2 Triumphs and a Nibling

On Wednesday we opened The Artist Collects: Highlights from the James Reed Print Collection, the first exhibition that I've curated. We got so much wonderful feedback on opening night, both on my interview of Jim and on the show itself, and I'm really proud of how it turned out. Honestly, Carey's really the only one who has an inkling of the immense amount of work it required, so I'm going to toot my own horn in this space!

Given the title of the show, it wasn't a given that it was going to have a defined theme or through-line. After all, the field for selection was 1,500 lithographs, etchings, and woodcuts (plus artists' books and multiples) that Jim has either already given us or has promised us as a bequest, ranging from the 16th to 21st centuries, so it could easily have been a hodge-podge of "greatest hits" with nothing more than captions on the labels. Instead, I developed a list of less than 100 objects that would not only be visually interesting, but could tell some form of a story about the developing of printmaking--the rise (and fall, and rise again) of lithography in the 19th century, the mid-century return of intaglio printmaking, the "primitive" turn to woodcuts at the end of the 19th century, and the flourishing of printmaking in the post-WWII US. I did all the research (and it was a lot, given that I knew nothing about lithography before last summer), I wrote all the labels and all the wall text, I figured out what the best "flow" of objects would be given the space we have. And you know what? It came out fucking awesome. The best compliment I received was from the mother of Brooke, our intern last summer who worked with me and Jim to catalogue and photograph the collection--she said that reading the labels, she really felt like someone was helping her understand as she went along while all these developments were significant. As someone who firmly believes that people still go to museums to learn something, rather than just be entertained--even if the knowledge doesn't necessarily stay with them!--that was really gratifying to hear.

Yesterday, Sean had his own moment of triumph, after a truly nail-biting race to the finish line. The deadline to file his dissertation to qualify for May graduation was 4pm; he ran from his department, print-out in hand, at 3:50. It's not *quite* done (there was technically supposed to be a concluding chapter 5, for example), but there's a built-in buffer of a couple of weeks in which he can submit a revised and finalized version. The important thing was getting a physical copy of a recognizable dissertation in their hands by the deadline--and he did! (Tooting my own horn again: all credit for the front matter, table of contents, and entire bibliography goes to yours truly...the acknowledgement page is currently still blank, but in the final version it had better read "Wife wife wife, wife wife, advisor, Linda, wife wife wife wife wife.") It's been a long and grueling road for him, but the end is finally, truly, in sight, and he can look forward to enjoying things--like this summer's 500-mile Camino de Santiago trek--with a heart lighter than it's been in the last decade or so!

The other incredible thing to happen this week was actually the first thing! Monday morning around 8am, my sister gave birth to a son, Leon Francisco Tranquillo. He was a little early, and only about 6 pounds, but he's healthy and handsome, and looks a lot like his brother! In a sad twist of fate, I was battling a chest cold I'd inherited from Sean last weekend, so it wasn't safe for me to go up to the hospital to see them, but my aunt Donna, bless her, took the day off on Wednesday and drove to Hartford to surprise her. I'm really glad that someone from the DiMarzo side was there. There are certain life events where you keenly feel the absence of a parent, even when you're surrounded by other people who love you. I felt it at my graduation and at my wedding, and I'm sure Jen has felt it now at the birth of both of her sons. I really wish my mom could have been there for her. My sister believes in an afterlife, so I hope it comforts her to imagine my mom watching over her and her grandchildren. On a lighter note, I made the discovery of the word "nibling" as a substitute for "nieces and nephews" and it's my new favorite! I will be visiting the niblings today with Linda, now that I'm returned to full health--poor Uncle Sean gets to wait behind for a plumber.

The last thing I wanted to write about didn't happen this week, but last week, after the final snowstorm in what's been a remarkably mild winter. While Sean and I were out shoveling, the clouds cleared away to reveal a gorgeous blue sky. The tree branches still had their little clumps of white snow clinging all over the branches, and when I looked up, the first thing I thought of was van Gogh's Almond Blossoms:

I said as much to Sean, and he had been thinking the exact same thing! Great minds. Now here's to spring!

CAA

Yesterday I went to New York for the day to attend some sessions at the College Art Association and realized that it's the third time I've attended the conference in that specific Hilton Midtown. The first time was senior year of college, when Jesus encouraged me to go to see what the world of art history was all about. He took me to lunch with Jonathan Brown, who even in my nascent scholarly awareness was clearly A Big Scholar (Jesus having previously gifted me his book on Spanish early modern art). I remember that it was snowy and gross, so I wore sneakers from Heather's apartment in Brooklyn and then changed into these green suede pumps (a thrift store find!) in the hotel lobby.

The second time was, hm, maybe 2014? Mainly it's memorable because the fire alarms went off while hundreds of people were milling about the convention level, and virtually no one made a move to the escalator to leave the hotel. I remember looking around and thinking, "I'm not dying in a hotel fire because all of these over-educated people are too stupid to evacuate!" Luckily, given the frigid weather that day, it turned out to be some kind of electrical fault that repeated itself several times, rather than a fire, but you'd better believe I was ready to gtfo.

I met up with Maite and Laura Igoe for lunch, which was awesome, not least because we had plenty of gossip to share. I miss my grad school friends, most of whom still live in Philadelphia or the neighboring PA area (Cate's in Westchester, Maite's in Reading). Philadelphia's not even that far away, it's just making the time to actually go down there. I promised them I'll come visit this summer, while Sean's off on the camino with Ron.

After lunch I popped into MOMA, which is down the street, and was immediately reminded of how much I dislike its vertical orientation, confusing gallery layout, and mobs of people, literally thinking to myself "why did I come into this hellscape?" I gave Starry Night a glance, but that's all you can do when there's a constant half-circle of Instagram-snappers in front of it. Instead, I spent some time looking closely at another nearby canvas, his Olive Trees: 

As I looked at it, I tried to actually visualize the different hand gestures that he would have used to produce the different kinds of brushstrokes. In some places, like the trees, it's just a tangle of quick comma-like strokes. Elsewhere, like in the sky, they're long and sinuous. When you look closely at the juncture of the sky-blue and the hill-blue, you can also tell that he painted the landscape in first and added the sky second--in some places the sky-blue overlaps, but in others he just tried to get as close as possible but wound up leaving fragments of bare canvas exposed. I also noticed a curious, deeply saturated blue that he seemed to use quite sparingly, without loading the brush as he does elsewhere--it shows up in a arc of shadow at the lower left corner, for example. Some Googling today suggests that that's cobalt blue, which was four times as expensive as other blues like Prussian and smalt; that would certainly explain a limited use! Anyway, I probably only spent three or four minutes doing this, but it was relaxing and helped me shut out the noise of the crowded gallery.

There were other pleasures, like Picasso's Demoiselles, which was larger than I recalled. The juncture of his Three Woman at a Well with Leger's Three Women is a great match, and there was an excitable group of French middle-schoolers having a discussion with their teacher in front of them. I sat in front of Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimus for a few minutes, but my eye was much more attracted across the gallery to Ad Reinhardt's Abstract Painting, which I won't even include here because the subtlety in shade between the purples and blacks of his grid is really difficult to discern on a screen. It matched wonderfully with the black-purple-maroon Rothko hanging next to it.

After MOMA I went back to the hotel, where just by chance I ran into Coop on the escalator! I had no idea she'd be there, but apparently she'd just had lunch with Jesus and they'd discussed their schemes for my future, haha. I finally had the chance to explain to her that Sean and I have decided to stay in Connecticut, so I won't be applying to the jobs at Oberlin or in Boston that she's sent me. Honestly, I was surprised--and touched--by how supportive she was, when I've been quietly assuming she's pretty much written me off (but when Coop asked me "how far is commutable for you," I knew exactly what her angle was and made it clear that working in NYC is not really an option!) She introduced me to one of her first-ever M.A. students, Art di Furia, as one of her all-time favorite advisees, and told me how much she misses our conversations. I do too, actually; I always had fun with Dr. Cooper (and yes, I can call her Tracy now, but it's really hard not to default back into the formalities!). I also got to chat with Tim and Jesus, which was a pleasure. How surprised Jesus was to hear that Sean would be doing the camino with Ron, haha!

It's funny, on my way into the city the only thing I was really looking forward to (besides not being in the office!) was seeing Maite, but unexpectedly getting to connect with Laura and talk to Coop made it such a pleasurable day, even if it was 10pm by the time Sean picked me up at the station. It was a lovely day to be in the city, too. One thing I always regret about walking around Manhattan is how difficult it is to stop and admire the architectural details of the late 19th and early 20th century buildings, so as not to clog up a sidewalk, get trampled, or trip over something. The only time I'm able to enjoy it is out the window of a cab, even if fleetingly, and in the dark as I did last night!

Adieu 2018!

Sean's mom gave him a 20-lb weighted blanket for Christmas, and I type this comfortably ensconced under its bulk. Ahhh. This is recharging time; in a couple of hours we're headed over to Jordy and Pinto's for the 2nd edition of our new NYE tradition of watching shitty movies before midnight; I'm not sure anything can top last year's screening of The Room but Sylvester Stallone will be giving it his all this evening.

Last night we were at the Richardsons' because Jon and Kim were up from NJ with their three kids. We were hanging out in the basement, watching the kids play with classic Fisher Price toys that Happy and Bill saved. It's just amazing, to think about the passage of time. That basement floor was where Sean and I hooked up for the first time, NYE 2004, and now we have doctorates and Richardson drives a minivan! Life is wild.

Carla was home again for Christmas, so I made the trek up to Mendon to see her. I don't think I've been to her house in (literally) years, but we drank wine and re-watched GoT season 2 with Cal in the background asking "who's this guy? is he a good guy?" for every character, and it was a delight. I forgot how solid the early seasons are, despite watching the whole thing with Sean earlier this year. There's a goal for 2019: full rewatch before the final season starts in April.

Sean's kicking off the New Year by traveling to San Diego for a conference. His dance card is full: Ron and Kathy will be there, Ward may drive down from LA, and he'll be reuniting with Nathan. It's been more than two years since we've seen him, but given that I spent two years living down the hall from the guy, it really doesn't seem like it's been that long, oddly enough. While Sean's away, Sara's going to come stay with me! Sean's dad gave us a gift card to this spa that has a "Himalayan salt cave" where you go and sit on deck chairs set in sand for 45 minutes while the salt...relaxes you? Releases mysterious, never-named "toxins"? We'll find out! You do this activity fully clothed and wearing clean white socks--they were very clear on the last point when I made the booking. I'm going to have to settle for "clean socks that were once white."

Now the weighted blanket has taken me from "relaxed" to "kind of sleepy," which is no good, especially as we have no sources of caffeine in the house. Time to get up! Adieu, 2018; you were a dumpster fire politically but pretty good personally and professionally (which I think is effectively the same thing I said this time last year). Bienvenue 2019, may you improve!

ETA: Last year's dark horse Christmas gift was an art page-a-day calendar from Linda. Every day you reveal something new and (mostly) interesting! We asked her for another one for 2019, and today Sean went through the entire box and we culled 365 images down to our favorite 25, which feature a nice range of period and medium. What we're going to do with them is as yet unclear, but we couldn't bear to toss them in the recycling!

Carla's Triumphant Return

Carla made a flying visit to the States this past week on the arm of her adorable but not-so-much-with-the-English-speaking Milanese boyfriend Ricardo. I couldn't make it to NYC to see them because I got sick after Thanksgiving, but yesterday they took the train up to Fairfield for lunch! Carla hasn't been back to campus since the day we graduated, so all of the new dorms, new dining hall, hyper-masculine stag sculpture, etc was new to her, as was our little museum. I did my best in speaking Italian, and we had fun discussing lots of idiomatic expressions and whether they exist in Italian. "By hook or by crook" was particularly tough, since even Carla wasn't sure of the words for "hook" and "crook." I learned a new equivalent to the old "in bocca al lupo"-- "in culo alla balena," or, "in the whale's ass!" The correct response to the former is "may the wolf die," while the correct response to the latter is "let's hope the whale doesn't shit." You've gotta love language.

Here are Carla and Ricardo posing with Lucas the Stag mascot, who was helping some students fundraise for a teddy-bear drive:

Ricardo even purchased his own Fairfield University sweatshirt! He also took this lovely photo of us outside Bellarmine (it took me a while to realize that he used a filter on my phone to take this since I never do):

Roomies forever! 

Weekend Adventures

Somehow, in all these years of Sean's Notre Dame pals being friends, we've never gone on any kind of group trip or group vacation, and in general, I'm really OK with that. A month or so ago, however, we discovered that everyone was interested in a visit to Hyde Park to see FDR's presidential library. Sean and I went last summer, and Jordy brings her students there every spring, but the others hadn't been. We joked about spending a weekend upstate together, which turned into me perusing AirBnB to see what was out there, and--lo and behold--a three-bedroom house on 75 acres with a pond, waterfall, and a kitchen that looked straight out of a Nancy Meyers film. I was sold, and so were they, so we enjoyed a long weekend together there with the Quinns and Pintos.

The property was amazing! This was actually our first time using AirBnB in the US, as I was reminded when the owner, Peter, jokingly said he couldn't actually read any of my profile reviews since none of them were in English. He explained to me later that he and his wife, a crime novelist (a stack of her books were in the living room) had bought the entire property a few years ago. They live in "the big house," a sprawling building by the road, while the building we were staying in had clear been converted out of part of a barn, and at the time of their purchase was occupied on weekends by a group of women who came up from the city to ride their horses. (Every property we passed up there was a horse farm, a polo training farm, or a llama farm!) This explained why the AirBnb listing included the option to stable your horses on the property. Once these women were no longer tenants, Peter and his wife decided to try Airbnb, starting only this year--something you would not have guessed, given how comfortable the whole set-up was.

Friday night, Sean cooked pasta alla matriciana, followed by a cheesecake he had made the night before, and we played Exploding Kittens. We went to Hyde Park on Saturday, and I once again found the library not only historically fascinating, but a deeply moving experience. We were having lunch  when the heavens quite literally opened up, so instead of visiting the Vanderbilt mansion up the road, we went back to the house for a combination of napping, cards, and--for me--once the rain had stopped in the late afternoon, a few hours in an Adirondack chair by the pond, re-reading Julia Childs' My Life in France, courtesy of the house's well-stocked library. All of the day's humidity vanished, replaced by a cool breeze and even some sun. The rain fed the stream into the pond, at the far end, where a very large, elegant stork waited for lunch to no avail, and then poured into a short but surprisingly loud waterfall near where I was sitting. A group of large, brilliantly blue dragonflies raced each other up and down the edges of the pond, every so often flitting to the surface and causing tiny ripples. At distant intervals I would hear a gurgle and look up just in time to miss one of the pond's denizens disappearing under the surface--and no matter how long I tried to pay attention, it never came back to the same spot while I was looking. It was truly peaceful, and a pleasure to re-read the book itself under those circumstances. I told Sean on our way home that I don't really have any desire to learn to cook French food, because it's so rich that if I ever got good at it, we'd wind up suffering the "biliousness" that Julia and her husband were constantly struggling with! But I do love to read about it.

Saturday evening we drove up to Rhinebeck, where we stopped at the little candy store owned by Paul Rudd and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (alas, nowhere in evidence) and had a delicious dinner at Gigi's, a place I've had lunch with Carin and wine with Leslie, on different occasions. Our waiter was a charming (and loquacious) French-Canadian named Michele, who sold us on a future group trip to Quebec City! Four of us ordered the bolognese, which was delicious, and thanks to the large, late lunch one of those meals that I wasn't overly hungry for and thus could savor every bite. Afterward we drove to a local DQ-type place called Holy Cow for ice cream (no vanilla! A sacrilege. I declined to partake).

It took until just before our departure on Sunday to meet Toast, Peter and Cornelia's friendly black cat. He turned out to look exactly like Sapphire, but was much more partial to men than women. He also loves to jump into guests' cars, as Peter warned us as we were packing up. The genial Peter, in fact, was the final surprise of our weekend. As we were all driving home separately, Jordy texted us--she had decided that his face was familiar, and wondered if we thought he looked like an actor from Animal House. Sean agreed, but IMDB gave no information on his current whereabouts or marital status. Nicole did some phone sleuthing and found a local paper item, identifying our Peter as the actor, along with his wife Cornelia the crime author. Jordy was aggrieved that she hadn't known this before we left, while Sean was tickled to know that a Hollywood actor would be enjoying the gift we had left behind: the final quarter of his honey-ricotta cheesecake. This morning, Peter sent along a private note via AirBnb thanking Sean for his culinary gifts, haha.

Perhaps Quebec City will be next?

Le Petit Cafe Redux

We visited Le Petit Cafe for the third time a few weeks ago, in celebration of Sean's birthday. This time, we went with Linda and Gary, and, as I had predicted, the pleasure in sharing such a good meal and overall wonderful experience with them helped return some of the initial wonder we felt upon our first time there. It also helped that the pork loin entree that I chose on our first visit was once again on the menu, and the sauce was, again, revelatory in terms of flavor. I even liked the wine! This is a rare thing for me, since I almost always find French wines lacking in character, intensity, or something else ineffable, but we chose a bottle of 2012 Saint-Emilion and it was superb. We visted Saint-Emilion while we were staying near Bourdeaux, but I don't recall being particularly interested in their wine at the time. In fact, I only ever enjoyed 2 French wines while in France: the first, a red produced by a vineyard down the street from the B&B in Naujan-et-Postillac, which our hosts informed us was sadly entirely bought up, and second, a rose left in our AirBnb in Menilmontant in Paris, which was probably nothing special but which I could never locate again to test. What I remember about Saint-Emilion, beyond the picturesque nature of its hilltop streets, is a few caramels topped with sea salt, a local specialty--divine. 

It's also a rainy day, and I've spent it re-reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, an epistolary novel that was made into a wholly unsatisfying Netflix film. There was never going to be any way to do justice to the novel's structure, given that the main character, Juliet, never even sets foot on Guernsey until halfway through the book, but the casting of the movie was the worst part. They picked Lily James, the girl who played Cinderella, to play Juliet, and I just couldn't buy it. She looked about seventeen and like a stiff breeze would topple her! According to IMDB, previous efforts to adapt the book were going to star Kate Winslet (yes please) or Rosamund Pike (also great), but instead, we wound up with this limp waif. And yes, they had to shoehorn in a mystery and a romantic triangle that's handled much more amusingly in the book, as well as cut cut out nearly every hilarious and heartbreaking story of the Guernsey Nazi occupation--otherwise the entire thing would have been watching people write and read letters, and occasionally look off into the distance. Honestly, though, that might have been an improvement. 

Dr. Gleason!

Yesterdy Sean defended his dissertation, "Morpho-syntax and Pragmatic Variation in the Latin accusativus cum infinitivo" (yes, I typed that from memory). This morning I discovered that he had fallen asleep on the couch (not unusual) and slept there all night (unusual). Before toddling off upstairs for more sleep, he announced that he had slept well all night (basically unheard of). Hooray for freedom!

Big Day!

Two things happened this morning!

First, Sean sent off a 300-page draft of his dissertation sometime in the wee hours; it's rough and he said he's barely sure of what it says, but it's in.

Second, I made a mammoth payment to Navient, which, when it processes, will pay off my private student loans in full. That money came from my trust account, so it's not like we did anything special (but thank you, parents!) However, when we paid off Sean's private loans a few weeks back, we did it entirely with what we'd saved during the past year while we were (almost) a two-income household.

That means as of this morning we're effectively debt-free! It helps that we've never had a mortgage, or car loans, or credit card debt. Hell, when we came back from Italy I even swore that I'd never sign another cell phone contract in my life, now that I know exactly how badly consumers get screwed here. Pay as you go, baby.

Anyway, now that we've paid those off, and now that we're finally going to be a real two-income household come September, we can start saving for a house like actual adults. How weird is that? :-)

Summer Approaches

Fitting that my next entry should come on the heels of the closing of the Gesu exhibition! I didn't have to work on the final day, so I won't find out until tomorrow what our final visitor count was, but on Friday we were already over 7,500. What a ride that's been! I'll be sad to see some of the pieces go, especially the chasuble and the Bernini bust, which are just so exquisitely lovely, but it's a relief not to have to deal with quite so many members of the public for a while.

I have a pretty strong headache right now, probably thanks to the changing weather and increased humidity. It was a cold, rainy week, and I felt sorry for all the graduating seniors who had this morning's soppy grass to contend with. Next week, here comes the sun--and our 9th wedding anniversary, to be spent in Mystic thanks to Gary and Linda!

A Very Bernini Spring

I really have the damned-est time trying to update this blog these days. I can't count the number of times I've written a sentence or two of a post and then suddenly, acutely, felt the sense of "meh"! A sign of my own wavering attention span, I wonder? Certainly not any slackening of the usefulness of this blog itself--just last night, as I was Skypeing with Adam, the subject of Le Petit Cafe came up and he wanted to know what the food was like, so I gleefully opened the post where I had copied out the description of our first (and most decadent) visit there to read to him. (Side note: we got another gift certificate to Le Petit from Sean's dad for Christmas, so there will be at least a third visit!)

Anyway! We're a month and a half into our big Baroque Bernini exhibition, and it's going really well. The museum has had close to 2,700 visitors in that time, when in the past they'd hope for 2,000 over the course of a full four months. I'm enjoying it immensely! It certainly doesn't hurt that museum-goers in general are a self-selecting crowd, and ones that have sought out the Fairfield U. Art Museum are definitely there because they're interested in Italian art, the Baroque, Bernini, or all of the above, so there's a receptiveness there that is not always present in the classroom (where one of my students, a senior finance major named Eric, literally cannot be bothered to repeat back a definition or concept that I stated five seconds previously; his default is a drawled "Couldn't tell ya").

The exhibition catalog was just published, 639 pages of beautiful full-color photographs and essays by leading scholars, as well as five catalog entries written by yours truly! My "author copy" is sitting on the record player as we speak. Honestly, I haven't even read all the essays yet, but every time I dive in I learn something new and fascinating. One of the most titillating mysteries to come out of this show is the fate of a drawing of the original wall tomb of Robert Bellarmine in the Gesu, which was demolished in 1841 to create a new doorway adjacent to the church's apse. The 17th-century drawing is the only record of the original wall tomb, which included full-size statues by Bernini's father Pietro, and it is supposed to be in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome, but when Xavier Salomon went to go look at it in preparation for the show, it wasn't where it should be. Unfortunately, things do go missing from libraries and archives in Italy all the time (not all of them have the anti-theft systems of the Vatican library). A further twist, however, was someone--an Italian--commenting on our Instagram that they had a "drawing of that tomb" in their possession, and then sending a quick digital photo of what was definitely the missing drawing! Whoever it was, they didn't respond further to our efforts to contact them, and we're not sure why they contacted us at all--were they going to try to sell it to us? Did they only belatedly realize it had been stolen? Who know.s

Speaking of Italy, Sean is headed back to the bel paese next month for a conference in Pisa. He's routing through Rome, but his travel schedule has him staying there overnight only on a weekend, meaning no chance to see any of the Academy staff. We joked that he could definitely make it for Saturday lunch, but there would be only Alessandro, who would give him a quick "Eh, Sean!" and move on; it's really Gabri and Tiziana that he'd want to see, as well as Tommaso. Anyway, I'm still super-envious because he's going to go to Bi-Won, aka the Korean restaurant of my dreams. Isn't that ironic--I'm not jealous of the actual Italian food he's going to eat, haha? Basically, once Sean demonstrated his mastery of matriciana, it was clear that we could basically recreate any of the dishes we want here (with exceptions for things involving hard-to-acquire ingredients such as puntarelle or fresh anchovies).

I AM totally jealous of the coffee he is about to receive, though. Our moka pots do a fine job for the morning, but we've searched fruitlessly for any coffee shop that can actually pull a decent espresso (and include crema!). Unfortunately, American tastes have been forged by Starbucks' dark roast, so there's always a burned flavor (unless you pour 20 oz. of milk into it and pay $5 for the privilege, natch). Gabri also lectured us repeatedly on how important it is to thoroughly clean the machine daily, or you'll accumulate an aftertaste there as well. (This is the kind of thing that Sean and I will only ever discuss with people we knew from Rome, because there is no way not to sound like a snotty Europhile asshole when you complain about the impossibility of obtaining properly-pulled espresso in the States).

Anyway, on our next visit to the city our goal will be to try this Italian espresso bar, Zibetto, which recently opened in several locations in Manhattan. I can only imagine what they charge for an espresso, but Sean and I agreed that based on the pictures, it really does seem like a proper bar in the Italian sense--a place you can drop in, order a 1-euro coffee which will be served to you in a real cup and takes all of 1 minute to sugar, stir, and drink, and then you're on you're way. Without the bar to stand and drink at, it's not a bar! Seriously, I think that bars might be the single aspect of Italian cultural life that I respect and miss the most--not least because it's not a thing even elsewhere in Europe. The cafe near in our apartment in Paris regarded us with such puzzled amazement that we didn't want to sit and enjoy our coffee on the sidewalk. They did have a bar, which is why we were initially hopefully, but then it turned out that they used it for food prep, and everyone sat for an hour sipping their cafe au lait. Non!

The Good Old Days

We just finished up watching all 9 seasons of The Office last night. In the finale, Andy says something about wishing there was a way to know when you're in the good old days while you're still in them. In the shower this morning I realized that I have realized it, a number of different times in my life. I remember the sort of 'advance nostalgia' that gripped me the summer after high school, and then at the end of each college semester. I felt it in Rome many times, especially toward the end of my second year. I feel fortunate for that, the early reminder to enjoy the great time you're having in the knowledge that it may not be that way again.

And even if not everything is the good old days, they can still be great days. This holiday season has been a little less joyous than it would have been, because Sean spent a week--including Christmas--in bed with the flu, but I also had the chance to see Carla (not once but twice!) and sit in the Flanagan living room catching up with Heather, Gary, and Mama Flan while Donut humped my leg repeatedly.
Tonight we're capping off the season by heading to Jordy and Pinto's for an new kind of adult NYE party: sweatpants and a screening of "The Room."

2017 may have sucked politically, but it's been pretty great personally. I have my PhD at last, I have a job that I love, and I have friends and family (especially little Charlie!). I've been incredibly lucky. Here's to 2018!

To the Lighthouse

On Sundays mornings, I run from our house to Lighthouse Park, and on days like today, when I'm actually feeling like I can make it, I run into the park all the way to the beach. Running itself isn't fun to me like it is for some people, but it's such a pleasure to see the water while the beach is pretty empty, and then to come around the side of the carousel building to see the lighthouse itself. Like a nerd, I usually say "to the lighthouse!" to myself (as if anyone in Virginia Woolf's book would be caught dead jogging).

I like the lighthouse: I like that it's faceted and not round; I like seeing it silhouetted against a bright blue sky, as I've been lucky to see it most Sunday mornings; and I like sitting on one of the benches at its base and watching the people fishing and families moving into the park to claim the best spots for their picnics and family reunions. This morning I saw two men in a distant part of the shore who were using a net to fish in the shallows...for what, I couldn't tell, but they were tipping something into a bucket. It's peaceful and beautiful, and even the profile of New Haven across the harbor has some elegance to it from such a distance.

Once my heart rate is back to normal, I walk out of the park and then run from the entrance back home. My cardio stamina is fine for running these days; my feet and knees object before my heart and lungs ever do. I'll never train to run marathons like Carla, that much is clear. I'd much rather stick with 9Round in the hopes that one day I can actually transition to a real boxing gym. And, on Sundays when the gym is closed: to the lighthouse!

Le Petit Cafe At Last: A Religious Experience

Tucked away behind an unassuming storefront in the center of Branford is a French restaurant that often winds up on a list of best restaurants in the US. It's been there for 20 years, and its best-known quirk is the European-style dining on Fridays and Saturdays: 2 seatings at 5:30 and 8:30 for a three-course prix-fixe meal. Sean and I have been planning to go to Le Petit Cafe for years, quite literally! After we went to France in 2014 and experienced the wonders of their cuisine, we decided to try and recapture the gourmand glory in our own background--but then we wound up cancelling our reservation, for reasons I can't even remember. Skip over the two years abroad, and this past January we decided to try again for our anniversary. This time it was Mother Nature that intervened; there was such a huge storm that the restaurant closed in advance. This past Saturday, however, we finally made it, as a belated celebration of Sean's birthday. And oh, did it ever live up to the years of heightened expectations! The entire experience was perfection, start to finish. We both agreed that it was without a doubt one of the best meals we've ever eaten in the States and a strong contender for best meal anywhere.

To begin: the restaurant isn't pretentious in the slightest. Rather, it's small, cosy, and yellow-painted inside. The table was already prepared with pickled yellow beets, olives, and black truffle butter, and the waiter immediately rocked up with a small, warm loaf of crusty French bread that they make themselves. Of course they make it themselves, it was fucking delicious! Not something you're going to find in a bakery here. And the truffle butter was just out of this world. We were in seventh heaven before we'd even ordered anything. Our waiter was a young kid from the Ukraine, who was adorable in a Anton Yelchin (RIP) type way, but also had kind of a thick accent that we had trouble deciphering--he'd ask me for my plate and I'd hand him my fork. You know what? That only made it feel more like we were really eating in a French restaurant (aside from his general politeness, of course).

Then, the menu! I copied the descriptions off their website so that I can conjure up these flavors in the future. Appetizer: I had "Sautéed French escargot (Burgundy) served with blue cheese (premium French “St. Agur”) and cognac sauce on herb accented puff pastry." Now, I was being pretty bold here; I've only had escargot once before in Paris, and did indeed send one flying across the table as I dug it out of its little shell. However, I was pleasantly surprised that these were already de-shelled and in that incredibly rich sauce (combined with the lower lighting, you could easily be eating a bit of calamari or clam or anything else a bit chewy; I'm not sure if there's a particular flavor to escargot themselves) and laying in the nest of the puff pastry. Sean chose as his appetizer "Chef Roy’s country style pork pate layered with armagnac infused cherries & house-cured foie gras, and served with cornichons, spiced shallot chutney, and dijon mustard." I'm not a fan of pate or foie gras, but Sean loves both and was very pleased.

After the salad course--very simply dressed, the tomatoes bursting with flavor--it was time for the main event. Sean chose "Pan-roasted five spice duck breast served with organic black rice, port wine infused cranberries, toasted organic pine nuts, and orange sauce." His dish was, in his opinion, very good. I didn't try it, even though I like duck well enough. Why? Because the first bite of my dish,
"Roasted center-cut pork rib chop (Berkshire, all natural) wrapped with jambon de Bayonne, and served with sautéed organic spinach, roasted Russian banana fingerling potatoes, crispy pancetta, fresh grapes, and port wine sauce" was, indeed, a religious experience. Muffled moans of pleasure were to be heard from my side of the table. The sauce was exquisite--there's no other way to describe it, warm and rich and electric with flavor. I understood once more the saying about the secret ingredient of French cooking being time, because that dish had clearly taken plenty. Dear God. Sean agreed, and acknowledged that this was a rare case in which I had chosen the better entree sight unseen!

After we polished off our plates, the remaining bit of French bread, and our bottle of wine (Cote du Rhone, not my favorite, but then I could never really warm up to French wines), and it time for our final selection of the evening: dessert. I'm not really a dessert fan, particularly not in restaurants; I'll have a brownie or ice cream or something, but I don't go in for pie, pastries, etc. And yet, I ate every bit of this dessert. Sean called it a 'deconstructed' apple tart; a thin rectagular raft of pastry on which the sliced apple was lying, drizzled with a caramel sauce, and accompanied by fresh-made Chantilly cream and blueberries. I ate the cream. I didn't even want to eat Chantilly cream while we were in Chantilly a couple of years ago, but at Le Petit, I ate it, and it was delicious, as the blueberries--perfectly firm and ripe!--burst in your mouth alongside each bit of cream.

Not only was the food wonderful, it was the perfect opportunity to reminisce about our trip to France, still one of our favorite trips, especially the Avignon-Bordeaux part. We brought up the Tripadvisor page for the B&B we stayed at in Naujan-et-Postillac and were thrilled to see that the English couple is still running it (and that it has an exceptionally high rating, with only a dozen out of over 500 reviews ranking it merely "Very Good" as opposed to all the "Excellents"). We talked about our night at La Poudette, the little house-restaurant out in the middle of nowhere that is another contender for Best Meal Ever, where the geese who ran across the drive as you walked up from the road were the same ones destined for the foie gras later. Sts-Maries-sur-la-mer, where the sky stayed streaked with light until almost 10 o'clock at night as we drove back to Avignon. Chateauneuf-du-Pape, a hilltop ruin buffeted by some of the strongest winds I've ever felt. The plane trees in Arles. The peaceful abbey of Senanque. The distant view of Mont Sainte-Victoire, even though we couldn't get up there. The friendly British couple we met in a restaurant in Avignon. So much beauty, so lush and verdant. I want to go again! Le sigh.

To the Tune of Lana Del Rey and White Wine

An inveterate radio-channel-flipper I've never been able to say that I have terribly well-defined musical preferences. Other people's recommendations have led me to so much music I wouldn't necessarily have encountered elsewhere. I miss the age of being able to borrow a CD from a friend and then either buy or burn my own copy if I liked it enough! Kay Cosgrove lent me her Elliott Smith CD freshmen year of college, I used to steal Carla's Regina Spektor CD in senior year, Lakshmi gave me Lykke Li at the Academy. Since the dawning of the mp3 age, though, I've become really fickle with regards to music. I rarely buy an actual album outright, but rather settle for one or two songs I've heard. Of course I know that this means I'm missing out on great songs that are elsewhere on Lorde's albums or on Muse's. It's my own fault, but not one I've ever been in any rush to rectify, despite the availability of Spotify and other streaming services. I don't even own some of my favorite albums anymore. Tool's Aenima wore out before I got around to burning it, so when I feel the need to rock out, I just bring it up on Youtube.

There are a few exceptions. Ligabue, for one; I've got most of his recent albums, including the one I bought in a record store in Florence in 2006 and the one I burned off of Sylvie during my time at Middlebury in 2011. Lana del Rey is another; not only do I have all her albums as Lana del Rey, plus assorted soundtrack songs, I have her much less impressive previous work as Lana del Ray and Lizzie Grant. And I just bought Lust for Life, which is playing right now as I write. Sean likes to call this "slit your writs music," but I would call it perfect "look out the bus/train window and daydream" music. This most recent record is my least favorite so far, but it might grow on me. I have such warm nostalgic associations with the previous albums; I associate Ultraviolence, for example, with our month in Venice, August 2015 (and even more specifically, for reasons I can't quite explain, with walking from our apartment near S. Maria Formosa over a few bridges toward the grocery store early in the morning while there were few people out), while Honeymoon I associate with our second year at the Academy.

A year ago, we were in Paris, waiting out the month before our brief return to Rome and departure for home. It seems a lifetime and (half) a world ago, not least since at that point, I had no idea how I was going to fill in the missing 2/3 of my dissertation. Now I'm waiting again, this time to begin my job at the end of the month, and, along the way, start revising my dissertation into an actual book manuscript. In preparation for my forthcoming working life, I finally acquired my own car, this lovely 2008 Honda Civic, which is in beautiful condition.

It might not have the leather heated seats of Sean's car, but it has much better gas mileage. In fact, Sean called a short while ago to ask if we could just meet at his dad's, since he had students wanting to talk to him late about tomorrow's final exam for the summer class. What would have been impossible a week ago is now as simple as pie.

"What News from Kent?" : A Job, and Jane Austen

First, briefly: I got the job at Fairfield! The peasants rejoice! Ahem.

Second, yesterday was the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death, and the Atlantic has a series of posts this week reporting on readers' favorite characters, quotations, and first encounters. My first encounter wasn't a successful one. The year was 1998, and I really liked the movie You've Got Mail, a movie that's held up surprisingly well, considering the number of times you have to listen to the AOL loading noises. In it, Meg Ryan's character talks to her internet pen pal about her love of P & P, and Tom Hanks tries reading it to please her but gives up in disgust, not impressed by the famous scene of Darcy snubbing Elizabeth. I, in turn, decided I wanted to read this classic novel, but instead of taking it out from the library, I used AOL and brought up an HTML version through Project Gutenberg (or some similar site). The poor quality of the online reading experience might help explain why I wasn't really impressed, but I do remember that, like Tom Hanks, I got to the dance scene with the snub and was like "...that's it?" I'm not sure if I even finished the book at all at that time, and neither am I sure when I fell in love with it or any of her other books. I searched my blog for mentions of Jane Austen, and the earliest is from 2004, when I mention planning to re-read P&P, so evidently by that time I had read it--definitely in a physical copy.

The Sunken Garden and Billy Collins

Sean and I agreed that the presents we came up with for our six-month dating anniversary in the summer of 2005 were a joint high point in our gift-giving history. I bought and framed the war/peace WWII newspapers, while Sean wrote to Billy Collins to ask him for an autograph for his girlfriend. Unfortunately BC didn't write back in time, so Sean gave me a book of his (with autograph) that he'd found in a used bookstore. Then, lo and behold, a month or so later BC wrote back, sending a little pre-printed poem as well as a note, "Hoping you and Michelle are still together..." (that ellipsis really said it all, don't you think? Six months seemed such an accomplishment to us then, but to a divorced guy it was probably pretty funny). Linda matted and framed both pieces of paper, and they're on the wall in my office. It was a great gift, and a wonderful story. I went to see BC read at Sacred Heart in Fairfield in 2007, and brought along a tiny picture of the frame taken on my LG Chocolate phone, to show him, but I decided it wasn't worth waiting in the long line of old ladies to show it to him.

We made up for it on Wednesday night, though! BC was the headliner of the 25th anniversary of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, held on the grounds of the Hillstead Museum in Farmington, where my high school friend Meghan's mom was a docent years ago. It turns out that the woman who designed the house for herself, Theodate Pope, did so with the help of McKim, Meade, and White, the architects of the AAR main building. The ground floor of the house was open, so we took a walk through admiring what really is an impressive collection of French Impressionist paintings, but also little gems like the anonymous 16th-century Venetian painter who painted a Saint Lucy, head tipped to the side in a reverse of Titian's Salome, her gaze on her two cartoonish removed eyeballs on a skewer in her hand.

Sara's mom took us to the poetry festival once during high school, but I don't really recall any of it, besides it being hot. We got there relatively early, a little after 4, which meant we could snag a parking spot right on the grounds, and then a spot for our chairs with a good view of the podium. It rained at one point and we got wet (before Sean ran to the car to retrieve the umbrella, which turned out to be a good call since there were repeated cloudbursts/sunshowers for an hour or two), but then it turned brilliantly sunny, and stayed clear as the sun went down on the longest day of the year, as BC read his work. The garden itself is beautiful, the birds were singing, and the sun striking the trees and the house as it slowly set were really lovely.

When I saw BC in 2007, I recall being a bit taken aback by the dryness of his voice and tone; poems that had seemed sincere to me on the page suddenly took on a sardonic edge when he read them. I remember thinking he seemed rather bitter about life, having (recently?) gotten divorced. This time, though, it was perfect. Sean enjoyed himself hugely, and said he hadn't laughed that hard in a very long time. One he particularly enjoyed was among the brief haiku BC read--poems which, he reminded us, can only have 17 syllables (he noted dryly that plenty of poets write three lines about a frog and call it a haiku). This was also the only one to which he had given a title:

New England Haiku

Whose woods these are I
think I know. His house is in
the village though. He

Maybe he read that in 2007, but I don't remember it (a quick search of Google suggests it's one of his standards) but we laughed so hard. BC mentioned that he's engaged, so perhaps that has slightly improved his outlook on life!

After the reading was over BC was available to sign books. Of course, we hadn't brought any books, but Sean suggested we get in line anyway and tell him about the gift. I was reluctant, but that was really a great idea. He was so gracious, and evidently tickled by our story. He shook my hand three times, told us we seemed like a really happy couple, and then joked "but if anything happens, don't blame me!"

Me, PhD

Updates here have been few and far between. There was, unsurprisingly, a considerable amount of stress leading up to my defense, although I count myself lucky in general (no sleepless nights, no crying fits). My defense went incredibly well. The outside reader, a Titian specialist and David Rosand alum, loved my dissertation, and thinks I should try to publish it as a book immediately, and Coop (who I can now call Tracy!) wants me to have a book proposal ready for CAA in winter 2018. Since the mantra about publishing is "your dissertation is NOT a book," this was a really high compliment. They also gave me virtually no edits for the text, so I was able to get everything formatted quickly and submitted to the Graduate School, where it was officially accepted last week. My graduation "date" is August 2017, but I'm effectively a PhD. Woohoo! Depending on how one calculates, it took either nine years (from when I started at Temple) or seven (from the beginning of my doctoral coursework). Either way, I beat the curve, since the average age for women to get their doctorates is 33...

Done!

Today is our eighth wedding anniversary! Yesterday I defended my dissertation. I have a PhD now! :-)

Friend Times

We're on Academy-Dave overload here! We stayed with Dave S., and saw Dave M., in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, and then met Dave McK. for dinner in New Haven on Friday night. He lives in Brooklyn and has been teaching at Yale's art school. He was from my first year, and even though we haven't been in contact since that year ended, we had a really good time. We even spoke a little Italian with the owner, who is originally from Assisi, and was delighted to learn we'd all lived together in Rome.  After dinner we headed down to Milford to get drinks with Sean's friends, two of whom, Pinto and Quinn, just had offers accepted on houses this week. Naturally, I'm slightly envious of their adult settled-ness, but at the same time, buying a house has come to mean the equivalent of "this is it: we're staying here forever" in my mind, and I'm OK with not quite being at that point yet.

Yesterday was my dad's 17th anniversary! Sean commented how it's interesting how mentions of my dad have dropped off over the years on this blog. It's normal, I suppose, because my life has grown so far beyond what it was when he was a part of it. I told him, I really only thought of my dad yesterday in a light-hearted context; I spent most of the day at my sister's house, playing with Charlie and helping my sister haul all of her bulk trash to the curb for pick-up. I teased her about why she doesn't like to leave the front door open, even though it lets in lots of light, and her answer was that someone might be watching her, and I said that's Dad talking (my sister lives across from a wetland nature preserve; the only thing likely to be watching her is a squirrel). She has a great picture of him in her bedroom, from a holiday at my auntie Donna's when we were kids. He's wearing a gray suit, sitting, with a glass of something in his hand, and smiling--not grinning--at the camera. He looks healthy, not the heavy, bloated, tired man I remember vaguely from the months immediately preceding his death. He was also, interestingly enough, more dark-skinned than I recall (and it can't have been summer, given the suit and that we were there for a holiday...)! Anyway, it's a nice photo. It's my dad the way I'd like to remember him, and more importantly, the way I'd like Jen to be able to remember him, since she has more pain there than I do. Charlie will still probably only hear about his Grandpa Joe from me and Sean, but that's OK.

Luckily for Charlie, in addition to Vinny's parents he also has a stand-in grandma in Linda! We Facetimed her yesterday so she could see him and it really made her day. Not incidentally, Sean finally had a vasectomy last week, so if she hadn't fully accepted that we were never having kids, it's probably pretty clear now. We joked to Daniel that he's now the only hope for the Gleason line, but he demurred, so who knows. Jen, always eager to shake off her in-laws, has already decided that they're spending next Easter with us (ie, at Linda's), and Vinny was even on board, which is good.

One of the few remaining things that annoys me about my sister (and Vinny) is that they are constantly falling all over themselves to thank us for anything, including a) coming to visit, b) going to the store with one of them, c) helping to clean, d) entertaining the baby so they can do something else, or e) all of the above. Like, twenty times in one visit. Partially this is just their own neuroses, I know, but I don't know how else to communicate that I enjoy  being there, and I like being useful! Charlie's cool and all, but actually sitting around for a whole afternoon watching him throw blocks on the floor isn't my idea of a party. I'd rather help clean. I've seen how stressful it is for them trying to balance work, the house, and the baby, and it really does make me happy to help her out when I can (though I still haven't yet cleaned a poop diaper, thank god). My mom would be so happy and amused to see us getting along so well, I'm sure.

Buona Pasqua!

Post-Conference Highs

A lot has happened in the last couple of weeks. Toward the end of March, I went down to Philly to represent Temple at the Barnes Foundation Symposium, an annual colloquy of graduate students from Philadelphia-area schools that used to be held at the PMA. In fact, when I went to visit Temple for the first time, Dr. Hall invited me to come to the symposium and then took me to lunch in the fancy museum restaurant. The Barnes, which moved to its new building on the parkway in 2012, just as I was moving out of the city, is a beautiful museum, and clearly a great deal of money went into it. Everyone agreed, for example, that the chairs in the auditorium were the most comfortable of their kind; enough so that you could spend an entire day sitting without your butt hurting!

My paper there went really well. Dr. Bolman and Dr. West stood in for Hall and Cooper, both of whom were traveling. It was really nice, in particular, to spend a little time with Dr. Bolman, who is both fiercely encouraging and wonderfully blunt--she had classic Bolman critiques to offer after my talk, including "no using "they" as pluralization" and "make sure to enunciate further, in case you have ESL listeners" (the latter of which honestly had never occurred to me, but as a Byzantinist she attends more international conferences). Dr. West also gave me a really warm introduction; apparently younger students still consider me some kind of a role model in the department? Who knew!

It was also great to spend some time with Phyllis, even though her house was pretty cold. I'm still vaguely used to it, but poor Sean was suffering! Her new housemate has an adorable tiny dog, a Papillon named Petey, who kept Sean company. One night we dined at Bacio, where Phyllis is totally in with the owner--who she once engaged in a spirited debate on the proper way to make Italian meatballs, (ie, his was not the right way) during which I was edging toward the door in embarrassment! Now, though, they're bros, and we got to enjoy a plate of incredible off-menu appetizers as a result. They're such a chill restaurant; there's a fat little tan dog who begs at all the tables, and like most restaurants in the city it's BYO, so you can sit there and drink your own wine for hours. There's no restaurant quite like that here; Home is our favorite in this area, but it's not quite as neighborhood-casual as Bacio.

We also went out to Media for lunch with Stuart and his wife Maureen; they had attended the symposium, along with another guy named Roland, who apparently was one of the Spotlight regular attendees. He seemed surprised I didn't recognize him, and I'm thinking, dude, that was four years ago! I was assured that my Spotlights are still considered the best, haha. Media is just a few miles away from Swarthmore, so that was our next stop; our friend Jeremy teaches there, and managed to wrangle one of the on-campus houses, partially out of luck and partially out of coincidence, as it happened to need a year's renovation while he was going to be in Rome last year. It's literally a five-minute walk from his office, and ten minutes' from Ruthie's school, while Bluma goes to Quaker kindergarten also on campus. Jeremy legitimately has the most enviable set-up of any academic I know (complete with annual research funding for a center they're opening in Trent, in the Dolomites!). We had a great evening with them, which naturally included some karaoke (for everyone but me, of course), including Sean's great staple, "Mack the Knife."

When I got back to New Haven, we had just 72 hours before we left for Chicago for RSA. Dr. Hall decided she couldn't wait for Dr. Cooper to actually send her comments on my dissertation and that she needed to have it by March 30, which meant applying all of the 200-odd corrections I'd been saving in a separate Excel sheet to the "master." Good thing we were flying out of Tweed, ie right behind our house, because I sent the revised draft to her at 1:30, packed in a hurry, and was on a 5:30 flight (ironically, back to Philadelphia, before going on to to Chicago).

In Chicago we stayed with other friends from Rome, Dave and Jinn. They're both painters, and Dave teaches at U of Chicago. Their apartment was lovely--so many incredible books! We stayed an entire week, though the conference itself was just three days. A whole bunch of AAR folks from my second year were in town: Will, one of the writers, lives in Chicago; Bryony was in town to give a lecture, and John was presenting at the conference; Lauren was doing the same, so Rick came with her. We had dinner one night at an amazing (if expensive) Mexican place in Dave and Jinn's neighborhood, which is Andersonville, about 45 min ride on the train north of downtown where the conference was being held. Lauren, Bryony, and John were all staying down there in the conference hotel, and headed back there after dinner, but Will and Rick came back to Dave and Jinn's place, and we ended up sitting around talking until 3am. By that point, Lauren had told Rick that it'd be best if he just stayed out, since she had to be up so early for her panel the next day, so he decided to stay over, and Will followed suit. Of course, the only spare blankets and pillows were already in use in the "guest room" (ie, Dave's office, air mattress, white curtain strung up in the doorway), so one of them took the couch, one the floor, and slept bundled in their coats. It was weird and wonderful. Sean pointed out that one of the signs that we're actually a group of friends, and not just Rome-friends, is that we barely discussed the Academy itself; we had other things to discuss and debate. It was so much fun, even if by the end of a week I was eager to get back to my own space and my own bed.

The next morning we all rallied, had breakfast, and then Sean, Rick and I went downtown to go to the Art Institute, where he and I spent a long time looking at the Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, one of Sean's favorite paintings. It was such a treat to stand there talking about it, a painting we both find interesting, as opposed to many times when Sean has patiently stood there as I inspected various early modern words (or more often, begun cracking jokes about them). Afterwards we met Dave Morris (AAR Year 1!) for a drink nearby, which was a pleasure, as he is still his loveable, chortling self.

What about the conference itself? That went great too! I was the lone grad student presenting alongside major scholars, which was a thrill. Unfortunately, the organizers of the conference put our two sessions in one of the smaller rooms, and it was literally standing room only. One of the speakers in the second session, Stephen Campbell, had to stand in the hallway for the first session!  I got good feedback from my fellow panelists and from attendees (Deborah Howard! Paul Hills!). Melissa Conn from Save Venice was there, and offered to put me in touch with the collector who owns one of the recently-attributed works I touched on in my paper. Apparently, a Bolognese doctor discovered what is now considered by some to be a self-portrait of Titian in a frame in an antique shop...in Connecticut. It seems unbelievable, but apparently the drawing is still being held here on the East Coast, so I might be able to go see it in person! Another good result, that I'm trying not to get too excited about, is that a woman from another session on coins and medals approached me about publishing my paper in a volume they're going to propose for publication...with Philip Attwood, a curator at the British Museum. That would be awesome if it happens, but we'll see.

One of the benefits about giving my paper in the first session on the first day was that the stress was over, and I could enjoy the rest of it! I saw a bunch of friends from Temple, including Erin Downey and Tammy, fought my way through lines at the reception for my free drinks, and hopped in a cab, buzzed, to zip uptown for one last dinner with the Academy gang. It was really, really great.

On our way back to New Haven, Dr. Hall responded with her comments, which happily were nothing structural (though she caught so, so many typos!). Naturally Dr. Cooper now wants a new edited version before she'll bother commenting, which is both frustrating--she was supposed to be the primary reader--and also nothing I can change, except by getting her the revised version ASAP. My outside reader will be Jodi Cranston, one of the organizers of my RSA session, and one of David Rosand's students. She said she'd be honored, which...squee!