Venice Notes, Somewhat Belated

            My second day in Venice is coming to a close.  So far everything is going OK; I had more trouble in Brooklyn, first with transit issues and then with getting locked out, than I had on the rest of the voyage altogether, so hopefully any bad travel karma has already been used.

 I don’t think I’ll fly Iberia again without checking to make sure it’s a big plane with the seatback entertainment sets.  That might sound silly, but I tend to have difficulty sleeping on international flights (as Sean knows only too well), so I rely on watching movie after movie to pass the time.  The few books I brought with me were in my checked luggage, so when I sat down and realized that something was missing I thought “oh, crap.”  The inflight movie, which they didn’t put on until maybe three or four hours into the flight, was about the rescue of the trapped whales in Alaska and was pretty good.  My seatmate was a junior from Sonoma College in California, headed to visit her best friends who were studying abroad.  I think I admirably contained my reaction when she replied to my inquiry about why she hadn’t joined them with a placid “oh, I’ve never really felt the need to be far from home.”  Her college is right near her hometown and I caught sight of her cell phone with the contact name “Mommy.” ‘Nuff said. 

           I also made conversation briefly with the couple who were sitting across the aisle from me.  The husband, who had the aisle seat, kept struggling to open the moist towlette packet that comes with your meal (delicious, so that’s a point to Iberia, and breakfast didn’t suck either), so finally I leaned over and tried to ask in Spanish if I could help him (after spending ten minutes trying to remember what the words were in Spanish and trying to disentangle ayudar from aiutare).  He didn’t seem to get what I was saying, so I just grabbed it and opened it for him, and then his wife laughed because he’d been fighting with it for so long.  They were Spanish (although she corrected me, Catalan, which is distinct for them like Sicilian is in Italy) but spoke Italian too, so we talked in that. They told me my Spanish was good, which had to be a lie, because the guy had clearly not understood what I’d said (although I admit I also have the bad habit of speaking in a softer-than-normal tone when speaking a foreign language, because I’m nervous about fucking up).   I seem to be able to pass as Spanish as long as I don’t speak, but it’s not the case for Italian--which is weird, because there’s such a diversity among Italians—I saw a couple of vaporetto workers today who looked Irish, red-blonde hair, fair skin and all.  Italians, y u no let me pass as one of you? (incidentally I saw t-shirts hanging in a store window with rageface comics on them! Ah, the unifying power of internet memes).

Anyone with a propensity for sea-sickness (you, Rae) would not last long in Venice, not if they planned to get around on the vaporetti, anyway.  Coming in from the airport we were moving at a snail’s pace, because the speed limit was posted at 7km, or about 3mph!  Meanwhile these private taxi boats were racing around us, kicking up huge wakes that shook the vaporetto like crazy (the driver was venting his spleen via horn at them).  I’ve read that the wakes also have a negative effect on the lagoon ecosystem, but there doesn’t seem to be much of an effort to check them.  There are police patrolling the waters but I doubt they have speed traps set up.  Using the vaporetti in the city and to and from Lido, there’s less interference from the taxis but there’s also the lovely sensation of docking—if a subway can be a bit jarring as it screeches to a halt, imagine the roar of the vaporetto engine  combined with the           *THUD *as the boat comes alongside and then whacks into the landing, sometimes gently, but more frequently not, it seems. 

It feels right to arrive in Venice by water because that’s how travelers saw the city for the first time for centuries; you understand the magical power this “impossible city” has over the viewer when you see it emerging from the water, which seems flecked with diamonds as the sun plays over it.  It took about an hour to get to the Lido from the airport.  I was able to get my iMob Venezia pass immediately at an office there; you have to pay 50 euro for it, but it lets you purchase tickets at a much-reduced rate (1 euro for vaporetto rides instead of 6) and it’s valid for five years.  Actually, the reason I left Sara and Zach’s apartment and got locked out was because I had just noticed on the website that they required a passport sized photo with your application and I was headed to a Walgreens to get them taken.  I never made it, but it turns out I didn’t need them anyway, as the office just took a photo of my passport photo (and that ghastly image will now adorn my Venice card till 2017, two years after the passport itself will have to be replaced, joy).

One errand done, I took a cab to Elsa’s house, which is a block off one of the main streets, Via San Gallo—incidentally, the name of the street we lived on in Florence!   I was a little worried as the cabbie deposited me and my bags on the sidewalk in a silent residential neighborhood; if there had been a mix-up and she wasn’t home, I’d have to haul my bags a long way to a phone.  However, no such disaster occurred.  Elsa, it turns out, is more than 90, very nice, if a bit difficult to understand when she speaks quietly (she’s missing most of her bottom from teeth which has something to do with it I think).  I can understand her fine when she speaks a bit more slowly and directly.  She told me I’m lucky she speaks Tuscan, aka normal Italian, instead of the incomprehensible (even to other Italians) Venetian dialect, since her mother was Tuscan. 

There have inevitably been difficulties of communication; I didn’t know the word for heater (stufa) so I had trouble asking her why, in the name of god, she was running the heater on a lovely day like yesterday (answer likely being she’s really old and likes it warm; solution, I keep my room’s door closed and open the window. Hopefully when it is hot she will not want it on…).  Today I had no idea what the word for shower curtain was (la tenda) when I was trying to joke about the difficulty in showering without a shower curtain without spraying water everywhere, since we always have them in the States.  I also accidentally called my “attempt” (tentativo) an “attack” (attentato).  Whoops.  The good thing is, I can talk to Elsa in full knowledge that I will screw up with less of the anxiety I feel about when I’m out and about.  They may not actually be scorning my attempts to speak their language, but I always think they are.  This is something I will have to work on, clearly, because I’ll never improve without risks.  I did converse successfully with the Vodafone guy when buying my cheapie cell phone yesterday, but when he was setting it up and asked me if I wanted it in Italian or English I laughed to myself and said English, because we both knew that’s my real language!  (I’m sure someone who wanted to make a big show of things would have put it in Italian, but what’s the point, no one will see it but you!)

After leaving my things with Elsa yesterday around 1 I headed into the city (although in Italian you could say “andare in centro” for going downtown, I learned from saying this to Elsa that each island counts as its own place with its own downtown; “andare a Venezia” is its own phrase, even though it’s just a 10 minute ride across the water).  I got gelato (vaniglia, of course), found an internet café to let everyone know I survived, and wandered around the streets for a few hours.  I bought cherries from Trreviso and discovered that in Venetian parlance they are “badoere” and not “ciligie.” (there was a famous Venetian family named the Badoer, and I can only assume somehow cherries took on their name).  I went to bed fairly early, and woke around 6:30 to a huge storm outside and howling wind.  I turned off my alarm and went back to sleep, and woke up before 11—almost 12 hours after I went to sleep!  It wasn’t a big loss, since a cold rain was still falling even when I left the house an hour later, and boy was it windy and freezing.  I had on a shirt, thin cardigan, zip-up hoodie, and a thin rain jacket, and I was still cold.  And thank God I opted to bring a pair of jeans.   I grimaced sympathetically at all the tourists in the city with sandals, capris and even shorts on some unlucky folks.  Unfortunately, I got to the city as all the churches and many shops closed for the mid-day break, so I did more wandering in search of the Toletta bookstore where Dr. Cooper told me I could find a particular guidebook.  Venice is beyond byzantine in its warren of streets; there are no street addresses, just the name of the sestiere, or section (literally “sixth” since there are six) plus a number, which don’t seem to run in any comprehensible order.  One minute I was doggedly trailing some 350s, turn a corner, and I’m in the 5300s; the other side of the street is 3800s.  Dorsoduro 1213, which Dr. Cooper said was near the university, Ca’ Foscari, eluded me, though I did find another bookstore where I bought an Italian copy of Sense and Sensibility (they didn’t have Emma but I’m going to look elsewhere).

Today’s only cultural event was going into the Frari. (Actually, no, I went into S. Giovanni Crisostomo first, when I was hunting for another bookstore, this one used (I found it but it was closed) and looked briefly at Sebastiano del Piombo’s altarpiece, which was surprisingly dark and hard to make out, compared to the images we’re used to from books).  But anyway the Frari was the big thing; seeing Titian’s Assunta has inaugurated my time in Venice!  I also decided that I quite enjoy Canova’s 18^th c tomb memorial (if memory serves, he was designing it for Titian but it wound up being used for his own), even if it is quite out of place in the Gothic church.  It’s a massive pyramid with an iron door cut into it; a pair of female mourners are preparing to enter with offerings on one side, while on the other, Fame and the lion of Venice lie prostrate with grief.  The door itself is actually ajar and you can just see a dark space beyond, which is what makes it intriguing in my eyes.

                I’ve never really been to Venice in the high season.  We were here during Carnival the first time, it’s true, so I remember the crush of 10 million people in the piazza S. Marco, but now you get to see things like people who have not only hired a gondola, they’ve hired a musician and a singer too!  I saw this twice today, as opera came floating over the water to the vaporetto.  (I can only imagine what they paid, since a 40 minute gondola ride is 80 euro itself; I also felt bad for the singers today, since it was chilly even after the rain had gone.)  On piazza S. Marco, the super-expensive cafes like Florian’s have competing house bands  playing classical music on little stages in their respective patios (according to Rick Steeves, you’ll pay 15 euro for a simple drink if you want to pretend you’re Hemingway or Byron). 

                The downside of traveling alone is that you have no one to talk to, no one to share your excitement with and, importantly, no one to eat with—I’m not going to go for a sit-down meal at a restaurant by myself, and I doubt I’ll even go in for cicchetti (Venetian tapas) and a drink at any of the bars unless Carla or Jasmine is around.  I’m not the type to strike up random conversations, especially in Italian, and it’s never a great idea to advertise being a woman alone, even if this is a very safe city.  

Triumph and Goodbyes

One of the reasons I stopped posting was that I had little to say aside from “IhopeIpasstheseexams." Seriously, I’ve lived and breathed virtually nothing but the exams since I came back to Philadelphia in January.  (In fact, thanks to my habit of keeping track of my hours for our accountability group on Google Docs, I can say that since the last week of January I logged 430 hours on exam prep.  Jesus!)  But I passed! I did more than that, actually; I fucking rocked those exams.  Sixteen hours and 55 pages later, my adviser said my broad field answers each seemed like articles in themselves, and all of my examiners called my special field exams a pleasure to read because they were not only insightful but well-written (as I said to them, imagine what they could have been if I hadn’t been typing to save my life). Even my orals were pretty freaking awesome (which I fully attribute to my habit of practicing answers by making myself talk them out out loud).  

This might seem like bragging until you contrast it against the completely awful, gut-wrenching fear and anxiety that I experienced before and during the exams.   I’ve never felt so much stress, angst, and general unhappiness in my entire freaking life. It was bad enough, if within relatively normal levels, going into the broad field, but most people are then much more relaxed going into the special field after they’ve passed the first.  Me? I had my first ever legitimate anxiety attack only hours after Dr. Cooper had called to glowingly compliment me on the broad field.  She was concerned that I shouldn’t get a big head about having done so well, and meanwhile hours later I’m sending her a panicked email about how I was certain that  I would fail the special!  It was my own fault: I’d only left three days between the written exams, and then had focused too much on preparing for the broad field, so when I looked at the questions that I’d proposed for the special field, I realized I could barely answer three of them.  I almost lost it.  And I was certain that they’d ask me precisely those questions, too, since on the broad field I’d gotten several questions that I didn’t want to answer and one that I actually couldn’t, because I’d mentally filed it away as “eh, they won’t ask me that, that’s stupid.”  Wrong--and good thing I prepared an answer for that one later, too, because then they asked it at the orals!  Anyway,  Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of last week were probably three of the worst days of my life so far, and this is coming from the orphan, so no joke.  I actually felt sick to my stomach with fear all the time, woke up in the middle of night with my brain trying to answer questions, and generally expected humiliating failure at every turn.  And then came the very sweetest moment of all, when the department secretary handed me the special field questions, I looked down, and I realized I can answer these, muthafucka!!   

Thus was the tale of my triumph!  Now it’s time to move out of Philadelphia: I spent all yesterday packing, with the result that everything except for clothes is basically ready to go in boxes.  Sean’s coming in on Friday and he’ll drive a truck to CT on Saturday, and then I’ll follow Monday.  My goodbye dinner with my friends is on Sunday night.  I’m going to miss them, and the life I’ve made here for myself.  Even though I’m happy to look forward to living with Sean at last, it can’t help but be bittersweet.

Spring? Feels like Summer

It's past 9pm in the middle of March, I've got my windows open, and I'm wearing shorts. I keep saying it, but really, this has been the best winter ever.

Today the temperature climbed to 70. It's cooler now, but every so often the wind pushes into the room, and there's just something about the way it smells. Melancholy, somehow. It's the kind of air that reminds me of soft, mild nights at the end of the school year in college, when I both wanted classes to be over and desperately didn't want to have to leave my friends for the summer. Bittersweet air, air that's full of things ending.

I don't think you need much psychology to guess that this is probably me reacting to the upheavals that are coming my way. Being with Sean will be awesome, yes, but it also means leaving all my friends, and the life I've made for myself here. It also means, more frighteningly, that the 'easy' part of my graduate career is over. No more fellowship to support me, no more classes to structure my life around, just me, out there trying to make some kind of mark in the academic world--still with no idea of how I'm going to be doing that, naturally. There's so much uncertainty ahead, which makes the world around me right now seem so comfortable, so warm. I can't even get excited about Venice, really; if my life were a book, Venice would be in the next chapter--or maybe in the interlude between chapters. I'm scared of what's going to come when I turn the page.

This melancholy night air isn't helping, naturally. Right now, what wouldn't I give to be back in one of those nights in college, when everything was still potential and possibility? A part of me thinks, how melodramatic! After all, it's not like my life is hopeless; it's just that there was such a sense of security back then, before we'd all made our choices and started on our paths. And there were friends around, always friends. Again, not that I'm without friends now. It's just bittersweet to look back on the time when I could turn over in my bed and talk to Carla in the dark, instead of sending her facebook messages that she won't return until the sun comes up where she is.

Maybe I should mention that when I have these thoughts about returning to Fairfield, I never imagine going back to the townhouses. It's always to our sophomore year dorm in Loyola, the last year we were all together, me and Carla, with Meredith and Popham at the end of the hall and the guys downstairs, trekking in herds to the dining hall in the evening and endlessly debating whether a group our size fit bitter at a round table or a rectangular one. I was always for the rectangles; more leg room, even if you couldn't talk to everyone as easily.

It's true what they say, of course; you can never go home again. Maybe that's a part of it, too, the idea of home. I haven't had a home, in the parental sense, for five years. Home has quite literally been where I've lain my head. In college (3/4 of it anyway) I still had that base to return to, with its own collection of bittersweet reunions with and partings from friends, and my mom, the center of gravity. I miss her, too, it goes without saying. Even though I doubt she'd have much in the way of advice to offer my on my life at this point, it would be enough just to hear her voice.

Here comes that sad wind blowing in again! Time to resist. Time to go look at funny cat pictures.

Another Glimpse

Antonio Lafrery, from Speculum Romanae magnificentiae, 1555, engraving.

This is another example of the how images from the past can be both cool and surprising! I doubt whether most non-Italian specialists would be able to immediately guess the subject of this engraving; it shows, in fact, the pope blessing the crowd from the balcony in front of St. Peter's Basilica. A little hard to recognize, isn't it, without the facade and colonnaded piazza provided by Maderno and Bernini in the 17thc? The only mildly recognizable facet is the drum of Michelangelo's dome rising in the background (his dome is actually much less visible today than he intended, thanks to alterations in the project by later architects who raised the height of the facade).

The rebuilding of St. Peter's was begun in 1506 under Julius II, the "Warrior Pope," but it wasn't finished until 1626. That is a long-ass time, but it was also the largest architectural undertaking in the world at the time (or at least in the West, as I have no idea what was going on elsewhere at this date). However, it was also a giant mess inside, as this drawing by Martin van Heemskerck from c. 1535 shows:

We're looking down toward the east end, with the colonnade of the nave of Early Christian church to either side. What's going on at the east end looks more like the ruins of an ancient Roman bath complex than a church-in-progress, but the barrel vault is supporting the as-yet-unfinished crossing of the nave and transept, where Michelangelo's dome would go later. The building there is a temporary structure built by the architect of St. Peter's, Bramante, to protect the altar (which is directly over Peter's tomb) from the elements, and, theoretically, to allow the pope to say mass in comfort. This apparently wasn't so, because I was just reading, in John Shearman's book on Raphael's tapestry cartoons for the Sistine, that Leo X was frequently forced to say Mass in the Sistine instead because it was so uncomfortable and even dangerous (!) to have to venture into St. Peter's.

Let's just finish this with Pannini's 18th-century depiction of the interior of the basilica. Say it with me: damn. The first time I walked into St. Peter's, I remember feeling just as dwarfed as those little people on the ground. Well done, Renaissance/Baroque people!

Old-Timey Goodness

Jan van Hemessen, Tavern Scene, c. 1540-5

General observation: when you look at a work of art from the past, you have to be cautious. There's a natural instinct, (bred in us, I'm sure, by decades of illustrated history textbooks), to look at art as a reflection of another period in time, a neutral window that reveals the lives and experiences of those who came before us. As Dwight Schrute would say: False. A work of art is a construction, a work in the most literal sense, mediated through any number of lenses: the artist, the patron, contemporary conventions of representation, etc. A work of art is not a photograph (which itself is a staged and constructed form of art, but that's another story), but it's extremely seductive to think of it that way. Indeed, nowhere is it more seductive, I think, than in those works of art that appear to be "realistic" or "spontaneous," like the scene above. (Someone once wrote that "realism" is a style that wants you to think it's not a style. They were referring to the mid-19thc. style of Courbet and Millet, not to the 16th c. Dutch tradition of genre (everday life) scenes, but I think the point is still good).

That art historical caveat aside, it's always interesting to see what kind of information you can glean from images of this type. No one would claim, for example, that this represents the artist's neighborhood tavern, or that it records an actual fight that took place (although I really love the vignette taking place at the right; not only the woman on the ground bitch-slapping the guy, but the woman restraining the her companion from getting involved, as if she's saying "No, she deserves it.") One bit of interesting information that the artist has given us, though, is the presence of the print, partially peeling off the upper wall in the center. It's a series of prints (probably woodcuts, the cheapest form of replication) of Landsknechts, or infantry soldiers, like this one by Hans Beham:

They were quite popular north of the Alps in the 16thc. Anyway, the subject matter isn't as interesting as their presence, because what van Hemessen's genre scene suggests, implicitly, is that it was a pretty common practice to paste prints up in a public watering hole. In other words, it suggests a way in which an entire class of visual material was actually used by people. That's the kind of information you won't find in a document or an archive, because it wouldn't have been considered worthy of being recorded. You can look at a surviving print today and talk about its context, its content, but what about its function? How was it actually touched, handled, passed around, and pasted up, until it cracked and crumbled and fell off, only to be replaced by another? That's the kind of thing you learn, instead, from an insignificant detail in a genre scene like this one.

In other words, this is why I think art history is so cool.

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...