More from "The Modern Mind"

Going into this book, I knew that my knowledge of 20th-century history was much stronger in the first half of the century than in the second, but the chapters I read today, on the 1960s and early 1970s, made me realize how vague my understanding has been of some of the major forces to shape our world. Case in point: China's Cultural Revolution. I knew of it, I didn't really know about it. Beginning in 1966, it was a brutal purge of all cultural institutions and objects that the Communists considered tainted by Western/capitalist influence. It lasted ten years and claimed the lives of 400,00 people.

Mao, already the Chairman of the Communist party, saw the opportunity in 1966 to consolidate his power after a play opened that indirectly criticized him. He whipped the revolutionary fervor of the youth to a violent intensity, encouraging high school and university students to form the vicious "Red Guards" who would carry out the purge (this year saw the publication of his "Little Red Book," which became their Bible). His wife, Jiang Qing, directed their attention first to their teachers (the "scholar-tyrants"), and then to anyone and anything that didn't meet with Communist approval. The Red Guards attacked the universities, destroyed books, and held bonfires of 'degenerate' Western objects like artwork, dresses, and jazz records. By Mao's own order, the police were not to interfere with Red Guard activities, lest they be labeled "counter-revolutionaries." And it didn't stop there: "Coffee bars, theaters, and circues were closed down, weddings forbidden, even holding hands and kite flying...by the second half of 1966 virtually every important cultural institution in China was under army control. On 12 December that year many 'public enemies,' who included playwrights, actors, film and theatre directors, poets, and composers, were marched to the Workers' Stadium before 10,000 people, each with a wooden placard around his or her neck." The scale of this event is hard even to encompass; it forms the foundation for contemporary China, the nation that is one of the most important players on the world stage today, and yet we learn so little about it in the West.

I knew a little more about the darkest part of the history of another major nation, the gulags of Stalinist Russia. When I was in high school we read Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and I also read the Gulag Archipelago, which is a blood-chilling, factual account of the violence perpetrated by Stalin against his own people. Years later, what I remember most from the book was the sheer absurdity of it all--under a gulag system that ran on monthly quotas of "enemies of the state," you could spend a decade or more in Siberia because ignored a Communist party flyer, because you made a passing reference to Stalin getting older, or--most absurd of all--because you went out to get groceries and ran across official who needed more criminals for his monthly shipment. It might take years for your family to find out what camp you had been sent to, and years more for them to find out you were already dead.

More than 14 million people went through the gulag system between 1930 and 1953. About 1.6 million people died there, with many more dying after their release from what they suffered. The gulags weren't death camps, not in the way the Nazis had built them, and in some ways that makes it so much worse. The Nazis attacked the groups they considered to be inferior to the Aryans--Jews, Catholics, gypsies, homosexuals--while Stalin perpetrated the horrors of the gulags against his own people, for nothing more than political reasons. This is another epochal event that I think is too-little-known in the West today, and it has ramifications just as powerful as those of the Cultural Revolution. Russia is becoming more and more conservative and repressive (cf. the repeated assassinations of journalists and reporters in recent years). Putin may not be Stalin, but it's important to know about an era that is still deeply stamped on the Russian collective mentality.

When Heather visited me earlier this year, she brought a copy of a magazine that had an article in it about re-reading the Gulag Archipelago (naturally, I remember neither magazine nor author, so I can't link it). The author's conclusion was that the book is still important today not only because it reminds us that totalitarianism is evil, but because it reminds us that we need to fight against it. He wrote that reading about Stalin's crimes against humanity changed his mind about American intervention in places like Afghanistan, because it is wrong to sit back and let people suffer and die under the whims of an totalitarian government--whether that government is predicated on religious or political authority.

This is a tough issue, because it requires us first to claim moral authority, and then to assert ourselves on foreign soil. In a case like the gulags, it's clear where the moral authority lies, but less so in the Middle East, with its powder keg of religious extremism and (often deserved) hatred of the West. And who is "us"? The US? The democratic nations? What if China wanted to step in and help eradicate the Taliban, would we let them?

As for involvement on foreign soil, the problem with totalitarian governments is that they don't respond to external forces. You can't sanction them out of existence, you can't scold them from the pulpit of the UN (see North Korea). That just turns them even more inward. Sometimes, like in the case of the USSR, they crumble from within. Other times, direct intervention is the only option. For example, I think we have a responsibility to prevent the Taliban from keeping the Afghans in bondage for another fifty years, even if that requires our own troops, and our own losses. In fact, I think our responsibility is greater there than anywhere else at the moment, precisely because we've already helped them achieve a little bit of freedom. To allow the Taliban to reassert its control now, to force the Aghans back into the darkness of the cave after they've seen the sun (to use the Platonic metaphor), would be the worst kind of betrayal. Maybe one day the fight against totalitarianism will be in the purview of strengthened United Nations, but for now, we can't just leave those who are too weak to defend themselves to the mercy of the wolves. Look where that has gotten us before.

Beginnings

The semester has certainly started off with vigor, if the volume of reading for my three seminars is any indication. Both Dr. Hall and Dr. Cooper decided they wanted us to come up with general topics for our semester projects by this week, which is not something I've ever seen them ask before, especially one week into the semester! Dr. Cooper's course is on Caravaggio, since it's the 400 anniversary of his death this year; she already informed me that she wants me to work on the Venetian artist Giorgione, who's celebrating his 500th anniversary and who has some links to Caravaggio in terms of themes and innovations. But...what about Giorgione am I doing, exactly? I don't know. I looked at a recent catalog raisonee in the library the other day, and nothing clicked. As for Dr. Hall, whose course is Art, Music and Theater in Renaissance Italy, I will also be doing something Venice-related. I sent her an email with a couple of topics today: the figure of the peasant in Ruzante's plays, theater in the Veneto, and the relationship of the pastoral mode of painting (a prime developer of which just happens to have been Giorgione himself) to the pastoral mode of drama, which didn't develop until decades later.

For Dr. Braddock's historiography seminar, I have to choose a work of art I want to repeatedly analyze through different theoretical lenses over the semester, culminating in a very short paper in which I summarize the prior literature on the object and offer a new interpretation. Not too bad, except that for preliminary-exam-related reasons I'd like to choose an object related to Venice, and the PMA's pickings in that regard are woefully slim. I'm not sure there's an object in that gallery that would stand up to analysis by Marx, Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and the host of other art historical worthies we'll be discussing, while still leaving me room to generate a fresh interpretation. The one painting that seems to have enough "meat," Bronzino's portrait of Cosimo I as Orpheus, is a little too well-treated in the literature (it's also Florentine, but I would be almost willing to overlook that because of its awesomeness). The image I thought of initially, and which I may use, is Titian's portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto:


I'm just not sure if this offers enough interpretative scope for the semester! Argh.

The historiography class starts this week with Plato, Aristotle, and Vasari. I've read "The Allegory of the Cave" a bunch of times, but I've actually never read Aristotle. Considering his reputation, though, I wasn't surprised to find him lucid and eminently readable, with plenty of concrete examples thrown in for illustration. Ah, empiricism. I like Aristotle for his style as well as his substance, like his observation of the relationship of poetry to history:

"The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writs in prose and the other in verse--indeed the writings of Herodotus could be put into verse and yet would still be a kind of history, whether written in meter or not. The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and more serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts."

Isn't that fascinating? When have you ever heard poetry called "scientific" at all, much less "more scientific and more serious" than history? And yet here is one of the forefathers of modern science saying exactly that.

A Bit of Serendipity in Pirandello

When I'm hiking, I don't ever really reach any kind of a 'zen' state where my mind just goes blank. Instead, I wind up thinking about the most random things. Yesterday, for example, as I was huffing and puffing up a slope, I found myself thinking of a philosophical problem presented by post-structuralists like Lacan (of all people). The question is this: if there is really no such thing as "meaning," but rather an unending chain of signifiers, and if those chains of signifiers are subjective, instead of objective realities, what possibility is there for real communication?

I was spurred on by an article on the New York Times on how language affects the way we think. The gist of the article was that languages don't necessarily restrain us from thinking in certain ways (which is what people thought, once) but rather different languages require us to think about certain things. For example, Romance languages require the speaker to think about objects in gendered terms, in order to give them their proper article. The article also mentioned that studying different languages reveals that some things we consider as objective fact, like colors, are really just matters of opinion; English-speakers think of green and blue as two colors and name them accordingly, but in plenty of other languages they're simply considered two shades of one color. So while we have to specify which color we're seeing, they don't have to think about it. In contrast, if you think about ROYGBIV from chemistry class, even though indigo and violet are named as separate spectra of light, I just think of them as two shades of purple.

The link between this article and my half-remembered thoughts of Lacan was related to color. How do we know, really, that what I think of as purple is what you think of as purple? We can test this in a general way by pointing to various purple or not-purple objects and seeing if our estimations agree, but how can we ever know if we are both experiencing the phenomenon of "purple-ness" in an identical fashion? Maybe our perceptions are merely similar, enough to pass the eggplant vs. tomato test, but not the same.

That led me into thinking about the issue of meaning in general, and the ability of verbal communication to, well, communicate with others. The whole point of communication is that we put words out there to describe what we're thinking or feeling, and trust that when the person we're speaking to hears those words, they will call up exactly the same meanings and associations as we had in our own minds. I'm not trying to say this doesn't happen in an effective manner pretty much every minute of the day--human society would have disintegrated by now, if it wasn't workable. The question is really just a philosophical one: does language reveal, or obscure? Can we ever really see the world through someone else's eyes?

That brings me to the Pirandello play, "Six Characters in Search of an Author." The play itself is a bit of absurdist meta-theatre (it reminded me of Noises Off, which, living with theater people, I had to watch/hear about a few too many times) in which a group of characters invade the rehearsal for one of Pirandello's own plays and demands that the manager let them enact their drama, since their Author has abandoned them. This bit jumped out at me:

The Father. But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here. In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.

Maybe we are only capable of understanding our fellow beings in broad strokes, most of the time. Maybe there are some instances, with the person you love, or a close friend, where you feel closer to being perfectly understood. Still, I can't help but wonder if my purple is really Sean's purple. And how would we ever know?

Reading The Modern Mind

My current reading is a rather hefty book called The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century. It offers a synthesis of a hundred years' worth of developments and discoveries in science, philosophy, art, music, and literature, and, what's more, manages to do it in an extremely engaging manner. As Library Review put it, "the mosaic he creates can best be illustrated by this typical sentence: "On 25 October 1900, only days after Max Planck sent his crucial equations on a postcard to Heinrich Rubens, Pablo Picasso stepped off the Barcelona train at the Gare d'Orsay in Paris."

The author, Peter Watson, states at the outset that he sees the twentieth century primarily as "a coming to terms with science." The first several chapters point out that so many of the scientific fields only received their fundamental grounding in the first decades of the century. In physics, the aforementioned Planck discovered the quantum; Rutherford's gold foil experiment proved the existence of the electron; Niels Bohr determined the structure of the atom; Einstein realized time is relative, not a constant. Geologists determined the age of the earth, and realized that the continents had once been a single great landmass. The 19th-century work of Gregor Mendel was taken up again, leading to the birth of the science of genetics, which was linked to Darwinism. Anthropology was born from the work of Franz Boas, who developed the concept of "culture" and introduced the idea of cultural relativism to a West that was obsessed with racial and genetic superiority of the white upper class. Freud's theories of the subconscious and of repression heralded the arrival of psychology and psychiatry. This is a breathtaking litany of accomplishments--and I've only read up to the mid-1920s! We take so many of these discoveries for granted today, when we learn them in grade school geography and high school chem class. We've all "always" known about continental drift, electron shells, the gene, but in reality it's all so incredibly recent. The 5th-century BCE Athenian philosopher Democritus theorized about the existence of discrete, indivisible particles of matter that he called "atoms," but science didn't really understand it until the 1920s CE.

The book itself is not overwhelmingly about science, however; all of the components of intellectual history are addressed (repeatedly exposing my woeful grasp of modern philosophy). I like the way the author is able to bring together the threads to show the intellectual atmosphere of a certain place, like Vienna, at a certain moment in time. Another review of the book criticized it as too "breezy and anecdotal;" perhaps that's accurate (I'm not sure I'm qualified to judge), but I wonder how much more deeply one could plumb such a massive amount of material while still creating a book that someone would actually want to read. This book is already 770 pages, with copious footnotes and a 75-page bibliography. Moreover, it's clearly intended as popular reading, not as an academic treatise, and from what I've seen so far it's both successful and enjoyable. I did notice one regrettable error, though; in his discussion of Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, which is one of my favorite books, he notes that the main character's crisis is precipitated by his best friend murdering his wife and being sent to prison. Paul does shoot his wife, but it's just a flesh wound; she doesn't die. Yes, it's a minor failing in the scheme of the mammoth undertaking of Watson's project, but as a fan of the novel, it bugs me.

I've tagged a couple of things in the book that really struck me, including these:

• Watson identifies pragmatism as one of the chief characteristics of America early in the century, a trait that allowed us, at a remove from European battles over ideology, to "cherry-pick what was best in the old world, and eschew the rest." Skyscrapers, powered flight, and film were all "fiercely practical developments," as opposed to European creations like abstraction and psychoanalysis.
• Horrified by the punitive clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, John Maynard Keynes wrote a book entitled The Economic Consequences of the Peace that predicted that Germany would encounter disaster if forced to comply with the program of reparations. This book later was seen to support the argument that the economic devastation that followed Versailles inevitably gave rise to Hitler. However, there were some who criticized Keynes for drawing undue attention to aspects of the treaty that were, ultimately, never fully enforced; these detractors claimed that Keynes' book actually helped to foster a powerful sense of resentment among the Germans. One of these critics later published a book entitled The Carthiginian Peace; or, The Economic Consquences of Mr. Keynes.
• Who does this sound like: "We are a movement...of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock..." That's not the Tea Party. Or Glenn Beck. Those are the words of Hiram W. Evans, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Anti-intellectualism has a long, long history in this country.
  

Finally, I've also added several items to my "to be read when I have time" list, including Proust's Swann's Way and Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. One book I cannot bring myself to add, though, is Ulysses. I just don't think I can handle 900 pages of Joyce; my adolescent experience of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man still rankles.

Reading Virginia Woolf

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction..." This is Woolf's statement at the very outset of her 1928 essay, "A Room of One's Own." She wonders why so few women have made significant contributions to literature, and this prescription contains the answer: historically, they have had neither the time nor the money to do so. Moreover, they have consistently been told by male authority figures that they cannot and should not write. At one point, she describes a poignant scenario in which Shakespeare had an equally talented sister, who, denied any opportunity to exercise her gift and forced into marriage by her father, winds up taking her own life, while her brother goes on to win the world's acclaim.

The conclusion that only economic and personal independence can foster individual expression may seem a little obvious to us today, and her earnest claim for equal rights for women strikes less of an urgent chord forty years after the feminist movement began in earnest (in fact, the way she traces the social obstacles that prevented women from taking up writing reminded me a lot of the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin's well-known essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?") Woolf, of course, was writing in a very different period, less than a decade after women had won the vote in Britain, and when women's attempts to move beyond the home sphere was still being met with open derision. At the beginning of the book she describes being barred from entering the quadrangle of an Oxford college, where she had just been a guest at a sumptuous luncheon, because she didn't have a (male) Fellow of the college to escort her. That evening, she has dinner at the women's college, where she is dismayed to find the food utterly unappealing, and the surroundings grim. Her recognition that although these female students have managed to make a foothold in the otherwise male territory of higher education, they are far from being able to compete on equal footing (or funding) leads her into the general contemplation of the kind of liberty that is required for creative endeavors.

Later on, she writes about how society judges the value of cultural products according to gendered expectations:

"Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying clothes "trivial". And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deal with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop..."

I think that this still holds true in some respects today. If you asked someone who had never read Tolstoy or Austen (but who had a basic understanding of what each wrote about) which author was greater, I'd bet that they would privilege the one who wrote about "important" themes like politics, revolution, and tragedy over the one who wrote about "insignificant" things like women's relationships. I'm not trying to claim that either writer was, in fact, better than the other (although, considering the fact that I spent most of Anna Karenina eagerly awaiting the title character's suicide, my personal preference is definitely Austen), just that those types of value judgments based on gender stereotypes still exist.

Although Woolf is clearly a believer in the equality of men and women, she's also a passionate defender of the value of the difference between the sexes:

"It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity, and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself "superior."

There are instances where Woolf reveals that she too has unconscious prejudices, formed from her own particular historical and social circumstances. For instance, like all British writers of the earlier era, she has a strongly defined sense of class, and no interest in how those boundaries might be made permeable or overturned altogether. She's not concerned with working class women or single mothers; only middle- and upper-class women interest her, because they are the only ones she imagines capable of works of genius. Her suggestion of the complementary nature of men and women's kinds of creativity is another example. She is only capable of envisioning this in heteronormative terms, with the very best result achieved from the union of masculine and feminine creative impulses.

I don't find Woolf particularly easy to read--the thread of her writing moves like a fish in a stream, darting this way and that, lyrical and modern at the same time. What was she like to talk to, I wonder? I'll add her to my list of famous personages I'd like to meet. Hm, do you know what I just realized, thinking over my list? There are no other women on it! Instead there are men who did "important" things, like conquer (Napoleon, Alexander), lead great nations (Churchill), create masterpieces (Michelangelo). I've never thought about wanting to meet Jane Austen, for example. I suppose it's because I've always imagined myself meeting people who had firsthand experience of some of the great events in history, and, due to the very obstacles Woolf describes, those individuals were very rarely women. Then again, it's not like I've ever given much thought to the list; if I had, I'm sure I could do women a bit more justice.

New Things, Pt II

My new netbook came today! This is my early birthday present from Sean, although it required quite a bit of cajoling to convince him I needed a second computer. I do, I swear! Thanks to Rae, I got it ridiculously cheap, too--she clued me in that Woot.com was offering a refurbished model of the exact type I wanted for $177, instead of the $300 I was going to pay for it. It's the same netbook Linda has, so I already knew I liked it. It's so little and cute! Look it at it next to its big sister:


Ironically, once I'd set it up and found that nice Georgia O'Keeffe background, I put it away--there's not much point in using a netbook at home when I have a laptop. Trains, planes and automobiles, that's another story! This little baby only weighs two pounds. That is awesome, compared to the size and heft of my laptop. I don't even need to put any software on it, because I take notes directly into Zotero. It even came with Skype pre-loaded, so I'm all set.

I downloaded a program called Gimp for my laptop, which is basically an open-source version of Photoshop. It's pretty awesome, and to someone of my limited Ps abilities, it seems pretty much the same as the original. I'm going to have to take a tutorial or something, though, because it took me a really long time to make this image for my laptop background:

It's just a matter of putting two images together, but that whole "layers" thing really confuses me, what can I say. The image on the left is Eakins' Portrait of Louis N. Kenton, frequently called "The Thinker," and on the right is Velazquez' famous portrait of Pablo de Valladolid. I think I've written about this on here before, but Eakins was extremely impressed by the Spanish Golden Age painters he saw in the Prado, chief among them Velazquez, and it's clear that he was thinking back to the earlier portrait in creating this one of his brother-in-law.

This is the first time I've changed my laptop background since I first bought it and installed Holbein's portrait of Sir Thomas More (I have a think for portraits, I suppose). I was looking through images I have saved from various school projects, and these guys caught my eye. Juxtaposed like this, it seems like Pablo is gesturing for us to take note of Kent--encouraging us to consider the contemplative life, perhaps?

To balance this acquisition, I happily divested myself of some unwanted goods today, thanks to Freecycle: my old laptop case, the wireless card, and both my undergrad and master's graduation gowns. I want to give away the laptop, too, but it's too screwed up to let me erase the hard drive. I tried physically removing the hard drive, but the screws mounting it to the cage are also screwed up and won't open. Everything from college is on there, lurking in some form on the disk drive, so I'm not giving it away with the hard drive intact. For now, it's been relegated to storage again.

Changes and New Things

The new school year has (almost!) begun. Yesterday was the new student orientation, which I attended as the president (cough-dictator-cough) of GAHO. We have 22 new students, which is just a huge group. There are even three, count 'em, THREE male students, including a kid from Taiwan who's going to be working on American road photography. Another one of the guys, who I actually met last year when he visited, moved to the neighborhood next to mine, and takes the R7 from the next stop.

Orientation was fun, at least the parts where were got to talk to the new students. Listening to the professors go over the minutiae of graduate requirements, not so much. (German language exams: get thee behind me, Satan!) Immediately after giving a tour to half the group, I ran back to Tyler for my meeting with Dr. Cooper re: my entire future. I'll finish my coursework this year, meaning I'll be taking my exams in the fall of 2011. However, in order to get funding for my fifth year and beyond, funding to go do research in Venice, I have to apply for grants which have deadlines in late November and December. Problem: in order to qualify for those grants, you need to have had your dissertation proposal submitted and accepted before the deadline. Meaning, within less than a year and a half, I need to have studied for and taken my preliminary exams AND figured out what I want to write a dissertation on. That's not going to be easy. Dr. Cooper pointed out that studying for the specialized field part of the exams should basically be providing you with the background for your dissertation, so hopefully that will make things easier. Right now, a rough idea of my areas is Venice and the Mediterranean, 1450-1550 for my broad field, and Venice and the Veneto for my boutique field.

Dr. Cooper also wants me to attend the annual Corso at the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura in Vicenza next year. It's a weeklong program every August that usually focuses on Palladio; all the major names in the field of 16th century architecture attend, there's a ton of networking (according to her), and you get guided tours of a whole bunch of Palladio's villas, including those that aren't open to the public. There are scholarships for grad students to attend, although airfare and hotel would be on me. Two problems: one, everything is in Italian, and two, this would be smack in the middle of exam prep. Dr. Cooper seems to think this is no big deal--she even suggested I look into opportunities that might allow me to go abroad to gather material and dissertation ideas before taking my exams, which I told her I definitely couldn't imagine doing from a psychological standpoint--but I'm not so sure. The jury is out on this.

Tomorrow begins what I hope will be a regimented, daily involvement with my Berlitz materials to focus on honing my speaking skills. Still, I don't know if I'll be up to listening to a week of not only Italian speakers, but Italian academics--if they talk anything like they write, they like to use a looooot of words to say very little. I'm also applying to participate in an online paleography course hosted by the Medici Archive project in Florence that trains people in reading 16th-century archival material. Jasmine did it last year and liked it; that was their first run, so it was free for everyone, but now they're charging $350. Still, I think it will be worth it.

Finally, Dr. Cooper encouraged me to let Dr. Hall know that I'm interested in being considered for the department's Rome fellowship, which sends one of the Renaissance/Baroque students to Rome for a semester every year. She thinks I could still be considered even though I have departmental funding. Of course, I have to be able to convince Dr. Hall that there's material for me to study in Rome that will be beneficial to my larger research interests--in other words, I have to dig up some Venetian stuff to tell her I want to look at.

Obviously, this is a lot to consider. There are some drawbacks to moving so quickly through the PhD coursework like I've done. Usually, people have to do three semesters of classes, and then use the fourth semester plus that summer to prepare for exams, take the exams in the summer, and then have until late fall to prepare a proposal. Jasmine did everything in record time last year, and Dr. Cooper expressed her conviction that I can handle everything just as smoothly. Well, I don't have Jasmine's near-photographic memory, so we'll see how this goes. Mainly, I need to focus on incorporating as much exam prep into the next two semesters as I can, and hopefully I'll figure out a fascinating and sale-able dissertation topic!

Self-Portraiture and Summer Pasta

Raphael, Self-Portrait with a Friend, c. 1519

Sean and I both slept in today, and then spent the remainder of the day reading. It being Sunday, Sean insisted on having "dinner" in the early afternoon, following the Italian tradition. I had agreed to cook--cook, in this instance, meaning "chop up some basil, garlic, arugula, and grape tomatoes, toss with oil and vinegar, and mix with pasta." So simple, but so good!

Speaking of good food, we went to an Afghan restaurant for dinner Friday night. We had tasted the food at Sean's professor's house early in the summer, and it was so flavorful that we knew we had to go to the actual establishment. The scent of the mingled spices when you walk in the door is incredibly enticing. Sean tried to compare it to Indian, but I resisted, because Indian restaurants smell like feet, and this place smelled like awesome. Now, I'd told myself that I was going to get chicken or something and not the lamb, because I've given up red meat, but when I was actually in the environment, with those spices tickling my nose, there was just no way I was not getting lamb. And it was absolutely delicious--I got it cooked in peppers and onions, with the best basmati rice I've ever tasted. Yeah, I'm getting a little hungry just thinking about it. This week will be my last in Charlottesville, and I probably won't be back again until January, so we're planning a bit of a restaurant cruise, including a tapas restaurant (Sean has been craving sangria, and they have croquetas!), Greek pizza from our favorite pizza joint, and maybe, just maybe, a bit more lamb from the Afghan place. Yum.

As for reading, I finished Joanna Woods-Marsden's Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist. My working procedure right now is to take notes as I'm reading, then go back and write a short summary so I can refresh my memory when I'm studying later on. After that I go on JSTOR and look for a couple of reviews. It seems to be a fact of grad school (or maybe just me and Sean) that if you're reading a well-written scholarly book, you often find yourself in general approbation of it once you're finished. You enjoyed it, you learned from it, the pictures were pretty. But then you read a review that--while not ripping the author the proverbial new one--points out flaws in the argument or the structure, and places where the author over-reached, or didn't go far enough. That forces you to step back and realize, hey, this book isn't perfect. On the other hand, if you notice that certain books received near-universal acclaim from other scholars, that's a good sign of a Very Important Book that you need to slot into your grasp of the historiography.

I enjoyed Woods-Marsden's book while I was reading it, but then I found a review that pointed out a series of limitations, chief among them the structure of the book. She only looked at about 25 self-portraits, all of which were Italian. They were also all "autonomous" self-portraits, meaning she excluded the many examples of the long-standing tradition of self-insertion in a wall fresco or other painting. A second reviewer pointed out that the division of the book into short chapter, nearly every one dealing with a separate artist and focusing a lot on biography, smacked a little too much of the archetypal "Vasarian" structure.

The first reviewer also found fault with the book's theoretical underpinning. I won't go into it at length, but suffice it to say that he thought her attitude toward self-portraits was too limited, in that she interpreted them merely as a function of the artists' desire to improve their social standing at court. She persisted in seeing the self-portraits simply as crafted, fictitious personae, rather than allowing for any "creative friction" between the artists' inner and outer selves. In sum, although thic could count as an Important Book, it doesn't qualify among the pantheon of the VIBs! Sorry, Joanna.

Travels

I've logged a little over 1,000 miles on my car since last Sunday, when I left Charlottesville for Philadelphia, eagerly awaiting Sean's return from the Netherlands. We spent a couple of days in New Haven and had Sean's slightly-belated birthday dinner, featuring crab sauce and Linda's delicious pistachio cake--it tastes nothing like pistachios, which is good because I don't like them! That in itself is actually surprising, because normally I love salty things. I associate pistachios with my mom and Jen. They would buy a bag of the (very expensive) nuts at Homsy's, the foreign-food store near my grandparents' house where we stocked up on Syrian bread and the allspice-formerly-known-as-Syrian-pepper, and then spend the evening filling the air with these sounds: crack! (shell opens) plink! (shell tossed in little glass bowl) chomp! (nut enters mouth). I think they could go through a pound of pistachios in a single sitting. It used to annoy me no end, especially since I couldn't join in, having tried them and found them, gasp, too salty.

But I digress. On Thursday, I headed north while Sean went south, he to Charlottesville, and I to Massachusetts. I had lunch with my aunts and my cousin Lisa (at an Applebee's, bleh), and then headed to the Wiegers compound in Mendon to see Carla. I hadn't seen her since December! It's kind of like living apart from Sean--the longer the separation, the easier it becomes in some ways, but then you see the other person and realize just how much you've missed them in the interim. (Thankfully I get to see Sean a lot more frequently than I get to see Carla!) She'll be back again in February to renew her visa and plans to visit me in Philadelphia, yay!

While at Carla's I read the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, about a relationship that springs up between a young writer living in 1947 London and a group of Channel Islanders who lived through the Nazi occupation of the islands during the war. It's a fascinating story; I'd never even heard of the Channel Islands before, much less that they were occupied--indeed, they were the only part of the UK that Hitler ever managed to conquer. The added narrative twist is that everything plays out in letters (an epistolary novel, thanks Mrs. Juda!) between the columnist, Juliet, and various residents of the island of Guernsey, as well as letters to her friends, her editor, and the wealthy American who wants to make her a trophy wife. Definitely a good read.

After leaving her house yesterday I went to Worcester to visit Rae. Her cat, Ophelia, is adorable (and is properly friendly to me, unlike Carla's cat Salem, who decided to be absolutely terrified of me on this visit). We had lunch, and then she took me to her lab at UMass to watch her do some Science. Prior to this when I talked to Rae while she was at work, I envisioned her in a space like Ms. Zubrowski's chem lab at NWC, but it was quite different. More stuff, less white surfaces. Rae also doesn't wear a lab coat--another illusion, smashed!

From there, I went back to New Haven, and this afternoon came down to Philadelphia. Tomorrow, the last leg--back to Charlottesville, and Sean. It has been a LOT of driving, and my 1998 Corolla finally hit 100k miles, but it's been a really good week!

A Bit of Raphael

Today was another successful day in the library! I managed to read (nearly) all of Lisa Pon's Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print, which offered a lot of intriguing context and analysis of the ways prints functioned in the early 16th century. The book centers around the relationship between Raphael, the greatest painter of the High Renaissance, and the printer Marcantonio Raimondi, with whom he had an active collaboration in Rome. Raphael embraced the rise of mechanical reproduction, not only because it offered a wider audience for his work, but, as Pon argues, because his own technical interests were closely allied to the art of engraving. Pon challenges several traditional ways of thinking about prints, like the tendency to automatically regard a print made after a painting as a faithful reproduction of the original-- something that is especially fraught if the original painting has been lost or damaged, and the print is all we have left.

In contrast to the Italian duo, Durer represents an artist who tried to maintain absolute control over the reproduction of his images in an age before copyright. He became enraged when he found out that Raimondi had only copied his Life of the Virgin engravings and was selling them in Venice--complete with Durer's AD monogram. He petitioned the Venetian Senate for damages, making this the first case brought by an artist over intellectual property rights. He ultimately won, but the judgment only decreed that Raimondi could no longer include the monogram in his images, not that he couldn't make copies at all. Now, this is a oft-told story, and one that usually makes Raimondi sound little better than the guys selling the knock-off Gucci bags in New York City. According to Pon's recreation of the context of early 16th-century printing, however, not only were such borrowings traditional and generally accepted, but the secondhand engravers and printers viewed themselves not as counterfeiters, but as working in collaboration with the original makers--hence their inclusion of authenticating insignia like Durer's monogram. She also points out that even though the verb used to denote the process, contrafare, is a cognate for "counterfeit," it had a much more neutral connotation during the 16th century.

Durer and Raphael worked in very different ways; the former by himself, the latter as the head of a large and very busy workshop of apprentices, associates, and specialists--the entire production of which, however, was recognized as being "by the hand of Raphael." (Long before Don Draper, Raphael had some serious brand recognition). Pon also reproduced a drawing that I'd never seen before today, a study for Pythagoras in the School of Athens.

At left, a group of young men cluster eagerly around a bald-headed artist who's sketching a nude male model in the center. The same model appears at the right, robed and slightly larger in scale. Although the uniform use of highlights make the left and center appear unified, this is actually a composite image. The turbaned man and the bald man each appear twice as separate characters; the bald sketcher is elbow-to-elbow with himself as an onlooker, and the turbaned man is both model and student. Pon also points out that the scale of the seated figure relative to the model makes it clear that the latter must be further back in space.

What interested me in this image is the way it represents workshop practice. Sketching from life was a major component of artistic education and practice in the Renaissance, and Raphael clearly made use of his own employees as models, posing them in different roles and then combining those drawings into the group shown here. More unique, though, is what the drawing reveals about how artists' models managed to contort themselves into appropriately sinuous positions long enough to be drawn--they used a prop! Raphael's drawing demonstrates two phases of preparatory drawing: the nude model with the crutch visible, and the more finished figure at the right, the crutch hidden beneath the fall of drapery.

In the actual fresco (I'm skipping over the stage of the cartoon, which is basically one giant preparatory drawing that is used to transfer the design to the wall), the artist and his pupils are transformed into Pythagoras and his students, while the model becomes another ancient philosopher. The grace and harmony of the finished fresco thus conceals two of the realities of artistic practice: the use of the same models (by altering their facial characteristics and hair) and the use of the crutch to achieve the perfect contrapposto pose.


I like this comparison so much that I'm going to work it into the AWW section that covers School of Athens. We try to put a lot of focus on materials and techniques, as opposed to style, because students tend to like the concrete stuff more. I think this demonstrates very clearly how an artist could move from idea to playing with a composition to a finished work, while also revealing the "special effects" that helped make the final illusion possible.

Slow Reading

I'm actually not using that title to refer to the movement, which has recently received attention on NPR and elsewhere, that lauds the pleasures and benefits of reading slowly. Those stories made me feel a little guilty, because I'm not a slow reader most of the time; my ability to read quickly with a high level of comprehension has been something that I've been proud of since I was in elementary school (except for in 5th grade, when Mrs. Barber in her infinite wisdom decided to pair the fastest reader in the class with Larry, the very slowest; torment ensued), and it's continued to be useful in graduate school, where you're often faced with parsing huge amounts of text in a short amount of time. I recognize the downsides to this method. If you read quickly, you're bound to miss things, and you don't experience the flavor and texture of language as fully as you would if you read very slowly. Or, as some of the people involved in the movement suggested, read out loud. I don't really like the sound of my voice when reading, so that's not going to happen.

The title refers more to the pace at which I am accomplishing the reading that I wanted to get through during these weeks Sean's away. I've kind of given up on prepping my Eakins paper for a journal submission after recognizing that there's just not enough original content there to merit it. Even though my professor encouraged me to do so, he hasn't looked directly at my sources, and I don't think they need the synthesis that my paper offered. So that was one thing I was planning to accomplish that is now out of the way.

I've been making very slow progress through Marilyn Lavin's The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches, 431-1600. It's one of those books that holds an important place in the canon of literature because Lavin did a very important thing--she looked at all (literally, all) the extant narrative cycles in churches, determined in what order the episodes of each cycle were presented, and then formulated theories as to why certain patterns were more suited to a location, context, patron, or theological argument. It had never been done before; no one had bothered to ask why the episodes of, say, the life of St. Francis appear in a triple wrap-around pattern in one place and in a weird zig-zag pattern in another, sometimes even in chapels painted by the same artist, or two chapels in the same church. She also used a computer database to compile the data, something that was new in the early 1980s, especially in art history. Again, an important accomplishment, but unfortunately one that makes for pretty boring reading. Especially since she describes, in detail, the organization of each pattern, even though there's also an accompanying diagram.

Today, I finally betook myself to the library to prevent myself from becoming permanently affixed to Sean's computer chair. What's been preventing me from doing that daily is that I have to walk there, about a mile, and in Charlottesville it's usually 90 degrees and humid by 10am (with a high of 100 or more daily). Today was different, though; no humidity, and only 83 when I left at 9am. I was dreading the walk home, but it hit just 91 today, which is pretty awesome. I started with a couple of hours reading Patricia Brown's Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio, which turned out to be a lot like Lavin's in terms of interest, and then I moved to Griselda Pollock's Old Mistresses: Women, Art, Ideology, which was much more interesting.

It's thirty years old now, so some of the complaints that were raised by the first feminist art historians have been addressed (for example, in the 1960s there were no women in art history survey texts at all, which is no longer the case), along with some of the secondary complaints addressed toward over-zealous feminist art historians, like the tendency to place every woman artist that could be dug up as on par with great men artists of their times, even when their skill level was clearly inferior. Pollock wrote her book after the first flush of feminist art history was over, so she was able to zero in on these and other ways in which feminist scholarship, for all its good intentions, succeeded in nothing more than either the continued marginalization of women artists, or the tacit acceptance of male-dominated standards for artistic merit. An example of the former might be a book titled something like "Women's Art History"--something that sets women apart, as though they existed separate and distinct from the social and cultural forces that shaped men. At the other end of the spectrum is scholarship that tries to prove that women painters were just as good as men, which, as Pollock points out, just implicitly accepts that men are the gold standard. She argues that there shouldn't be a competition, but rather an examination of why and how women created the art they did, considering their particular positions within societies and cultures, and even their limitations (lack of access to education and materials, etc). I think most art historians, feminist and otherwise, have tried to follow this more balanced option since the turbulence of the 1970s. Like Lavin and Brown, then, Pollock's is a Very Important Book, but one that was much more engaging to read for a few hours.

The Book of the Courtier

Part of my reading this week is The Book of the Courtier, the famous 16th-century book of manners written by Baldassare Castiglione (shown above in his equally famous portrait by Raphael, a great friend of his). I picked it up at a used bookstore in town, together with Stendhal's The Red and the Black, for $1.50, which is a pretty awesome deal.

Like Vasari's Lives, the Book of the Courtier is one of those texts with which you can be pretty familiar without ever having read, so thorough has been their osmosis into the cultural ideals of the Renaissance and beyond. Presented as a conversation among the courtiers of the Duke of Urbino, the prescription is pretty simple: the ideal courtier should be able to do just about everything, do it well, and yet be able to make it look like he wasn't trying at all. That last requirement is the quality of sprezzatura, which is usually translated as "nonchalance."

As you would expect in books of this kind, there's lot of advice on what type of musical instruments the courtier should be able to play (strings are fine, but not flutes, because they make you contort your face unattractively), and how it's acceptable to mimic the vocal patterns and gestures of a famous person for laughs, but not their physical deformities (because that's just mean). The part I was just reading admonished gentlemen against the use of "enchantments, charms, sometimes force, sometimes sleeping potions and other such things" in order to, er, "enjoy a lady to the full." Roofies are nothing new, it seems, and neither are creeps.

There were a couple of passages that I marked. First, this one made me feel better about not being able to play chess well:

Signore Gaspare replied: "And what do you say about the game of chess?"

"That is certainly a refined and ingenious recreation," said Federico, "but it seems to me to possess one defect; namely, that it is possible for it to demand too much knowledge, so that anyone who wishes to become an outstanding player must, I think, give it as much time and study as he would to learning some noble science or performing well something or other of importance; and yet for all his pains when all is said and done all he knows is a game. Therefore as far as chess is concerned we reach what is a very rare conclusion: that mediocrity is more to be praised than excellence."

This one just amused me because of the author's obvious contempt for fops and dandies:

"...I don't want him to appear soft and feminine as so many try to do, when they not only curl their hair and pluck their eyebrows but also preen themselves like the most wanton and dissolute creatures imaginable. Indeed, they appear so effeminate and languid in the way they walk, or stand, or do anything at all, that their limbs look as if they are about to fall apart...since Nature has not in fact made them the ladies they want to seem and be, they should be treated not as honest women but as common whores and be driven out from all gentlemanly society, let alone the Courts of great lords."

Methinks Baldassare would not have been over-fond of the metrosexual look!

More Travels

A lot has happened since my last post! Anna and TJ's wedding went off beautifully, despite a little bit of rain, and the reception was a blast. It was great to see the Fairfield crowd again! Two of our friends, Mike Talmadge and Michelle Holmberg, recently got engaged themselves, so we were able to give them our congratulations in person. Sara, Zac, and Heather were also in attendance, plus special guest star Melissa, who was DJing, that is, when she wasn't dancing with a blazer-wearing Heather (who also shouted at one point in the evening, "That's my jam! Imma take off mah jewelry!" and then actually did so at the DJ's table). Basically, the only person missing from this wedding was Rae, so I'll just give her a shout-out here: we love you, Rae!!

I mustn't forget to mention the wedding favors, a box of delicious, delicious fudge in both chocolate and coconut that tasted like frosting that died and went to heaven. Tragedy occurred when Sean and I forgot ours while we were scrambling to join Sara and Zac in the shuttle back to the hotel, but! Zac was kind enough to give us his. Speaking of the hotel, that was not the best Courtyard I have ever stayed in. Bitches made you pay $12 for breakfast! Not cool! Making it more worthwhile, however, was that we ate with Meredith, Pimp Juice, and his lovely girlfriend, Becky, with whom he's now living in Stratford (his parents moved out to...Texas, maybe? with his younger sister, and sold him their house, making him the first of my college friends to be a homeowner). Then we hit the road once again, this time headed for Connecticut, where we (or more specifically, I) spent a week being slowly driven mad by Hubbard's...eccentricities.

While we were there, we journeyed to northern Connecticut for a swing through my old haunts. We went by the house first. Nothing had changed from the last time I visited, but it was still sad driving down all the streets I spent the first twenty years of my life looking at, and knowing that they're just not mine anymore; it's not my neighborhood, and not my house. Even though I absolutely hated that house, it was still my home, and I don't have one anymore. Philadelphia feels like home to me, of course, but I don't have an ancestral home, for lack of a better term, a place where my family is rooted, where I have lifelong memories. That sucks.

From the house we went by the cemetery, even though neither Sean nor I feel any connection to gravesites whatsoever. We never even get out of the car; you don't have to, since my parents' stone is at the very corner where the road turns left at the rear of the cemetery. We usually just laugh at whatever crappy memento someone (read: Jen) has left there (the stupid angel she put there years ago is still there, but she added a pair of praying hands cupping another angel. There is also an angel carved on the stone, at her behest. My poor parents are literally beset with angels.) From there we went to Northwest Park, but the barn was closed, so we couldn't feed treats to our old friends: the Cotswald ram, the two pygmy goats, and the cow with the disturbingly long tongue that only Sean will feed. Our pal the lonely donkey was gone from the paddock outside, too, replaced by a pair of horses.

We didn't just go there for a maudlin memory tour, though; we were headed to East Windsor to have dinner with Jen and her boyfriend Vinny. Sean hadn't met him before, but they got on really well. That's kind of surprising in a way, if you think that they're involved with sisters who have spent so much of their lives being diametrically opposite in personality, but it's a good thing all the same. I think Vinny is a keeper, and I really do like him. We had dinner at Ad's, the pizza dive that's a favorite of Jen and Monica's, and then we played Scrabble. Now, a word about Scrabble. Sean and I play pretty frequently, and it's a known fact that he plays strategically while I fail at that, bigtime. The result is that in five and a half years, I've won Scrabble once. Once! This time, I had such a chance to win, I was in the lead for the whole game, until Sean whips out a 66-point word ("jive" on both a double-letter and triple-word score) to zoom by me for the win. Balls!!

We also had dinner with Ron and Kathy while we were in CT, which is always a good time. It always happens that Ron will monopolize Sean's conversation (though he insists that women, in fact, are the ones who dominate) and I'll always be catching scraps of whatever scandalous story he's telling while Kathy and I are having a more grown-up conversation on the other side of the table. I'm always envious, because hey, I love Kathy, but I want to hear about how Ron dropped LSD before a chemistry test and scored higher than anyone else in his class when he was at Berkeley in the 60s! Anything that involves Berkeley in the 60s is going to be more interesting than a new exhibition at the Acropolis museum; I'm sorry, it's just a fact. This time, we actually spent more time conversing as a group than we ever have before, so I got to hear some of the tales direct from the horse's mouth, as it were. Those two really are a riot, especially in tandem, and as per usual, we left their house some six hours and four bottles of wine later. I cannot wait to be like them when we're older.

We left Connecticut Friday morning and headed back to Philadelphia just in time for the worst of rush hour traffic. We hit everything, including an accident on the Tappan Zee that closed all four lanes, so it wound up taking us five hours to get there. We used the time wisely, though, to set up dinner with Richardson and Kim, who braved the traffic from New Jersey. We were going to take them to Baci's, but time constraints led us to the Trolley Car Diner instead, and leaving the mega-bottle of Chianti that Sean had picked up for dinner for my personal enjoyment back in Charlottesville (and yes, I'm drinking it now). Then we went to see Twilight, which I had somehow convinced Sean to agree to see when it came out, but we never ended up going. It was perhaps not as bad as I had expected, but it was plenty bad enough, so I was thoroughly amused. Sean's expressions alone were pretty priceless. Kim turned out to be an actual hardcore fan of the books, though, so there was no out-and-out mockery.

Finally, yesterday was the day I sent Sean off to the Netherlands. As I told Rae, I really wasn't on top of my game for the pre-trip planning; I nearly forgot about calling Bank of America for his debit cards, he didn't get a phrasebook, and I forgot to give him extra batteries for my camera. Oh, and his umbrella, which was in the backseat of my car. Minor errors aside, I know he arrived safely, since he emailed me this morning from Leiden. After dropping him off at the airport, I hit the road back down to C-ville, and made awesome time--just under 4 hours, when it's supposed to take 5. Go me!

The apartment is lonely without him. I'm getting a taste of how difficult it will be to go back to living apart in September after spending the summer together. At least in September I can pick up the phone and call him whenever I want to. My phone rang a little while ago (the best mother-in-law ever, checking on me) and my first thought was "Sean! Oh, wait..." I know he's going to have a great time, but I miss him already.

On the Road

We packed up this morning and left Charlottesville for Philadelphia, with a brief stop in Cherry Hill to pick up Sean's tux for the wedding this weekend. It was in the 90s in VA when we bid a mournful goodbye to the central air in Sean's apartment, anticipating how hot it would be in Philadelphia. And damn, is it hot. Unfortunately, while our house has the ability to stay pretty cool for a long time in the heat, once it heats up it also tends to hold it in. It must be 90 degrees on the third floor, because it's 85 on the ground floor. Phyllis was nice enough to turn on the air conditioner in my room this morning, so it's nice enough for the two of us in here, but leaving the room is like walking into a wall of heat.

This has required some tinkering with our travel schedule. First, off, we're going to go straight home to CT from Anna's wedding, instead of coming back to Philly to wait out the weekend traffic. We'll come back next Friday, so we just have to spend the one night there before Sean goes to Amsterdam on the 17th. After I drop him off at the airport, I'm going back down to his apartment! I just can't stay here and roast for two weeks, I'll kill myself! Also, it would be ridiculously inefficient to keep my air conditioner running for that long, when I can have an entirely cool apartment to myself in Virginia. Hopefully, by the time I get back to Philly for good at the end of August, things will have cooled down a bit.

Ragged Mountain

Sean and I finally made it to Ragged Mountain to go hiking this morning! We'd planned to go a bunch of times, but something (read: the as-yet-still-incomplete project) kept getting in the way. It was already 87 degrees and humid when we left at ten in the morning, but luckily it was much, much cooler in the woods, and once we got near the lake there was a nice breeze. The trail is 3.5 miles long, and is very steep in places--especially in the beginning, when it rises more than 300 ft in the first half mile. We were both rather out of breath by the time we reached the first crest, so it was good that it was at the beginning!

It took us about an hour and a half to do the full circuit (the website said 2-3 hours, but we were moving at a pretty fast clip), which takes you around the two lakes in the center of the preserve. It was beautifully serene and quiet. Aside from some squirrels, the only other creature we saw was a deer browsing through some foliage. At one point, you cross a land bridge between the upper and lower lakes that gives you an unrivaled view of the splendor of the water, surrounded on all sides by the forest. That was where we saw the curious structure in the photo above: a rickety old cabin built on top of a stone pier rising some some thirty or so feet from the water. The front door was padlocked, which was kind of ridiculous since it's in midair. However, we judged from a lip of stone protruding out from under the door that there must once have been some kind of walkway between the cabin and the land bridge, but what they needed an elevated cabin for, I have no idea.

All in all, it was a tough hike, but totally worth it. I was definitely glad that I hadn't gone on my own, as I had thought of doing a couple of weeks ago. My spirits would have flagged much faster without Sean there to keep them up!

They Like Me, They Really Like Me!

I got great reviews from my students from last semester! Sadly, no one called me a fox this time around, but several kids mentioned my impressive understanding of the subject matter (aw, shucks) and willingness to answer questions as what helped them most during the semester. One (guy, I think) even said that my sense of humor was what helped him most!

To the question "what would you change about the course," most kids didn't respond, while a couple mentioned less homework, and one urged me to be more lenient in my grading (unlikely).
The third and last question is about the instructor's sensitivity to diversity, and while several students pronounced me "very sensitive," one student bluntly assured the reader: "She's not racist or anything like that." Thanks guys!

Blacked Out

We lost power during a terrific thunderstorm yesterday at 5pm, and only got it back (albeit with repeated brownouts) at 11am this morning. Winds were gusting up to 85 mph, the rain was practically moving parallel to the ground, and when I ran out to the car at 5 to pick Sean up from work, getting totally drenched in the process, the wind was actually rocking the car. Sean's car is really low and heavy, so that was a little unnerving. Trees and powerlines were down all over Charlottesville, as we discovered when we tried to go out and find somewhere with power to get dinner and got caught in a huge snarl of traffic and heard on the radio that nearly every major road in the town was blocked by fallen trees. I think we traveled one or two miles, max, and it took us 30 minutes or more to get back to the apartment.

Since Sean doesn't even own a flashlight, and scoffed when I told him that my parents also kept candles and matches around for emergencies (he noted, not without basis, that my dad was totally paranoid), that meant we only had enough light as the sky would give us. Not having air conditioning wasn't pleasant either, but luckily the storm had cooled things down from the 104 degrees it had reached earlier that day. I was able to read on the balcony until 9 o'clock or so, but it was freaky not being able to turn on any lights in the apartment. It was also eerie to look out at the other buildings in the complex without seeing a single light, but at the same time hearing lots of people's voices as they mingled outside in the cooler air.

I ended up going to bed at 10 o'clock and listening to NPR on my earphones until midnight or so. It was so warm that we stripped everything off the bed and just lay there, but neither of us were able to get into anything resembling a deep sleep. I was pretty sure the power would come back on during the night, and I kept repeatedly dreaming that it had, only to crack open an eye at the clock and see nothing but its blank face. At 5am I was restless, and going out on the balcony I saw, to my great joy, that there were lights on in the laundry room of the complex facing ours. Saved! Except our power wouldn't go on, even after I flipped the breakers repeatedly. It turned out that that lucky apartment block was the only one in the whole damned complex (there are a lot of buildings) that had their power; everyone else lost theirs. Still, at the time I was certain that this meant that ours would come back at any moment.

A little later in the morning, with still no power, I went in search of the maintenance people to ask if they knew anything about when it would come back. We had a lot of perishables in the fridge, including some catfish fillets, that I was worried about. They told me to call the power company, so I called Sean's mom from the laundry room, where I was charging my phone, and she gave me the number as well as the news from their website that 48,000 people were without power in our area. The power company then told me the power was expected to return by 10 o'clock tonight. Unbelievable, especially with the temperature predicted to hit 93 today!

I ended up going to Walmart around 9am to get a cooler so we could pack the perishables with ice. Most of the street lights were out, and cops had to direct traffic at the intersections along Route 29, which is the single main artery leading out of Charlottesville. By the time I stopped back at the gas station near the apartment, they were down to their last couple of bags of ice, which I snagged. Luckily I had a few dollars in my wallet, because despite being open, their power was still down too: cash only. It's times like that that you realize how dangerous it can be to rely on plastic. Anyway, I got back to the apartment, stuffed as much as I could into the cooler, and began making plans with Sean to spend the day at the library, then find an unaffected restaurant and movie theater so we could stay away from the apartment. Just about 11, though, the wonderful sound of the air conditioner kicking in alerted us that the power was restored. The people rejoiced! Literally! There was some booing, later, when the power kept flicking off and on, but mostly it was rejoicing. Sadly, the catfish could not be saved; it had begun to smell fishy. We consulted the FDA's website and learned that technically, I shouldn't have eaten that soy milk with my breakfast either (but that was like 8am and I haven't died yet). We're keeping the other two cartons, which were unopened anyway. The jury is still out on everything else, like Sean's yogurt )which he tends to stockpile as if it were the yogurt-alypse), the mayo, etc.

Anyway, we survived the great blackout of 2010! What have we learned from this? Well, for one thing, we now know that JTD was not wrong to have plenty of flashlights, candles, and even a very old, black-and-white, battery operated TV on hand. It is really, really boring not to have electricity once it's dark. Also: air conditioning is AWESOME.

Night on the Town

Yesterday evening Sean and I drove to Staunton, a small city about 45 minutes away from Charlottesville, to see a production of Beaumont's "The Knight of the Burning Pestle" at the American Shakespeare Center. We had dinner beforehand at a cute little place called The Pampered Palate. We both had Greek salads with the tastiest feta imaginable on top, and Sean also bought a bottle of blueberry wine, which we have not yet tried. I vetoed his attempted purchase of peach-flavored port, however.

The theatre at the ASC is a re-creation of the Blackfriars Theatre in London, which after 1609 was taken over by a group of actors from the King's Men, including William Shakespeare. It became their winter playhouse, while the more famous Globe continued to be their summer venue. Blackfriars was one of the earliest indoor theaters, and (according to Wikipedia, as ever) was the first to use artificial lighting and to play music between the acts. The ASC won't let you take photos inside, but here's one from Google:

We had seats in the fourth row from the stage, which cost a pretty penny today but, as Sean pointed out wryly, would have been the cheap seats back in the day. The ASC tries to present its plays in as close to the original format as possible: that means the lights stay on, audience members are up on stage (and, in last night's show, occasionally pulled into the action), and the actors double or triple up on roles with minimal costume changes. I've seen Shakespeare done that way before, most notably the Macbeth we saw in high school (three orgasmically-writhing witches, anyone?), but not any of the comedies.

The play is an exercise in meta-theatre; it starts out with a company of actors doing a comedy about a couple of lovers, when a guy gets up out of the crowd (the row behind us, actually) and starts heckling. He and his wife (both dressed not in Jacobean, but contemporary middle-class attire, with her looking particularly Jersey-ish) start demanding changes to the play, and the rest of the show revolves around the players' increasingly farcical attempts to both satisfy their demands and keep their own play going at the same time. Beaumont's original play apparently included a lot of contemporary music, and the program noted that they substituted modern music instead so that it would more relatable for the audience. Translation: when we went in to sit down before the show, the actors were in the balcony, in full costume, singing "Eye of the Tiger," and at another point a harried husband fends off his wife by singing a version of Lenny Kravitz: "Jacobean woman, stay away from meeeee...." All in all, I thought it was pretty hysterical. It was a powerful reminder about how hard it is to do justice to a play, especially a comedy that calls for lots of physicality and bawdy gestures, just by reading it; a couple of times as I was laughing particularly hard, I found myself thinking that I probably wouldn't have found the lines funny at all by themselves, but acted out they were awesome.

We're going to go back on Sunday night for a free preview of Othello. It'll be interesting to see the range these actors can play in just the space of a couple of nights!

Mmmm

That's two pounds of fresh-picked sweet cherries, courtesy of yours truly! Yesterday we went to a potluck dinner held by one of the faculty in Sean's department, and one of his professors told us that she had just been cherry picking with her kids the day before, and said that although it's the very end of the season, I might be able to get some if I went today. Sean didn't come, as he was supposed to be working on his project (due to the same professor), but as I type this he's continuing what must be a near-record streak of procrastination.

On the map, the orchard was pretty close, only 15 miles away, but getting there reminded me how very rural Virginia can be, and how much of a surburbanite I really am. After heading down Route 29, a major thoroughfare, I turned off onto county road 633 (everything hereabouts is a county road), which is a pleasant, if narrow, little road that runs by some farms. Then it got really narrow, with no shoulder, leaving me uneasy how this would work if another car came around one of the turns. Then this skinny little strip of blacktop stopped being paved at all, and became a very bumpy gravel lane that started to rise steeply, winding through the mountains. Every fifty feet there was a completely blind curve, so I was driving about 20 miles an hour and hoping that no local was about to come speeding through. The road was so rough that I thought the car might shiver to pieces right underneath me, it was shaking so badly, and the road behind the car was completely obscured by the dust and dirt it kicked up. This was terrain suited to a pickup truck, not a 1994 Buick LeSabre!

By now I was in a densely wooded area, with the trees occasionally breaking to reveal beautifully lush valleys below. At one point I glanced out the window at a particularly nice view, only to look back and see a deer running across the road in front of me. I'm used to deer, but not in broad daylight. As the car shuddered further up the road, there were a few houses dotted here and there. Their sheer isolation caused my inner suburbanite to wonder, How the hell do they deliver mail up here? Jesus, what do they do when it snows? I mean, Sean was trapped in his apartment complex for four days this past winter, because no one in Charlottesville owns a shovel and there are so few plows. What did this people do, ski down the mountain?

Going seven miles on this road took about twenty minutes, but eventually I reached the orchard. It was indeed the very end of the cherry season, so the trees had been almost completely picked over, but I was able to come up with my two pounds of cherries after about an hour of squinting under the tree branches, looking for that elusive bit of dark red. It's more fun to pick cherries than it is blueberries (though we plan to do that too, in August), but it's not cheap: my two pounds cost $9, more than they would in the supermarket. But the taste. They're fucking delicious! Granted, I'm not a connoisseur, having only begun to eat fresh cherries last year in Spain, when our grocery-store breakfasts consisted of them together with bread and jam. Still, Sean was in agreement that these were the best damned cherries he'd ever tasted.

Next year I'll have to come down earlier so that we can hit the orchard when the trees are still loaded with fruit. Honestly, I'm not sure what I'd do with more than a couple pounds of cherries (blueberries freeze really well, so they're easy), but hey, a surfeit of delectable fruit is never a bad thing. Next time, too, Sean can drive!

A Change of Scenery

Last weekend was a long one! I traveled from Philadelphia to NJ to NY for a wedding, a bridal shower, and a bachelorette party, then back to Philadelphia and on to Virginia. Quite the whirlwind tour, but it was fun! Now Sean and I will be in Virginia until the beginning of July, when we head north again for Anna and TJ's wedding.

Virginia really is lovely, there's no denying that. Since Charlottesville is only 20 miles away from the Blue Ridge Mountains, you can see them towering in the distance whenever you're on a slight hill. I've been to a couple of the parks in the past week, both of which were serene and beautiful, if not particularly challenging in terms of their trails. When Sean has a day off (he's working Tues-Sat) and the weather is nice, we're going to go to Ragged Mountain, where the trail climbs 300 ft in the first half-mile!

We also have tickets to see a play called "The Knight of the Burning Pestle" at the American Shakespeare Center in a couple of weeks. This is the description: "Imagine Homer and Marge Simpson buying tickets to a Chekhov play and then climbing on stage to redirect the show with Bart as the star, and you have some idea of the fun Beaumont unleashes in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Loaded with laughter and song, this play is a celebration of the way Elizabethan audiences expected to be a part of the action." I'm excited!