Sigh

What a freaking nice day, and I'm sitting here trying to write about Chicana art and porn which is a giant FAIL.

Botticelli Boys

Madonna of the Magnificat and Madonna of the Pomegranate, respectively. I love their hair!

Good News Friday

Sean got into the University of Virginia today!!

The Book That Will Not Die

I still have more than a hundred pages to read in the next hour and a half about Hans Baldung Grien and his Durer/daddy complex, witches, sausages that might be castrated penises, and then horses. Where is the justice?

Oh, and the woman on the ground in the picture? She's lighting a torch. From her ass. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.

I Just Realized...

...that I started writing on this blog seven years ago this month! I'm a little late for the anniversary (March 9). Over 960 posts and counting! Perhaps I'll break 1,000 by the summer.

What a Morning

Today I had yet another of my panic attack moments where I'm walking to the train but suddenly can't remember if I checked that I unplugged my hair straightener. With six minutes till the train comes, I run back up the block, up and down three flights of stairs and then back to the station, arriving just as the train pulls up. Awesome that I caught it; NOT awesome that I have been left coughing intermittently ever since. It's not serious coughing, but if I take a really deep breath I feel a tickle in my lungs. I will laugh if it turns out I have asthma, even a mild form. Both my parents did at one time or another, but I'd really rather not share any more medical history with them than I have to, given my already terrible odds of living past middle age!

Perhaps to balance out that crappiness, I got some good news today. Really good news, in fact. I'll be TA-ing next year, which gets you tuitition remission, health insurance, and a stipend, but one that's a lot smaller than what I have right now. Last week the graduate school told me that, contrary to what Dr. Hall indicated, they would not be 'topping off' that stipend to bring it to the level I have right now, basically meaning that although I am pretty poor right now, the next two years would be extremely difficult. However! I talked to Dr. Hall this morning and she told me to check again, because my fellowship is the highest one the university gives and should have that extra benefit. So this time I called the graduate school secretary directly, and discovered that she had somehow put me down as a University Fellow and not a Presidential Fellow (despite having a copy of the award letter in my file) That means that I'll still get the same support next year that I do now, which is a huge, astronomical, incomparable relief.

It's funny, when I think back to when I started working, I didn't think $33k was that much. By the time I left I was making $40k (Paul, ever-generous, told me he wanted me to be able to tell my next job that I had already been making that much so I wouldn't have to accept lower) and I still didn't think it was that much. Well, seen in the light of a $20k stipend...I was a millionaire!

Long Day

I had a dentist appointment this morning. I chose the place because it was close enough for me to walk and because, miraculously, I only had to make the appt two weeks in advance. It turned out to be in a sketchier part of Germantown, which wouldn't have bothered me except when I went in, I discovered that the inside of the office matched the outside. A dirty dentist's office is not a good indication. So I was already uneasy, and then I see the dentist come out, coughing repeatedly into his hand, which did it for me. I told the receptionist I'd had a text message telling me to come home immediately and ran like hell.

After that debacle, I headed out to the King of Prussia mall to have my wedding dress altered at Nordstrom. If I had thought about this in advance I would have perhaps worn something slightly fancier than sneakers and my 'Golden Lightning Bolts' tee shirt, because I looked about a hundred times more poor than the other glittery creatures swarming the dressing rooms. One girl was buying a $1000 prom dress. A thousand dollars, for prom? I'm not even willing to spend that much on a wedding dress! Another woman was buying a gown for a benefit she was going to tonight, and told me she was paying to have the seamstress do her dress while she waited. I have to admit that I felt a little bit like a minnow that had slipped in among the goldfish, and I was not thrilled that I'd have to stand in the middle of this circus on the platform to have the seamstress pin the dress. Luckily for me, I got a dressing room with its own little platform inside (how fancy you are, Nordstrom).

I couldn't help but notice that all of the sales assistants were well-dressed, highly made-up white women, while all of the seamstresses were Asian women. I wonder who gets paid more in that equation, the people who suck up to you in the dressing room (I watched one of these women tell a client "that looks AMAZING on you" to everything the lady put on; no bias there, of course) or the people who actually have a skill? Sadly, it's probably the professional ass-kissers. Since I'd already bought a dress from them, they didn't need to send an ass-kisser in with me; it was just the seamstress, who was very pleasant. Of course she told me the dress looks great on me, but it does, so I'm just going to take her at her word. No bias necessary! The alterations cost $53 between the hem and having the straps shortened just slightly, but based on how competent the seamstress appeared to be, I'm pretty confident they'll do a good job. I had originally expected to find a tailor via a recommendation from Phyllis, but to my chagrin, she actually didn't know anyone.

Obviously I really love this dress, and they don't sell it anymore, so I was somewhat anxious about something happening to it--when they hung it up on a rack by the register the train was on the ground, and I was like "not to be a bitch...but put a bag on that, please, right now." Then there was a piece of classic bridal snobbery: the saleswoman asked when my event was, and I told her I'd be getting married in May; she then looked at my simple but very elegant dress and said "Oh, is it a destination wedding?" As in, obviously you bought something that plain because it has to travel to Aruba in a suitcase, right? Then when I answered "No...I'm getting married outside," she smiled and said "Ahhhh, OK," as though that made it acceptable that I had not chosen a giant, pouf-tastic monstrosity. I should have told her I was getting married at the Ritz!

This experience reminded me that although one of the prime explanations for the high prices of a place like Nordstrom is that you're paying for exceptional service, I really don't require the kind of obsequious attention that they offer their customers (or at least those with acceptable wedding dress decisions). I'm content with salespeople who are polite and who will make a decent attempt to assist you if you so require, rather than those who fall all over themselves to ask you if you need anything, anything at all, and can they suggest the perfect pair of shoes to go with this, available in their shoe department? (Fyi, the shoes they suggested for my ivory dress were glittery silver.)

Shoes are another headache. Do you know how hard it is to find off-white or ivory ballet flats? Not white, not tan, but off-white? Hard! I've looked at DSW, Payless, Famous Footwear, Zappo's, and now, even Nordstrom. So if anyone spots a pair in an 8.5 and they're not prohibitively expensive (when am I ever going to wear off-white ballet flats again?), let me know. Please.

Check Out My Nuns

Who doesn't love a good nun? Or about thirty late Byzantine nuns, in this case. The picture comes from the typikon (foundation document) of the convent of Bebaias Elpidos in Constantinople, and together with about a dozen other miniatures forms the material I'm working on for my project in gender class.

Generally speaking, my paper's going to look at how gender was constructed differently for a nun than for a regular Byzantine woman, and specifically how gender interacted with kinship ties and class status within the convent. The ideal for monastic women was to overcome their gender and be as men--in the typikon, the aristocratic foundress Theodora Synadenos urges the nuns to "gird your loins like men"--except everything they did, and were, was still predicated on their gender. They were still defined against a male authority, here as brides of Christ; although the convent was supposedly independent, Theodora had to appoint a series of male guardians from the outside, her sons, to protect its interests; and the nuns interacted with each other as 'sisters' and with the abbess as 'daughters.'

There are also class issues to contend with. Within the convent, the nuns were divided between the liturgical sisters, who were from the upper class, educated, and from whom the abbess and other important convent officials were drawn, and the laboring sisters, who comprised the uneducated, lower-class women and who did all the work of the convent. Aristocratic women entering the convent were permitted to keep a servant, and although ties with family were supposed to be severed according to the monastic ideal, Theodora maintained her network of family associations. She brought her daughter Euphrosyne into the convent with her, and made her her successor as abbess, and probably was able to keep in contact with her two sons as well, since the convent was conveniently located across the street from one of their houses!

The niece of Emperor Michael VIII and widow of the supreme military commander of the Byzantine empire, the illuminations preceding the typikon's text make Theodora's dynastic connections prominent--incongruous though this is, considering her admonishment to the nuns not to think of their worldly families anymore. This is one of Theodora's sons, Theodore, and his wife Eudokia:


Not too shabby, right? Anyway, I have a work-in-progress presentation in class on Monday, which is why I'm using this post to kind of work out my theme. I think I might argue that there were differences in the experience of gender of a lower class nun versus an upper class one. To use Catia Galatariotou's version of the famous Holy Roman Empire phrase, the female cenobitic convent of the late Byzantine era was neither wholly female nor wholly cenobitic.

Things I Didn't Know About Porn

I was doing research for my Playboy paper today (for which I have yet to come up with an appropriately pithy-yet-risque title), mostly reading more articles about the fact that everyone capable of logical thought (ie, everyone who doesn't approach the Guadalupe issue with the sole intention of proving it's true) accepts that there was no Juan Diego, no apparition, and no acheiropoietic image of the Virgin. Even the prior of the cathedral that houses the image publicly said it was all a myth back in the 90s, before the Pope canonized Juan Diego--and he promptly caught hell for it, death threats and all. Of course, the Roman Catholic Church already has plenty of saints of dubious or false existence: St. George, St. Christopher, St. Valentine, etc., so I guess they figured one more wasn't that big a deal in exchange for securing the allegiance of Latin America.

But I digress. As I was doing this, it struck me that I should probably do some reading on pornography as well, because the major controversy of the image I'm working with is that it presents a holy figure in a sexual context in a porn magazine. So I pop in "pornography" to JSTOR and, unsurprisingly, get hundreds of results. Most of them were sociological studies, which are really handy because they give you an abstract right at the beginning, including their conclusions. I like to read the research background and how they perform experiments, but once it gets to the data analysis,"where n=0.23," I just skip to the discussion of results.

One of the great things about studies in the social sciences is that they start by often exhaustively referencing all the other studies that have been done in this area recently. So the first article I read, which was about the effects of repeated exposure to porn and erotica on attitudes toward women, nicely summed up a bunch of other research that had reached similar results--namely, there is no negative effect. Watching a lot of porn doesn't make people think women are more inferior or should be treated solely as sex objects. This is kind of a big challenge to the quietly accepted idea that porn reinforces negative stereotypes about women, and especially to the "anti-pornography feminists" like Andrea Dworkin who led crusades to ban porn in the 80s based on it being all kinds of evil.

More interesting was another study which examined the relationship of circulation rates of pornography magazines to gender equality in all 50 states. To estimate the level of gender equality the researchers used a 24-point Gender Equality Index, which may not have been of their own devising, I don't remember. The results showed that in states where more copies of Playboy and Hustler were sold there was actually greater equality of the sexes; the authors suggested that this is because a community that is politically tolerant enough to be open to porn is also likely to be open to gender equality.

Food for thought...and for inclusion in my paper!

Good to be Home

I put more than 900 miles on my car this past week--"spring break" my eye. Happily, I did manage to accomplish everything I had planned, and I got to see Rae, Heather, and even my sister. Sean and I met her for lunch at Dom's on Friday and then went to see her new apartment, which is on the bank of the Connecticut River in East Windsor, and really attractive. It's bigger than her apartment in Brooklyn, and she has a porch overlooking the river. Sapphire seems to have doubled in size since the last time I saw her; "Fatty Lumpkin" was mostly a joke nickname, but Jesus, now it really applies, the poor thing is obese! I saw Cinnamon for half a second at Rae's house before she grumpily ran away, since Rae's dad had just woken her up to bring her downstairs. When I got home tonight to Thomas' welcoming yowls, I looked at him and realized that my idea of cat-size has become skewed by living with such a skinny little thing. Phyllis says he just has a 'Gandhi-esque' physique. Little HIV-cat, I actually missed you a little (only a little, till the top-volume meowing began).

Sean pointed out that our separation this time will be the longest we've been apart since Italy three years ago (hard to be believe that this past Thursday, Sara's birthday, was three years to the day since "Blob night"...) Sigh.

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In Which I Am (Again) Not Working

Technically, spring break has already begun for me, but here I am sitting in the 'new' grad lounge in the brand-spanking-new art building, doing absolutely nothing except reading old journal entries. In my defense, this so-called lounge is a soul-crushing wasteland, tucked away in the back, back basement of the building, past the damn loading dock, and protected by a mountain of unnecessary security--you have to key in a code on a little box by the door to get the key out, then unlock the door, throw the key back in, go inside and retrieve a second key from its hiding place to open the computer room. Sooooo much easier than just giving the grad students their own keys, right?

Also, whatever genius designed this building decided it would be awesome to have not one, but two basements, which don't even connect to one another. So if you attempted to go down the stairs by the entrance, you would find an auditorium, classrooms, photography studios, and a bunch of art students who all seem to know instinctively when an outsider is present, but no art history offices. However, if you went back upstairs, down a giant hallway that is part studios and part exhibition space and which is always crawling with more of the aforementioned art students, and then went down the staircase at the back of the building, you would find a lot of mechanical noises, a loading dock, and! joy of joys, a couple of art history classrooms and our lounge. Which you would be free to enjoy once you have achieved the double-key entrance.

In contrast, let me just point out that our old location was a very 1970s-looking floor of one of the other humanities buildings, conveniently close to the library and also the cart from which I like to buy lunch. It was on the eighth floor, which really made you feel like you'd earned your food, and it was just art history, so it was quiet, and nice, and the professors had their offices there so you could see the teachers you didn't have classes with. Here, we're in the hinterlands and they're up on the second floor in--this is awesome, too--modular cubicles. They used to have offices, with real wooden doors, and sometimes a window. Now they have less space than I did when I worked for Paul, or even for Stubhub for that matter. Progress, right?

I Passed the German Exam!

....that's all. That news just made my day.

March Already

Last night I had a bad dream about the wedding--it was the day of but somehow I'd still thought it was far away, so everyone's telling me I have to get going for the ceremony, but I hadn't had my hair done and had no shoes to wear. Sean wasn't in the dream, but ironically, my parents were; my father was hurrying me along and my mom was in her bathroom showing me the shoes she was going to wear, which were not real shoes but these massive contraptions looking like nothing so much as 16th century Venetian platforms. And then my sister tried to force her scuffed, formerly white shoes on me, telling me no one would see them under my dress. Typical.

Random

There's a big orange storage container in my closet that holds almost all of the things I've saved over the course of my life. In Windsor they were separated into several plastic underbed containers, and innumerable shoeboxes. I started out with the shoeboxes, probably in eighth grade or so, although only years later did I realize that labeling them would be useful. Some boxes are miscellaneous; some contain everything from a particular year, like senior year of high school. There is a box for the Europe trip sophomore year, one for the HILL trip, and another for Florence. The same storage container has awards from high school, my dad's childhood baseball glove, and a long piece of faded Chinese silk, preserved now in a plastic bag, that was once my prized possession.

I like to imagine someone going through that box years from now and trying to get an idea of who I was, like an archaeologist trying to form the image of a people through a shard of the cup that once held their wine. The first thing you see when you open the box is a small paper plate wrapped in tissue paper; on it there's a handprint in clay. What would someone make of that, supposing that it survived? What are the chances that they would be able to guess that that was my mother's hand, even if they had everything else in that box to help them?

Of Nuns and Adultery

Right now I'm rather slowly translating a German article on the legal differences between nuns and monks in the Byzantine period. Apparently, if you decided the nunnery wasn't for you and wanted to quit, you would be prosecuted as an adulteress. Because, you know, you were betrothed to God, and then you cheated on him, filthy tramp! It didn't exactly say how they punished adultery back then, but I feel like it might have been something of the "who wants to throw the first stone?" variety. Later on it also mentions the fact that dual-sex complexes, with a monastery and nunnery in the same place, were completely forbidden, and that if any monks and nuns lived together 'as brother and sister,' it was considered bigamy. Which would undoubtedly lead to more nasty punishments. What a drag.

ETA: Um, so later it does explain what happened to the adulterers--you got the death penalty. And if I'm reading this right, they just locked you up in the cloister and let you die in there. Oh, but some later legislation was milder: you only had your nose cut off. Yay!

Rainy-Day Trip Planning

It's cold and wet here, so what better time to focus on July in Spain, where daily temps average between 95 and 104? Last night I figured out a basic itinerary for our travels: Madrid for three nights, then Salamanca, Avila, Segovia, and Toledo, and finally three nights in Madrid with a day trip out to El Escorial. That gives me not one, but two Sunday mornings in Madrid to experience the wonder of El Rastro, the world's largest flea market: 3500 stalls! Sadly, I think I'm almost equally excited for that as I am to visit the Prado again. Priorities, right?

Post From South Bend

Sadly, it is already the morning of my departure, which sucks. The last time I was here I was able to stay for five days, but alas, having class on Thursday and Monday, I could only do the weekend. Still, we had a lovely Valentine's Day; we went to Notre Dame's museum on campus, which surprisingly had an interesting collective of medieval/Renaissance objects, then we went to what passes for a fancy Italian restaurant around these parts *derisive hmph* and then, on Sean's insistence, we saw the Reader. I wasn't really interested in watching a movie about Nazi pedophiles on V-Day, but I must admit that it was really good even if it was depressing. Kate Winslet has, like, the perfect body. And yes, the actor who was playing the 15 year old boy was hot too, except in this case he's not actually 15 in real life (unlike that time we all saw Peter Pan in high school...anyone?)

This is Some Fuckery

I'm suffering from an excess of adrenaline right now...I was in the German department with my friends, all of us pumped to finally take the exam and get it over with at fucking last so we could stop living and breathing German, and what happens? The proctor doesn't show. She had to take her husband to the hospital because he had an eye problem. OK, yes, not her fault, but what really pissed us off was that despite this being a GERMAN DEPARTMENT no one else could manage to proctor the exam for us. They said they didn't have the materials. Just photocopy an essay out of one of our german for reading knowledge books, for god's sake, it's where you take them from anyway! But no, now we have to individually reschedule the exam next week. Which means more stress over passing or not passing. And I still have to sit through my Durer class at 3 to get to the part where we go out for drinks. If it weren't a little too "ladies who lunch" I would have totally been OK with going for drinks right the hell now. Dammit!!

Fingers Crossed

Tomorrow is the German translation exam; I have about a one-in-five chance of passing, but I'm still hopeful...