT of Venetian panels to be had, and with Dr. Cooper it's kind of a command performance.

Today has been a particularly interesting day for other reasons. I went to several panels that were really interesting, including one on realism in northern 17^th century painting, and the first two of six panels on the relationship between the Venetian stato da mar and the stato da terra. After the end of the second panel, Dr. Cooper urged me to talk to James Grubb, a Venetian historian, who was a little gruff until he decided he was interested in my project. Then I stood around talking to her and a couple other scholars for a while before we all headed back upstairs toward the rooms. Near the elevator, Dr. Cooper asked me about our dinner plans and then suggested we should reach out to some of the Princeton girls who'd been at the last panel; I said 'oh sure' in that way that means 'I have no intention of complying'. At that moment, Dr. Cooper spies one of the girls who'd given a paper behind me, and says “Oh! Emily! This is Michelle DiMarzo. You should join her for dinner!” And then walked away. Um, what? Naturally then I HAD to invite this girl to our pre-arranged dinner, PLUS the friend she'd been planning to eat dinner with.

Luckily she seems really engaging and friendly. She asks me if I want to grab a drink at the hotel bar. I was kind of frantically trying to figure out how to coordinate alerting my roommates to the change, changing our reservations, etc. (our cell phones are not free in Canada) so I distractedly said oh sure. As we're waiting in the several-people-deep line at the bar, this guy walks up to us and starts talking familiarly to Emily. It was immediately clear, from his clothes, bearing, and way of speaking that he was not your average historian—something a little more casual about him. Not really handsome, but craggy and intense. Anyway, he was looking for Alexander Nagel (another art historian) and I told him I'd seen him at a panel but not since. Emily invited him to join us for a drink, but he said he hated waiting at bars and invited us, instead, to “the real party” down the hall, which turned out to be the VIP suite that you needed a card key to access—buffet, beer, and wine, all complimentary, in this swanky lounge with a glass wall to the hallway beyond, so curious people could look in at all the eliteness they were not partaking in. As we walked over I asked Emily who he was (he'd introduced himself, but it was so loud I could barely hear) and she said “Peter Weller.” Then, in a whisper, “Robocop.”

Ironically, my friend Cate had told me earlier that this guy would be presenting in a panel on Michelangelo. He's working on his dissertation at UCLA in his spare time (where he and Emily had met). His day job, which he referred to repeatedly, is being an actor (and he regaled us with how he finished his dissertation proposal while stuck in a trailer for 18 hours waiting for Michael C Hall to get back from chemo so they could film for Dexter) and also known for ye olde Robocop. He was certainly very well-educated and intelligent, but there was that indefinable something about him that screamed “I'm used to being a center of attention” which you definitely do find in scholars, but not in this earthy, physical way. He wasn't creepy, though he did tell us he enjoys being surrrounded by pretty girls—in fact, he proudly showed us his wife's sonogram (a wife he met when she was many many years his junior and he cast her in a film...he described it as lust at first sight, then friendship, then love), right before showing us the absolutely picture-perfect view from his balcony on the Amalfi coast where they spend the winter, and where he invited us to join them if we had no Christmas plans. Like, what? I wonder what would happen if you were actually ballsy enough to follow up on that kind of invitation. Would it be some kind of freaky orgy? Does he really just enjoy spreading largesse? Is it (most likely) a completely insincere invitation never meant to be really considered? I really don't know.

While I'm trying to carrry on a conversation with this guy, I'm also trying to alert my roommates that we have had a change of plans. Finally I had to go find a hotel phone and call the room. Imagine their surprise to hear where I was! I have to say, he was interesting enough that I wouldn't have minded staying around for a while (plus, free wine), but we had about half an hour to get everyone together and go find our restaurant. One of my roommates was quite displeased with random people being invited, although I was able to assure her that Emily, at least was really fun.

Our food experience in Montreal has been AWESOME. Totally expensive, but awesome. Last night we ate at a place called Accords (Sarah took my business card for it, so it's good for me to record it here), where I had piglet served over sauteed onions and potatoes, and Jasmine had some divine duck sausage. Accords also deserves note because its waiters were seriously, seriously HOT. Like, model pretty, and all six women at that table, married and unmarried, agreed. Damn. It was also expensive ($66, although to be fair, that included 1 glass of prosecco and 1 of wine). Anyway, tonight we ate at La Sauvargine, which I think means 'the savage', in the old city. Its menu is heavily game meats—Tammy andI had wild boar drenched in a maple syrup reduction, Emily and Sarah got the duck trio (medallion, confit, and foie gras, the last of which I tasted under duress--it was nasty)­, and I don't remember what Cate had, but it was all amazing! The waiters were more mature in age, alas, but it was less expensive than Accords.

I had a good time at dinner; Emily was very lively, though Sarah seemed a bit reserved. Emily works on post-Byzantine painting in Crete and Sarah on the interchange between Renaissance Venice and Eastern Europe. However, more fun was had when we got back to the hotel. Before we got into our two taxis they'd asked us to join them for a drink and we all demurred, but by the time we hit the hotel I realized it was only 9 and I wasn't at all tired, so I joined them in the hotel bar while the others went upstairs. We spent about an hour and a half there, and it was really, really fun to talk to new art history people about traveling, and art, and scholars, and pretty much anything and everything. Sarah also loosened up considerably. It's great to connect with Princeton people since we go up there so often for symposia and things. I finally had a chance to give my business (scholar?) cards to people! It was pretty cool. Well, less cool when we got the check—my wine was $11, but Sarah had ordered a Kir something or other, liquer plus champagne, and they charged her $27!! For one cocktail! Apparently that's a risk of the Hilton wine bar.

Anyway, today was pretty wild. I'll have much to tell Dr. Cooper tomorrow, and I have to admit that she was really right about meeting people at conferences—we met Helen, a literature girl from England, at the reception on our first night and ended up having dinner and drinks with her, and now these girls (who will also be people I'll encounter in the future, unlike Helen!) Also: drinks in the VIP lounge with Robocop. Freaky/awesome.

Look About You

Last night we went to see another play at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton. This one was Look About You, a comedy written by an anonymous playwright around 1595. It was a farce with a lot of disguises, mistaken identities, guys in drag, actors mimicking other actors' mannerisms, etc., and it was really, really funny. Sean liked it, even though mistaken identity is probably his least favorite plot device, and something that he dislikes about Shakespeare's comedies, like Comedy of Errors, in which there are two sets of twins and it's basically one giant case of mistaken identity. We saw that at the Yale Rep theater in college, a production that I chiefly remember for the fact that there was a little loft in a corner of the stage where one actor, in costume, was effectively the foley artist, clashing pans and shaking beans to make the sound effects for what was going on below.

I thought this play was actually a bit funnier than Shakespeare (even though I'm almost afraid they'll take back my English major-ness for saying so). That's probably due not only to the amount of snark/sarcastic wit in the play itself, but also to the talent of the actors at the ASC. The plays we've seen there have all been excellent, and the atmosphere is so awesome!

I'll really, really miss this place once Sean leaves Virginia. Their spring season, which goes until June 19th, right when I'll be leaving for Vermont, includes Measure for Measure, which I've neither read nor seen, and Macbeth, which I've seen twice before, and...meh? Of course, it might be worth seeing what they make of it! But here's the rub: after I leave they're doing The Tempest and Hamlet. Dammit!

Happy Dance

Sean decided to go to Yale, not OSU! Cue the happy dance...

Pliny

I finished reading Pliny the Younger's letters last week, but never got around to writing my reaction down. I enjoyed them! Like Montaigne's essays, a real sense of personality came through the writing, although of course, the sense of similarity evoked by something written in the 1st century CE is going to be a lot less than something written in the late 16th century on the brink of the scientific revolution. In addition, while both men published their work during their lifetime, Montaigne makes it clear that he feels free to be candid thanks to his early retirement; Pliny, on the contrary, who worked as a prominent lawyer and magistrate until his death, is certainly out to shape his own image. His personal goal, as he reiterates unashamedly throughout his letters, is to achieve immortality through his writing (though of course he meant his poetry and speeches, not his letters).

Now for some of my favorite lines (I dog-eared my copy something fierce):

"It is better to have no work to do than work at nothing." So says Pliny, the fairly wealthy landowner, to a friend working too hard in the city, telling him to devote himself to literature or lesiure. His letters feature several lengthy descriptions of his villa at Laurentum; it's never been uncovered, but his description is so detailed that scholars have been able to precisely reconstruct it, as you can see here.

"...votes are counted, their value is not weighted, and no other method is possible in a public assembly. Yet this strict equality results in something very different from equity, so long as men have the same right to judge but not the same ability to judge wisely." Pliny is dissatisfied with the results of a corruption case decided by the Senate. Roman senators weren't democratically elected, but I think the point carries. People are stupid.

After failed crops at his other properties, Pliny says of his seaside villa: "For there I do most of my writing, and instead of the land I lack, I work to cultivate myself, so that I have a harvest in my desk to show you in place of full granaries elsewhere."

On a silver-tongued opponent in court: "Scarcely anyone has the gift of eloquence...but what Candidus calls loquacity is common to many people and the special gift of every impudent rascal."

To his friend, the historian Tacitus: "There may be writers who are ranked higher than either of us, but if we are classed together our position does not matter; for me the highest position is the one nearest to you." Aww. Buddies.

Pliny does not agree with Machiavelli in this advice to a friend, headed to take up the reins in a Greek province: "Affection is more effective than fear in gaining you your ends. Fear disappears at your departure, affection remains, and, whereas fear engenders hatred, affection develops into genuine regard." OK, technically I think M. said "It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both" but who has ever been both, really?

Self-assurance is not an issue. "I do think all your written works are very fine, but especially those that deal with me. For...you are at your best in writing about your friends, and I find it your best when it is about myself."

Writing to his boss, the emperor Trajan, Pliny described a new religious sect as "nothing but a degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths." It was Christianity, of course.

Three Cheers!

Sean was accepted into Yale today! Out of 130-odd applicants they made five offers, and he was one of them! I couldn't be prouder of my husband :-)

What a Week

This semester has been pretty rough from the start. I really dislike my schedule, for one thing; all of my classes are in the evening, but the classes I teach/TA are in the morning, so I feel like I'm constantly rushing to something, or just wiped from being on campus all day. It takes about five hours to do the readings for each of my classes, and I usually wind up reviewing them and my notes before each class, which takes up a lot of time. Heritage requires a good deal of prep because it's my first time teaching it, and being head TA for AWW is just a constant string of minor tasks and annoyances. I work seven days a week every week, and although this in no way compares to the physical/mental taxation of the same number of hours in an office job, it's really tiring. My shoulders feel like one solid knot of tension lately.

Recent weeks have also been stressful on other fronts. Sean (briefly) lost his job at the library due to the fact that he's no longer eligible for work-study now that he's finished with full-time coursework. Happily, his boss figured out a way to fix this and get him back, but for about a week we didn't know how he would be able to support himself until the fall, considering jobs in Charlottesville are few and far between and he's locked into his lease until August. We're also still waiting for word from graduate schools. UPenn was a negative, which Sean had predicted, but he came out of the Yale open house with positive feelings today, and he thinks his Harvard interview went really well. It's really stressing me out (and Sean too, naturally) not to know the shape of our future for the next few years.

There are some things I'm really looking forward to, on a more positive note. Our Turkey trip plans are becoming more crystallized. We're going to fly from Istanbul to Izmir, a 1-hr flight that will save us an 8-hour bus ride, and rent a car for four days to drive around to all of the ancient sites--Pergamon, Afrodisias, Ephesus, Didyma, Priene, and Miletus.

Further ahead, I'm really looking forward to next semester. No more courses (although I'll be sitting in on Dr. Cooper's seminar, and possibly an Italian class), no more semester projects, no more teaching (at least for one year). Just reading, and research, and exam prep. Who knew that could sound like heaven?

Yay!!!

Sean got his first acceptance to a PhD program today!! It's Ohio State, which is not his first choice, but they do boast one of the top guys in his field, who called Sean personally (although he had to leave a voicemail) to tell him he was accepted. That says quite a bit about Sean's qualifications, I'd say! He has a phone interview with Harvard tomorrow, and he's been invited to Yale's open house the 16-18th of this month. Things are looking quite good! I'm so proud of him :-)

Awesome Sauce

A couple of months ago Jen and I switched financial advisers from Ron (who was terrible at responding to calls, tended to blow off our concerns, and on more than one occasion simply told me a flat "no" about something to do with my own damned money) to Gene, who has been a friend of Sean's family for decades and was a guest at our wedding. It was a good move. Even though I'm Gene's client and not Sean, he considers our needs as a couple, and doesn't just act like Sean doesn't exist (like Ron).

Anyway, after discussing the issue with Gene a few weeks ago, today I paid off one third of the student loan debt that Sean and I collectively owe. Sean's debt, in particular, we were able to cut in half! Ron wouldn't even hear of addressing Sean's debt before mine was completely paid off, but Gene was more reasonable in terms of looking at which loans have higher interest and are costing you more money in the long run, etc., and it clearly made more sense to clear out a bunch of high-interest loans that Sean had, rather than focus on my low-interest loans. Granted, I'm sure that the fact that Gene's known Sean since birth (and is Sean's brother's godfather) makes him less likely to suspect him of trying to make off with my money, but still. I'm a firm believer that when you marry someone, you're pooling everything--resources and debts.

Sean quipped that he could imagine my dad somewhere saying "But I don't even know this kid!" as I used what was once his money to pay Sean's loans. True, but my mother would have shut him up immediately; she loved Sean like a son (and occasionally, yes, perhaps a little better than her own daughter...banana bread...) Ultimately, though, I think my parents had the same financial ethos about marriage. You're in together. And now, thanks to Gene, there's a little less of it to be in! Yay!!

I'm Bad With Titles

I really am; back when I was still writing poetry (ah, those halcyon days!) I always had such trouble figuring out a good title. I would have left most of them untitled if Dr. Bridgford hadn't felt so strongly that untitled poems are cop-outs. I'm marginally better with my research papers, I suppose. Actually, that thought just inspired me to do a survey of the titles of all the paper's I've written in my graduate career. In no particular order:

Invoking Arcadia: The Pastoral Mode in the Art and Theater of the Cinquecento

Caravaggio e il Seicento veneziano: echi del maestro: A Proposed Exhibition

Lost in (Christian) Thought: Leandro Bassano’s Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman Before a Landscape

The Legacy of Theoderic: Reconciliatio and Traces of Gothic Power in S. Apollinare Nuovo

In the Shadow of the Pantheon: Palladio’s Tempietto at Maser

The Ties That Bind: Depicting Family Memory in Quattrocento Florence

Patterns of Influence: Mariano Fortuny, Raimundo Madrazo, and Thomas Eakins

The Nefarious and Multifarious Turk In the Work of Albrecht Dürer and His Contemporaries

The Lincoln College Typikon: Gender, Family, and Status in a Late Byzantine Convent

Unveiling the Virgin: Playboy Mexico’s December 2008 Cover

Reason and Rationality: Reflections on the Kantian Sublime

With a Merchant’s Eye: The Mecenatismo of Paolo Cassotti

Clearly I have a preference for the SHORT AND PITHY : LONGER AND EXPLANATORY type of title. I have exactly one paper that doesn't follow that formula! Maybe I'll challenge myself to do things differently this semester, with my last three class papers ever. I'll be writing papers and articles (and books, God willing) for the rest of my career, but no more semester projects after May 6! That'll be a good day.

Anyway, I started this blog entry to comment on my first successful day of Heritage lecturing. The students were really active and there were more hands up for each question than I could actually call on. Let's hope this continues past the blush of the first week, shall we?

I also finished re-reading Fitzgerald's Beautiful and Damned this evening. Like the last time I read it, I felt like it lost steam toward the end, even as the slow, book-long course of Gloria and Anthony's financial, social and moral decline turns into a headlong plunge into the unseemly side of the Jazz Age. There's nothing sympathetic about them; they're terrible, empty, and entitled people. You can't like them, and you're not meant to. But once Fitzgerald's evocation of the effervescent culture of the wealthy in New York in the 1910s vanishes along with their socio-economic status, it's harder to want to keep reading about their slide into disrepute. The ending is a twist; after spending years, and most of the book, waiting desperately to hear the outcome of a court case for Anthony's grandfather's fortune, they win it all--only it's too late for either of them. The last scene reveals them on a ship to Italy, Anthony a physically broken drunk in a wheelchair, and Gloria, at long last clad in the expensive fur coat she desires, giving off the air of being "unclean" that, a few hundred pages before, she herself had so despised in other women. They win, but still they lose. In The Great Gatsby, in contrast, it's not the wealthy couple who suffers; in the most jarring moment of the novel, Nick realizes that Daisy and Tom Buchanan have been completely unaffected by the tragedy that they've wrought in other people's lives. They go on, as rich and self-centered as ever.

Whew

The semester is off to a running start! Dr. Bolman's seminar on the visual culture of Christian Egypt promises to be really interesting, and, as always, methodologically challenging. I'm also enjoying Dr. West's seminar on Art, Science, and Collecting in the northern Baroque, because it's not an area I know anything about--our readings for last week were about contemporary interpretations of marvels, portents, and monstrous births, for example. These included Siamese twins, giants, hairy people, and, of course, monsters like the so-called "Papal Ass," which was supposedly found in the Tiber in the 16th century and illustrated in a hugely popular print that was used as "evidence" by writes on both sides of the Reformation conflict:

I'm TA-ing AWW for the fourth and thankfully last time, and I've also started my first class as teacher of record, for the second half of the art history survey--early Renaissance to modern and contemporary. Both classes are big; I have just under 70 students total. That's a lot in addition my own classes, but this is also my last semester of coursework! The students in both groups seem pretty interested, which is a good sign.

Tomorrow is my first full lecture in Heritage, on the Proto-Renaissance--Cimabue, Giotto, Duccio, the Arena Chapel, etc. Jumping into the 14th century with kids who may or may not have any conception of the medieval period, or who the Byzantines are and how their style of image-making became dominant in Italy, is a little daunting, but you need to lay the groundwork for the status quo so that they understand why someone like Giotto is considered such an innovator.

This also means that tomorrow I get to show my favorite scene from the Arena Chapel, the Lamentation:

Tiny back-flipping angels, ahoy!

Avoiding Work

I haven't posted since Christmas, which was only two weeks ago but seems much longer. The holidays were good, but some drama and tension among Sean's family members made our escape to the milder climate of Virginia a happy thing. Yay, Charlottesville, where I can still walk to the gym in the morning in shorts in January without getting frostbite!

I was ridiculously productive last week--I cranked out slideshows and lecture notes for six weeks' worth of classes. On Saturday Anna came up from North Carolina to spend the night; she's been pretty bored and isolated in Winston-Salem and TJ had a lot of work to get done. We went bowling: Sean kicked my ass. We came home and played Scrabble: Sean kicked my ass again. Sigh.

I have plenty to get done this week, too. I started reading Anachronic Renaissance, which is the subject of the first meeting of our department's new Renaissance reading group on the 21st. It's boring and theoretical, so far. Another sigh. I also have to start working on my paper for RSA, but I've been putting it off, which means I'll get some shaming from my friends in our accountability group on Wednesday. It'll be email-based shaming, though, which is really less effective. Plus it's still vacation, so I feel less compelled to accomplish things.

Oh, an in an update to my last post, Sean was quite naturally excited to open the tickets to Turkey, though he felt the need to point out that this didn't quite count as the best-gift-ever for him, since it was also a present for me. Whatever. We had a basic itinerary sketched out within a couple of days: we'll start in Istanbul, then go to the site of ancient Troy, south to Ephesus, then fly to Cappadoccia, which is in the central region of the country, then north to Ankara, and finally take an overnight train back to Istanbul. Sean has volunteered to familiarize himself with Turkish this semester, too!

Our major disagreement now is whether we'll hit up a traditional Turkish hamam while we're in Istanbul; Sean is totally pro, but I'm not sure I want to lie on a bare floor while someone else bathes me (and apparently removes a year's worth of dead skin in the process). I can do that at home. Sean's mostly in it for the optional oil massage afterward, but so far I haven't found anywhere that lets you skip the bathing and go right for the massage. I'll keep looking.

Merry Christmas!

Sean and I went to bed around 2am last night, and I meant to set the alarm for 10 so I could get 8 hours of sleep, but instead I set it for 8am. Waaaay too early. However, the alarm is across the room, so there's not even the option of whacking it and going back to sleep. So I'm up! I'm switching between the Christmas Story and Christmas Vacation, though, so it's not a total loss.

Sean's going to get quite the Christmas surprise in a few hours. Last night I bought us tickets to Turkey. May 9-19th, Constantinople, here we come!!!

Hm

So, I just finished reading Swann's Way (which my friend Amy had dared me, last week, to do by tomorrow; I may not have finished grading even half of the students' papers like I'd planned, but I accomplished something!).

I liked the second half less than the first. The theme of obsessive love crops up again, but we've moved from the young narrator to Charles Swann of the title, and from maternal love to the more amorous kind. This part of the book tells the story of Swann's love affair with Odette, a woman of the demi-monde who has almost nothing to recommend her to Swann except the picture of her that he's created in his head, to which he stubbornly clings despite mounting evidence of her sordid background and lax morals (including bisexuality). Along the way he gives up his friends and his interests in order to join her at her lower social and intellectual level, believing that this kind of sacrifice only proves how much he loves her. His idea of "love" is disturbingly immature and delusional. He acknowledges that he gets absolutely no enjoyment out of his actual meetings with his mistress, but he's in a constant state of anxiety and passion whenever he's not with her. She treats him like crap, cheats on him, and still he supports her with money and slavish devotion, even as he recognizes her low worth and almost looks forward to the day when he'll be free of loving her. Woof.

All this takes place in dense, searching prose, that traces over and over Swann's thousand inconstancies--his brief flare-ups of independence and his desire to escape her, followed inevitably by the resurgence of his belief in her goodness and beauty (again, despite his repeated acknowledgement that she's not really very pretty, and, at one point, his astonished realization at seeing a picture of her earlier in their relationship that she's gotten worse-looking over time!). Being that deep in someone's head for that long (two hundred pages or so) gets old pretty quickly, especially when you don't like them, and I don't like Swann, just like I didn't like the narrator. I kind of wanted to slap, him, actually, and tell him to get a damned job or something--anything but mope around Paris being cuckolded! For example, when he thinks of his desire to visit the Netherlands so he can finally finish an essay he's writing on Vermeer (the only sign of occupation of any sort of this wealthy member of the French bourgeoisie), he quickly realizes that not only can he never, ever leave Paris while Odette is there, he can't even go while she's gone on one of her many trips without him (trips that he's paid for, but which she takes with other men), just in case she might come back early. Seriously. It's that level of pathetic-ness.

By the end of it (and I acknowledge, I was reading far less intently by this point), he's pretty much gotten over his love for her, but he's still obsessed with her. As you find out in the book's final section, though (something that's apparently supposed to be a big reveal but which I knew already thanks to an overview of the novel) the woman he ended up marrying, of whom the narrator's parents disapproved, turns out to be Odette herself. According to what I've read, the second volume explains that he was able to marry her once he no longer loved her. Oh, and he's still obsessed with her, even though he doesn't love her and cheats on her. Yay!

The young narrator, back again, embarks in the final pages on an obsessive crush on their daughter, Gilberte, that follows in many ways the caprices of Swann's passion for Odette--the obsessive need to see her, the belief that any moment she's going to proclaim her love, the near-stalking. Arghhh. Proust's men are so stupid! No, that's wrong, his women are stupid too, we're just not treated to their self-absorbed interior monologues for 462 pages. Any desire I had to read the remaining parts was dimmed when I read that a lot of the rest of it is about, you guessed it, the narrator's obsessive affairs with women! Apparently, in one part that is fittingly entitled "The Captive," he keeps a young woman, Albertine, prisoner in his Paris mansion. Oh, holy Jesus. I am not putting myself through that, no thank you.

Many books can be easily enjoyed on your own, without needing to talk about them with other people, but Swann's Way is one that I think is probably best read in the context of a seminar or book group, with a chance to bring out, through discussion with other people, themes and ideas that my own reading might have passed over. Looking at other people's discussions of Swann's Way online reminded me that this is not a book to be glossed easily, and is undoubtedly one that would repay a closer re-reading, but honestly? I'm just not interested enough to attempt it.

At any rate, I did like the last lines, which return again to the theme of memory and how it can neither recreate nor recapture the past:

"The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years."

Adieu, Proust!

Reading Swann's Way

The first volume of Proust's epic novel has been on my "to read" list for quite a while. Sara's boyfriend Zach is a Proust aficionado, going so far as to have a quote from the author tattooed on his arm (note to self: ask what the quote actually says), and while I was visiting their apartment last weekend I looked at his bookshelf-worth of Proust and decided it was finally time to give it a try. He assured me that if I read the first one I'd want to read all of them. He also opined that it's the greatest work of fiction ever written.

I'm halfway through Swann's Way now, and while I can't say that I agree with either assessment, I don't have a terribly strong opinion about it yet; or rather, I should say that I have a bunch of small opinions, but not a generalized opinion of the whole book. I was certainly surprised to find it fairly readable, though; when a thing reaches 1.5 million words and seven volumes and yet still insists on being called a single novel, you expect that there are going to be all manner of strange, impenetrable digressions. Well, digressions there certainly are, but they're musing, melancholy, and philosophical rather than indigestible. I was expecting stream-of-consciousness writing in the manner of Joyce, I suppose, and have been pleasantly surprised on that score.

There's an incredible amount of feeling in this book, and by that I mean that the young narrator, who is a semi-autobiographical reflection of Proust himself, is incredibly sensitive to beauty in the world around him. Sometimes it made me feel like I must be a little bit of a dull block not to be able to share this absolute, over-powering sense of presence within nature, to be able to lose myself for hours, as he claims to be able to do, in contemplating the play of sunlight over the slates of a distant church steeple, or a carpet of buttercups in a meadow. I admire things like that, too, but clearly not to this depth. At other times, however, the extended, rambling passages in which the narrator goes into ecstasies over some kind of flower or another were frankly a little much, and I skipped forward.

I had a vague idea that this was a work of fiction without a real plot, a novel turned inward, on the memories and feelings of its narrator. In that sense it reminds me of Montaigne, who wrote "I myself am the subject of my essays." Proust has an incredible facility with language (and I'm reading the old translation, not the Modern Library one that Zach recommended, which wasn't available in the local library), and so even though there's nothing much happening, I'm interested to see where he's going to go next, what scene or character he's going to sketch vividly in just a few paragraphs. I dog-eared the page with the following passage, which deals with the book's prominent theme of memory--in this case, a memory of the steeple of the church in Combray, the town he knew from his childhood:

"And so even to-day if, in a large provincial town, or in a quarter of Paris which I do not know very well, a passer-by who is "putting me on the right road" shows me in the distance, as a point to aim at, some hospital belfry or convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical cap at the corner of the street which I am to take, my memory need only find in it some dim resemblance to that dear and vanished outline, and the passer-by, should he turn round to make sure that I have not gone astray, may be amazed to see me still standing there, oblivious of the walk I had planned or take or the place where I was obliged to call, gazing at the steeple for hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of the Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it again; and then no doubt, and then more anxiously than when, just now, I asked him to direct me, I seek my way again, I turn a corner...but...the goal is in my heart..."

I do have certain negative feelings toward the novel, though. I'm not sure I really like this narrator,this sort-of-Proust-child. Sensitive he may be, but he's also neurotic and self-obsessed. The first section of the novel (the individual volumes themselves even have queer internal structures) focuses around his recollections of his inability to sleep alone as a child, and his obsession with his mother coming in to give him a goodnight kiss before he faced the darkness--to the extent that he was willing to undertake an elaborate plot to lure his mother upstairs on one of the occasions she remained at the dinner table rather than come up to see him. It's difficult to describe here the level of pathological obsession that this kid seems to have with his mother kissing him goodnight; on nights when he knows she won't come up, because they have guests or for another reason, he's plunged into utter despair for hours preceding his bedtime. As in, he says that he wishes he were dead rather than go to sleep without her kissing him. What? It's not clear exactly how old the narrator is supposed to be at this point, and this is terribly gendered, but I can't help it: man the fuck up.

His twisted attitude toward women is expressed obliquely elsewhere; he notes offhand, for example, that you can never trust your mistress, even when you are inflamed with passion, the way you can trust your mother:

"...one has doubts of them even at the moment when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in a kiss, my mother's heart, whole and entire, without qualm or reservation, without the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone."

Now, I know that children are selfish, but this to me smacks of a self-involvement verging on solipsism; perhaps because it echoed an earlier passage I took issue with. The narrator, wandering in a wood near Combray, is so overcome with his love of the place that he desires nothing so much as to meet a local peasant girl in order to understand, through her (and implicitly, through having sex with her) its beauty more completely:

"...to wander thus among the woods of Roussainville without a peasant-girl to embrace was to see those woods and yet know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep-hidden beauty. That girl...was to me herself a plant of local growth, and one whose structure would enable me to get closer...to the intimate savor of the country."

This really irritated me, because he sees this girl not as an actual individual with feelings but as a fantasy-object onto which he could project his own desires. She's a tool and not a person--no matter how poetically it's all phrased. Of course, it doesn't help that he goes immediately on to talk about being at:

"that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not yet reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same." So women are structures and instruments, not people? Nice.

These reservations notwithstanding, I'm glad to be reading it, if only for its importance in the general literary canon. I still refuse to read Joyce, though. On principle! I'm still scarred from my high school attempts to read Portrait of the Author, also known as the only time I BSed my way through an English exam.

Finish Line!

OK, I'm not 100% done with the semester quite yet; I still have to hand in my paper to Dr. Braddock and grade AWW papers and then the exam on the 17th, but at least classes are over! This semester was more stressful than others, for some reason, and I'm grateful that it's done. I like to think I carried everything off well...except for that online archival translation class, which, let's be honest, I definitely let fall by the wayside when I got overwhelmed with my project for the Caravaggio class. Oh well. I'm not a genius at reading archives, so what?

I was in New York this past weekend, where I stayed at Sara and Zach's apartment, with their adorable new dog Oscar:

He's exactly the kind of dog I can take to immediately: totally non-aggressive, doesn't bark, doesn't enthusiastically jump on you in a manner that I always perceive as semi-threatening, loves to cuddle, soft ears...the works. I actually threw a tennis ball for him for the better part of an hour after Sara and Zach left on Sunday morning, which is saying something, because a) I find dog-drool-covered toys disgusting, and b) it freaks me out to have to get near their teeth to get the toy away from them.

Saturday night, we went with Heather to see Peter Greenaway's Last Supper project at the Park Ave Armory. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it was really cool to see a digital reproduction of Leonardo's masterpiece, projected into a space that duplicated the size and scale of the actual refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie (which I'm not sure when I'll get around to visiting, if ever). Also awesome was the way Greenaway used digital rendering to turn the flat scene into something that seemed, briefly, three-dimensional; the entire scene would go dark, and then lights would play around the figures, making them seem almost to be moving and breathing in the dim light, or he would highlight just the feet, or the hands. I know part of his goal is to make the viewer look at a masterpiece in detail, instead of just absorbing it all at one go, and I felt that was successful. (There's a bit of video here, but it's really not the coolest parts.)

Once this little light show completed after 15 minutes or so and began to loop, though, it sort of lost its flavor. A NYTimes review complained that it lacked any kind of crescendo, although knowing even just a little bit of Greenaway's weirdness (we watched one of his films, The Draughtsman's Contract, during the Rome program) I'm not too surprised.

The odder thing was that despite the event being billed as his Last Supper project, they also threw in his work with Veronese's massive Wedding at Cana, which he projected onto the wall of the church of S. Giorgio in Venice, where it used to hang before Napoleon's soldiers cut it down and took it to France.

This project was much less successful than the Last Supper bit. One reason might be that it's just not as much of a hyper-familiar piece as Leonardo's, even if it is a beautiful spectacle. Greenaway seems to be fascinated by the sheer number of figures present (I forget the number, but maybe 150?) so repeatedly, he would show the scene with numbers superimposed over every single figure. That got old quickly. He also made up dialogue, mostly snarky, for many of the figures, but that veered from amusing to cheesy. Finally, there was an unnecessary voice-over at the beginning about theories that the Wedding at Cana was really Jesus' own wedding to Mary Magdalen, and that that's why Veronese showed him at the center and the married couple off to the left. Now, Veronese had already gotten in trouble with the Inquisition for painting a rowdy Last Supper that featured a bunch of unsavory characters (he wiggled out by re-naming it Supper in the House of Levi). If he'd really painted anything that could be interpreted as mildly heretical in a painting hanging in the biggest church in Venice, don't you think the Inquisition might have taken note? It was unnecessary and made me less interested in the rest of the project.

The Times review called this show, overall, a "dud," and I would almost be tempted to agree, if not for the experience of feeling like I really was standing in that refectory looking up at Leonardo's painting. That was definitely worth it.

On Sunday, I got to check out Heather's new apartment in Carroll Gardens. Her subway stop is elevated, so you get a beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline in one direction, and the Statue of Liberty in the other. The apartment had a lot of light, which is not something I generally associate with urban dwellings, and the neighborhood was really cool--a bunch of (expensive) vintage and antique shops, a couple of Italian markets, a brunch place with delicious, delicious bacon (There was a lot of red meat-eating this weekend. I regret nothing.) One of the vintage stores, where Heather admired a necklace that turned out to cost $275, also sold old timey candy, which we agreed was a good way to make people feel they could come in and poke around without that awkward "I'm totally not going to buy anything" feeling you sometimes get in small shops. (Of course, it can also lead to one friend saying "I can't afford anything, I'm unemployed...maybe I'll get a Sugar Daddy," and the other friend saying "Oh, do they have those?" and then realizing that her friend meant the "wealthy older man" variety and not the candy variety. But I did come out of there with a Sugar Daddy.) Heather really seemed to light up in her new surroundings, which was great. She also just got a three-month position with MacMillan, the publishing company, another sign of new beginnings.

After New York it was off to Connecticut. My wonderful mother-in-law picked me up from the train station in New Haven and whisked me off to her house for dinner, then dropped me off with Jen at a parking lot in Rocky Hill. My sister, wearing pajamas, naturally, ordered me to drive her car. Ah, sisters. We actually shared her bed that night, which was a little weird, since we haven't done that in, oh, more than a decade? Everything was fine, though, until I woke up at 6:15 to Jen yelling "Bob, do you want my cat?" I really have no idea what her damage is. When I asked her later why she thought she had to ask me that right then, when I was sleeping, when it was 6:15 in the morning, she just shrugged and said "I dunno." On the plus side, I got to cuddle with the other cat she wasn't trying to foist onto to me, Sapphire. I'd forgotten that she purrs like a freight train.

There was quite a lot of hustle and bustle, squabbling, yelling, you name it, involved in getting Jen to Hartford for the swearing in. My sister can be insane at the best of times, and she was definitely worked up that morning. More than once I wanted to choke her. It's just a natural reaction to us being in close quarters for any length of time, I'm afraid. We were joined by her boyfriend, Vinny, with whom she was celebrating a year's anniversary, together with my aunt and cousin, our nosy former neighbor Mrs. Long, one of Jen's friends, and Monica's mom, since Monica herself couldn't be there. After the swearing-in Jen dragged us to her office to meet her coworkers, and from there we went to Dom's. My mom's picture was hanging up at the waitress station, and Joanne and the other waitresses who knew us were there. I even ran into Mrs. Caruso, the secretary from St. Gabriel's. She was really friendly, but she asked me, rather presumptuously (even if I didn't think of that until later) if I was married; obviously I could say yes, but later I wondered, "How many people at 25 would be able to say yes to that? How many people would even ask that of someone they haven't seen since they were 14?") Then she asked me if I had kids! Maybe she thought I was a lot older than I am; I don't know. I am proud of what Jen and I have accomplished, though; her road has been a lot harder than mine, and I'm really impressed by how well she's done.

Success!

My presentation to my Caravaggio class yesterday went swimmingly! I still don't think it was the best work I've ever done, but my visuals, if I do say so myself, were pretty fabulous, like my poster for my fake exhibition above, and the gallery mock-ups below. Here we have a room dedicated to Carlo Saraceni (with Caravaggio's Omnia Vincit Amor on the left wall, made a lot bigger than its actual size):

And a gallery for Nicolas Regnier:

I was lucky enough to find high-resolution images of the Caravaggio show that is currently on in Rome right now, to which I simply added the paintings I wanted to use for my exhibition. It did require some fiddling and duplication of parts of the images to have enough correctly sized frames, and I'm not skilled enough with Photoshop to know how to get rid of the line that pretty clearly divides the Saraceni image down the center, but hey, not bad for a first-timer, I'd say. When I saw Dr. Cooper smiling and nodding the first few minutes, I was like, "Ok, this is not going to crash and burn, awesome sauce!" One of classmates told me after that my presentations are always a pleasure just to listen to and that this one was even more enjoyable, which was a really nice compliment. Not too shabby for a project that I started working on, oh, three weeks ago!

I ended up making two exhibition posters, actually, using the one above, Carlo Saraceni's alluring Judith with the Head of Holofernes for my first slide, and the one below, Nicolas Regnier's Carnival Scene, for the last:

Busy, Busy

The hectic end-of-semester rush is here, and I'm really feeling it this time. I sort of put off-slash-kept changing my mind on what to do for my project for Dr. Cooper's class, with the result that I finished my two other projects early and now have to throw myself into this 110% before my presentation on December 1. Naturally, with Thanksgiving coming up, I have even less time, plus there's so much else going on around this time of year, so it's been rather stressful.

Yet as much as I begrudge the time that I could be spending working on my project and feeling less like I'm going to expire from a heart attack at any moment, I had some fun this week. I covered two classes for my friend Amy on Thursday at the Ambler campus, which is 20 minutes from my house and a world away from the downtown campus--it was like a cute, miniaturized version of Fairfield (really miniaturized, really; I couldn't help but think of what these kids were missing out on versus the main campus). Her first class was an Arts of the Western World, and the kids were...mouthy, verging on disrespectful. There were like three different conversations going on during my lecture--in a small class of only 25 or so. Once or twice I asked them to be quiet, but it's hard to be authoritative when you're basically a substitute teacher. It didn't bother me much, though, for that same reason--they're not my students, and the other kids did seem interested. One girl asked me after class what else I teach, and expressed interest in my Heritage survey next semester because "you seem to actually know what you're talking about." Um, OK--that was an awkward compliment, because was she suggesting that Amy--whose lectures notes I was using, mind you--doesn't?

The second class was much more awesome--it was a class on mythology in art, and I was handling the early Renaissance, so Botticelli, Pollaiuolo, etc. The class was smaller and had many more adult students, and everyone was so eager to participate: they knew the myths in question, they had pertinent observations, questions, etc. A teacher's dream, in other words. Everyone has the most fun with this painting, Botticelli's Venus and Mars, which probably decorated a piece of furniture like a chest in early Renaissance Florence:


Mars has passed out after sex and Venus is looking at him like That's it? What the hell kind of god are you? Five hundred years later and some things haven't changed. Also, imagine how pissed Mars is going to be when that satyr blow the conch shell in his ear (Venus probably put them up to it). After class, several of the students complimented me on the lecture and told me they really enjoyed it, which hey, it's always really nice to hear, especially when these aren't even your own students and are thus clearly not sucking up (unlike the girl who came up to me after class once, pointedly complimented my green coat, and then asked for an extension on her paper. Brown-nosing fail.)

Thursday night, there was a lecture on campus that I had been grumbling about having to attend, but it turned out to be really great. The speaker was Jonathan Lopez, who wrote a book called The Man Who Made Vermeers about the Dutch forger Hans van Meegeren. He was arrested by the Dutch government in 1945 on charges of collaborating with the Nazis, since he had sold Hermann Goering, the number two man in Germany, a priceless Vermeer, Christ and the Adulteress. In order to evade that extremely serious charge, van Meegeren admitted that he hadn't sold Goering anything priceless--it was his own forgery. It later turned out that he'd been forging Vermeers for years, and they had been accepted by art historians and curators around the world, including the National Gallery of Art in DC. His forgeries even included the Supper at Emmaus that was considered, at the time, to be Vermeer's masterpiece.

But the real fascination of this story is not so much that van Meegeren was able to produce forged Vermeers that fooled everyone; it's that the Vermeers he produced look nothing like real Vermeers. For example, these two paintings are legitimate Vermeers, the Geographer and the Girl with the Red Hat:



This is van Meegeren's Supper at Emmaus:


Not for a second would anyone today think that the same artist painted that third image as the other two, and yet this fooled everyone. Lopez' most interesting argument was that fakes rely on subliminal references to contemporary culture that make the picture oddly resonant to the viewer and thus more likely to accept it; however, after a few decades (he suggested 40 years is the timeline) the power of those contemporary references has faded, leaving people surprised that anyone could have been tricked all those years ago. In the case of this painting, Lopez traced its relationship to the style of volkisch painting being promoted in Nazi Germany, of which the Dutch van Meegerem was a huge supporter (he sent Hitler a note in 1942 thanking him for doing such a good job. Seriously. It was in Lopez' slideshow), as well as the resemblance between the facial physiognomy of Christ here and Albrecht Durer's famous Self Portrait:

Durer was enthusiastically held up as the paragon of "good" German art by the Nazis, and they had specifically identified his physiognomy as the "ideal" Germanic face. Thus, by incorporating those elements into his completely fake painting, van Meegerem made it subtly more attractive to his contemporaries, who were already "used to" seeing paintings that looked like this.

This is only a small fraction of Lopez' argument, both about this painting and about van Meegeren's forgeries in general, but it was really fascinating to listen to.

Still Life

Raphaelle Peale, Blackberries, c. 1813, oil on panel

One of my classmates gave her presentation in our Caravaggio seminar on the relationship between Caravaggio and 19th century American still life painters. Typically the American still life tradition has been linked to the long history of Dutch still lifes, but my friend discovered that the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts had exhibited a still life attributed to Caravaggio in 1811, just before Raphaelle Peale and others began to paint the kind of tenebristic composition shown above.

The location of the painting itself is a mystery, but the fact that it was identified as a Caravaggio in the early 19th century, when his reputation was basically in the gutter (he wouldn't be catapulted to the megastardom through which we know him today until a historic exhibition in Milan in 1951) suggests that it was a secure attribution. Only one independent still life by Caravaggio is known today, this incredibly illusionistic work of 1599 (it's like you could reach out and stroke the wicker of that basket!):


Yet we know he painted more of them--and one of them, it seems, found its way to Philadelphia and had an impact on Peale, a member of a prominent family of Philadelphia artists.

Now, I'm not usually a big fan of still life. Caravaggio's marvelous little picture is an exception to this rule, on account of its general awesomeness, but in general, blech. Dutch still life, in particular, is probably the genre of Western art I like least.

Clara Peeters, Still Life with Flowers, 17th c.

I know they're full of hyper-specific symbolism and they constitute warnings about vanitas, but I just find them so. damn. ugly. My friend knows all this, so she was teasing me in advance about how I would probably be bored to tears by her paper, but to my surprise, I really enjoyed not only her argument, but the images as well. Don't Peale's blackberries look good enough to eat? She also showed this late 16th century drawing of irises by a Florentine naturalist named Ligozzi (not technically a still life, but it's still something I'm not usually intrigued by):

I have a fondness for irises, so this really struck me as lovely. However, I remain resolute in my hatred of Dutch still life. Gah.