The too-rapid change in weather here from seasonably chilly to Indian summer over the past couple of days has wreaked havoc on my sinuses, rendering me sniffly, sneezy, and tired. I went to bed almost immediately after watching the season premiere of Supernatural last night and slept 11 hours, with the help of Sudafed. I've taken the day pills today, but I still feel out of it and tired. I dragged myself to school to get some books so I can stay home today and tomorrow and still have a hope of getting something accomplished. Later. Much later.
In the meantime, I came across this list from 2004 that the BBC compiled of the best-loved novels in Britain. Supposedly they said that the average person has read only six of 100, but I didn't see anything to that effect on their website. Anyway, despite not being British, I thought I would go through and see how many I've read.
1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien: LOTR is seriously Britain's number 1 book? Hm. I found them rather dry, actually. This is one instance in which I can say I like the movie version better. (I'm thinking rather snidely of Francis Ford Coppola's maxim as regards the Godfather: "if you want to make a great movie, use a mediocre book.")
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen: One of my favorite books of all time!
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman: Although a good series, I'm again surprised to see this so high up on the list. Do British people like sci-fi/fantasy a bit more than Americans? I cried so much at the end of the third book.
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams: I read all the Hitchhiker books at one go, after I confiscated Sean's collected works of Douglas Adams when he visited me in Italy in 2006. The first one is of course the best; they get progressively weirder and harder to follow. Adams wasn't much concerned with continuity, I don't think.
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling: Need I say anything? Although I do wonder if I will love these books as much when I'm 40 as I did when I was 20. That's not a question I've ever asked myself of something like Pride and Prejudice, which has had the benefit of a few hundred years of popularity.
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee: This book interested me while I was reading it for a summer book list in high school, but once I was done with it I never regarded it with any affection. Perhaps it's time for a re-read.
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne: Um, I've never read it so I guess I can't comment, but...really?
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell: Sean mentioned a plot point from this book on the phone the other night, and I realized quite frankly how little of this book I remember. I read it in high school, and what I chiefly recall was how much of its vocabulary--words like "doublespeak"--I began to notice as having been absorbed into our common speech and writing. Another book I should revisit.
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis: This is the only book of the series I ever read, and that when I was in elementary school, I believe. I never really became attached to it, though I did have a strong desire to try marzipan based on its description in the book (until I saw what it looked like, and no thanks, I do not want fruit-shaped candy)
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë: I got this book in Florence and really enjoyed it my first time through, but on successive re-readings I've found myself completely skipping the several hundred pages between Jane's flight from Thornfield and her return to the broken Mr. Rochester. The part about St. John bores me, frankly, and I never liked that the book's last lines are about him. Re-reading has also made me question the relationship between Jane and Rochester, which is unequal in so many respects, and I don't like the way he messes with her head for his own amusement. Also: Charlotte Bronte hated on Jane Austen's books, and she slides in my esteem for that!
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller: I read this for a class I took on comedy in college, and then I re-read about half of it this past summer. It certainly is black comedy, but I think Heller sort of loses control of it about halfway through. Possibly that was the point. I don't remember.
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë: Given a choice to hang out with Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters for a day, there would be no contest. They had a rather bleak outlook on life, didn't they? None more so than Emily. I object to anyone who finds Heathcliff a romantic character in the 'dark and brooding' mold. He is an asshole. Plain and simple. People die and lives are miserable because he is an asshole. There's nothing romantic in that.
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks: I'm not sure what this is...
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier: I just read this book this summer. It's a decent thriller, but the plot was probably was much more novel in its day (1938) than it is now. The relationship between the main character (I thought I had forgotten her name, but nope, she's unnamed) and her new husband Max de Winter has a lot of parallels to the Jane/Rochester relationship, and not in a good way. This book is probably better in the film version, because I think the silent creepiness of Mrs. Danvers could be better appreciated visually than it is here.
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger: Grumble. I did not love this book when we read it in high school. I found its protagonist irritating. Holden Caulfield is often held forward as epitomizing the struggle of young people to find themselves, but I didn't sympathize with him. Perhaps because I've always always had a fairly good grasp on my own identity? Or do young men find him more sympathetic than girls?
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame: Well this is embarrassing: I thought I had read this, but it turns out I was thinking of the book Frog and Toad Are Friends. Whoops. That...is probably not considered great literature, since it's like for 5-year-olds. "The Lost Button," anyone?
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens: I started to read this once, but never finished it. In fact, the only Dickens I've read in full is a Tale of Two Cities, which I'm always meaning to re-read. I've also read David Copperfield, if you count the Great Illustrated Classics versions...
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott: Never read it.
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres: Nope.
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy: Another one I started and didn't get into. I read Anna Karenina, though! I should get points for slogging through one Tolstoy at least.
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell: This is a very long book, from what I remember (which is not much, since I got the book from the library when I was a kid after having spent an entire Saturday afternoon on the couch watching the film version).
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling: Love.
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling: Love.
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling: Love.
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien: Meh. Again, Tolkien just doesn't grab me. And it's not that I don't like fantasy novels; I do, or least I was much more into them at the same age when I read this.
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy: No, although I remember Sara reading this when we were in middle school. Also, I frequently mixed it up in my mind with The Hound of the Baskervilles. Yeah, that's a Sherlock Holmes story (another book I re-read this summer).
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot: No.
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving: No. I read another of his books, Life According to Garp, on the advice of--believe it or not--Dr. Eliasoph. I didn't really like it.
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck: Nope.
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll: Yes, but meh. This is really one of people's favorite stories? I envision favorite books as something you can return to again and again with renewed enthusiasm. Lewis Carroll, like JM. Barrie, doesn't attract me now like he once might have (but even as a child I wasn't a huge fan, it was a little too absurdist).
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson: I've never heard of this before.
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez: No, but it's on my "read when I have time" list!
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett: I love historical fiction, but I shy away from the kind that spans decades and generations because you know from the outset that your favorite characters are all going to die. That said, I did try to read this, and couldn't get into it, despite many people's assertions that it is the Best Book Ever.
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens: yes, via Great Illustrated Classics (along with books like Ivanhoe, Around the World in 80 Days, The Prince and the Pauper...my mom was a big fan of those books!) I'm going to say that I probably didn't get the full effect.
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl: One of my favorites! Even though it's children's lit, I can come back to this and other Dahl books over and over again. Neither Gene Wilder nor Johnny Depp will ever capture Mr. Wonka for me; I will always picture him as the little goateed man he is in the book's illustrations.
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson: Yes, when I was quite young (meaning it probably wasn't the original version), and I don't remember it. My grandfather used to call me Long John Silver because I was taller than him.
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute: No.
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen: No, surprisingly enough.
39. Dune, Frank Herbert: No. Greg and his mom were really into this series, though.
40. Emma, Jane Austen: When I first read this book, I disliked the character of Emma immensely; I thought she was a selfish, immature busybody, and I hated her paternalistic attitude towards Harriet. Remarkably, what changed my mind was not the book itself but the recent BBC miniseries (which I happened to be re-watching last night, actually). Romola Garai's Emma is winsomely effervescent and over-eager at the beginning, but she sobers quite a bit by the end after she realizes how mistaken she's been. Rereading the book after watching the series, I was much more impressed by the novel as a whole. Also, I think Clueless is one of the greatest translations of classical literature into modern cinema!
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery: I've loved these books (and the attendant films) since I was a little girl and I think I'll love them when I'm 80. Even though I am, by personality, probably more of a practical Diana Barry than a manic-pixie-dreamgirl like Anne, I love Anne Shirley and the world of Avonlea. Also, Gilbert Blythe is my perfect man (though Sean comes close).
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams: It's a book about rabbits. Honestly, I was expecting a little more. I read this because it was one of Greg's favorite books, and at the end I thought "That was nothing compared to Brian Jacques." His Redwall series, which is set in a medieval Britain populated by anthropomorphic animals, probably wouldn't captivate me quite as much now as it did then, but it was a darn sight more exciting (and insightful) than these rabbits.
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald: I must be the only person who didn't have to read this book in high school! By the time I read it, a year or two ago, I'd already read The Beautiful and the Damned, and so knew I liked his writing style. Gatsby brings the tragedy to its close much more swiftly, but his evocation of a particular class, and the individuals in that class, is terrifyingly acute. The world is still full of Daisys and Toms, and probably, sadly, Gatsbys as well.
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas: Yes, although I don't have a particularly strong recollection of it. I was very into Dumas one summer during college, and I read several of the books about the Three Musketeers plus this one.
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh: No. This strikes me as one of those books that is very British--boarding school vacations and the old moneyed class, etc. I've read only one Waugh book, Scoop (which I enjoyed) but it was entirely different in subject and tone.
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell: When I first read this I was probably in seventh grade or so, because Jen was reading it for a class in high school. I liked it, although I had no idea that it had an allegorical meaning about socialism and Communism! I remember being very surprised when I found that out, although I can't remember if Jen told me or if it was later.
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens: Hm, I'm really not sure if I've ever read this, actually. I suppose with the plethora and film and cartoon adaptations it's one of those things you feel completely familiar with without ever having read. I think I'll always associate it most with the Disney version--Scrooge McDuck as his namesake, Goofy as Jakob Marley, and Mickey's son as Tiny Tim. On another note, the Christmas episode of Doctor Who this season is supposed to be related to A Christmas Carol, and since they've already met Charles Dickens, I'm interested to see where they'll take it.
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy: No, but we read The Mayor of Casterbridge in high school. Thomas Hardy really knew how to write a depressing story, didn't he?
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian: No idea.
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher: Nope.
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett: Yes (there's quite a bit of children's lit on this list, isn't there?)
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck: This is such a sad story in the end. Steinbeck and Hardy would have gotten along so well!
53. The Stand, Stephen King: No.
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy: This book is about so much more than the figure of Anna herself, but my intense dislike for her colored what I thought of the rest of the book. Her absolute shock at finding out that no, you can't just divorce your husband in 19th-century Moscow and then expect all your society friends to keep treating you the same way when you start running around town with your military boytoy was so irritating! I was eager for her to quit her melodramatic hissy fits and just throw herself under the train already.
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth: No idea.
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl: Another Dahl book! Yes! BFG was one of my favorite; so favorite, in fact, that I borrowed and lost no less than three successive copies of this book from the Windsor Public Library. I had to work off the cost (what was it, like $4?) in chores for my mother each time.
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome: No idea.
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell: I read this, but it was in an easy-reader format when I was in third grade, along with The Little Princess. I wanted a monkey.
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer: The first book in this series was quite good, and promised wonderful things that I'm not sure the remainder of the series carried through. I'm sure it suffered by the inevitable comparisons with Harry Potter, especially since the main character, a super-brilliant billionaire's son with a flagrant disregard for all authority, is hardly sympathetic.
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: I tried to read this in high school, but I couldn't get all the way through. Is it an unfair assessment to say that Russian literature is just dark?
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman: no idea.
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden: What I love most about this book is its evocation of a time and a place that is so far removed from my experience: the exotic elegance of the geisha world. I don't enjoy the last quarter or so as much as I do the rest; in narrative terms, that's where the story has to go, of course, but post-war Gion is just such a sad shadow of its former glory. (Also, the idea that the Chairman has been interested in her since she was what, 11? is just a little too weird for me).
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens: One day I will re-read this. One day.
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough: This is a long book, on the scale of Gone with the Wind. I saw part of the miniseries on TV in high school and found the book at my grandfather's house, but I never got all the way through.
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett: Nope.
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton: Nope.
67. The Magus, John Fowles: Nope--I've never heard of a bunch of these books!
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Thi.s is a great book.
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett: British people are serious Pratchett fans. Nope.
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding: I've always wondered how the events of this book would have played out if it had been a group of girls stranded on the island. Also, has anyone ever figured out why they say "Sucks to your asmar" as an insult?
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind: No.
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell: No.
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett: No.
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl: Not my favorite Dahl (where is The Witches on this list?)
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding: Another book I liked less than its film. The diary format makes you like Bridget less, I think, because she comes off as a bit of a narcissist. Each entry starts off with a tabulation of her weight, number of cigarettes smoked, and number of drinks consumed. By rights I'm shocked she wasn't dead by the end of that book.
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt: No.
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins: No.
78. Ulysses, James Joyce: Shudder. No.
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens: No. Jen got this book on Amazon and was surprised to discover it was depressing. Gee, the title was too subtle?
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson: No.
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl: British people love Dahl, I guess.
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith: No; I saw the movie, and it was very strange.
83. Holes, Louis Sachar: No.
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake: Never heard of it.
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy: No.
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson: Never heard of it.
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley: Ironically, I read this book for my comedy class, same as Catch-22.
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons: I saw the movie version of this first, and was a little freaked out by it because I didn't realize it was supposed to be a slightly over-the-top satire. Once I read the book I appreciated it much more.
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist: No.
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac: Maybe it's because I'm not a man, or because I'm not edgy and interested in trying a lot of drugs to access other planes of consciousness, or...whatever. This book alienated me like three pages in.
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo: I'm very surprised to see this on here, because it's usually considered a pretty mediocre book, as Coppola would tell you. The structure is different than the movies, because this book starts with Corleone in his youth in Sicily, then documents how he came to the US and rose to power. I don't even remember if Michael plays a role in it. Tommy went to college with a girl who was Puzo's granddaughter; she said all his grandchildren were discouraged from reading his books until they were 18, when he gave them each a complete set.
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel: Hm, I think I read parts of this when I was a kid, but I'm not sure.
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett: No.
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho: Some people talk about this book like it's some kind of gospel. I didn't see that in it at all; it's part fable, part magical realism, yes, but it didn't change my life.
95. Katherine, Anya Seton: Never heard of it.
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer: Ditto.
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez: No.
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson: No.
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot: I am...very surprised that this is on this list. I did read the book because I liked the movie, and it's a fine example of YA lit, I guess.
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie: No. I read The Satanic Verses and couldn't quite come to terms with the unorthodox narrative structure; however, I quite enjoyed The Enchantress of Florence.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Michel de Montaigne
I finished The Modern Mind a couple of days ago. I have to admit that I noticed a progressive weakening of my interest as the book--and the century--went on; I'm not quite as captivated by the developments of the last quarter of the 20th century as I am by what happened in earlier three-quarters. Now I've moved on to the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, a book that's been on my "to read" list since I read Jane Kramer's article about him in the New Yorker last year, which begins thusly:
He's also quite humorous, and capable of talking about sex in a manner that is both frank and wry--again, something I haven't seen before in Renaissance literature. In one of his essays, he muses for a while about the various psychosomatic causes of impotence, and then launches into a mock-legal defense of the penis:
"We are right to note the licence and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it; so imperiously contests for authority with our will: it stubbornly and proudly refuses all our incitements, mental and manual. Yet if this member were arraigned for rebelliousness, found guilty because of it and then retained me to plead its cause, I would doubtless cast suspicion on our members for having deliberately brought a trumped-up charge, plotting to arm everybody against it and maliciously accusing it alone of a defect common to them all."
One of his more well-known essays is "On the Cannibals," in which he discusses the practice in Brazil of killing and eating prisoners of war. His enthusiastic description of how close these "primitives" are to nature in some ways anticipates the 18th-century concept of the "noble savage," yet he also realizes that we have no absolute standard by which to judge the customs of others: "I find that there is nothing savage or barbarous about those peoples [he's not referring to the cannibals just yet], but that every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country. There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything!"
Later he observes, strikingly, that Europeans have no right to decide who is and who is not barbaric: "It does not sadden me that we should note the horrific barbarity in a practice such as theirs; what does sadden me is that, while judging correctly of their wrongdoings we should be so blind to our own...we can indeed call those folk barbarians by the rules of reason but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarism." Montaigne was writing from direct experience of the French Wars of Religion, which saw atrocities committed by both the Catholic and Huguenot forces. Torture, he says, is one crime that makes his "civilized" nation no better than the barbarians, a contention no less applicable today.
So far I'm really enjoying the book, as you may be able to tell. It's huge--1200 pages--but the nice thing about the essays is that they're mostly fairly short, and you don't feel constrained to read them all in order, or even to read all of them! It's also offering me a different perspective on the 16th century, which I'm used to looking at from the lens of Italy. I'll admit that my knowledge of the history and politics of late 16th-century France has mostly been shaped by one of Judith Merkle Riley's historical fiction novels, The Master of All Desires (to be fair, Riley is a PhD, albeit one of political science, not history). So it's good to get some exposure to the transalpine Renaissance culture!
One last funny bit, quoted by Montaigne:
Socrates was told that some man had not been improved by travel. "I am sure he was not," he said. "He went with himself!"
Montaigne's tone is candid in a way that I've never encountered in 16th-century literature. Actually, I can't think of anything that's quite this accessible until the 19th century (not that I'm anything like an expert). It's the kind of authorial tone that immediately puts you at your ease with the writer; he's not preaching, he's not arguing, he's just trying to work out his thoughts on a particular topic. He doesn't pull any punches, either; for example, despite his high connections to the court, he's clear about his distaste for court life and its ridiculous ceremonial: "...in my home I have cut out all formalities. Does anyone take offense? What of it? It is better than I offend him once than myself all the time--that would amount to servitude for life! What is the use in fleeing from the slavery of the Court if we then go and drag it back to our lairs?"
He's also quite humorous, and capable of talking about sex in a manner that is both frank and wry--again, something I haven't seen before in Renaissance literature. In one of his essays, he muses for a while about the various psychosomatic causes of impotence, and then launches into a mock-legal defense of the penis:
"We are right to note the licence and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it; so imperiously contests for authority with our will: it stubbornly and proudly refuses all our incitements, mental and manual. Yet if this member were arraigned for rebelliousness, found guilty because of it and then retained me to plead its cause, I would doubtless cast suspicion on our members for having deliberately brought a trumped-up charge, plotting to arm everybody against it and maliciously accusing it alone of a defect common to them all."
One of his more well-known essays is "On the Cannibals," in which he discusses the practice in Brazil of killing and eating prisoners of war. His enthusiastic description of how close these "primitives" are to nature in some ways anticipates the 18th-century concept of the "noble savage," yet he also realizes that we have no absolute standard by which to judge the customs of others: "I find that there is nothing savage or barbarous about those peoples [he's not referring to the cannibals just yet], but that every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country. There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything!"
Later he observes, strikingly, that Europeans have no right to decide who is and who is not barbaric: "It does not sadden me that we should note the horrific barbarity in a practice such as theirs; what does sadden me is that, while judging correctly of their wrongdoings we should be so blind to our own...we can indeed call those folk barbarians by the rules of reason but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarism." Montaigne was writing from direct experience of the French Wars of Religion, which saw atrocities committed by both the Catholic and Huguenot forces. Torture, he says, is one crime that makes his "civilized" nation no better than the barbarians, a contention no less applicable today.
So far I'm really enjoying the book, as you may be able to tell. It's huge--1200 pages--but the nice thing about the essays is that they're mostly fairly short, and you don't feel constrained to read them all in order, or even to read all of them! It's also offering me a different perspective on the 16th century, which I'm used to looking at from the lens of Italy. I'll admit that my knowledge of the history and politics of late 16th-century France has mostly been shaped by one of Judith Merkle Riley's historical fiction novels, The Master of All Desires (to be fair, Riley is a PhD, albeit one of political science, not history). So it's good to get some exposure to the transalpine Renaissance culture!
One last funny bit, quoted by Montaigne:
Socrates was told that some man had not been improved by travel. "I am sure he was not," he said. "He went with himself!"
Monday, September 06, 2010
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.
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.
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.
Monday, August 30, 2010
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?
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?
Saturday, August 28, 2010
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:
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.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
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.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
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.
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!
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!
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Self-Portraiture and Summer Pasta
Raphael, Self-Portrait with a Friend, c. 1519Sean 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.
Monday, August 09, 2010
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!
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!
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, July 26, 2010
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 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.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
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!
Sunday, July 18, 2010
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.
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.