A Long, Lovely Weekend in New York

I had a great time at RSA a week or so ago.  San Diego was too far to travel last year, but NYC is practically in my backyard, relatively speaking; in fact, it was being held at the same Hilton where I attended my very first conference in 2007 as a college senior, just trying to get a sense of what the academic world was like on the advice of my then-adviser, Jesus.  That conference was CAA, the bigger, rougher, discipline-wide conference for all art historians; RSA, though no less crowded or fast-paced is widely considered to be a friendlier environment.  What can I say, we early modernists are just nice folk all around...

I actually delayed registering for the conference until the very last minute in December.  At the time I felt so uncertain about my future in the field: what if I was paying $150 for a conference I'd be too depressed to go to, if I got rejected from all of my grant applications?  Happily, the reverse was true; once I was freshly injected with self-confidence by news of the grants I'd won, I started actually looking forward to the conference, not only to see my friends and Dr. Cooper, but to actually talk to other scholars--the dreaded "networking"!

It's part of the curious calculus practiced by conference attendees that everyone is perpetually flicking their gazes at the chests of the people around them, trying to get a glimpse of the all-important name tag.  If your name isn't recognizable to them, your institutional affiliation is the next best thing.  Having an Ivy League school listed under your name is likely going to net you a slightly different reception than someone from the University of Iowa--but on the other hand, your interlocutor may know someone on the faculty at UI, or have gone there, factors that will also influence how willing they may be to take time to talk to you.  Then there's the weight of your adviser; Temple may not be an Ivy, but among Venetianists Dr. Cooper happens to be a heavyweight, so that connection works well in my favor.

She's also deeply committed to networking, enough so that when I spotted her on the first morning, she greeted me, kissed me on both cheeks, and then immediately pushed me at Ed Muir, one of most venerable Venetian historians.  Did I mention we hadn't met in person for an actual year?  Or that I did not in fact have anything specific to talk to Muir about?   The longest words I exchanged with her were during the closing reception after I told her I'd have to head out.  At one point Jasmine complained that she felt Coop was ignoring her, but nope, it was all of us.  Dr. Cooper is most on her game in a crowd of people, all of whom she can instantly remember in terms of first meeting, subject of research, useful connections for her students, etc. etc.  It's both impressive and a bit frightening. 

This conference marked the first time I've felt confident introducing myself to scholars without Coop's aegis.  It is amazing what the knowledge of a Rome Prize can do for the self-confidence, as well as the awareness that people really do find my research topic interesting!  I was also happy to realize that I've begun making connections beyond the Temple web of students or friends of Coop's; I ran into Colin, a guy from the University of Toronto I met in Venice a couple of years ago, at the first session, and also Marsha, a girl from Johns Hopkins who was at Middlebury with me.  As it turns out she's writing her dissertation on Sebastiano del Piombo, a Venetian who transferred to Rome and became BFFs with Michelangelo for a few years before they had a nasty falling-out.  We've discussed sponsoring a panel together at the next RSA meeting in Berlin (convenient that I'll already be in Europe).

Among the Temple students, I will admit, I felt like something of a rock star.  Cooper and Hall have apparently been touting my achievements, though all is still officially hush-hush until this week's award ceremony, and there was a certain sense of awe among the younger students.  Even super-intense Tiffany, who I went to great lengths to avoid last year in Rome, didn't bother me overmuch.  Brad, though, I found as annoyingly intense as ever (I made a joke about how Dr. Hall flat-out told me she'd forgotten about me last fall, and he responded, very seriously, "but aren't you concerned about that?  Having left?"  Um, fuck you very much, I think I've done alright. How are your nine proposal drafts and conspicuous lack of grants coming?)  Another example of my gleeful schadenfreude: one of our lunches included a girl who did her master's at Temple in my group and then went to UDel for her PhD.  I never liked her, as she always seemed very sneakily competitive, so it amused me to hear her mention excitedly that a friend of hers had just won the Kress to the Hertziana.  You mean the fellowship I turned down for my awesome-r Rome Prize?  Muahaha.  I didn't say anything, obviously, but the evil laughter was definitely in my thoughts. 

Finally and at last, I also no longer feel in Jasmine's shadow.  I don't even really mind the certain sense of know-it-all ness that she brings to all things Rome.  Well, maybe I do a little.  Let's see, so far she's informed me that the Academy library is far inferior to the Hertziana's, so I'll want to use the latter's all the time (which is true), that Academy people are insular and pretentious (which could definitely be true), and that most of the fellows tend to stay up on the hill and not be out in the city (which could also be true).  Jasmine is never being malicious, just sharing her experience, but a few times I thought to myself "my fellowship is more prestigious than yours and you can't get a job, so pipe down!"  I am a terrible person, sometimes, especially in the privacy of my thoughts.  To her credit, she did introduce me to the head of the Minerva research project at the BH, and to an Italian post-doc there, Elena, who also previously held an affiliated Rome Prize.  She told me that one of the perks of the Academy is that they pick you up in a black SUV from the airport (which is extra awesome since I will have god knows how many bags with me).  The BH doesn't do that, do they?  Fuck yeah.

The other fantastic thing that happened at the conference was meeting Ellen Rosand, who told me bluntly that she had nothing to do with my winning the Rome Prize, and that my interview was simply the best one she'd ever seen.  Wow.  She went on to say that she'd "had a feeling" everything would work out after meeting me in January.  Interestingly, from the same event, Pat Brown told Dr. Cooper that she was very impressed with how I presented myself.  (I don't know exactly what I was doing that was so great, clutching my glass of prosecco like a lifeline as I circulated aimlessly in a room in which the only people I knew were the important folk everyone else was trying to talk to at the same time. But I will keep on trying to do it).

Ellen apparently also approached Coop to tell her the same thing about me later, because Coop told me at the reception that I must have really impressed her.  She confirmed my suspicious that she'd not a terribly warm woman in general.  So different from her husband, who seemed very frail at the first panel where I saw them both.  Afterward I went over to say hello, where he was sitting with another Titian scholar, Matthias Wivel, to whom I'd introduced myself earlier in the day, and he actually stopped talking to him to stand up and talk to me (while I was urging him to stay seated, since the poor man was leaning on a cane).  He told me with a chuckle that it was probably for the best he hadn't written for me, since Ellen would have had to recuse herself from my committee, and that he was really looking forward to seeing me develop.  I thanked him, but inwardly I couldn't get away from how frail he seemed. 

This has been a very long post, but I wanted to leave something to remind me of this conference, which felt like a kind of turning point for me, as I start to take my place in the community of scholars, instead of lingering nervously at the fringes, afraid to approach anyone.  This time there were no walks in the sunshine with my friends like in DC two years ago, or drinking bottles of wine in our hotel rooms in the late afternoon, but it was an awesome experience!

The Definition of "Random"

I came home this evening to the following email:

Dear Ms DiMarzo,

I wanted to thank you and Temple University for making AWW available on YouTube. I was an undergraduate Art History major at Oberlin College in 60's, before diverting to med school. Your lectures were a great refresher for me, especially before travelling to Milan.  My compliments on your great lecture style, and I believe I detected extra effort on your part with supplementary material for your students.  I personally appreciated the historical context provided which I  don't always remember getting as an undergrad.  

Best wishes, 

Arthur P. Liang, MD, MPH

 Sr Advisor for Food Safety 

CDC

Atlanta, Ga

I was terribly flattered, of course, except for the part where I had no freaking clue that those videos were publicly viewable.  I thought I made them all private!  Apparently not. I checked my other Youtube account and my videos have been viewed a collected 897 times, with 81 subscribers.

Now I'm torn on what to do.  I thought those videos were for an audience of ten Temple University students, not random people on the internet.  What if I said something completely off-base in one of those lectures? (I absolutely can't bear to go back and listen to them, it's too freaking weird). I mean, those kids wouldn't have known (too busy cheating on their homework) but I have this perverse fear that I'm going to be called to account by some specialist in Cezanne, or something (the module on Impressionism/Post-Impressionism has been viewed the most times, almost 200).  The other issue is that I'm teaching the class again this summer.  Remove all the videos and post new ones, leaving the channel open? Delete them all and start a totally new channel?

At any rate, I wrote to Dr. Liang to tell him how happy I was that a former AH student was interested in the lectures.  He undoubtedly gained more from it than any of my actual students!

Whew

This has been a fun, but long, weekend.  On Friday night we went to Kelly's to watch the Providence NCAA game with Sean's friends (they lost).  We told them our Rome news, and Pinto rejoiced at the prospect of drunk pseudo-bachelor Sean antics, which have memorably including scaling a wrought-iron fence to knock at one of the secret societies, and blowing $200 with Ward on a single a dinner (happily, this time around I will have the wives/girlfriends for added surveillance).

We were somewhat unexpectedly invited to dinner Saturday night at the home of Raffaela and Bob, two of Sean's professors who are married.  Another couple, Jason and his wife Kim, as well as a first-year British student, Matt, were invited.  None of us were quite sure about how we got on this guest list, but we were all pleased to be there.  They're both very friendly and funny people, their house was lovely, and the conversation was a lot of fun.  Sean and I have reflected before on the wonders of the dinner party; in the right setting and mix, a dinner party allows you to have fresh conversations with a limited set of strangers, as opposed either to hanging out with friends you already know well, or being forced to mingle with a big crowd at a house party.  We don't have a varied enough acquaintance to really pull off dinner parties, but Phyllis was an acknowledged master of the fruitful mixing of guests from different circles and backgrounds.  In fact, the only dinner party we've attended that wasn't given by an adult or adult couple was Ward and Kathy, when they invited us, one of his friends from college, and one friend from his brief teaching stint.  It was a lot of fun, and we had regretted at the time that we just don't mix widely enough to be able to go to a lot of similar events.

That's not to say that regular friends aren't good company!  This morning, Sean and I went up to West Hartford to have brunch with Sara and Zach, who were in town to do some pre-wedding shopping with her mom, who had unfortunately gotten pretty sick.  We squeezed into the Quaker Diner across the street, which somehow we've never tried in all these years.   After lunch, Sara showed us a bunch of photo albums from high school and college which induced both "awws" and "aahhhhhs", plus one truly horrific photo of us from 8th grade, which both guys had a serious cackle over.  Heather was in town too, as it happened, but couldn't meet us since she was going to lunch in honor of Melissa, another bride-to-be.  Too bad, because Sara actually had a photo of Sean on the night he really met her for the first time, when she demonstrated both titty-fucking and her Brazilian wax.  Zach looked at Sara and said, "wait, that story's legit?"  Yup.  Trial by fire, my friend.

This afternoon we did some shopping, during which Sean actually purchased an item, a blazer, from a thrift store!  This is true progress.  He was, however, more excited about the 12 cassette tapes he picked up, several of them, like "Best of the Late 1940s" still in their cellophane wrappers.  Score!

RIP

Rocky was put to sleep last night, rather unexpectedly, although he was very old (91 in human years)!  I found myself crying more at the pathos of the scene in which everyone else was sobbing, then because of direct grief.  I was never overly attached to Rocky when my mom was alive, and less so since he lived with Linda.  Sapphire's death was different; she still sort of felt like "my" pet by extension, since I saw her so much, and she always seemed so happy to see me.  Linda and Gary are really taking it hard, especially since they had virtually no time to prepare.

It's weird to think that it was my mom's death that brought Rocky into Linda's life--and they had him for so much longer than my mom did, or even Jane, his first owner.  I realized on the ride home that the last time I ever saw my mom was in Rocky's company.  She came down to school in the beginning of September that year, to lend us her nicer vacuum and to drop off whatever I'd forgotten. I can remember exactly where her van was parked, on the one-way road past our townhouse block.  Rocky was on his little purple leash, and we left him in the house while she took us all grocery shopping.  She had also brought a tray of pumpkin squares with cream cheese frosting, which were delicious, and as we stood around in Townhouse 31 eating them, she mentioned there having been a small accident on the stairs in the house with some cream cheese.  True to form, when I got home the night of her death a few weeks later, there was a big smudge on the carpet!  And there was Rocky, completely unaware that his human wasn't coming back.

Sean and I joked about Rocky showing up in heaven and seeing my parents, and my dad looking at Rocky and saying "so this is the little bastard who got to sleep on my pillow?"  Poor JTD--all he ever wanted was a big, manly dog (well, and a boat).  Then he dies, and his wife gets two frou-frou dogs in succession!  I don't actually believe in heaven, of course, but it's still nice to picture it.

(Former) Home Again

It was a little surreal to wave goodbye to Phyllis this morning from inside 213 E. Sedgwick! She was headed up to Ct to see her father, who entered hospice weeks ago but who has made a Lazarus-like recovery recently. I'm staying here until tomorrow.  I'm driving to Mediato meet Stuart and Maureen for lunch, and then tonight my friends are coming to Mt Airy for dinner at Earth Bread.

It's always such a pleasure to come back here, and to spend time with Phyllis. We had dinner at  Baci last night, a fantastic seafood soup and delicate pesto ravioli. It always feelslike I'm visiting an aunt or some other close family member, rather than just a friend-we did live together for four years, so we know each other's foibles quite well. And I love coming back to this house whose foibles I also know quite well-the creak of the staircase, the particular woody smell when you walk in the front door,  the rumble of the electric kettle as it brews. To date, this is the home I've spent the longest span in after leaving Windsor, so I suppose it does feel like a return home when I'm here. ButI have the pleasure of visiting without regret-I don't wish I still lived here, so I can enjoy the nostalgia without its being tinged with sadness.

So True

I was just reading an interview in Slate with Simon Vance, who does audiobook recordings, and he said this: "Many people read to themselves so fast—sometimes scanning the page in apparent moments of not-much-going-on to get to the next bit of action—that the audiobook listening experience can actually be richer for the way it forces one to listen to the book at a narrator’s pace."  I typically avoid audiobooks, because I read so much faster on my own; I got a Harry Potter audiobook in high school for a long drive and was annoyed at the slow pace, especially when I could practically recite the next lines myself!   However, when I listened to The Great Gatsby in an audiobook format over the course of a couple of train rides to and from NYC last year, I found that Vance said was absolutely true.  This short book, which I've read a dozen times, and in Italian as well as English (Il Grande Gatsby!), had so much more to reveal when I listened to someone read it to me.  I remember a particularly long passage that, quite frankly, I always skip over while reading, a list of the names of all of the people who come to Gatsby's parties; I would read a couple of names, think "yup, got it, lots o' rich folk" and move on to the next paragraph.  But having no choice (save fast-forwarding) but to sit there as this whole long roll call of names and origins was read out was really interesting.  The party described afterward felt peopled to me in a more distinct way than it ever had before...

Awesomeness

As it turns out, I can accept 1/2 of the Delmas award in conjunction with my AAR fellowship.  That's because the Academy apparently closes for six weeks every summer, to clean and get ready for the next year's crop of Rome Prize winners, and two-year fellows have to find somewhere else to stay.  I learned this from Jill Deupi, who used the time to conduct primary research in Naples.  

I checked with the Delmas Foundation, and they don't care when you use the money, as long as you do it before September 2015 and write a report to them afterward.  That means that $7500 will support Sean and I spending a couple of months in Venice in the summer of 2015!  As an added benefit, we'll be out of Rome and in someplace with air conditioning during the hottest months.  Did I mention the Academy isn't air-conditioned?  Carla assures me that you can buy a portable pinguino for 100 euro, which from what she's said (or moaned, I should say) will be money well-spent.

An Embarrassment of Riches

As of today, I've officially pulled off an academic hat trick: the AAR Rome Prize, the Kress Institutional to the Hertziana, and now a Delmas grant for Venetian research!  You know you've really entered a Twilight Zone of riches when you open an envelope and see you won a fellowship, only to think "well, that's nice" and then leave it in your car while you go pick up smoked pork hocks for pea soup...

The Delmas is not as prestigious as AAR or the Kress by any means, but it's an award specifically for research in a Venetian field, which makes it coveted among my crowd of venezianisti.  It's not residential; they'll give up up to a certain dollar amount (the top is $19k; they offered me up to $15k) to fund travel and research in the Veneto.  The catch is that you can only use the money in the Veneto; in fact, you have to promise not only to tell them how you spent the money, but to return any money that you don't use.  So I can't take the money and just stay in Rome.  And as an AAR fellow, I'm expected to be in Rome for most of my time there.

Dr. Hall already tried to suggest I use the Delmas money this summer before AAR--I haven't responded, because I'm trying to figure out how to say "um, I'm completely not ready, plus I have two weddings to attend in June, plus my husband would kill me."  Sean already put his foot down about whether I should head to Italy a few weeks early in order to meet Stuart and his wife in Tivoli. It remains to be seen whether I can finagle using this money for some limited travel to Venice during my tenure in Rome, of course.  

In conclusion: DAMN.

More Good News

I woke up this morning to an email from the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, informing me I'd won the Kress Fellowship there.  That's the fellowship Jasmine held for two years.  Holy shitballs!!  This is amazing.

I previously thought that the Kress was the most prestigious fellowship in our field, which is why I was hoping against hope that I would win it, following first in Jasmine's shoes and then my friend Erin (who holds a Kress to the University of Leiden right now), but I've since learned that AAR is the most significant because of the prestige associated with being a Fellow throughout your career.  On a practical level, the BH has one big advantage (better library) and two big drawbacks: you're supposed to be able to speak German conversationally since it's a German institute, and it's also not residential, so although their stipend is a few thousand more than AAR's, you have to pay for your own rent and food.  Rome is very expensive, and I don't want to learn German, so that works out well.

Even though I won't accept the Kress, it will still have an impact on my CV, since I can list it as "declined".  More to the point, this suggests that the scholars working on the Minerva Research Project at the BH, which is focused on the national churches of foreigners in Rome in the early modern period, found my project interesting!  I had originally started thinking about the Venetians in Rome and their affiliation with the church of San Marco there as a way to make my project proposal more attractive to the BH--and then I just really interested in it myself, although I worried there must not be much there if no one in the research group was investigating it (as opposed to San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, San Luigi dei Francesi, or San Giovanni dei Fiorentini; notice that San Marco doesn't even have "dei Veneziani" in its name!).  In fact, I know that my suggestion that I could be collaborating with scholars from another research institution while in Rome was one of the things that interested the Rome Prize jury, so this has all worked to the good!

The head of the Minerva group is going to be presenting at RSA later this month. Now not only I will have an introduction via Jasmine, a former fellow, but the true bona fides of being an accepted fellow myself!  Much less intimidating.

I have to point out here that Dr. Cooper is really, really good at shepherding her students to prestigious grants.  This is three Kress fellowships in a row for her, plus a Rome Prize (which, to the best of my Googling ability, no one from Temple University has ever won).  I owe her a super nice bottle of Prosecco when I go down to Philly in a couple of weeks!

ETA: How did I inform Sean of this achievement? "Who has two thumbs and a Kress fellowship? THIS GUY!"

Two Memories

I had a sad thought driving home from the gym today.  After my dad's anniversary on April 15, he will officially have been out of my life for longer than he was in it, since I was 14 when he died, and it's 14 years this year.  The same won't happen for my mom until I'm 42, which is a little comforting.  It's always really hard to imagine what he would have said or thought about anything in my life, since I never knew him on an adult level; I can't help but think he'd be totally paranoid about me moving abroad though.  In fact, I remarked to Sean that I wonder if he'd have even let me study abroad.

I had a much happier remembrance the other day; I remembered how often I'd be waiting outside Dr. Cooper's office (really, cubicle) and be staring at the poster she had tacked up, which was often the Rome Prize competition poster.  I remember sort of mentally shrugging, as though this had nothing to do with me (after all, I was working on a Venetian artist, right?).  I wonder if this year's poster was on her door, too.  Unfortunately it's kind of ugly, unlike the ones I remember, which frequently involved classical sculpture:

More of Same

So Carla just made fun of me over Skype for all the time I've spent being angsty about my academic future over the past couple of years, and I had to explain that although I definitely appreciated her support, and Sean's, and the support of everyone who was assuring me "I bet you'll think of something!" or "it'll all work out!", nothing really substitutes for external, institutional approval.  That's how you know you've made it in academia, when you win prestigious research funding.

I was also reminded of an email exchange that I had with Stuart back in July when I confessed that my research was stalling out, something that I attributed partially to how much of my attention was being taken up with Sean's mental health issues.  For a charming elderly Brit, Stuart dealt me quite a firm blow in his response:  Well, Michelle, I'm a "like-minded person," so I expect you to step up a notch or two now, to advance your career.  I'm not going to sit back and let you waste your brilliant mind....I'm sorry about Sean's health problems, but don't let that be an excuse for not doing your research.  It might alter HOW you do it, but not IF.  Those were some seriously wise words, and when I emailed him to let him know the news,  I thanked him for the fact that even when I least wanted to think about Titian or my research or art in general, his queries on various points of fact or theory kept me engaged.  He would ask something about Titian's relationship to Giorgione vs. Bellini, for example, and I would think, "hmm, I know I prepared a whole essay on this for my exams, let's go find that..."  It helped keep the scholarly flame alive, even if it was burning at a very low volume there for a while. 

I confess I really wasn't very aware of the Academy or its relative standing in terms of prestige when I applied.  My goal was the Kress Fellowship to the Hertziana, the one Jasmine received, or failing that, a Delmas Foundation grant for Venetian research (the jury's still out on both, technically).  I didn't think very much of the Rome Prize at all, and I didn't really read up too much on the Academy itself.  Now I'm discovering that it is indeed a very big deal; Dr. Hall, in her surprisingly effusive congratulatory note, called this "career-making" for me, and Jill Deupi, who runs the museum at Fairfield and who was herself a two-year fellow, told me that I have no idea how many doors this will open for me even well into the future. (Fellows helping fellows, I suppose.  Maybe there's even a secret handshake!) My email from Dr. Bolman made me laugh because it started "I AM TOTALLY THRILLED!!!!!!!!!" It's an honor in itself to rate that many exclamation points from a woman who once told all of us graduate students that we should write as if we were allotted only three exclamation points for the entirety of our careers. 

Dr. Cooper also made a great point about Sean joining me in the second year; she said that it will allow me time to develop my own connections and identity as a scholar, together with a research schedule, and then when Sean arrives, he'll make his own contacts too.  She and Tim followed the same pattern; she received a Finley pre-doctoral fellowship from CASVA, with two years in Venice followed by one in DC, and Tim was able to come to Venice for her second year. They're also college sweethearts, as it happens, and kind of adorable in their own odd way.  I'm remembering them quietly squabbling as we walked along some pretty rank back alleys in Venice, because Dr. Cooper was convinced she could find the way to Titian's house without consulting a map, and Tim was worried we'd be late to dinner.  We found it.  Eventually.

Holy Crap

That was my actual response today when Shawn from the American Academy called to tell me that I'd won the Rome Prize.  Not the regular 1-year Rome Prize, but the 2-year Rome Prize, which is even harder to get (out of 30 fellows this year, 2 have a 2-year fellowship).  I mean, my interview on Saturday went really, really well, and one of the judges turned out to be, in my words to Sean afterward, "ELLEN FUCKING ROSAND" (wife of David Rosand, my erstwhile champion), so I was cautiously optimistic that I'd win, and when I grabbed my phone around 4pm and saw a (212) number I felt the strangled elation of "holy shit, yes!"  but I was calm and, I like to think, nonchalant when I answered.  Then he told me, and my professionalism went right out the window.  "Holy crap, are you kidding me?"  I'm literally so tired right now that my face hurts.  I wasn't feeling well today, and I got the call right as I was about to head out to my class in Waterbury, so I've kind of been powering through since then.  I'm technically supposed to keep quiet on this until April, but obviously everyone tells their friends and family; Jasmine did with the Kress.

This is the Academy property, on the Janiculum hill on the Trastevere side of the Tiber.  I already checked the distance to Carla's St. Johns University: 27 minutes by public transit, or 45 minutes' walk on a warm day!  As a fellow, you live here, and you also eat both lunch and dinner here every day, so it's a big community environment, with the goal of fostering cross-disciplinary research.  It's not just scholars, either, but designers, architects, composers, etc.

The best part is that Sean can hopefully join me after his school year is over in May 2015, and stay with me until the end of my time there in summer 2016.  Married couples get a bigger room, and a separate office, which is sweet.  Two-year fellows also get a nicer stipend, which is already generous since you aren't paying for room and board. That can pay for a few international tickets for me to come home during December, and Sean to come out during spring break, etc.

 Dr. Cooper informed me that AAR is "the most prestigious award in our field, bar none" so...I guess I don't suck?  Honestly, I have not come to terms with the level of incredible awesomeness that is involved here.  I feel incredibly gratified that an outside force is saying "yes, your research is worthwhile, yes, we think you're good enough."  I've had a serious case of academic anxiety over the last year or two, worrying that I have nothing original to contribute and that I'll never finish my Ph.D.  I think Linda put it best when I called her on my way to Waterbury, already kind of freaking out over being away from Sean; she told me to remember that this is my investment in our future, which is absolutely true.

I'm going to live in Rome for two years!  Ahhhhh!

Valentine

This year was our 10th Valentine's Day together!  We decided to stay in and cook one of our favorite meals, my mom's beef stroganoff, but before that we went to Target, the obvious destination for lovers.  In the check-out line, a woman with two little boys behind us gave us such a nice compliment; she said we looked like the perfect couple, just wonderfully suited to each other.  I told Sean in the parking lot that it probably helps that we look physically similar; he responded that it probably also helped that I was wearing "real person clothes" and not my frequent hoodie-and-Sean's-gym-pants look.  Haha.

DIY

I've posted before about some of the ways we've changed what we eat over the past year, like Sean making his own peanut butter.  In that case, there was a definite trial-and-error component involved, not so much in the recipe (put nuts in a food processor, add a small amount peanut oil, and blend till consistency achieved, or your wife starts bleeding from her eardrums from the racket) but in the selection of nuts.  Sean sampled jars of both regular and honey-roasted peanuts from every brand we could find, plus all the store brands, before finally settling on the Target unsalted plain peanuts as his preferred choice.

Experimentation has also been a big part of my attempts to create reliable household cleaners that aren't full of harsh chemicals.  I liked the first all-purpose cleaner I got from Green Clean, but the problem was that it left really obvious whiteish streaks on the counters, probably residue from either the borax or the soda.  To get rid of them you had to wipe everything down again with a wet cloth.  :-/   This was especially problematic since that recipe was one of the few I'd found that didn't require vinegar, Sean's bete noire.  Happily, I recently came across a ridiculously simple recipe that works like a charm: equal parts water and hydrogen peroxide, with a few drops of lemon oil.  I moved the spray bottle with Version 1.0 to the hall closet upstairs; it's still a good cleaner, so I'll use it in the bathroom where you don't have to worry about seeing streaks on the porcelain.

I've also tried making orange oil, with better success the second round than the first.  Cara Cara oranges were on sale at the store for weeks, so I had all these huge peels.  I dried them by the heating vent, then packed them into a Ball jar and soaked them with vodka for about a week.  Strain out the liquid, allow the alcohol to evaporate, and voila, you should have orange essence. The first batch smelled somewhat sour; I think that was because I had a lot of thin, not-great tangerine peels that I'd been saving.  The second, which was all thick, fresh Cara Cara peels, came out much better.  I put a little bit of it in my furniture polish, which is just olive oil and lemon juice.  This requires more effort than store-bought polish, since you really have to buff it nicely to get all of the oil residue off, but it seems to be the best option.  Never again will I allow Sean to purchase so much dark wood furniture.  Especially the black bedroom set!  Our house spits up dust continually from the heating vents, and you only get about 1 day of things looking clean till they're covered in very visible dust again.  I use a microfiber cloth to just brush things off mostly, but every once in a while things actually need to be cleaned.

My next adventure will be moving from household products to personal care.  Once you start casting an eye on all of the shit that's in the products that we consume or apply to ourselves, you may start getting kind of concerned.  Nothing seems simple; everything from toothpaste to shaving cream requires a laundry list of chemicals that you can't pronounce.  I was especially annoyed by this in food products because I realized (after reading Sugar Salt Fat) that often those chemicals are introduced because they create the proper taste more cheaply than would real ingredients; that's a clear case of how the consumer gets screwed with lower-quality goods in order to benefit the corporations that make them.  Cosmetics and other personal products are a little trickier.  It's easier to recognize what should and shouldn't be in a jar of peanut butter, for example (nuts, oil, possibly salt; why is there 'soy lethicin' or caramel coloring?) than it is a bottle of Moroccan oil conditioner.  But the same principle applies: it feels good to know exactly what's in the stuff you're using, and it feels good to have made something yourself using basic ingredients, rather than having forked over cash to multinational corporations that use an ingredients list that's longer than Santa's.

Right now I'm in the process of assembling the ingredients that I'll need for some of these items.  Beyond the basics that I can buy at Target, like hydrogen peroxide and with hazel, I need things like coconut oil, pure aloe vera, and citric acid, as well as essential oils like peppermint.  Recipes I'm going to try include toothpaste (baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, and peppermint oil); mouthwash (aloe juice, witch hazel, baking soda); conditioner (coconut milk, honey, olive oil); and shaving cream (aloe vera gel, olive oil).  Ironically, the product that I most wanted to make for myself, facial moisturizer, seems to be one of the most difficult and expensive to make, particularly if you want its base to be jojoba or argan oil; Sean also pointed out that he expects sunscreen in his moisturizer, which I theoretically could accomplish by adding zinc oxide, but then we're really getting into chemistry stuff.

The funny thing is, I remember being sort of bemused years ago when Heather would post various recipes she was trying out for face washes and other assorted items on her "urban homesteading" blog.  Now here I am, doing the same thing.  Sean and I have often joked about how we don't really have hobbies; I look at cats on the internet, he plays card games on his computer while not-watching TV.  Now he has the piano (and has made incredibly quick progress in learning to play) and I have my "potions" as we're calling them, haha.

Ode to my Rain Boots

My rain boots are nothing special.  They are so nondescript that the above picture is not even really a photograph of them, just something I found on Google Images that looks pretty much the same.   I bought them in Venice four years ago, in a shop by the train station that sold cheap accessories.  We had just arrived from Bergamo in the middle of a very unseasonable March snowstorm; the streets were flooded, soaking my Converse as soon as we left the station.  I remember how miserable I was, miserable enough to throw away (so I thought) 15 euro on a pair of cheap rubber boots. I was completely wrong, of course!  Not only did those boots keep my feet delightfully dry, allowing me to splash around in a flooded Piazza San Marco, they've kept on doing their job in rain and snow for four years.

This morning they kept my feet nice and dry while I spent two hours shoveling ridiculously heavy, wet snow, and when I went down the street to Krauszer's, kicking the slush and water in the street.  They're not lined, so it helps to wear 2 pairs of socks, but other than that they're pretty awesome.  Yesterday at Fairfield I rolled my eyes at Fairfield at the sight of all my female students tromping in the door, a veritable parade of Hunter boots in every possible color.  What an excellent example of the manipulative power of consumer culture, to convince people to pay $100 or more for a product that cost $5 to produce in a Chinese factory...

Another reason that I'm probably being moved to pen an ode to my rain boots is the very slight buzz I have right now from the Percoset that I took when I came in from shoveling.  (I'm not even sure if I should really describe it as a 'buzz', but for the first hour or so after I take one, it just feels a little weird.  It's not relaxed like you would feel with a glass of wine, more...separated from the world around you?) On Saturday morning I woke up with the most excruciating pain in my neck, pain so all-consuming that I had to try for five minutes or so to find a position that would actually allow me to leverage myself up off the bed.  I never realized that you need your neck muscles for that (I would have thought abs/back muscles), but apparently you do. It felt like I was paralyzed, because for whole minutes I simply could not find a way to move.  How I did so much damage to myself while sleeping, with zero changes to bed or pillows or temperature, I have no idea.

It was exquisitely painful for the first few days, though it was easier to move my head while standing versus while sitting down.  I've had a bottle of Percoset hanging around since my kidney stone disaster, but ironically, they didn't really do much for the pain since I only took 1 at a time.  The bottle says 1-2 as needed, but as I discovered when they were first prescribed, I will literally keel over and fall asleep if I take two.  It took the edge off, anyway, even if I had to *sniff* forgo my evening glass of wine entirely.  The neck pain has improved dramatically (it was still hard for me to pull myself upright this morning, but now that I'm up and about it barely hurts), but three consecutive days of heavy shoveling have left my back screaming. Sean was a little concerned I would immediately become a raging pillhead (perhaps I exaggerate) but as I pointed out, I have three or four pills left, and no refills, so there's not much cause for concern.

In terms of pain relief, nothing will ever match the experience of morphine from the kidney stone episode. I was just discussing this with my sister today.  She was admitted to the hospital a few years ago for a headache that was so awful she thought she was having a stroke, and when they gave her morphine she had the same reaction I did.  It's not that you're flying, or feel in any way relaxed or high; it's just the absolute relief of having the extraordinary pain you were feeling a second ago vanish as though it had never been. It was incredible.  I remember acting very rude to the hospital staff because I was just in so much pain, and they kept asking me idiotic questions, and I'd already been there for an hour with no medication whatsoever, and then--poof!  I was completely myself again, the pain was gone, and I apologized profusely for my behavior.

From rain boots to morphine!  What a progression.

I Made a Thing!

I found a leatherbound collector's edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own for $3.99 at Savers.  Mild guilt over what I'm about to do to it...

After about an hour of gluing and box-cutting, we have a hollow book! 

Complete with earphones and charger port.

Voila! One of my exercise hairbands is even the perfect size to keep the book closed for transit.  

Pollan Strikes Again

Yesterday, I baked a Rustic Sourdough boule from scratch, and it turned out awesome!  Baking it in our new Dutch oven trapped the steam and mimicked the condition of a real bakery oven, giving it that awesome crust; slashing the dough a couple of times relieves the tension in the loaf as it rises, and gives it that characteristic bakery "look". I'm super proud of myself, I'm not going to lie.  This shit is delicious.

The inspiration for baking my first loaf of real bread was Michael Pollan's Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.  I can't remember the last time I read a book with such avidity, or dog-eared so many passages to read out loud to Sean.  The book's premise is that cooking, perhaps more than any other human trait, sets us apart from the animals (as opposed to altruism, humor, grief, etc., all of which have been observed in animals).  Pollan demonstrates how "little dramas of transformation" made possible by cooking, in all its elemental forms (his chapters focus on roasting for fire, braising for water, baking for air, and fermenting for earth), proved equally transformative for us as a species, allowing us to quite literally create things that are more than the sum of their parts, whether it's delicious and energy-rich bread from the inedible wheat seed, or a tangy cheese resulting from the furious activity of bacteria and yeast.

 Pollan makes a fantastic point about the value of getting back in the kitchen, the space that women, especially, have been trying really hard to get out of: reclaiming our independence from the corporations who have eagerly stepped in and offered to take the work off our hands, to our serious nutritional and environmental disadvantage. He calls his book "an invitation to alter, however slightly, the ratio between production and consumption in your life.  The regular exercise of these simple skills for producing some of the necessities of life increases self-reliance and freedom while reducing our dependence on distant corporations.  Not just our money but our powre flows toward them whenever we cannot supply any of our everyday needs and desires ourselves.  And it begins to flow back toward us, and our community, as soon as we decide to take some responsibility for feeding ourselves."

As I wrote in a previous entry, this year has marked a serious shift in our attitude toward food.  We're cooking more of it, and it's more based on fresh ingredients than it ever has been before.  This goes along with our increasing efforts to rely less on processed food, and even home products that are full of chemical crap.  Yesterday, in fact, I made a revamped version of my laundry detergent, as well as a new all-purpose cleaner--part of the never-ending hunt for one that won't leave streaks on the dark countertops.  I'll also be making my own hand soap, as soon as I can lay hands on some vegetable glycerine.

Pollan's writing is always engaging, but this is even more of a personal book than his others, recording his efforts to master the various "elements": working alongside pit masters in a South Carolina whole-pig barbecue, spending Sundays with a chef trained at Chez Panisse learning the mysteries of the mire-poix and the long, slow braise; helping Sister Noella, a nun with a Ph.D. in microbiology, make stinky French cheese at a Connecticut abbey; or trying to create the famous breads from the Tartine bakery in San Francisco.  I learned so many fucking things from this book.  Among them:

• in addition to the flavor impacts of earth and water, the invisible ecosystems of fungi and bacteria contribute their own terroir to foods
• bacteria can trade DNA with one another!  Japanese people have gut bacteria that's better able to break down seaweed--DNA that originally came from a bacteria species that lived on seaweed itself
• nearly one-third of all foods we eat (and drink) are products of fermentation--rotting. 
• fermentation is decomposition is death, lending layers to the mystery and near-taboo associated with the very bodily-ness of foods like stinky cheese
• according to Levi-Strauss, when American troops landed in Normany in 1944 they destroyed several Camambert dairies, because they believed the pungent odor to be corpses
• Fermented foods tend to be acquired tastes, and the beloved food of one culture (rotted shark in Iceland, kimchi in Korea) is often repulsive to outsiders, and thus can serve to create and maintain group identity.  (As Pollan puts it, "We are the ones who eat rotted shark.")

One of the most fascinating themes was that humans, the most extraordinarily adaptive species, tend to get ourselves into trouble because we overdo it.  We process something, whether be cooking it, fermenting it, etc., to make it better than it was, both in terms of taste and nutrition.  But then we keep messing with it, until we've over-processed it into something that's not nutritious at all.  Bread is a great example of this. Pollan visits niche bakeries like Tartine and interviews old-school breadmakers, but he also visits a Wonderbread factory.  He points out, for example, that the long fermentation of sourdough partially breaks down gluten, making it easier to digest. Mass-produced bread, however, isn't allowed to ferment for long, and thus there's more gluten in modern bread than there has ever been in bread up until this age of processed, shelf-stable foods. A potentially simple answer to the question of rising gluten intolerance--it's not that we're eating anything humans haven't eaten for centuries, it's that the very nature and identity of that foodstuff has been chemically altered and adulterated (hearing about the additives dumped into Wonderbread by the sackful to affect this or that characteristic was frankly appalling) until it's a pale ghost of its former self.

Of the four elements, fire interested me least, since I'm not that into BBQ, and certainly not planning to roast a pig in a fire pit on my lawn (as Pollan eventually does).  Braising was certainly interesting, but that's a skill I feel comfortable with, especially with my recent run of soups.  I did learn that onions form the backbone of braises, soups, and stews all over the world, whether it's the mire-poix in France (onions, carrots, celery) or soffritto in Italy (onions, garlic, celery), and that rather than sauteeing the aromatics, you can achieve much better overall flavor by sweating them inside--cooking them over very low heat for a much longer period of time, without browning them.  Still, those are variations on things I'm already somewhat familiar with.  It was the chapters on baking and fermenting that were fairly revelatory, and since I'm not going to brew my own mead or make my own cheese (though I might try pickling in the summer), baking bread seemed like the most promising avenue.

We retired our unreliable bread machine, as I think I mentioned, because we couldn't stop eating the bread.  So this was already a bit of a dangerous proposition (and true to form, most of that boule is gone!), but I couldn't resist; after reading Pollan, bread machine baking seemed completely lame.  Rather than use a "wild" starter, which would take weeks, I bought a starter from King Arthur.  Unfortunately, I don't think we fed it in time, since we were away, and then lacked filtered water (chlorinated water can kill the yeast), so it wasn't as frothy and bubbly as I think it should have been.  But after a few days, it still turned out a damned fine loaf of bread, so, win! For the aforementioned reason of danger, of course, home-baked bread is unlikely to earn a regular place in our house.  The exception would be multigrain bread for sandwiches, but as I learned from Pollan, the chief difficulty in creating an edible whole grain loaf is that you're fighting a losing battle with gravity.  White flour is light and rises easily; whole grains are the equivalent of lead.

I really enjoyed making bread, too, which was something Pollan point out--we can find pleasure in something that used to feel like a chore we'd rather outsource.  It feels good to develop a skill, to create, to be able to look at a golden, crusty loaf and think "I made that happen."  Also, shaping dough is fun!

Anniversary (with Hens)

Tuesday marked nine years that Sean and I have been together. One more year till a decade, which is sort of unbelievable.  Sometimes college seems like it was just yesterday, and then, as Anna reminded me on the phone the other night, you remember we graduated seven years ago.

My Christmas present from Sean was a cooking class at Sur La Table in Canton and an overnight stay at Green Acres B&B in Simsbury.  He chose the inn because it was close to Sur La Table, really well-reviewed online, and....*drumroll* they have chickens.  A whole flock of free-range chickens who have the run of the property, and who provide all the fresh eggs for the breakfast.  Now, it has long been my dream of having some chickens, the queen of which shall be named Petunia (in aggregate they shall be known as "Petunia and her sisters"). Even given adequate space, which we lack on Concord St, I've doubted whether I could ever manage it, considering that I read that chickens only lay for 2 years, after which time you either need to kill them (not sure I could) or resign yourself to feeding a "poop machine", as the article put it.

Anyway, I was delighted with the gift, and with the inn, which was an 18th-century structure that the current owners had taken down to the studs and painstakingly restored.  It was filled with antiques, and the mind positively boggled at the amount of money that must have been required not only to restore the house, but to stock it with extraordinary period furniture and objects.  There were only two guestrooms, and a wonderful fire in the living room in front of which Sean and I battled at checkers (he wins), a game called the Captain's Mistress that's basically Connect4 with wooden balls, and an old pub game called Shut the Box.  Our breakfast in the morning ranked as one of the best we've ever had in an inn: fresh fruit parfait, french toast, and the most shockingly yellow, fluffy, pillowy scrambled eggs, made from the hens outside, served on china and crystal and silver that looked like it belonged in a Jane Austen adaptation.

All of this was awesome, but I was just a little bit downcast because no hens.  Thanks to the stupid polar vortex and the snow the area had just received, it was too cold for the hens to be out of the henhouse (although Jim, the owner, assured me they were generally out and about even in winter).  I resigned myself to being surrounded by chicken figurines (seriously, there were a whole bunch),and eating their eggs, without ever getting to meet them.  On the order form for breakfast, under "location" the options were: in room, dining room, swimming pool, patio WITH CHICKENS, and patio WITHOUT CHICKENS.  I may have sniffled.  Breakfast with chickens!  We came at the wrong time of year.

However, this sad story has a happy ending, because in the morning, as Jim was telling us stories about "the girls", he said he'd be happy to take me out to the coop before we left.  Joy!  Ignore the fact that it was literally 7 degrees outside and that I couldn't feel my face after five minutes, it was still awesome, because I got to pet chickens.  For Jim they're pets; he keeps them even after they stop laying (though he pointed out that one of the eggs that morning had come from a 4-year-old hen, so they can make it past 2 years), and he has them all named things like Dulcia.  News flash: chickens are really fucking soft and fluffy.  They're not very smart (he kept calling to them by name, trying to get them to come close enough to the door of the coop that he could grab them, and I asked "oh, do they respond to that?" and he laughed at me), but he said they really won't ever peck you, and they're easy to take care of.  Also, I learned that they love fruit!  He tossed in the canteloupe rinds from breakfast as their treat.

The cooking class was fun, too, but let's be honest, the highlight of this for me was the chickens.  Our other planned activities came to naught: the farmstore I had located in Granby that sold their own pork cuts was closed when we got there, and the Mark Twain house in Hartford turned out to be closed on Tuesdays when we got there.  We did stop in Windsor along the way and discovered a new bakery had opened near the train station, so we picked up a honey wheat loaf that is quite...chewy.  And yeasty-smelling.  That reminds me, I ordered a sourdough starter from King Arthur so we can make our own bread.  I'm not sure the culture is very lively, but if I can lay hands on some rye flour today, I can soak the wheat and make the leaven tonight and bake tomorrow.  I'm going to use the recipe from Michael Pollan's Cooked, which has to go back to the library....today, actually.  Good to know!

ETA: Our jaunt to northern Connecticut actually did not start on an auspicious note. Monday was a really unpleasant day to contemplate doing anything more than staying indoors--it was cold, overcast, and raining.  I wasn't in a great mood when we headed out, and I was grumbling that Sean wanted to stop for lunch in North Haven instead of just going straight there.  He was headed for a diner in North Haven, which serendipitous-ly happened to be adjacent to Leon's, a slightly expensive restaurant that we really like.  What were the chances they were open for lunch at 2:15 on a Monday?  But they were!  We had the elegant dining room almost entirely to ourselves, and great service from our waiter, who we've had before and who knows Sean from their baseball team way back in the day.  Add a good sandwich and--most importantly--a glass of Reisling, and all of a sudden the thoroughly unpleasant day wasn't looking so terrible.  It wasn't a cheap lunch, but it was a magical solution, and one infinitely preferably to diner food on a Monday afternoon, with old people.

Awesome

It's always gratifying when a student expresses appreciation for a class, especially if they acknowledge having been uninterested in the topic at the beginning.  My favorite this semester had been this beefy guy, Mike, in my ancient art survey, who actually shook my hand at the end and thanked me for making it "not boring"!  But I think he might have just been trumped by one of my modern survey students, Naadiya:

"Hi Professor DiMarzo,

I just remembered...that I forgot to tell you thanks at the end of the semester. I'd come into class on the first day confused as to why I had to even take Art History when my major was Human Services. But as the classes went on I realized that even if it had nothing to do with my major it was still interesting to learn. I'd heard a lot of things about Art History classes and how they were boring but I was very happy to find that they were wrong. You made class very energetic and I was always looking forward to coming there every week. 

Recently I was going through the guide on TV and came across a show that talked about the many paintings that the Louvre had and prior to your class it wouldn't have even registered in my brain. But I found myself making my whole family sit down to watch it with me and when the paintings came up that I knew I went into full blown explanations about each one. 

I realize now how much of an impact a teacher can make on a person and how they view things that are new to them. I think people don't tell others thank you enough and really take the time to express their gratitude. Thanks Mrs. DiMarzo for opening a new door and giving me another good reason to beg my parents to let me go to Paris."

ETA my response:

Hi Naadiya,

Thanks for your email; it's always wonderful to hear from students who have enjoyed an art history class, particularly when they acknowledge not having had too much interest in it at the start (I've been there--I signed up for my first AH course because it looked like the easiest way to fulfill a requirement!)  I'm thrilled that this course has inspired your desire to travel and visit museums--and how great for your family, too, to now have their own budding tour guide!

I'm not sure what your plans are beyond your associate's degree, but if you plan to transfer to another school in the future and find yourself in need of a recommendation, let me know.  In the meantime, as the Italians say, buona fortuna and buon viaggio!  :-)

Holiday Week

Today was the first day this week that we had no plans of any kind.  So, naturally, I started it off in kickboxing class at 9am with Linda, and boy, did we feel it. It was kind of ridiculous, actually; I went to kick last Monday night, and I didn't even eat that much in the intervening days, but it still felt harder than it has since the first couple of times I went.  Then I came home and gave the house a thorough cleaning (thorough meaning "even the baseboards"), so everything looks and smells lemony-fresh now.  The all-purpose cleaner recipe I got from the Green Clean book works pretty well; true, it does leave streaks on the laminated countertops, but I suppose that's what you pay for lacking in toxic fumes.

For reference (I've never written this down, I just keep using Amazon's "Look Inside" function, since it shows up on a visible page)

1 tsp borax
2 tsp washing soda
1/2 tsp castile soap
10 drops lemon essence
2 cups boiling water

Anyway, our holiday week started off on Monday night at Shane and Nicole's new house, where we were celebrating their long-anticipated engagement (Sean and I elected not to attend the World's Most Overblown Proposal in Providence on Sunday evening).  Minus Richardson, the old gang was all there, since even Iannone, who rarely shows his face during his blitzkrieg visits from Chicago, came around.

Christmas Eve is always spent with Sean's dad, first at Sean's aunt Kathy's house, with the many "characters" of the extended Gleason clan.  There were two new additions, baby Noah, who was born to Sean's first cousin Amy, and Isabella, born to Sean's, um, I guess second cousin, Samantha.  Amy is 40, and Samantha is 20 or so (it's always thrown me that Sean can have a first cousin who's 20 years older; that's because the six Gleason children, of which Sean's dad is in the middle, spanned about two decades in age).  That means that Sean's dad is a great-uncle to one baby and a great-great uncle to the other!

After Kathy's, we were spared the traditional gift-giving fest at Danny's house.  Well, Sean and I went over, but Dana was sick in bed and the girls were at their dad's house, so we exchanged gifts pretty quickly.  Danny gave me an awesome chef's knife, Dana got me another lovely scarf (the grey one she gave me last year is one of my favorites, so she's good at this), and, rather unexpectedly, I also got a tablet from Sean's dad.  Honestly, I was completely thrown when I unwrapped it because I thought it was a phone, and I was thinking "oh my god, I don't want this" before Danny pointed out it was a tablet.  Much preferable!  It works great with the Chromecast I got from Linda.  I refrained from downloading the Tumblr app or the Facebook app, though--I'm already on my computer all the time, I really don't need to have constant access in every room of the house.

Christmas was a really fun day. Alas, my major present for Sean, the refurbishment of the Buick, hasn't gone anywhere yet, but he really liked a gift that I actually picked up at a tag sale, a double clock/tide clock that has a map of New Haven and its harbor as the background.  His gift for me was awesome--we're going to take a cooking class at Sur La Table in Canton the night before our (dating) anniversary, and then stay in a bed-and-breakfast that has chickens.  And guests are welcome to gather eggs in the morning.  Yessss.  Those chickens don't know it but they're going to make a new friend on January 6.

 I went to Linda's early, since Sean was slow in getting dressed.  Gary's mother was there already, so I was able to help Linda out by holding up the conversation. Luckily, Gary's  father, Sal--who is a close talker, prone to delivering the same 1950s life advice repeatedly over the course of an evening, while holding the advisee's hand--had gone to visit a lady friend down the road.  Alice, his wife, is more of a hoot, and she loves to drink at holidays, so we had the white wine flowing at 1pm, just how I like it!  Even the later arrival of Linda's sister didn't ruin things, which is pretty impressive.

We spent the day after Christmas with my sister, and it too was (surprisngly) fun.  I showed her how to make pasta fagioli, though it had to be slightly modified upon the discovery that she lacked a blender or food processor.  In terms of cooking, Jen is where I was maybe five years ago; "cooking" to her (and to Vinny, despite his Italian background) is cracking a jar of Prego. I'm not sure I sold her on the "cooking can be fun, no really!" spiel, but hopefully I struck a balance between "inspirational" and "Jen you idiot, have you never used a knife before?"  Despite the chunkiness, the sauce turned out great, and we spent the afternoon playing games (I won at Scrabble, possibly only my third win against Sean in...9 years?) before we went to see "American Hustle".  During the previews Jen told me, quite solemnly, that I'm one of her best friends. She's done this before, and I'm always glad if I can keep my composure on and not start grinning.  I love my sister, definitely, but...I consider a best friend someone you don't (often) want to strangle (Carla and the chewing gum, Carla and the slamming of drawers in the early am...haha).

Yesterday, to bring our week to a grand finale, we went up to Newtown to see Phyllis.  It's a lovely, old-New-England type of area, with lots of gorgeous houses and hills that give you stunning views over the surrounding valleys.  We had lunch at a historic inn, which was honestly nothing special, and toured the library, which was once the home of the town's most prominent family, the Hawleys (among their treasures: a butter dish once used by George Washington, egads!).  It was an incredible public library, with an entire section devoted to art books, another to theater, another to music--a clear sign of a well-educated and well-heeled tax base.

It's always wonderful to see Phyllis.  I lived with her for four years, so her mannerisms and her way of speaking, which are all quite idiosyncratic, are as familiar to me as though I'd known her my whole life.  I told Sean afterward that it feels like meeting up with a family member (and honestly, I saw Phyllis more times in 2013 than I saw my aunts!).  You can really have a conversation with her about anything, since she's just had such an incredible range of life experiences.  Sean sometimes worries about the shape our lives will take without children to define them, but I consider her a prime example of how without children (or in her case, even without a partner), you can shape your life into something full and wonderful.  Not only are Phyllis' friends some of the most varied and seriously well-informed people I've ever met, she has one of the most active social calendars of any nearly-60-year-old women I know of.  (Actually, let's be honest, I don't know if I'll ever have the energy to live quite that fully).

After we parted ways, we drove to Bethel, a town maybe 15 minutes away, to check out the Rainy Day Paperback exchange.  We walked out with a stack of books between us, all for $34!  Highlights include a Latin copy of "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas"and a book about the history of mathematics for Sean, while I walked away with several art history books, EM Forster's Notes on the Novel Form and An Assembly Such as This, the retelling of P&P from Darcy's perspective that I learned about in Among the Janeites.  Not a bad haul.

I'm a little relieved that tomorrow's planned outing to NYC for Daniel's birthday is being cancelled because of the oncoming rain...I feel like I need another day just to unwind from all the unwinding!

Books and Food, Books on Food

Yesterday, I was trying to remember some of the books I've read over the course of 2013; I logged on to my library account hoping to see my list of check-outs, but discovered that you have to opt-in for that service, as a nod to privacy concerns. Fair enough. After a bit of brain-wracking, I discovered that with a couple of exceptions (the Pride & Prejudice mystery Death Comes to Pemberley; the two fat and thoroughly satirical volumes of Mark Twain's Roughing It), the books whose titles were actually popping to mind were mostly about food. It may be a coincidence that this was the same year that I started cooking more complicated meals, but only some of the books I read appealed on a gastronomic level; several had the opposite effect, increasing my doubt and dissatisfaction with many of the food options available to us on a regular basis.

As far as I can remember, this all started with Sugar, Salt, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, which I was eager to read after listening to the author being interviewed on NPR on one of my many long drives down to Philadelphia in the winter. The book didn't disappoint; it unveiled how food companies have increasingly packed our food with chemicals that are cheaper than the ingredients they replaced, and are continually tweaking the levels of sugar, salt and fat in a given product to achieve the perfect "bliss point" of taste. It was surprising to think of some of our beloved food products, many of which been a part of our diets our whole lives, as continually in flux, but apparently companies never stop changing and testing, not only to save more money but to attract new consumers. There were some really great-slash-horrifying origin stories in the book, not least about how the Lunchable was created (and boy, am I glad now that my mom never bought them for us, not that I recall being particularly envious of those who had them). Eating processed food is like playing in a casino--the house always wins. When foods are designed to be as delicious and addictive as possible, your poor body can't help but want them, even when they contribute negligibly to actual nutrition.

Michael Pollan's short book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto described this environment as one filled with "foodlike substances" rather than actual food. He offered a number of deceptively simple suggestions for eating more whole foods: choose foods that your grandmother would recognize as food (no Go-Gurt or soy product), for example, and if you eat processed foods, choose ones that have fewer than five ingredients, and make sure you can pronounce all of them. After I read the book I spent a little time surveying the contents of our pantry, and was surprised that we still had a number of things that didn't fit the profile of "food", pure and simple. This, despite the fact that 2013 has been a banner year for us in terms of improving what and how we eat: we have less processed food and refined grains on hand, and more fruits and vegetables than ever before; we cook regularly, and make our own versions of easy items like hummus, salad dressing, and peanut butter; we try not to buy crap.

To be fair, sometimes it's a rock-and-a-hard place choice--like making our own bread. Would it be healthier to have homemade multigrain bread? Sure, as long as we could keep our hands off it, which we couldn't. Our time on the dysglycemia diet, when we were only supposed to eat a single serving of grains (ie, 1 slice) per day, made the decision to retire the breadmaker much easier. That diet, by the way, was responsible for helping us break a lot of our dependence on grains; we're no longer following it strictly, but Sean now drinks a kale, berry, and peanut-butter protein smoothie for breakfast in place of oatmeal, and I have eggs, fruit, and almonds in place of my old friend, Cheerios. I haven't eaten a granola bar since May, when I replaced them with cheese sticks. Pasta has made a return, along with the aforementioned sandwich bread, but we're much more careful about it than before. Just the other night, making pasta for the two of us, I threw in a whole cupful of dry pasta for myself, and then complained that it was too much--Sean, enjoying 1/2 a cup, laughed and pointed out that last year, we'd have split the entire box of pasta.

Another eye-opening book was The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table, by Tracy McMillan. I referred to this as Nickel and Dimed: Food Edition, because that's pretty much what it was. Instead of reading about the experience of a Minute Maid in Maine, I read about what it's like to be a migrant farmer picking peaches, garlic and grapes in California; the massive food waste in Walmart's produce sections; and the "foodlike substances" that are prepackaged and reheated for your eating, um, pleasure, at chain restaurants like Applebee's. We're not chain restaurant eaters anyway, but if we were, I'd be seriously grossed out by how little actual cooking is going on in those kitchens! One of Sean's friends loves Olive Garden, despite living in New Haven, where the Italian food is fantastic. It boggles the mind--or rather, it would, until you consider that those restaurants are extensions of the food-industrial complex described in Sugar Salt Fat: those pre-made dishes are designed to hit you right in the tastebuds and keep you coming back for more. Plus, breadsticks.

My reading has taken a pleasant turn more recently, however, starting with Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste by Luke Barr.  I was familiar with Child and Beard (the latter only because of the award named after him), but not Fisher, who was one of the first well-known American food writers, beginning in the 1930s.  Profoundly influenced by her love of France and French cuisine, she wrote essays and books that explored the sensual pleasures of the table--at a time when that concept was largely anathema to Puritan-inflected America. The author of the book is Fisher's great-nephew, and he based it on the voluminous correspondence preserved among and by the personalities in the book, as well as his aunt's meticulous journal covering the winter of 1970, when she, Child, Beard, and a raft of other American culinary lights happened all to be in Provence at the same time, sharing meals and wine together.**  He argues that 1970 represented an important moment of tension for the American food scene after decades of dominance by French haute cuisine, and among the individuals present in Provence that winter he identifies members of the various factions--the old guard and the purists (Child's stormy French collaborator, Simone Beck, and the perfectionist American ex-pat Richard Olney) vs. those ready for a breath of something new, and perhaps no longer exclusively European (Child, Fisher, Beard). 

The book managed to evoke the smells and tastes of the meals just as well as the turbulent personalities of those who created and enjoyed them, and left me with the desire to visit Provence, and to drink and taste some of what they describe. True, I'm not much interested in the snails, oysters, or sea urchins, but rabbit stew, braised slowly over low heat in a pan sealed with a piece of fabric dipped in water and flour, to form an airtight seal? Count me in. Same for sole meuniere, the fish which converted Julia Child to French cuisine upon her arrival in France--sole fillets dredged in milk and flour, fried in butter, and garnished with butter and lemon juice. (I have aspirations of making this after the holidays, as soon as I can locate sole fillets).  I should add, though, that I sensed more hidden issues of class and snobbery at play here than did Barr (who was clearly raised with money, and who is now an editor at Travel + Leisure).  For for example, I found myself rolling my eyes when Fisher mourned how crass and commercial, how American, everything in la belle France was becoming by 1970, in contrast to the pre-war halcyon days. Somehow her attitude, which was shared by Child and the others, seemed terribly selfish.  France is not for you, I kept wanting to say.  It's not some sort of Eden for wearied Americans to recharge their cultural and gastronomic batteries; it's a living culture, not an artifact displayed for your pleasure in a museum. 

At any rate, after I finished the book I read some of Fisher's own  work, starting with the rather eclectic Serve it Forth from 1937.  Julia Child's My Life in France is on my to-read (I even watched Julie and Julia, but only for the Meryl Streep parts; Amy Adams' plotline was so terrible I couldn't even bear to watch her).  I've just started another book by Michael Pollan, as well: Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, and so far it's excellent.  More food reading, more food-making, and of course, more eating is to come between now and the New Year!

**Wouldn't it be great if one day, some grand-niece or grand-nephew of mine wanted to use this blog as material for a novel?  

Lost in Austen

I just finished reading Among the Janeites: a Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom.  It was a fairly quick read, but its breadth was somewhat surprising;honestly, I was just expecting some breezy commentary on the films, fanfiction, and cheesy Jane Austen tours in England, but the author managed to suss out plenty of interesting topics and colorful characters to interview.  She explores the tension between academics and non-specialist fans (guess who tends to look down on whom?); she probes the issue of what it actually means to be a "fan" of someone who's a pop-culture powerhouse as well as part of the literary canon (is it OK just to like the films?  Are you still a real fan if you've never read Persuasion or Mansfield Park, even though you love Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility?); she tries to achieve, through expensive corsetry, the Empire-waisted look at a JASNA (Jane Austen Society of North America) meeting.

Maybe all great literature is like a mirror held up to the reader, but it seems  Jane Austen offers more fodder than most.  For example, Yaffe interviews a clinical nurse who became convinced  that not only do many of the characters in Austen's novels display traits of borderline personality disorder (in the four types: waif, hermit, queen, witch), but that these characters reflect the actual borderline disorder suffered by Austen's mother.  Unsurprisingly, the life of this woman, Christine Shih, had been shaped by the borderline personality disorder suffered by both of her parents, and she came to see Austen's novels as a way of dealing with the emotional wreckage.  Another woman Jaffe interviews, a speech pathologist, is convinced that many of Austen's characters, like the children she treats, fall somewhere on the autism spectrum.  Chief among these is Mr. Darcy--she suggests that explains his comment to Elizabeth at Lady de Bourgh's house, about how he lacks the ability to converse with strangers.  It's an interesting thesis--they both are--but you get a sense that it's easy to become blinkered, capable of reading the novels only from your parochial perspective. (I enjoy one online commentator's point: "You know, sometimes people aren't autistic...sometimes, people are just dicks.") Or, as one academic put it, a lot of writing on Jane Austen, academic or otherwise, turns out to be "mutilated intellectual autobiography."  Burn.

 I haven't read Mansfield Park or Persuasion (I've seen an unprepossessing film version of the latter, with a young-ish Ciaran Hinds as the male protagonist), so I suppose those will have to go on my reading list.  Not that I think I qualify as an Austen fan at the level of many of the people written about in Yaffe's book; for one thing, I'm not really interested in Austen's own life and times. *shrug*  I am kind of envious of the JASNA members getting together with other people who really love a book you love, who are willing to talk about it on a deeper level than "ooh, Colin Firth is so hot!"  I miss that about college literature courses.  Over the summer I thought about joining a book club that reads classic and contemporary fiction, but they always meet in loud pubs downtown, and I'd prefer something a little more like the book club Phyllis was in, rotating among people's homes (though Phyllis' book club had its own torrid history of feuds and power-grabs, so maybe that's not a great example).  Sean pointed out that a lot of people might not have the space to host, especially if they live in apartments, which is true; god knows we couldn't fit twenty people in here.  Still, how much thoughtful conversation can you have shouting over a plate full of wings at Christy's?  The East Haven library does one classic read a month, though the next couple of months' books don't really interest me. March's book is Larch Rise to Candleford; maybe I'll join in for that one.

Snow Weekend

The anticipation of a winter storm, especially one that falls on a weekend, can be pretty fun.  I got up early on Friday morning to hit the grocery store, and we've been cooking up a storm.  Friday afternoon I made another batch of the creamy white bean and chorizo soup, mostly to freeze.  Saturday morning Sean made pignoli cookies for the cookie swap; we didn't wind up going because of the weather, so the cookies wound up divided between Hubbard, our neighbors, and Sean, since I find these cookies repulsive because of the almond paste, blech.  In the afternoon he made one huge pot of sauce, along with a small pot of pasta fagioli sauce for me. (There's a neat distinction around here that "sauce" refers only the traditional meat-based concoction that brews for four or five hours on a weekend afternoon, while all other sauce concoctions have to be given their proper names.  So where I would just say that Sean made two different sauces, everyone else would say he made pasta fagioli and Sauce).

I stocked up on books and movies at the library, though we haven't watched a single one of those I brought home.  I was particularly on the lookout for movies you can't get on Netflix, like Julie and Julia.  We went to the see The Hobbit on Friday night, which I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about in advance, but I have to admit to liking it better than the first.  I really do resent that this one children's book has been dragged out into a trilogy; maybe it was indeed Peter Jackson's "vision", but you know it had to be one gleefully encouraged by the studio suits!   I annoyed Sean by peppering him with questions in his ear during the movie ("Why are wood-elves unstable?" "Who kills Smaug in the end?") because apparently I am now That Girl (fond memories of Carla sitting down to watch half of Godfather 3 having never seen the other two...).  I can't say I was super-impressed by Smaug or Benedict Cumberbatch's voice-over. *shrug*  It's a dragon?  Yay?

Last night we watched Love Actually, which I assume I've probably watched almost every year since it first came out in 2003.  Ten years!  Unbelievable.  Honestly, I can't remember seeing it in the theater, though Sean assures me that all of us freshmen girls went together; the viewing I remember best was sophomore year, in Meredith and Popham's room that always seemed incredibly over-pink thanks to Popham's belongings and hot pink duvet.  We swooned over Rodrigo Santoro (Sean also helpfully reminded me that we nicknamed him "Pablo" for some reason), and someone eventually made Popham a huge glossy printed collage of pictures of him.  You can see the collage in the background of a photo of me and Sean that's sitting on the bookcase in our upstairs hallway.  We look really, really young--I was still flat-ironing my hair back then, and Sean was in his manorexic stage.

This morning I was Skyping with Carla and she told me about an article claiming that the movie is actually a terrible romantic film because so many bad things that happen--"Plumpy" getting hit on by the President, Emma Thompson getting cheated on, etc.  But the movie would have been completely trite if everything worked out for everyone.  People die, relationships sour, and nice girls like Laura Linney don't always get to fuck the hot guy who digs them.  I think the strongest scene in the entire film is Emma Thompson crying in her bedroom while Joni Mitchell plays in the background, before sucking it up and heading back out to get her kids to the play.  I used to cry at that scene, though I didn't this time around.  I was also struck this time by the complete lack of reality in Colin Firth's storyline, even though it remains adorable thanks to a) Colin Firth and b) the chubby sister ("Miss Dunkin Donut 2003") who may or may not remind me of Jen.  He and Aurelia don't know each other at all; they're just projecting their fantasies about the other one!  He could have been telling her how he wanted to kill and eat her, for all she knows.  Not really the best basis for a quickie marriage.

...Overall, I think Love Actually might be tied with Holiday Inn as my favorite Christmas movie. Time to track that one down!

Cookery

We've been on a soup kick the past few weeks, now that the weather has gotten colder. It started with a recipe for lentil soup with dandelion greens, finished with fresh lemon juice, that came from the Greek cookbook Kathy Schwab recommended, The Olive and the Caper (the recipes are fabulous, but the layout is just too much; lots of insets, wacky fonts, etc. Also, I don't really need a primer on the Greek gods, or Homer, in order to make tzatziki).  Then I made a split pea soup with ham hocks from a recipe on Skinnytaste, which got a thumbs-up from Sean's dad.  It was so good I ended up making it twice more; some went to our neighbors, Kari and Brady, when they got home from being in Utah for a couple of weeks (they'd previously given us some of the best beef stew I've ever tasted, so I returned their tupperware with my own offering inside) and the third go-round was chiefly to freeze.  After I'd already sauteed the vegetables, though, I realized I was out of chicken stock.  I was literally turning off the stove and trying to decide whether the Krauszer's down the street would be likely to carry stock or if I'd have to go to the store when Kari knocked to ask something.  The awesome thing about having a friendly neighbor?  She responded to my dilemma with one container of stock and a bag of chicken bouillon cubes!  The third batch was also an experiment to see if you could re-use the ham hocks, since it seemed kind of wasteful to chuck them out; doable, I learned, but it doesn't give you the same level of flavor as fresh ones. It's nice of the powers that be to call them "hocks," by the way, instead of saying "now flavor your broth with these severed pig's feet."  That might put people off.

Tonight's effort, however, was much more involved, creamy white bean and chorizo soup from Bon Appetit. It came from the stack of 2007-era magazines Linda had left behind in the closet in the basement, which I've been flipping through before recycling.  It took two hours to make, most of it active time, and more pots, pans, and utensils than I think I've ever used on a food item. I even used the blender with hot liquids inside.  Surreal.  I told Sean afterward that I had forgotten that Bon Appetit is not really designed for the J.V. cook, but I realized that that's not even really true; there weren't any special techniques required, just a lot of time management and following precise instructions.  The result, I'm happy to say, was fucking awesome, and since there was fresh rosemary and thyme in the pot, the house smelled delicious to boot. I'll be making a freezer batch on Friday, since I have enough left of everything.

The only real snafu tonight was discovering that I'd bought Spanish smoked chorizo,--the only kind I knew existed--while the recipe called for fresh, aka Mexican chorizo, that's in sausage link casings and which can be ground up easily. Slicing up slippery medallions of smoked chorizo into little bits? Actually really difficult, even with our knives newly resharpened courtesy of Gary (I learned on Top Chef that a knife's true test is whether it can easily slice through a sheet of printer paper...now ours finally can).

In a nice bit of serendipity, I started reading Provence, 1970 tonight, about a couple of months when Julia Child, James Beard, and a whole raft of American food luminaries whose names I'd never heard were gathered together wining and dining in the south of France.  It's written by one of the participants' great-nephews, who found his great aunt's meticulous diary in addition to studying the archived correspondence of the other figures, and it's really captivating.  It's making me want to try French cooking (except for snails, urchins, oysters, and things in aspic, all of which seem to be playing a big role), or go to Provence, or both.

Side note: While reading I was confused by the phrase pommes mousseline, which, I read below, means mashed potatoes.  But doesn't pomme itself mean apple, ala the Pomme d'Or?  But then how do you get pommes frites? Confusion...Googling...answer: French people call potatoes pommes de terre, "apples of the earth" (which is delightfully poetic), and then typically just shorten it to pommes.  I guess they figure no idiot is going to think you mean mashed apples...

One

I submitted my first fellowship application yesterday, for the Rome Prize!  I'm actually pretty happy with the state of my project proposal right now, which owes a lot to the continuing criticism of my professors.  Dr. West had asked to take a look, and she got back to me Thursday evening with some of the most perceptive criticism in terms of organization and really getting my point across.  It does help to have an outside pair of eyes.  Likewise helpful has been my Philadelphia pen pal, Stuart, this charming British retiree from the UPenn museum I met while doing the Spotlights at the PMA. Just this week he suggested a quote from Pietro Bembo about Titian being in Rome that starts my proposal off with a nice flourish that it was lacking before.  Stuart and his wife are renting a villa in Tivoli in August, and they're determined that I need to be in Rome by then to join them, haha.  (I think they have me in mind as a free tour guide, which for all the help he's given me, I'd be happy to do!)

So, one down, and six or seven more to go.  Rome was one of the "big three", with CASVA and Kress--both of those are due, or need to be shipped out, on the 15th, so I've got two weeks.  After that, I have a month until RSA and Delmas applications (with, hopefully, a final chance to get in touch with Rosand where he would be most useful), and then CAORC in January and the Cini Foundation (again) in February.  E' basta!  Then I can wait around for a few months to be rejected.  Lol.  I've told Sean that if I don't win any fellowships, which is always a good possibility considering the level of competition, I'm getting a new car, and new I mean a used-but-newer-than-1998 car.  That will be my consolation prize to myself!

Anniversary

Today is the seventh anniversary of my mom's death, and despite having discussed this with Sean at least twice in the past week or so, and despite my sister having mentioned it on the phone last night, naturally, today it completely slipped my mind until a few minutes ago in the shower, when I said "Oh!" out loud.  It's surprising, and maybe a little sad in and of itself, to realize that the remembrance of my mom's death no longer directly linked to feelings of sadness or loss.  This isn't new or anything; I've been able to think about it objectively for a long time.  It just still feels a tiny bit like a wrong done to her, that it wasn't uppermost in my mind this morning.  (Let's not even mention my poor grandpa, whose death date I had to put in my Google calendar because I'm so incapable of remembering it).

So here I'll raise the proverbial glass in my mom's memory.  (Well, a cup of tea, like the one I enjoyed outside in the sun before my shower, would be most fitting.  I think she'd have made fun of me for finally having come around to drinking massive amounts of tea like her, even though I still find the prospect of adding milk to be gross).  A metaphorical cup of Lipton, then, in honor of Joan DiMarzo: tiny spitfire, baker of breads, giver of insanely tight hugs. Not the sweetest mom in the world, nor the most outgoing, but mine, and very much missed.