NY Adventures

Yesterday was such an awesome day! I caught a ride to NYC on my friend Maite's bus trip, which is pretty convenient in that it is a) free and b) takes you direct between Temple and the Met. Granted, I had to get up while it was still dark to get there, which I did not enjoy, but it was definitely worth it to spend the day with Sara.

We met at the Frick Collection, which is housed in a Gilded Age mansion built by the steel magnate Henry Clay Frick. I'd only been there once before, and virtually all I remembered of it was the room with some of my favorite portraits in it, such as Titian's Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap:

and Hans Holbein's portrait of Thomas More:

However, I was really not prepared for how incredible the collection was as a whole. There's an amazing array of small bronzes, including Sara's favorite piece, Alessandro Algardi's Pieta:

The largest gallery featured two huge and luscious Veronese canvases, as well as Rembrandt's arresting self-portrait:

and this gorgeous portrait of Lady Hamilton, mistress of Lord Nelson:

There were also two Rococo rooms, which is not necessarily to my taste but did give me the opportunity to have Sara watch Rococo Puffs; therefore totally worth it.

After the museum and some lunch, Sara's eye was caught by someone walking by with a bag from the exclusive French macaroon shop Laduree (we were on the upper East side, after all, which means walking about the Cartier shop and wondering at the people who are just walking in like, you know, they're going to buy something). The shop turned out to be pretty close, so we waited in an incredibly long line in this tiny shop that looked like it had been perfectly transposed from 18th-century Paris for Sara to buy a small box of these colorful confections (which are not to my taste, as I have a hatred of almond-flavoring) which she later assured me had been delicious.

After that, we wandered through Central Park, where I finally saw the obelisk that's behind the Metropolitan, as well as the incongruously huge statue of the 15th-century Polish king Jagiello (which was originally created for the Polish pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair and wound up staying because of the war). It's easy to forget how huge Central Park really is, till you're staring across the Jackie Kennedy Onassis reservoir and questioning whether ducks can actually drown themselves (in this case, no, although the duck stayed under for two or three minutes with no air bubbles). And then it was time to depart! I'm kind of tired today, but it was totally worth it. :-)

Christmas Cheer

Sean keeps reminding me that I've been seriously neglecting putting up posts on this blog. What better time to do it than the day after Christmas?

We both agreed that Christmas didn't quite feel like Christmas this year, with no snow, and days of 50-degree temperatures, but it was still a Christmas of firsts. We put up our first Christmas tree together (a real one, despite my protests that there was a perfectly good fake one in the basement), discovering in the process that we had some of the same little wooden ornaments from the '90s. We argued over Sean's desire to decorate said tree with tinsel (vetoed), wooden balls that supposedly resemble popcorn (vetoed) and strings of gold beads (reluctantly accepted). Growing up, our trees were just decorated with ornaments, balls, and lights! Is that so strange? (According to Sean, yes.)

We also decorated our first gingerbread house together, during which process Sean insisted on using every godforsaken piece of candy that had come with the kit, resulting in the creation of a candy fence, koi pond, and decorative bushes. I had the idea (genius, if I do say so myself) to use sugar to fill the yard with snow! It was a lovely house, and it lasted maybe 36 hours until Sean took a giant bite out of one corner of the roof. The next day he took another bite, this time taking off about half the roof, and it was just downhill from there. This is why we can't have nice things.

As for Christmas itself, my only disappointment in celebrating with Sean's family is that they have no respect for the concept of Christmas morning. Last year we opened presents at 5pm. This year was better--only 2pm! Personally, I think 10am is the ideal present-opening time, but that's just me. Anyway, I got a number of lovely gifts, but this one Sean gave me is without a doubt the most awesome:

The globe even spins, how cool is that?? Sean's favorite gift was actually received a few weeks back and is sitting in the driveway--his Buick, freshly repainted, shining as though it were new instead of being two years away from antique status. I'm distinctly less embarrassed to drive it now, I have to say, which is good, because it is way more comfortable than the Corolla.

The other awesome part of Christmas: the ham. Dear god, I think I was actually in danger of a food coma yesterday. We hadn't eaten all day, so when we finally ate dinner around 5, I think I must have eaten 8 or 9 slices of ham. I barely paid attention to the mashed potatoes, and that's saying something. Then, of course, I felt like I was dying of thirst the rest of the night thanks to all that salt. Oh, also of note: Rachel Buglione Corbett, lifelong vegetarian, tried a bit of ham yesterday! This from the girl who didn't want to try chicken because it might be a "gateway meat." Lol.

In conclusion, it was a wonderful Christmas, and I am, officially, the Best Wife Ever (2011).

Squee!

The title of this post encapsulates my feelings last night when Dr. Rosand gave me an awesome compliment. He's teaching the Titian seminar I'm sitting in on at Princeton, and during the break he told me how happy he is that I'm in the class and that I'm "a wonderful colleague to have around the table." Hence: squee! Although I think I managed a more calm "Thank you!" David Rosand is one of the foremost Venetian scholars in the world, his CV is about a mile long, his work on Titian is standard to any bibliography, and he thinks I'm making good contributions! Gah.

That was actually just the pick-me-up I needed, because yesterday morning I was getting a bit despondent over the fact that so far nothing has struck me as a possibility for a dissertation topic. I can rattle you off such a list of recent work, that I wish I'd done myself, but avenues for the future? Nada. That's disconcerting, especially since the application for the Cini grant is due in January and is in fact much more restrictive than last year's, with only 3 fellowships open to people who have clearly-defined projects to offer. We're going to Venice even if I don't get one (and I won't, because I have practically nothing even if Dr. Cooper is BFF with the director).

Enough of that. David Rosand thinks I'm awesome and that's enough for this week. To conclude, an image that popped up in someone's presentation last night, a drawing of three nudes by Francesco Salviati, c. 1545. Presented without comment.

Musee des Beaux Arts

Pieter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558, oil on canvas

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W. H. Auden

On Reading

I've just finished reading a slim green volume of essays, Ex-Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, by Anne Fadiman. I don't think the title was particularly accurate; can you rightly call someone who owns literally thousands of books (and seems to remember all of them) a “common reader?” Essays on literature that drop names like Guy de Maupasssant (who?) and Trollope (whose name I only remember from finding it worthy of snickers in the public library as a child, along with Eric van Lustbader) make me feel incredibly unworthy as a reader. Unaccomplished! After all, here I am, shortly to be 26 years old, and I've read the Odyssey, but never the Iliad, and definitely not the Aeneid. I've read a lot of Shakespeare but not Antony and Cleopatra or Julius Caesar. Anna Karenina, yes, but not War and Peace. Dostoyevsky and I had a fruitless meeting years ago with Crime and Punishment; when I moved from Windsor (or maybe it lasted through Shelton) I ditched that, along with the Brothers Karamazov. Charles Lamb has been on my “to read” list for over a year. I've never read Moby Dick, or Paradise Lost, and I haven't looked at anything written by the Romantic poets since a Brit Lit course (Mullen!) my sophomore year of college. Don't even mention modern American writers—I've never read anything by Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, or Jonathan Updike (I think I tried reading Witches of Eastwick and it was weird), and even more recent ones—Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonthan Franzen, other people whose names I know from the New Yorker, New York Times, and Phyllis' book piles? Nada.

Unlike Fadiman, I can't even look to my bookshelves to sound the roll call of all of the books I have read because I don't usually buy books, I borrow them from the library. I have the feeling that someone with a multi-thousand-volume library would look down upon this way of doing--in fact, not once in her essays does Fadiman mention the word “library” except in the context of one's personal collection. Unlike Fadiman (and Sean), I've never seen the point in buying a book I haven't yet read. How do I know that I'll consider it worthy of re-reading, which is, to me, the only reason worth buying a book.? (Why Phyllis, who professes to rarely, if ever, re-read a book (just as she dislikes visiting a restaurant more than once, much less ordering the same dish) owns so darned many I don't know). Books you've read and liked come to be like friends; visiting with them might not offer any curveballs, but it's a warm, comfortable pleasure all the same. They've earned the pride of place on your shelf. It's such a nice feeling to take down a book I've read many times and be able to start reading from anywhere, even in the middle of a chapter; this works with classics like Pride and Prejudice, of course, but also Lamb, Lake Woebegone Days, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

I've also always been resistant to paying full price for a book. I prefer to find it at a tag sale or a used book store, which offers the added thrill of serendipity, like when I completed my collection of Winston Churchill's WWII series at a book sale in Chestnut Hill this spring. Elation! The best kind of book sale is the kind where they let you fill a box for $5, or something like that; I used to make out like a bandit at our public library's book sales back in the day. Occasionally I've even wound up with multiple copies of the same book, either because I didn't realize I already had it (Candide), because I liked the cover of the one I'd found (Pride and Prejudice), because I owned a paperback and this was a hardback, or the reverse (Jonathan Strange, Illusion).

At book sales I've always tended to gravitate toward classics in the hopes of filling out my list of “Important Books Read.” Sometimes this backfires; Dostoyevsky was something I picked up at the Windsor Library book sale, for example. But, as opposed to people who are always expanding their libraries, I've pruned mine remorselessly over the years, with the result that I probably own now only a fraction of books that I used to own. Part of this was the exigencies of being on the move from Windsor to Shelton to Philly. Plus, I'm always trying to get rid of things I don't need, so as to live an existence less freighted by things, and that includes books that I either read and hated (cf. Dostoyevsky), or ones that I've accepted I will simply never read, not even on a rainy day when there's seemingly nothing else to do (Of Human Bondage). In contrast, I don't think Sean had ever gotten rid of a book until I donated all his juvenile fiction to Goodwill a couple of weeks ago (with the exception of an entire box of Great Illustrated Classics, which went to the couple next door to hold in trust for their 3-year-old, Ruthie). But what's the point in keeping a book that I'll never open, just to have it on the shelves? Shouldn't someone else be making use of it instead?

Here's another place that my faulty memory makes me regretful; Fadiman writes so eloquently of being able to remember the first time she read certain books, and I almost never can. I know that I attempted Pride and Prejudice on the computer in HTML format sometime in the late 90s (I had just watched You've Got Mail and wanted to know what this “famous snub” was all about)...but I wasn't impressed, probably because reading it online was giving me a headache. Also, being in middle school at the time, I remember thinking that “she's not nearly handsome enough to tempt me” was a pretty weak jab. When did I really read and begin to grasp the subtlety? I don't know.

I think that I remember books read in foreign places the most because the setting itself was so memorable. For example, I know I first read Jane Eyre and “Our Town” in our apartment in Florence, where they were books left behind by previous students. I read Tacitus' Annals on a train to Rome with Sara, Anna, Tess and Carla (and when the train pulled into Termini, who stood up on the other end of the car than Mike Lombardi, a kid Sara and I had gone to high school with). I bought Lake Woebegone Days (which has since earned a spot of my list of absolute favorite books, and a book I would consider taking to a desert island) from the Paperback Exchange in Florence for 25 euro cents. In Rome two years ago, I borrowed the collected works of P.G. Wodehouse from Caitlin and read it lying on that hard, narrow little bed in our room, chuckling to myself at the antics of Bertie Wooster and the implacable cleverness of Jeeves. Most recently, I remember reading Julius Caesar's words about himself in the third person, sitting on the roof deck of our hotel in Turkey. What will I read in France, I wonder? Perhaps Flaubert--but then it won't be for the first time.

I know that my academic career is the major reason why I don't consume as many books as I used to. It's not that I read less (in fact I read more now than I ever have in my life, I'm sure), it's just that I have less time to attack my "Must Read" list. C'est la vie. And speaking of, it's time to read for school!

A Spot of Ethical Bother

I am not, and will never be, a vegetarian. Nor, god help me, a vegan. I like hamburgers, and those soy ice cream sandwiches taste like shit (oh Shenandoah Farms sandwiches, why are you only available in Virginia? I dream of your creamy goodness and your shockingly low saturated-fat content) However, recent discoveries have forced me to think hard about my choices in the kind of animal products I'll consume in the future.

First, let's be honest: no reasonably intelligent person, in this day and age, can possibly claim absolute naivete regarding the conditions experienced by animals raised for slaughter. You can be like my sister, if you so desire, and vehemently demand that the topic be changed if it's even brushed upon, but that's also called being an ostrich and is not generally considered a strong position from which to argue. We all know those animals' lives are, quite literally, nasty, brutish and short, we all know that there are abuses, we all know that we like to sink our teeth into a tasty turkey sandwich. We know these things, but we'd generally rather not know these things in their full, horrifying, PETA-ad depth, because then we wouldn't be able to eat that sandwich without guilt. I admit to being one of these people; despite having a vague awareness that factory farming, as it's called, is exploitative and cruel, I never sought out information on exactly how awful it is. And it's bad.

Two things conspired to make me actually pay attention. First, during a debate at Middlebury, one of my classmates mentioned that the label "cage free" and "free range" mean absolutely bupkis when it comes to chicken and eggs. I will also admit to being a little naively surprised by this, but it's really true in 99% of cases. Second, Sean and I were reading a NYTimes article by an ethics professor recently in which he mentioned, in the middle of a string of examples, the fact that in the egg industry, male chicks (which do not lay eggs and are thus useless) are thrown alive into a meat grinder. Let's take a minute to process that. Cute, fluffy yellow chicks. Meat grinder. I later learned that not only is this absolutely true, but that other times male chicks are tossed into plastic bags and allowed to suffocate.

It's not like the female chicks get a much better life. I'm not going to go into graphic details, because honestly some of this stuff turned my stomach (particularly some of the sickening torture of helpless birds perpetrated by bored factory workers for fun), but in addition to being crammed in dirty quarters with so many birds that they will never, ever be able to spread their wings (yes, even the "free range" ones), these chickens have their beaks removed sans anesthesia so that they can't peck the other chickens around them to death in frustrated rage. Jesus. And the pictures of these places...it's truly horrifying. And it's not OK.

Now, I had already had a couple of points regarding meat on which I was willing to draw a line; I will never, ever eat lobster, for example, no matter how delicious it is, because I cannot get past the fact of its being boiled the fuck alive. All of a sudden, though, I also found myself recoiling at the thought of the tasty hardboiled eggs that I ate all summer for breakfast at Middlebury. Eggs seem so innocuous, so pure, until you begin to perceive the immense amount of suffering that's required to get them on your plate at the low price we're all accustomed to.

So, it is time to vote with my wallet, since I don't plan to go out and throw paint with PETA. I don't buy eggs frequently, but I know now that I can get actual cage-free eggs at the co-op from several local farms. Organizations like http://www.certifiedhumane.org/ offer lists of smaller farmers that treat their livestock responsibly (and actually live up to their labelling). They also list restaurants, and I was happy to discover a chain of CT burger restaurants that offer humane hamburgers. Sometimes, you just need one, dammit. In terms of meat, though, the only thing I buy is turkey, which is probably also available at the coop but likely is too expensive for my budget, so I cut it out entirely; I'm subbing in jelly sandwiches and tuna sandwiches for now. (Actually the tuna makes me feel guilty too, not only for the fish but because mayo has egg whites...maybe one day I'll actually make my own mayo, like Phyllis).

To conclude, I'm not against the consumption of meat in small amounts; it's tasty, and we don't have these pointy canines for nothing. But there's no reason animals should suffer this kind of anguish just so I can enjoy scrambled eggs. None at all.

Turkish Insertion

I opened my little moleskine notebook take notes in class on Wednesday evening and discovered that, aside from using it once at Middlebury to take notes on the film Concorrenza Sleale, I had apparently also jotted down a number of impressions after we had left Istabul. Just so I don't forget, a few extracts:

"Reached Selcuk no problem--GPS is a wonder! Sean rested, we went over to the Basilica of St. John, lovely. Just saw the tail end of a delicious sunset. Roses everywhere here, full bloom, also something like lilac, small, star-shaped, white. Donkeys grazing around byzantine cistern. Storks nesting atop byz. aqueduct. Sean found byz. aqueduct construction much shoddier than "real" Romans!"

"Bergama: acropolis was awesome. Massive hill, tiny funicular cars, Sean was freaked. He climbed down the theater. In search of a lower path to the orchestra we wound up halfway down the mountain, encountered a couple who claimed you could walk all the way down "unofficially." Lies. Though they apparently clambered goatlike down a steep hillside because I saw them later on the road below. Climb back UP to take funicular DOWN was brutal. So tired we hit the road immediately, rather than see Asklepion."

Finally: "May 16: Beat Sean to monastery up giant ass mountain. Go me." Haha, my favorite!

I had also written something about how lovely and cool the plush carpets in the mosques felt on your feet, especially after the heat of a day out walking. God, that's a nice memory. Those may have been some of the thickest carpets I've ever walked on.

I don't think I wrote this before, but they didn't make us cover our heads in any of the mosques in Istanbul: we had to take off our shoes, and, oddly enough, I had to cover my forearms with a scarf in the Blue Mosque--but no head coverings. Then you're herded in the tourist entrance to a cordoned-off section of the mosque, where you can stand gawking at the Muslims performing their prostrations. A little awkward to treat another people's religion as a theme park, but then again, I do it to the Catholics, too. I can't say as much for the Jews, as the only synagogue I've been in as a tourist was a museum in Spain. And as for the Protestants, well, they don't really built many churches worth snapping a photo of, do they?

A Brief Review of Books Read Recently

1) The Gallic Wars: The hotel in which we stayed in Selcuk, near Ephesus, had a book swap on the rooftop patio, where I found Julius Caesar tucked amid the yellowing guidebooks to Turkey in every possible language, including Japanese. It was a pretty slim volume, which surprised me; I had had the idea that it was really long.

It was certainly interesting, but I didn't find in it the Art of War-style, universally-applicable insight that I think I was expecting. Mostly I was astounded by the Roman ability to move tens of thousands of soldiers, plus baggage trains, over such vast distances in a relatively short amount of time. The organizational capacity of the Romans never ceases to amaze. Then there were battles in which he reported ten or fifteen thousand of an enemy tribe were slain--they must have been estimating, but how close to the mark? At another point he describes selling an entire city into slavery to a single, unnamed buyer:

"The day after, Caesar, after breaking open the gates, which there was no one then to defend, and sending in our soldiers, sold the whole spoil of that town. The number of 53,000 persons was reported to him by those who had bought them."

Who the hell could afford to buy an entire city's worth of people? How would you use them? What would stop them from just killing you once the Romans were gone? So many questions. Sadly, I ended up leaving this book in another book swap in our hotel in Istanbul so that Sean could take the next one on my list:

2) The Mouse That Roared: This book is awesome! A satire of the Cold War from 1955, it tells the story of a tiny European principality called the Duchy of Grand Fenwick that decides to declare war on the United States so that they can be defeated and start collecting money from the Marshall Plan. They're so poor and medieval that their expeditionary force still wears chain mail! Through a series of coincidences, they manage to invade New York City during a city-wide disaster drill and unwittingly kidnap the scientist who's just created the most destructive atom weapon ever, the Q-bomb, which could easily destroy Earth. All of a sudden all of the superpowers of the Cold War have to bow to this tiny country they've never heard of.

It was a great read, and I'm looking forward to watching the Peter Sellers movie version. I don't think I could imagine a movie version of this that didn't have Peter Sellers in it, really--it reads like it was written for him!

Sherlock Holmes: Sean loves to have the fancy editions of books, with the stamped and embossed covers; he thinks they look nicer in a library, which is probably true. I prefer paperbacks; even though they're not as durable, they're so much friendlier to the hand and to the eye. Case in point: Sean owns the collected Sherlock Holmes stories in a massive bound edition that must weigh six pounds if it weighs an ounce. The pages are feather-light and the type is fairly small. This does not make for the most commodious reading experience, but despite these inconveniences, I spent quite a bit of the month of May in Sean's big wingback chair reading tale after tale of dear Sherlock. Many of them I'd never actually read before, and even the ones I had I rarely remembered all the ins-and-outs (except for "The Case of the Speckled Band," which I skipped because I remembered the snake).

Arthur Conan Doyle clearly had a low opinion of Mormons, judging from the story "A Study in Scarlet." The story was recently banned from a school in the US, I read, because it's considered offensive on religious grounds. I find the Mormon religion kind of ridiculous, I have to admit. Alright, I find religions in general pretty ridiculous in the things they're willing to believe, but c'mon, the "true" religion really just popped up in the US in 1830 via a miraculous visitation and some buried golden plates? And the angel's name was "moron" with an "i" after it? Are you kidding? Worst marketing strategy ever.

Vanity Fair: This is a book I've been intending to read for some time, but never had; finally I spotted a copy at a tag sale in Chesnut Hill (the same place I scored the remaining 5 volumes of Winston Churchill's account of WWII for less than $5, so happy) and thus had no further reason to delay. It's a great read. Thackeray had an incredible ability to sketch characters to the point that they seemed like someone you've met on the street before, especially clever, scheming Becky Sharp, a sociopath if there ever was one. Beautiful, ambitious, and totally without morals, she lies, cheats and steals her way through the book, ruining the lives of others and yet always managing to scrape right through. She's not redeemed at the end, nor does she die in some overly moralistic way--you catch of a glimpse of her when she's older, faded, but every bit as ruthless as before.

According to the foreword, Dickens and Thackeray were frequently compared in their ability to create this world of characters, but Thackery's tone is lighter, tinged with sarcasm, in lieu of what I always perceived as Dickens' never-ending gloom. Some of the best parts of the novel, for me, are when the narrator speaks of his observations of "the Fair":

"Indeed, for my own part, though I have been repeatedly told by persons for whom I have the greatest respect, that Miss Brown is an insignificant chit, and Mrs. White has nothing but her petit minois chiffonne, and Mrs. Black has not a word to say for herself; yet I know that I have had the most delightful conversations with Mrs. Black (of course, my dear Madam, they are inviolable): I see all the men in a cluster round Mrs. White's chair: all the young fellows battling to dance with Miss Brown; and so I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman."

A Sentimental Education: I found this at a used bookstore in Middlebury for 25 cents! Cue my great delight. I loved Madame Bovary, despite the grimness of the ending, and I was intrigued to read that this book is considered by many to be Flaubert's masterwork. I think I prefer the character of Emma Bovary (as did the author, who said "Emma Bovary c'est moi"), but the atmosphere of Frederic Moreau's gay Paris. I don't know who would prefer reading about a dusty provincial town and that infernal man with his lathe if you could read about all-night parties with prostitutes under the gas lamps of the capital, against the background of the 1848 revolution.

The books are similar in that they sketch out lives gone to waste--Emma trapped in her one-horse town, Frederic desperately obsessed with a married woman that he can never have. I'm more inclined to feel sorry for Emma, who was at least constrained by gender roles to a life of inactivity, to Frederic, who has money and education but does nothing with it but moon over a frankly unremarkable female that he met briefly on a riverboat (I found shades of Proust and Charles Swann in this, and I've expressed my feelings on Swann before, blech).

However, Frederic doesn't meet the kind of tragic end that Emma does--he just fades out. In the last scene he and his friend reminisce about their youth, how they were once going to take the world by storm, and what happened? Nothing. In the last lines they remind one another of a youthful, failed attempt to visit a whorehouse that ended with them running away in terror and being the scandal of the countryside--and then they agree that was perhaps the best time they ever had! According to the foreword, this attracted a lot of heat to Flaubert, as people thought he was encouraging bohemian behavior, but in fact it refers to the potentiality of that moment, everything unknown and untasted that lay before them, all the world to explore. Halcyon days, from the perspective of the older, jaded failures they've become.

Innocents Abroad: Mark Twain in Europe. 'Nuff said. So many great quotes, including this (really long) one on the surfeit of Michelangelo:

"In this connection I wish to say one word about Michael Angelo Buonarotti. I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo--that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture--great in every thing he undertook. But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast--for luncheon--for dinner--for tea--for supper--for between meals. I like a change, occasionally. In Genoa, he designed every thing; in Milan he or his pupils designed every thing; he designed the Lake of Como; in Padua, Verona, Venice, Bologna, who did we ever hear of, from guides, but Michael Angelo? In Florence, he painted every thing, designed every thing, nearly, and what he did not design he used to sit on a favorite stone and look at, and they showed us the stone. In Pisa he designed every thing but the old shot-tower, and they would have attributed that to him if it had not been so awfully out of the perpendicular. He designed the piers of Leghorn and the custom house regulations of Civita Vecchia. But, here--here it is frightful. He designed St. Peter's; he designed the Pope; he designed the Pantheon, the uniform of the Pope's soldiers, the Tiber, the Vatican, the Coliseum, the Capitol, the Tarpeian Rock, the Barberini Palace, St. John Lateran, the Campagna, the Appian Way, the Seven Hills, the Baths of Caracalla, the Claudian Aqueduct, the Cloaca Maxima--the eternal bore designed the Eternal City, and unless all men and books do lie, he painted every thing in it! Dan said the other day to the guide, "Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!" I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace as I did yesterday when I learned that Michelangelo was dead.”

On foreign communication: "In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language."

My personal favorite: Twain and his friends insisted on calling every one of their guides (Greeks, Frenchmen, Turks) by the same name: Ferguson. They also enjoyed staring dumbly at every statue and image of some figure from ages gone by and then asking their guide, slowly, stupidly "But...is he dead?" Heehee.

Roundup

It's been quite some time since I updated my blog, more than two months. The two big things that happened in the interim are pretty much my seven weeks at Middlebury in the Scuola Italiana, and Sean's move back to New Haven. I'm happy to report that the latter went smoothly, and we're now comfortably established in what once was Linda's side of the house. I love it, but it's taking Sean longer to really think of it as "his" space. If all goes to plan, I'll be there permanently after my exams in April! No more marriage commuting, whoohoo!

As for Middlebury, it was amazing, truly. It's incredible what your mind can do when it's saturated so completely in a language! My reading and listening comprehension rocketed ahead of where I started, and while I still make lots of mistakes while speaking, I know that's a hell of a lot better than before. The thing to do now is to make sure I don't lose the skills! I've emailed my fellow Italian-speakers in the department, suggesting that we have a weekly Italian lunch date or something. I also considered asking for a Kindle for my birthday in order to be able to purchase Italian-translation literature more easily, but as of now I'm not sure it's worth it.

I'm kind of surprised at myself for how little I've written down about Middlebury. I think I just wrote so many emails to people describing the program and all the cool things we were doing that I don't really feel like recapitulating it to myself--I can always just go read the emails themselves. But it was amazing, worth every minute and every penny. One day in Italy it will serve me well!

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.