Oy

This morning I made a total rookie mistake--I managed to entirely forget that it is Saturday, that the trains run on a different schedule, and thus that my 9:38 train (which would get me to the Penn Museum on time for my first tour at 10:30) wasn't running. The next train would have gotten me there late, so I ran home in a panicky fashion, hopped in the car, and then, lo and behold, discovered that what should have been a 20-minute drive took double the time, because there was only one lane open on a two-lane highway for about three miles. Of course, my luck was such that it was the three miles leading up to the specific exit I needed! It was so infuriating to sit there, inching along, all the while being able to actually SEE the museum's parking garage. Luckily, I made it there five minutes before the tour was scheduled to start, which is decent, but I felt bad for repeatedly instructing the students to be there ten or fifteen minutes early. Actually, I shouldn't feel bad, because it's not like they listened anyway--people found there way onto the tour fifteen, twenty minutes late, and my second group had four people who missed their scheduled time (one of them because he'd actually gotten into a fender-bender on the way. At least I didn't have his luck).

Anyway, the tours weren't bad, although I'm always disappointed by how few cultural or historical references these students can pick up on. Only one kid was familiar with Charlton Heston and the Ten Commandments, for example (it was relevant: we were looking at a colossal head of Ramses II, who according to historians is the mostly likely candidate for being the pharaoh of ten-plague fame). They were also really surprised when I pointed out a swastika on a Greek vase of the Geometric period, though in that case, I expect that the story of its co-option as a symbol by the Nazis is something a lot of Americans are not aware of. The most excitement was generated when I pointed out the room with the mummies, but it quickly died when I said they would have to go gawk at the desiccated corpses on their own time. A couple of them actually grumbled at that. Yes, how they suffer! Forced to come to a museum, repository of humankind's collective history and culture, on a Saturday morning--oh, the pain.

Mostly I try to make analogies or references that they'll be familiar with; when we were looking at white-ground lekythoi, for example, a type of Greek vase used almost exclusively for commemorative offerings of oil, I likened the to flower arrangements sent to a funeral, some big and showy, some modest but heartfelt. One of the lekythoi was large in size but actually had a false bottom, so the amount of oil actually offered was nowhere near the amount implied by the size of the container--which, I explained, would be like sending a really elaborate bouquet of flowers that are secretly silk.

I like pointing out instances like this one, ones that show the craftiness or sneakiness of people in past cultures; I feel that an easy way to break down the sense of distance is to remind the students that whatever crazy scheme or trick you've thought of, the Greeks or the Romans or the ancient Chinese got there way before you. In a slightly different vein, I considered, but ultimately chose not to make the analogy between the Roman practice of using a vomitorium between courses at a banquet, and our own (venerable?) tradition of the "puke-n-rally." There's all such a thing as too close, I suppose, and I don't want anyone coming away from the class with the mistaken idea that Romans were alcoholics.

The Last Time

Two days into my senior year she came,
bearing gifts: diet cola, a vaccuum cleaner,
other small things I had left behind.
Of course, she had baked something for us,
the famous Mrs. D, bringer of sweets;
this time it was pumpkin squares
with cream cheese frosting.
Standing in our kitchen, she told us,
a mixture of chagrin and amusement,
about the other tray she had made,
the dog between her legs on the stairs,
and the greasy stain waiting for her at home.
We laughed, and devoured the survivors.

Three weeks later, in that newly-silenced house,
I moved through the rooms
cleaning up all the little traces
(the tea cup, the sewing pattern)
that would have told my sister, still on her way,
that our mother had been here
just a few hours ago: messy, purposeful, alive.
The stain I left alone. It was only later,
when my sister’s friends
asked what they could do to help,
that I showed them where we kept the rug cleaner,
and watched as they soaked and scrubbed
like my mother (so lax in her housekeeping)
probably never did,
their knuckles red from the steaming water,
until finally they lifted the rags away
to show me how it looked just like new,
like nothing had ever left its mark.

Aftermath of a Long Weekend

Meredith, Rae and Sara came down to visit this past weekend, which was great--we went to the PMA, hit up the St. Paul's tag sale, tried out the Wine Thief restaurant--but unfortunately it also meant that I got next to nothing done school-wise. Which is bad, because already I feel the weight of everything I need to accomplish pressing down upon me. Graduate classes are the rocks and I am Giles Corey!

OK, dramatic, but with cause: for some reason I had the bright idea to request via PALCI all of the books I planned to look at for my entire independent study, all at one time; and now they've all arrived, thirty or so of them, and I have but a scarce month to read, take notes, and digest them before I have to send them back. There is nothing more frustrating than sitting down to write and discovering that you forgot to write down the page number of a quote from a source you no longer have; or, even worse, if your notes look suspiciously close to quotation, but you can't remember if you were just being sloppy that day and forgetting punctuation, or if this is some particularly blessed stroke of rhetorical genius that is all your own. These situations can lead to the rending of garments and the gnashing of teeth, let me tell you.

Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if I could just devote the next month to working on the independent study, but I have my two other classes and, of course, AWW. Even if the Eakins class is fairly low-stress, the readings for Dr. Cooper's theory-based class on the spectator are certainly no walk in the park, as I learned last night as I was racing to think of appropriately insightful discussion questions to submit before the 9pm deadline (having scrapped all my earlier pathetic efforts once I saw the points being put forward by the other students).

One good thing to emerge today: while talking with Dr. Cooper about my research plans, I realized how imperative it is that I be on the ground in Venice and the Veneto in the near future. As in, potentially next summer. Sean is on board, so we might just be good to go...

Oh, Marriage

This tickled me a little! It's a wedding portrait by Lorenzo Lotto, Marsilio Cassotti and His Bride, Faustina, from 1523. The groom places the ring on the bride's finger, while behind him a sly Cupid is actually yoking the two of them together. Ball and chain!

The book I'm reading quotes one of the great art historians, Bernard Berenson: "This is perhaps the first positively humorous interpretation of a character and of a situation that we have in Italian painting, and we never again have it so well done."

Hm, I'm imagining how Sean and I would look if we recreated this painting. Haha.

Fuck Yeah

I submitted my paper for the Rome seminar two weeks ago tomorrow, and have as yet heard nothing back from any of the three professors beyond acknowledging that they received it. A few minutes ago, I decided to check my grade record online out of sheer perversity, only to find--to my eternal shock and awe--a big ol' A next to the Rome class! That means I must have gotten an A on that paper, because it's not like there were any other course requirements besides showing up and making snarky comments about Lacan's total lack of scholarly accuracy (oh wait, that was just my requirement for myself).

Part of me, of course, will reserve the full-on whoopin', hollerin', and ritual destruction of course materials until such time as I actually get paper comments, or at the very least an email, back from one of the professors, but another part of me is giving Lacan, Lyotard, and all their sorry ilk a very self-satisfied middle finger. If I can get an A in this course, I think I just might be able to do anything...

Museum Adventures

This morning I met Dr. Betancourt and my fellow TAs at the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (which I have to confess I never knew existed). It's such a gem, though! The most famous artifact they possess is the Bull Lyre of Ur:

Frustratingly enough, it was not on display, since they're preparing for an exhibit on the art of ancient Iraq in October. I was also very impressed by the first Egyptian gallery, which features six massive columns arranged in the manner of a hypostyle hall, as well as a sizable sphinx (I was reminded to inform the students that this is not THE sphinx, merely, A sphinx). They have a large painted grave stele and a partially gilded door lintel, both of which are good examples to show students how all statuary of the ancient world was painted, no matter how pale and lifeless it appears to us know. Upstairs they had a colossal head of Ramses II with the original paint intact, which was a gift from the Egyptian government in thanks for Penn's assistance in saving their treasures from the Aswan Dam.

Dr. Betancourt was nice enough to treat us to lunch in the museum cafe, and then Agnes, Amy and I headed back to campus. We decided to use the trolley since I'd never been on it, and though I was imagining something like the sleek green trolleys in Rome with the super high seats, what I found was a tiny, squalid car that made far too many stops. The subway is better, even with the homicide rate! The trip also took somewhat longer than it should have thanks to dear Agnes, who accidentally led us onto the trolley going the wrong way. But we made it back to school eventually, and here I am, theoretically about to embark on work.

St. Christopher

I'm at school on a holiday trying to get some "work" done. There was a Titian painting of St. Christopher in the book I'm reading, which reminded me of this monumental image of the saint that I saw in the Toledo cathedral:


My picture doesn't really give an idea of scale (this was yet another instance in which I was snapping pictures hurriedly so as to avoid detection by the guards), so here's a photo from Life magazine in 1963:


He's huge! Christopher is supposed to be a giant among men, and this artist, whoever it was, certainly took that concept and ran with it.

First Day of Teaching

I couldn't sleep at all last night, it seemed--not that I was really consciously nervous, but I'm not used to trying to force myself to fall asleep at 10:30. I was up ridiculously early (by my reckoning) and arrived at school at 8:15, giving me time to do all the usual 'run around like a chicken with your head cut off' stuff--did I print a copy of the revised syllabus for myself? Do I have my lecture notes? What's the password for the projector? How do I make a split-screen image in Gallery? Why is it 8:59 and half the students aren't here yet? Etc, etc. I turned out to be missing a couple of students in each class who either dropped it or forgot to come, and the rest came wandering in eventually, blaming the difficulty in finding the classroom. Admittedly, it is hard to find.

The lectures were--not that bad! In a typical class we're supposed to talk less and they're supposed to talk more, but today being the first day, I had to go over the syllabus, teach them how to take notes, and so forth, so it was just me talking and occasionally soliciting their input, like, how likely do you think it is that King Tut actually looked like his famous death mask? (As it happens, they reconstructed his face a few years ago, so we know what he probably looked like--weedy, weak chin, and an underbite. Sooooo not as divine as the mask. We call that idealization, kids!)

The first class I talked so quickly that I was done at 9:35 instead of 9:50, but I slowed down for the second. More kids chimed in in my 9am section than in the 10am, oddly enough. In the 10am class I had a couple of guys who sat in the back and made jokes to each other the whole time, but unless they're really disruptive, I don't care. I had one kid tell me he can't go on our first field trip because he's going to be in South Carolina auditioning for a drum and fife corps. Another girl has military training exercises next Friday but is going to bring me a note from her CO, and another guy told me he'll be missing the field trip because he's going to be "away. Like, far away." A really shy kid from South Korea came up after class and asked if the course requires any public speaking because his language skills aren't good, but I told him I thought he spoke really well, and no, I'm the only one who has to face the 30 uncaring faces from the front of the room! Oh, and let's not forget the girl who addressed her email after class to "Mrs. DiMarzo," probably because I made a joke about not worrying that they don't know who Rembrandt is because my husband doesn't either.

While they're not as totally uninterested in art as I expected them to be, they are painfully ignorant of....lots of stuff. Amy told me to school them on the BC/AD and BCE/CE distinctions, but I figured everyone really must know that, somehow, deep down. Right? Wrong. I felt especially awkward trying to explain that BCE and CE are really just euphemisms since we still use the birth of Christ as the dividing date, but that we don't want to privilege the Christian tradition...or something. Blank looks. Same when I explained why we don't make value judgments, like saying that Greek art was 'better' than Egyptian art because they depicted the human form more naturalistically. More blank looks, and one kid shook his head as if disagreeing with me. But, on the whole, I found it pretty exciting, and definitely exhausting. Woof.

First Day of School

Today I had to wake up bright and early (as I will every Friday this whole semester, sigh) to be at school by nine to meet with Dr. Betancourt and the three other TAs for Arts of the Western World for a meeting, and then it was off to my first class! Being a TA in a giant, stadium-style lecture hall with 200 vaguely confused-looking freshmen is a lot like being a shepherd, since they seem to need someone to herd them into seats instead of all piling up at the top of the room and trying to steal the TA tables at the back. They were also unable to complete the simple task of circulating sign-in sheets around the room during a 50-minute class period, and many of them, rather than bother to look for their name on the helpfully color-coded sheets, just wrote them in at the bottom. Finally, five minutes before class was to end, they all began to put their stuff away and make general rustling noises, which is bad enough in a class of 20, but in a group this large it sounds like the prelude to a stampede. Amy had to get up and tell them to settle down, but Dr. Betancourt kind of ruined the effect of the chatisement by deciding to just end class there. Then there really WAS a stampede for the exit.

I knew this class was going to go quickly, but I had no idea how quickly. Today's 50 minutes was Egyptian art--all of it. Wednesday we will move on the to Aegean, and next Monday we'll be at the Parthenon. That's mind-boggling, especially if these kids have as tentative a grasp of history as the other TAs have informed me. They told me to be sure to go over the difference betwen BCE and CE, because they usually just don't know. Meep.

Yessssss

I finally found a video clip that I was worried might have been lost! I never re-uploaded it to my computer after I reinstalled the OS last summer, so it wasn't in the files I put on the new computer. It was on a backup CD of photos that was in my CD case, in my car (probably due to my own semi-JTD paranoia, in the hope that even if my computer perishes in a fire, the files will be elsewhere). It's one of three short clips of my grandfather and my mother, made the summer before they both died. It preserves his voice, and her laugh, and the fun that we used to have just sitting around making fun of one another. And, of course, it contains my grandfather's immortal line, uttered to my mom as she avoided me taking a video of her: "Joan, you think you're homely?" Classic Papa. Oh, and it has Jen's maniacal cackle in there too, for good measure. The concluding "Die, Bob, die!" is particularly ironic, since she and I are the only ones still alive, lol. Unfortunately, Blogger does not want to let me post it.

However, on the same trip up there I took a lot of photos of his house, because I was worried it might be one of the last times we would be there. I was worried he would die, but of course I didn't expect that when I would be there again, for his funeral, my mom would have been gone for more than a month. Some of my favorite pictures came from the basement walls, which my dad and aunts had begun covering in graffiti when they were kids, and to which all of us kids contributed over the years:


That's probably my grandfather's writing in the middle: NOTICE: Only assholes write on cellar walls--join the club!

My dad contributed plenty of his own writing, mostly in the form of geekiness:


Let me assure you that in all three DiMarzo generations, only one person would have been writing out calculus formulas on a basement wall. The same person who doodled Planck's constant in his journal. Dork.

Finally, my grandpa put this on the wall down in his workshop:


The very first grandchild. Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo of the wall by the stairs, which had all six of the grandkids' names in chalk (for some reason, I come last, even though I was the second! I suspect Jen had a hand in that...)

I'm so glad I found these discs, the pictures, and especially, the videos. One of the things that makes me sad about my dad is that I have trouble remembering his voice sometimes, but thanks to these, I won't forget my mom or my grandpa.

Reading Linda Nochlin

In 1971, Linda Nochlin published an essay that revolutionized the study of art. Entitled "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" it tackled the issue of how to connect feminist ideas to the reality of the dearth of great art produced by women. She noted that feminists usually took one of two paths in answering this question: either they quickly dredged up the limited list of well-known women artists, like Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun in France and Artemisia Gentileschi in Italy, or they claimed that there should be different standards of value for 'masculine' versus 'feminine' art. Nochlin evaluated and discarded both of these avenues: for the first argument, it is an unfortunate fact that these women artists do not, under any circumstances, rise to the level of a Michelangelo or a Rodin; for the second, you cannot define certain types of art as "feminine" without running into plenty of men who have worked in those materials or styles, like the dainty Rococo paintings of Fragonard in the early 18th century.

Nochlin then analyzed the concept of Genius as the "golden nugget" that was then still implicitly accepted as the semi-divine source of artistic ability. Basically, the idea went that if so many male artists could triumph over adversity to produce great art, women should have been able to do the same; the fact that they haven't suggests a lack of Genius in their entire sex. She argues that this myth doesn't hold water under any kind of sociological analysis--the fact that most great artists have been white males of the bourgeoisie (and very often members of artistic families) suggests the reason that members of other groups, including women and blacks but also, surprisingly, the nobility, have not produced great art is because their roles precluded a full-time devotion to artistic pursuits.

This seems somewhat like old hat three decades later, after the rise of feminist art history and the subsequent (and necessary, in my opinion) takeover by gender studies, but Nochlin was the first to really put this in print, to change the way people thought about the creation of art, and to replace feminist defensiveness with a well-reasoned explanation of a historical fact. I have to admit that today was the first time I'd actually read the essay, though I've seen to summarized and referred to in any number of places. I suppose that's a good testimonial to how well Nochlin's ideas have been absorbed into scholarly consciousness.

As for the picture, that's the so-called Bikini Venus, a Roman sculpture in the Gabinetto Segreto (read: erotic art collection) in the Naples Archeological Museum. I should have taken a detail so the gold paint could catch the light, but I love the design of her bikini. The way she's using that little male figure as an armrest is amusing too--he has his hands on his hips like, fine, lean on me, but hurry up and fix your sandal, dammit! Of course, this was probably sculpted by a man...

Still in Virginia

Back in Panera, using their free wifi again. They block DListed, though, which is annoying. My favorite website, too! How dare they.

Yesterday I hung out at the library to finish my paper while Sean attended the linguistics orientation. (Yes, the monster is finished and submitted! Whoot! Sean read it over last night and he actually liked it, which is frankly surprising.) Afterwards we went to look inside the Rotunda, and then I accompanied him to the general graduate student orientation, which was a spectacular waste of time--lectures on academic honesty, how to be a better TA, blah blah blah. Then we picked up Sean's car, which had indeed needed a $300 alternator. Oh, Bertha.

For dinner we went to a place that offered both Chinese and Japanese, which was pretty win-win because Sean likes sushi and finds Chinese boring, and I hate sushi and love my chicken and broccoli. Of course, in normal life, any restaurant that offers menus from two separate countries as though you shouldn't know that they're two different cultures should be cause for alarm, but we're in the south, we're prepared to forgive them some foibles. After dinner we ended the evening with a rousing game of Scrabble, in which Sean, as usual, kicked my ass, and I, as usual, peppered him with insults and kicks to the shin. That's married life, folks!

Virginia

I drove down to Charlottesville on Friday to help Sean move in. It was quite a pleasant drive, especially through Virginia, which is really beautiful; the only downside was a hurricane-like storm I had to drive through for about fifty miles south of Harrisburg. It was raining and blowing so hard that the cars were just crawling along with their hazard lights on for miles and miles, and just when you thought it would let up it managed to just pour harder. But Virginia is gorgeous, aand Sean's apartment is really, really awesome. It's even bigger than he thought it was going to be, and it has air conditioning, a dishwasher, a balcony, and the pool and the laundry room are right across from his building. Yeah, I'm a little jealous of the air conditioning....

Moving Sean in turned out to be less difficult than I was expecting because we had so many hands--Sean's mom, Gary, and Hubbard all came down to help as well. Linda said she didn't know how we would have managed it without Gary, because some of the furniture, like Sean's desk and the bookcases, were pretty heavy, and he's on the third floor. We let the menfolk do the really heavy lifting, but I don't think I have sweated that much in...well...a long, long time. It didn't help that it was like 95 degrees and humid as hell, either! Y esterday we spent more than four hundred dollars at Target and let Hubbard buy Sean $150 worth of groceries, so he should be set until....forever. His apartment looks like a real apartment, too, because he was able to take a lot of the furniture from his grandmother's house, which they're planning to sell at some point. In other words, not everything is from Ikea this time around.

We had some mild setbacks, like the fact that Hubbard went a little crazy at dinner the first night when Linda refused to let her pay; when we let them off at the hotel, she was smacking Linda with her purse, and we found out the next day that she spent half the evening yelling at Linda and trying to run away. She was even in a bit of a snit the next day, too. Then there was Sean's car; on our way back from dinner the battery light came on, the lights dimmed, and it was having trouble accelerating. Luckily it made it back to Sean's apartment, but barely, and now we have to find a garage tomorrow and hope that it's just the alternator.

Last night we all walked around campus, which is just plain spectacular. All the buildings on the main lawn were designed by Jefferson as part of the original "academical village." Everything is red brick and white accents--hello, American Neoclassicism! At one end of the huge green is the Rotunda, which is based on the Pantheon, and at the other end is a building with a Parthenon-inspired temple front, complete with pediment sculptures. Along the sides are the individual department buildings, connected by a stoa-like colonnade that houses student rooms. We were able to peek into a few, and of course Linda struck up a conversation with some parents who were sitting outside their daughter's room; there's no air conditioning, no bathroom, and the university provides you with wood for your fireplace--not my cup of tea, mind you.

All in all, this place is really beautiful, and I know Sean's going to be happy here. He's excited for tomorrow, which is orientation and signing up for classes, which start the very next day. My little husband, all grown up! :-)

Ah, Blue

This is probably a tie with yesterday's picture for "favorite blue sky." I took it on top of the Palatine hill, at the beginning of what turned out to be something like a five hour exploration of the ruins there and in the Forum below.


I have an excessive fondness for that kind of tree. This specimen, in particular, just seems so hearty and determined, all alone amid those ruins. I bet if that tree had to write a paper on Kant, it wouldn't procrastinate and write blog entries and read Dlisted. You're a better man (woman?) than I, tree.

In Which I Hate Kant

I accidentally slept until 11:30 today, which unsurprisingly cut down on my productivity. Which I don't have much of anyway with this paper--I'm only onto page 2, with 18 to go! Also, I have a paralyzing fear that I'm not going to get an A and will thus have screwed up my perfect 4.0 GPA, which shouldn't matter, because no one will ever look at my GPA again, but I'll know, dammit. It would annoy me no end if this class, of all things, ruined it.


I took this picture in the Roseto, the municipal rose garden on the Aventine hill. Through the trees you can see the campanile of Sta Maria in Cosmedin, best known for housing the Boca della Verita. I never bothered to go in there because it's basically a tourist trap--ooh, stick your arm in and lie and it's going to get eaten off! Oh wait....no it won't. Now smile, take your photo, and let the next sweaty tourist shove their appendage in.

The sky was so blue there. What makes that possible in the Mediterranean that we don't have here?

Orto Botanico

More than a few of my favorite Rome '09 pictures came from the botanical garden in Rome, where I spent a wonderful part of an afternoon just soaking up the goodness, like watching ducks and fish in the pond with the lilypads:



Being a botanical garden, there were labels on almost all of the plants, but since this is not somewhere they generally expect a lot of English-speaking tourists, the labels had the scientific name and the Italian common name. Boo. So this is a pretty common flower, but I have no idea what it's called (theme?):


I'm not even sure if you would properly call these things flowers, but they were pretty, too:


And of course, no trip to the botanical garden would be complete without wandering around in the bamboo forest!

Botanical Musing

Yesterday's beautiful weather has dulled back to clouds and humidity, although it is sprinkling pleasantly right now. I had to go into school to pick up the Venice and the Veneto volume that Jasmine had squirreled away in her carrell, and somehow the 1.5 hour round-trip voyage has tired me out, and I just want to sit here on my bed, and listen to the rain.

I fell in love with a particular type of flower in Rome, a bright purple one that grows in huge falling masses of color and leaves. Perhaps it's better referred to as a flowering plant, really. I don't know what it's called, and neither did Caitlin nor Alice, the resident botanists in our apartment, who helped me identify other delicious floral scents like honeysuckle and oleander. I encountered this plant all over the city, but I only took a few photos of it. The first was in Largo del Febo, a little curved bit of road somewhere above and to the left of the Piazza Navona. I think it was a Sunday morning and I was on a church-seeing expedition in the neighborhood. The photo doesn't capture the brilliant color of the flowers, but more so the plant's sprawling mass, a waterfall of green coming down the side of this building.


The second photo I took was up on the Parco de Traiano, which sits on a hill beside the Colosseum. This hill contains the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, or Golden House, which was decorated with such an embarrassment of riches that a later and more sensible emperor, Trajan, filled it in with rubble and built a bath complex for the people on top of it. When it was uncovered during the Renaissance, people discovered that what they thought was a grotto, or cave, was covered with paintings, and it became quite the thing to go spelunking down there to check them out. Michelangelo, Raphael, Ghirlandaio, and a whole host of other artists went in, often leaving a graffiti signature. The type of decorative motifs that were drawn from and inspired by these Roman wall paintings came to be know as 'grotteschi,' and from that we have ultimately derived the word 'grotesque,' referring to things that are strange and distorted, like the screaming heads enwreathed with foliage that the Romans liked to fill their walls with.

I didn't make it into the Domus Aurea on this trip, but I did go up to the park to look around and admire the view of the Colosseum. There are ruins up there, great hulking frames of a barrel-vaulted structure, and somehow, possibly because I'd had a little too much sun that day, I found myself thinking, Oh, is that the Domus Aurea? Uh, no, that is underground, hence the whole grotto thing. The ruins are Trajan's baths, and nothing really special about them. But the best part, I thought, was leaning over a railing and seeing these flowers cascading down about thirty feet. The angle of this photo doesn't make it seem like it goes down very far, but I had to huff and puff up a big staircase from the road next to the Colosseum to get up there, and the plant started up at the railing and went all the way down. Combined with that blue, blue sky, and the palm trees...heaven.



The last photo I took of the mystery flower was a day or two before we left, when I went exploring on the Aventine hill. I saw Santa Sabina, and then kept going up hill till I found the Priorate of the Knights of Malta, and then I turned around. On the walk back I saw these beauties, with graffiti written between the plants in Italian that said "you want to see that I love you? I love you!" Ah, romance. Of course, nothing will ever beat the graffiti Sara and I saw in Ravenna, which said "I love you because you make me dream"--even if that did lose points for being spray painted onto a Fascist-era government building.


That's it for my love affair with the purple plant. I wish I could find out what it is so that I could at least dream of planting it in the house we'll have someday. Well, I'd have to plant it well away from the house, or one day we might wake up and find purple flowers blocking out the windows. Dreams!

Laocoon, Lacan

I think I'm just going to start posting the couple dozen or so of my favorite photographs from Rome. At the very least, it'll make flipping back through older entries more visually stimulating. This, like the Boxer, is a Hellenistic Greek sculptural group called Laocoon. It was dug up in Rome in the early 16th century (Michelangelo, who was inspired by this type of emotional, writhing, athletic figure, was present at the disinterment). The group depicts the tragic fate of the Trojan priest Laocoon and his two sons; Apollo sent one of his sacred pythons to strangle the three of them after Laocoon warned his countrymen not to accept a certain wooden horse the Greeks were offering (obviously you can guess whose side Apollo was on in this tiff).


The statue now stands in the octagonal sculpture courtyard in the Vatican, right near the equally-famous Apollo Belvedere. I took this photo in between tour groups that generally cluster so tightly around the damned thing that you can't get a shot of it. It's a beautiful statue, and what's more, it perfectly captures my mood right now, struggling as I am against my own version of a murderous python, the 20-page paper I have to turn in in three weeks. In other words, Lacan, my old enemy.

Loving puns and wordplay as he did, I'm sure he would have appreciated the similarity between his own name and the statue, but he probably would have followed it up with some incomprehensible crap about how this sculpture symbolizes the anguished desire that is supposedly the chronic condition of every human being, since we are tormented by the lack of the Real, lost when we entered into culture via language. Right. The only thing tormenting me right now is the desire to be DONE with this paper. Except I haven't started it yet--this is just the note-taking portion! Ahhh!

Love

I just went through all my Italy photos on facebook and saved my favorites to my computer. I think this is my absolute favorite photograph that I took:


It's a detail of a Greek bronze from the Hellenistic period called the Boxer. This is the full image:


The entire sculpture is incredible for its veracity, right down to the cauliflower ears that modern boxers still get from being beaten about the head so much, and also for its emotional intensity (a hallmark of the Hellenistic style). The expression on his face is evocative, even if you can't figure out exactly what he's feeling--is it just exhaustion from the fight? Is he turning his head to speak to an admirer, or be heckled by a critic?

I love the close-up I took of his face because you can see the effort the sculptor put into to making this a realistic image. The bloody wounds and red lips are actually cast in a copper alloy which gives them a different color from the rest of the sculpture. The missing eyes would have been made of glass or stone, attached by hooks on the interior of the eyelids. I think I like it better without the eyes, with just those gaping, dark holes giving nothing away.

This sculpture, perhaps more than any other I saw in Rome, seemed to me like a living, breathing figure, a man who has turned his head briefly for a word or two, and who in a moment will finish unwrapping his hands, get up, and make his weary way home.

It All Works Out

Really, today's thwarting was partially my own fault; I could have stopped by the campus library yesterday before meeting my fellow GAHO officers for dinner, but my lazy butt preferred to simply take the R7 into Center City rather than get off at Temple, grab the books I needed, and then take the subway downtown. So I went back to Temple this morning (which is not so much as a hassle as it is an expense, since I don't have a metropass for this month) only to find that the one book I really, really needed was not there--despite being listed as in the library on the catalogue. I was so annoyed at having come back into the city for nothing. I need this book to plan out my independent study for the fall, so it's a matter of some urgency.

When I got home, I emailed Jasmine hoping she might have a copy (since it's a book on the Veneto), and then I went shopping for a dress for Heather's wedding. She's getting married at 11:30 on a Sunday, which kind of rules out the black dresses I own. Imagine my delight at finding not one, but two dresses! One is chocolate brown and one is blue. I haven't decided if I'll keep both; I want to show them to Sean next week. The pleasure of not being thwarted while shopping was great on its own, but to place a cherry on the cake, Jasmine emailed me back and sheepishly admitted that she had committed the same sin that I so often have--taking a book from the stacks and sticking it in your carrel without actually checking it out. It's just such a pain sometimes to haul everything downstairs, check it out, and haul it back upstairs. They should really put a self-checkout kiosk in the carrels! That would probably cut down on a lot of book-seeking rage like my own this morning. But even though this means I have to go into school again to collect said book from Jasmine's carrell, at least I know I can get it and I don't have to wait for PALCI. Ahh.

Dinner last night was fun, even if my fellow officers do get awfully tied up in bureaucratic crap like whether we should buy full bagels or minibagels for the orientation breakfast (hint: no one cares). Only at the end of dinner was there the inevitable comps discussion. Caitlin asked me outright if I was taking them in the fall, and when I just responded with an "Ummm...." she took that to mean I had decided to wait and do them in the spring instead (which I had totally forgotten was even an option, mostly because who in their right mind wants to write a thesis and study for comps in one semester?). It's not surprising that she thought I would put it off, either, considering that I have three courses and TA duty; Caitlin and Nicole are taking only two classes each to have enough time to prepare.

After Rachel sent me what the professors suggested in terms of prep, I have to say again (even though I've said it here how many times?) how glad I am that I'm not studying for these for real. For example, Dr. West, who does Northern Ren and Baroque, suggested no less than seven texts. Just for the North. Meanwhile, Dr. Silk sent a three page bibliography for modern and contemporary. Who the hell would have time to read all of that, much less memorize it, by October? Woof.